On November 14, 2018, Blake Snell won the AL Cy Young award. It was a close vote, but no one could say Snell didn’t deserve at least to be in the discussion. He compiled a 1.89 ERA, best in the AL, and his peripherals (2.95 FIP, an outrageous 31.6% strikeout rate) weren’t far behind. He was, simply put, one of the best starters in baseball — unfair, as future Rays employee Jeff Sullivan put it. Just more than seven months later, on June 29, 2019, Blake Snell’s ERA was on the wrong side of 5. By RA9-based WAR, he was barely above replacement level in 2019. A strong start yesterday moved his ERA down to a still-inflated 4.87, but it’s worth asking: is something wrong with Blake Snell?

Now, as my RotoGraphs colleague Al Melchior recently put it: nothing is wrong with Blake Snell. Still, it seems like it might merit investigating. Guys with stuff like Snell’s aren’t supposed to even be capable of putting up near-5 ERA’s this far into the season. Al focused on Snell’s strike-throwing, and that’s always a make-or-break issue for a guy with such dynamite stuff, but Snell’s walk numbers, while high, aren’t crippling. He’s actually walking fewer batters than last year, and his K-BB% is a career high. No, Snell’s 2019 has been alarming because of his inconsistency, and that’s worth looking into.

In 2018, Snell made only four starts in which he didn’t last at least five innings. One was his first start back from injury, which hardly counts. This year has been an entirely different story. Snell’s start on June 25, when he survived only 3.1 innings against the Twins, was his sixth outing of 2019 to see him not finish the fifth inning. There’s always batted-ball luck involved in short outings, but still, Snell’s 2019 feels extreme. Did he change something in 2019 that’s leading to more abbreviated outings?

It’s worth saying again that Blake Snell is incredible. All four of his pitches are weapons. His four-seam fastball is the fastest thrown by any left-handed starter, and it generates whiffs on more than a quarter of batters’ swings against it. Its rise and fade are near-unmatched; only Justin Verlander gets more total movement on his four-seam. Snell’s curveball, which he’s throwing 27% of the time this year, is awe-inspiring. Batters whiff on 55% of their swings against it, the second-best mark for any starter who has thrown 100 curveballs this year. His changeup? It generates the fourth-most whiffs per swing, 44%. He rarely throws his slider (7.6% of the time so far this year), but you guessed it: no starter’s slider gets more whiffs per swing than Snell’s. Read the rest of this entry »

Our Playoff Odds page has a nice little feature that lets you display, for any two dates, the difference between a team’s playoff odds on Date A and its odds on Date B. Around the end of each calendar month, I like to use that feature to check in on which teams most improved their odds over the month that was and which lost ground. It’s a long season, and it’s easy to miss things. Here are the largest changes in playoff odds from June 1 to June 30:

There’s a story there. Let me start it by saying that 17 of 30 big-league teams saw no change at all to their playoff odds in June, or saw a change of less than 2%. Another five saw a change greater than 2%, but less than 10%. Of the eight teams whose playoff odds swung by more than 10% in June, fully half — the four teams at the top of the table — came from the same division: the National League East. To some extent, that kind of clustering is to be expected — when one team rises, another in its division must fall — but the relative quiet of every other division gives us an opportunity to reflect for a moment on what happened in the NL East in June, and what lies ahead in July. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, the Cubs ended months of waiting by signing Craig Kimbrel to be their closer. Due to the lack of a spring training, Kimbrel was sent down to the minors for a bit to make sure he could still pitch. In Triple-A Iowa, Kimbrel made four appearances and pitched 3.2 innings. He struck out four of the 14 batters he faced, walked just one and gave up a lone run on a solo homer. The Cubs, satisfied that he was well enough to face major league hitting, called Kimbrel up yesterday.

After the Braves jumped out to a 6-1 lead, it didn’t look like Kimbrel’s services would be needed. But the Cubs stormed back with eight runs across innings four through six and the new Cubs’ closer was asked to come on for the save in the ninth inning, protecting a 9-7 lead. The first batter to the plate was catcher Brian McCann. After taking a 98 mph fastball at the bottom of the zone for strike one, McCann fouled off three more fastballs. Then Kimbrel tried to drop in his curve:

McCann was obviously displeased, but the pitch might have been even closer to the strike zone than the box on the television suggested, as it did look to catch the corner. Kimbrel threw seven curves among his 20 pitches. As for the movement on the pitch, it was in line his numbers from last season, though its drop yesterday and last season wasn’t quite as big as it had been in the years prior. Read the rest of this entry »

2018 was the end of an era for the Washington Nationals. After failing to get Bryce Harper to agree to a long-term contract with the organization, his final year in D.C. appeared destined to have something of a valedictory nature, a long farewell to the player who was drafted to be the face of the franchise. The script seemed to be in place for one last hurrah. After all, this was a team that during the Pax Brycetania won the NL East four times in six seasons, with their 555 wins second only to the Dodgers. 2018 would be the year they finally got over the playoff hump and won the World Series, after which the credits would roll, and captions would indicate what had happened to each of our favorite characters.

Oops.

Projected to go 89-73 by ZiPS, the Nats underperformed by seven games, finishing 82-80. Thanks to the Braves misbehaving and butting into contention before their number was called, Washington fell out of the postseason race for good by the All-Star break. There was a silver lining in the emergence of Juan Soto, who somehow needed just a month more seasoning to turn from a South-Atlantic League star into a major league one, effectively becoming better at being Bryce Harper than Bryce Harper. The way forward in 2019 was clear: a full season of Soto and Victor Robles, together with Patrick Corbin, would make up for the loss of Harper, and constitute enough of a gain that it wouldn’t be a major problem that Brian Dozier was a poor replacement for vintage Daniel Murphy. ZiPS even projected the Nats to be better in 2019 than it did in 2018.

Oops.

An 8-18 run from mid-April to mid-May left Washington rubbing elbows with the Marlins in the wastelands at the bottom of the NL East. The team’s gone 20-9 since, but that’s only been enough to get them to the precipice of a .500 season, rather the edge of greatness. At 39-40, they still stand eight games behind the Braves, a team with a lot more prospect currency to trade for short-term improvement at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

The lingering suspense over whether the Yankees could break the major league record for consecutive games with a home run, which they had tied at 27 on Monday night, lasted until Tuesday night’s sixth pitch from Blue Jays starter Clayton Richard to Yankees leadoff hitter DJ LeMahieu. Boom!

In the brief interval that it took this scribe to tweet about that record — admittedly, while juggling a beer and a scorebook in section 422 of Yankee Stadium — Aaron Judge homered as well. In fact, solo home runs accounted for the Yankees’ entire output in their 4-3 victory, with Gleyber Torres and Edwin Encarnacion joining the party, too. The latter even broke out the parrot against his old team for just the second time since departing in the winter of 2016-17, that while a hawk literally watched his dinger from atop the right field foul pole.

Here’s the Yankees’ new perch after Wednesday, when Didi Gregorius’ second-inning home run off Toronto’s Trent Thornton further extended the streak (LeMahieu added another one in the Yankees’ come-from-behind win as well):

It doesn’t take the eyesight of a hawk to note that 11 of those 13 seasons are from the post-1992 expansion era, which has featured at least one home run per team per game — a level previously topped only in 1987 — in all but five seasons (1993, and every year from 2010-14 except for ’12). Four of those seasons, including three of the top seven, are from the 2016-19 period, which, as I noted on Monday in relation to Justin Verlander’s performance, is the first four-year stretch with at least 1.1 home runs per team per game. This year’s 1.36 per game is the all-time high, 0.1 ahead of the previous high set just two seasons ago, an increase of 8.7%. It’s 0.21 home runs per game (18.8%) higher than last year, and 0.5 homers per game (58.4% higher) than in 2014, the year of the post-1992 low:

If we factor in the ever-increasing strikeout rates, the rise is even sharper. This year’s rate of home runs per batted ball — that is, HR/(AB-SO+SF) — is 5.31%, 0.49 points (10.1%) higher than the previous high in 2017, 0.86 points (19.3%) higher than last year, and 2.08 points (64.2%) higher than 2014.

I’ll get back to that momentarily, but it’s worth noting that when the Yankees’ streak began in late May, only three of the seven players who contributed the most home runs to last year’s record-setting total of 267 were active, namely Aaron Hicks (who tied for second on the team with 27 homers), the sixth-ranked Torres (24), and seventh-ranked Gary Sanchez (18). Since then, the 1-2 punch of Giancarlo Stanton (38) and Judge (27) has returned from lengthy stints on the injured list, and Gregorius (27) has returned from off-season Tommy John surgery. Miguel Andujar (27) is out for the remainder of the season due to surgery to repair a torn labrum, but on June 16, the team traded for Encarnacion, who currently leads the league in homers (24, including three as a Yankee).

All of which is to say that it’s been a mix of A- and B-list players who have not only propelled this particular Yankee streak but have helped the team out-homer all but three other teams, namely the Twins (149), Mariners (145), and Brewers (138):

Such are the Yankees’ power reserves that the acquisition of Encarnacion led to Frazier, who has hit a robust .283/.330/.513 (117 wRC+), being optioned to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, and remaining on the farm even as Stanton went back to the IL with a sprained posterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, the result of a baserunning mishap early in Tuesday night’s game. He’ll miss the upcoming London series against the Red Sox, and will be out for longer than the 10-day minimum. With or without Stanton, who has played just nine games this season, it’s not hard to imagine a more complete Yankees lineup overtaking the Twins in the home run department. But even if they don’t, the rather patchwork lineup has kept them on pace to eclipse last year’s total, which is a hint that the homer situation is simply getting silly.

League-wide, no individual is on pace to challenge Barry Bonds‘ single-season home run record of 73; Christian Yelich, who leads the majors with 29 homers, would finish with 62 if he were to keep hitting them at the same pace over the Brewers’ final 82 games as he has over his first 73 (he’s missed seven games with assorted aches and pains). However, with only five teams past the halfway point in their schedules heading into Thursday (the Mariners have played 84 games, the other four of those teams 82), a total of 56 players had reached the 15 homer plateau, meaning that they were on pace for 30 homers. The league-wide record for such players is 47, set in 2000. Four of the top five totals hail from the 1996-2001 stretch, with the fifth coming in 2017, when 41 players reached it. Similarly, 18 players have reached 20 homers, and are on pace for at least 40. The record for players with 40-homer seasons is 17, set in 1996, and we haven’t seen more than nine players do it in any Statcast-era season; there were nine in 2015, but just three last year. Yelich, Pete Alonso (27 homers through the Mets’ 81 games) and Cody Bellinger (26 homers through the Dodgers’ 82 games, including one on Wednesday) are on pace for at least 50 homers. Only in 1998 and 2001 did more than two players reach that plateau, with four apiece in both of those years, including the single-season record breakers, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds.

Meanwhile, 14 of the majors’ 30 teams are on pace to set franchise records, with the top four surpassing last year’s Yankees:

All but three of the 30 teams are averaging at least one homer per game. Twenty-two teams are on pace for 200 homers, one fewer than in all of baseball prior to the 1994 players’ strike. Only in 2017, when 17 teams reached that plateau, have there even been as many as a dozen teams to do so. Eight teams are on pace for 250 homers, a level reached by just six teams ever prior to this year. The mind reels at these numbers.

While one can point to the general trend of batters making greater efforts to elevate the ball — whether to hit it over shifted infielders or not — it’s more accurate to call that an adaptation to the new reality. The scientific evidence again points to the ball itself as being the driving factor. Earlier this week at The Athletic, Dr. Meredith Wills published a follow-up to last year’s breakthrough article, which itself was a follow-up to MLB’s Home Run Committee report. That committee, led by Dr. Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois, had found that the recent home run spike was caused by a decrease in the ball’s aerodynamic drag, but found no physical difference in the balls that would explain the change.

Conducting her own measurements using digital calipers and disassembled baseballs, Wills concluded that post-2015 balls’ laces, which were an average of nine percent thicker than balls from the 2010-14 period, were producing less bulging at the seams, yielding a more spherically symmetric ball with less aerodynamic drag — thus allowing them to fly further.

For her latest study, Wills examined 39 balls from this season, which she found differed from the 2015-18 balls and even earlier ones. Most notably, she found “demonstrably lower” seams, only 54.6 percent ± 15.0 percent as high as those on balls from previous seasons. By measuring the coefficient of static friction, she also found that the leather on this year’s balls is relatively smoother, concluding, “the static friction for the 2019 balls is 27.6 percent lower, a statistically significant result demonstrating the leather covers are genuinely smoother.” She measured the bulging of the seams and found, “Not only were the 2019 balls virtually round, what bulging they did show was slightly negative, suggesting the seams might be slightly ‘nestled’ into the leather.” The significantly rounder balls, which have thinner laces than last year’s (more in line with 2000-14 samples) produce even less drag than before, and thus even more carry. Wills noted that both the seam and smoothness issues jibe with anecdotal reports from pitchers about difficulties in gripping this year’s balls, as voiced by players such as Sean Doolittle, Jon Lester, and Noah Syndergaard.

As for commissioner Rob Manfred’s recent suggestion that a better-centered pill (the core of the ball) is a factor in creating less drag, Wills was largely dismissive, writing, “[T]his is the most difficult result to produce without significant manufacturing changes, since existing techniques make it hard to keep the pill from being centered to begin with… Therefore, it seems unlikely that pill-centering would explain a sudden change in drag; at the very least, we would be remiss not to also examine other possible sources.”

All of Wills’ articles on the topic, which are behind a paywall, are worth reading, but it should suffice to say that there’s ample scientific evidence that the ball is carrying this. And how. Check out these numbers, which combine Statcast’s average distance measurements with those from our stat pages:

Fly balls are carrying an average of four feet further than last year, and eight feet further than in 2015. Add to that a general increase in fly ball rates and you have a recipe for significantly more homers. Perhaps too many homers. Combine that trend with the aforementioned strikeout trend and lower batting averages — though this year’s .251 is three points higher than last year, it’s in a virtual tie with 2014 for the second-lowest mark of the DH era, which began in 1973 — and the result is a greater percentage of runs being scored via homer than ever before. Here’s an historic look at what Joe Sheehan christened “the Guillen Number” a decade ago at Baseball Prospectus:

For a period of over two decades, from 1994-2014 — two decades that saw record home run rates, PED scandals, expansion, new ballparks galore — the rate of runs scored via homers was remarkably stable around 35%, never deviating more than two points in either direction. It hit 37.3% in 2015, and has climbed at a rate of about two points per year since, to heights previously unseen, and now, both statistically and aesthetically, the situation sticks out like a sore thumb. Ken Rosenthal called it “Bludgeon Ball” earlier this month, and I think the description fits. This is brute force baseball, and while it doesn’t lack for a certain amount of excitement, it’s very lacking in subtlety. When nearly half the league is on pace to set home run records, and the vast majority of teams are set to exceed totals that were once very rare, we’ve gone too far.

It’s time for MLB and Rawlings (which the league bought last year) to fix this. Wills noted that while Manfred has maintained that Rawlings hasn’t changed its manufacturing process or materials “in any meaningful way,” this may be an issue of semantics:

The Home Run Committee found that Rawlings regularly implements production improvements, including changes to the yarn (February 2014), the pill (March 2014, May 2015), the leather (June 2014, February 2017, August 2017) and the drying process (March 2016, February 2018). The Committee described these changes as “largely technical in nature and very unlikely to be in any way related to the (2017) home run increase.” That being the case, things like enhancing leather smoothness or drying baseballs more efficiently might not be considered “meaningful” to manufacturing.

While this may have been a reasonable attitude in the past, such enhancements now appear to have compounded, producing a more aerodynamic ball.

Wills recommended another committee report with the goal of using the information to tighten specifications, improve quality control and “determine further production improvements.” To these eyes — and I know I’m not alone — such improvement would include the restoration of some normalcy. When a player’s 40-homer season, or a team’s mountain of 200 homers, is no longer worthy of celebration, is as common as a garden weed, we’ve lost something. It’s worth searching for how to get that special something back.

Here’s the picture that got me interested in what Mike Trout had been up to between the end of April and the beginning of May, 2019:

I thought a big red circle would be gauche, so I’ll write this out: Starting on April 19, the rate at which Trout saw sliders (as a percentage of all pitches seen, and as measured by Pitch Info) rose from 8.7% over the 15 games preceding that date to an astonishing 30.9% over the 15 games preceding May 11. That’s the highest such number ever observed during Trout’s eight-season career. No other period even comes close. Over the course of his career, in fact, Trout has seen sliders less than half as often (15.0%) as he did over that 15-game stretch at the beginning of May.

To some extent, this is a consequence of the schedule. Slider use is up league-wide again this year, to 18.4% from last year’s 16.9%, and from 13.7% just five years ago. Thus, my first theory of the case — the case, here, being why Trout was suddenly seeing so many more sliders than he ever had before — was that Trout had just run into a series of teams that happened to be at the leading end of the league-wide rush away from fastballs and toward sliders. In other words, that this was just a bit of random chance. Could happen to anyone. And indeed, the seven teams Trout’s Angels faced during the period from April 19 to May 11 are throwing more sliders than the league as a whole this season:

Read the rest of this entry »

In his rookie season, Pete Alonso has already hit 27 home runs, second in baseball behind Christian Yelich. He’s sporting a .281/.371/.634 slash line that’s created a 161 wRC+, which trails only Cody Bellinger, Mike Trout, and Yelich. Even after adjusting for defense, Alonso’s 3.3 WAR is seventh among all position players. With numbers like that, it might be difficult to believe that Alonso has already gone through a prolonged slump with just half the season finished. He has, though. Behold:

Hitting like a slightly below-average player for a month might not be classified as a slump for most, but Alonso has been one of the most productive hitters in the game, and the middle-third of his season thus far is a departure from the rest of his numbers. I could have massaged the numbers to make them slightly worse by going from April 30 to May 25, but the above sample fits neatly as the middle third of Alonso’s season so far. Earlier this season when Alonso was doing very well, Ben Clemens discussed the good and bad aspects of the first baseman’s game, though Ben’s focus was on the good as Alonso was annihilating baseballs at the time:

The two parts of this article are the Pete Alonso experience in a nutshell. The quality of contact isn’t the question — when Alonso hits something, it goes a long way. The question is always going to be whether he can make enough contact to tap into his tremendous raw power. The early returns are promising, but they’re also confusing. Alonso can hit — not that there were many questions about that before — but he’s been a pure manifestation of 80-grade power this year. He’s also struck out 30% of the time, which is, you know, not great.

What we saw from Alonso for much of May was the troublesome aspect of his profile. He was swinging and missing a lot, and not drawing walks. He was hitting home runs, but he produced such a low batting average that his hitting line was below average. We could chalk the BABIP up to bad luck, but his expected numbers from Statcast weren’t much better than what he actually produced. For a first baseman with potential fielding issues, that profile is nearly unplayable on a contending team. Alonso was experiencing his first adjustment from pitchers, and for about a month, he adjusted poorly.

Here are Alonso’s plate discipline numbers from the first few months of the season:

Pitchers threw to Alonso more carefully and he responded in the worst way possible: swinging more. His O-Swing% numbers were already below average at the start of the season, and for a month, he got worse. In visual form, here’s Alonso’s swing percentage heatmaps from those periods:

Maybe those maps don’t look completely different, but look at the sections up and in, and low and away. On the left map from April, Alonso isn’t swinging frequently at those pitches, while in May, he offered at the same pitches more often. That he made contact more often on pitches out of the zone might have prevented even more strikeouts, but it also caused weaker contact when Alonso put the ball in play. At the height of his slump, he told Mike Puma of the New York Post about his need to focus on pitch location.

“If I am swinging at junk then they are going to keep throwing it,” he said. “If I am doing my job and swinging at strikes and taking borderline pitches or sitting on good pitchers’ pitches and being locked in on my zone then it is kind of rewarding if I get a quality pitch to hit, whether it be a breaking ball that’s over the middle of the plate or changeup over the middle or fastball.

“For me it doesn’t matter what type of pitch it is, I need something middle, because even if I expand the zone on a fastball then I am still going to get myself out or not get myself in a good count to do damage or help the team.”

Alonso identified and understood his weakness. Making a demonstrable change against the best pitchers in the world can be difficult. Here’s his swing map over roughly the last month:

That area down and in is still the place to throw it if you want to try to get it by Alonso, but he’s pretty clearly swung less in an effort to avoid chasing bad pitches. That up and in area, and the low and away area look even better than they did the first month of the season. The lack of swings on the outside of the zone isn’t an indication it is a safe place to throw there, though, as Cole Hamels recently found out:

This is what Alonso’s plate discipline numbers have looked like over the past month compared to the first two we saw above:

I highlighted the O-Swing% and Zone% because those stats show the changes pitchers have made against Alonso and how Alonso has responded. Pitchers continue to hope Alonso chases, and are hopeful to avoid the strike zone. The Mets’ slugger initially responded with poor plate discipline but has since responded with fewer swings. As a result, Alonso has been better lately than he was in April when he took the league by storm:

Alonso has seen a massive decrease in his strikeout rate as pitchers have opted to avoid the strike zone. It’s possible his passivity could be exploited, but that’s a dangerous game given his ability to punish strikes. For good measure, here’s how his Statcast statistics during the same time periods measure up:

Since the end of May, only Mike Trout and Jorge Soler have been hitting the ball with more authority when contact is made. Factoring in walks and strikeouts, only Trout has exceeded Alonso by Statcast’s metrics over that span. Statcast’s numbers align with our own, as Mike Trout has a 227 wRC+ since May 29, with Alonso second to Trout with a 204 mark just besting Christian Yelich. He’s made some of my skepticism at his pace seem foolish, but at least I’m in good company along with a lot of the game’s best pitchers.

The last two offseasons have not been kind to Mike Moustakas.

After hitting a Royals franchise record 38 home runs in 2017, Moustakas went into free agency hoping to score a long-term deal. Months went by without a new contract. He was forced to settle in early March, taking a one-year, $6.5 million deal to return to Kansas City.

The Royals traded Moustakas to the Brewers midway through the 2018 season, ending his 12-year tenure with the organization. (Moustakas had been the Royals’ first round pick in 2007.) While he played well, his offensive production took a dip from the year prior. This was particularly true in the power department: Moustakas’ ISO fell from .249 to .208. He posted a 105 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR overall.

Due to improved defense, Moustakas was actually more valuable in 2018 than he was in 2017, but he faced similar issues in his attempt to procure a new contract. Again, Moustakas was forced to wait until late in the game to sign. A February 19 contract with the Brewers — a one-year, $10 million pact with a $7 million mutual option — to be the starting second baseman was the offer he ultimately accepted.

But now, after his second chilly free agency winter, Moustakas has stepped up his game, reaching a new level of offensive performance that we have not previously witnessed.

His numbers are better across the board. He’s already hit 22 home runs, just six shy of his 2018 season total. His 47-home run pace (per 650 PA) would result in a career-high. But in a larger sense, Moustakas has done more than just crank homers. He is getting on base at a higher rate and collecting more hits, many of which have been of the extra-base variety. His .390 wOBA would be a career-high, as would be his 140 wRC+. Moustakas has already produced 2.7 WAR, his highest total in four years and already the third-highest mark of his career. All of which is to say that Mike Moustakas has experienced an offensive surge, and I’m here to tell you why. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Greinke shouldn’t still be this good. His fastball velocity has ticked down yet again; per Pitch Info, his four-seamer is averaging under 90 mph for the first time in his career. This isn’t a new phenomenon — his velocity has been in slow decline since his masterful 2015 season, when he posted a 1.66 ERA and finished second in Cy Young voting. These days, Greinke makes the news for shunning no-hitters and hitting like a position player more than he does for his pitching. Quietly, though, he’s having another superlative season, defying the slow ravages of time to amass a vintage stat line. His ERA and FIP are both lower than his career averages, which must be gratifying for someone who cares about his FIP more than perhaps any other active pitcher.

The way Greinke has adapted to aging is particularly interesting when compared to his former teammate, Clayton Kershaw, whose adaptations Ben Lindbergh recently chronicled. Kershaw was a singular marvel at his peak, and he remains so today. He’s always been predictable, and it hasn’t seemed to matter. When he was all-caps KERSHAW, he basically never threw a curveball when he was behind in the count. Hitters knew it, and it didn’t matter. Now, he’s throwing more pitches in the zone than ever on 0-0 before throwing fewer than ever in the zone after that. He’s still predictable, only in different ways.

Greinke, by contrast, was never as dogmatic as Kershaw. He’s thrown 62.5% fastballs when down in the count for his career, compared to Kershaw’s 72.8%. His first-pitch zone percentage this year, 52.3%, is actually below his career average, whereas Kershaw’s 61.3% rate is the highest of his career. Greinke has also always erred on the side of more pitches rather than fewer, throwing most of his pitches in any count and any location. Despite this difference in mindset, though, Greinke and Kershaw’s 2019s share two major themes: fewer fastballs, and using the count (and base/out state) to their advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

The last two seasons, Jose Berrios has been on the periphery when it comes to considering the best pitchers in baseball. In 2017 and 2018, he put up three-win campaigns and his 6.1 WAR ranked 22nd among pitchers, just behind Blake Snell, Kyle Freeland, and Mike Clevenger, and just ahead of Jon Gray, Charlie Morton, and Kyle Hendricks. It’s a good group to be associated with, and a few of those players have had great seasons, but with Berrios putting up two similar seasons, he’s not viewed in the same way as Snell and he hasn’t been quite good enough to move himself into the top 10 or 15 pitchers in the game. That’s changed this season, as Berrios has been more aggressive, reduced his walk rate, and become more effective against lefties, all of which has resulted in a season that’s put him firmly among the top 10 pitchers in the game.

After an uneven debut season in 2016 at just 22 years of age, Berrios registered solid efforts in 2017 and 2018. Here’s how those seasons compare to what Berrios has been able to do this year:

The big positive change is the reduction in his walk rate. Berrios has achieved that number mostly by pitching more in the zone. He’s sacrificed his strikeout rate slightly, though he’s made up for that loss by doubling his infield fly rate. Berrios’ FIP this season might not seem drastically altered from the previous two seasons, but with the change in run environment, the three-tenths difference means more than a win over the course of a full season. Berrios did suffer a blister issue in his last start against Kansas City, but currently remains on schedule to start later this week with hopes that the issue is a minor one. Read the rest of this entry »