Last year, Rob Arthur and Tim Dix of FiveThirtyEight helped to reveal to the masses that the core of the major league baseball had changed, reducing the air drag and resulting in the ball traveling farther in the air. Ever since then, the ball has been a recurring topic of conversation, including here at FanGraphs. The subject got a re-boot earlier this month when Arthur, writing for Baseball Prospectus, concluded that there’s less drag on the batted balls hit in the 2019 season, which has led to more speculation that the league has “juiced” the ball.

While it is fun to see more dingers and harder hit batted balls, there’s something to be said about how the league may or may not have deliberately manipulated the ball to make it happen. It’s fun to see players like Aaron Judge have a 50-homer season in his rookie campaign or to watch Giancarlo Stanton flirt with a 60-homer mark on the way to earning an MVP award, but fans may question how “authentic” those feats are compared to the pre-juiced ball days, though it’s worth noting that the liveliness of the ball has changed throughout baseball’s history.

Here in Korea, there’s been an opposite trend. Prior to the start of the 2019 season, it was reported that the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) would decrease the coefficient of restitution (COR) value in their baseball. To put it in layman’s terms, the higher the COR number is, the further the ball travels from the impact of the bat. Last year, the KBO allowed baseball COR values between .4134 and .4374. To put that in contrast, Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) in Japan allows it to be between .4034 and .4234; MLB allows between .3860 and .4005. The KBO decided to lower it to the NPB’s Mizuno baseball level of between .4034 and .4234. There’s a reason for such a change. If you’ve followed the KBO for awhile, you know that the league has been quite hitter-friendly for the past few years. Here’s how hitters fared in the three seasons prior to 2019:

To give you an idea how hitter-friendly an environment it was, MLB hitters slashed .248/.318/.409 overall in 2018. The recent baseball change is not the first time the KBO has attempted to curb its high-offense environment. In 2017, they increased the length of the strike zone, which I wrote about during my residency last year. It had an effect, but not really a lasting one. The umpires struggled to maintain consistency with the zone and the hitters adjusted well enough to keep up the league’s high-offense reputation. Read the rest of this entry »

It would not have been a surprise if Christian Yelich had leveled off after coming out of Baseball Nowhere (a.k.a. Miami), joining the Brewers, and winning the NL MVP award. He may yet do that, because nobody makes baseball look so easy for very long. Thus far this season, however, the 27-year-old slugger appears to be improving in several areas, and despite Monday night’s 0-for-4 against the Cardinals — just the third time in 24 games that he had failed to get on base this year — he’s been as hot as any hitter in baseball, batting .337/.439/.820 with a 210 wRC+.

Yelich began his 2019 season with an Opening Day home run off the Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas, and proceeded to go yard again in each of the next three games, thus joining Willie Mays (1971), Mark McGwire (1998), Nelson Cruz (2011), Chris Davis (2013), and Trevor Story (2016) as the only players to homer in each of his team’s first four games. After a relatively quiet 12-game stretch in which he homered just once, he broke out with a three-homer game against the Cardinals on April 15, the first hat trick of his career. Thus began an eight-homers-in-six-games binge that, if not for a bit of highway robbery by the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger on Sunday, would have been nine homers in seven games.

Even with his two-game drought, Yelich’s 13 homers in his team’s first 24 games put him in select company. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s still April, so it may be premature to talk about the year’s most extreme events. If a home run was hit on a high pitch, there will likely be a higher pitch that gets hit for a home run later on. Think an umpire called a perfect pitch a ball? We’ve got plenty more time for an even better pitch to be missed. However, I think we may have already seen the best pitch frame of the year.

I don’t mean the pitch furthest outside the strike zone that gets called a strike — there’s still plenty of time for that to change. I’m talking about full dedication to the craft of pitch framing. Francisco Cervelli sold a pitch against the Cubs not just with his glove and his positioning, but with his whole being. You’ll probably see worse pitches sold for strikes this year. Heck, you might see Cervelli get more egregious calls than this. You won’t see better framing, though — I can pretty much guarantee it. Read the rest of this entry »

As players decline, we tend to focus on what they have lost since their primes. Whether it is velocity, speed, or power, what is newly absent is typically most notable. This is particularly true for once-great, Hall of Fame-type players like Clayton Kershaw. The Dodgers’ ace is one of the greatest pitchers of all time, but the last few seasons have seen his fastball velocity dip considerably, which has negatively affected his numbers. I noted late last season that Kershaw was no longer a fastball pitcher, and instead used his slider as his dominant pitch. This spring, some focus switched to his changeup, and how Kershaw might need something new to combat what he has lost. So far this season, Kershaw has been effective by going to his strengths and using hitter tendencies to his advantage.

Through two starts, Clayton Kershaw has pitched 13 innings, struck out 13 batters, walked four, and given up two homers and four runs total. If we assume that Kershaw will give up homers at a slightly lesser rate but keep the same strikeout and walk numbers, he’d be one of the best 10 or 20 starting pitchers the rest of the season. While we obviously can’t say he will do that, we can look at what he’s done so far and see what has made him successful this season compared to years past. While we won’t focus on Kershaw’s fastball, we can’t escape it entirely. Here’s the graph I used last year showing how Kershaw’s slider usage overtook his fastball.

That trend has held up so far this season, with Kershaw throwing one more slider than fastball in his first two games. That fastball has averaged just over 90 mph, several ticks slower than his prime. It’s a fine fastball, but the velocity is below-average. To get batters out, Kershaw has been forced to go away from his fastball and to his offspeed offerings. This is particularly true when Kershaw is ahead. The graph below shows Kershaw’s fastball usage when ahead in the count since 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Lewis Thorpe, LHP, Minnesota Twins
Level: Triple-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: 12   FV: 40
Line: 5.2 IP, 4 H, 1 BB, 2 R, 12 K

Notes
After two middling starts to kick off his season, Thorpe was dominant yesterday and K’d 12 of the 22 hitters he faced, all on either a fastball at the letters or with a curveball beneath the strike zone. He has quite the injury history (including a two-year stretch where he didn’t pitch at all) and it has impact on how the industry perceives him, which is why he’ll be ranked a bit beneath where he would otherwise be based on his stuff and proximity to the majors. But Thorpe has been consistently healthy since May of 2017, which may begin to allay concerns.

Cody Thomas, OF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Level: Double-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 40
Line: 4-for-4, 3 HR

Notes
The Dodgers have done well drafting and developing college power/speed hitters who are athletically stiff, have some swing and miss issues, or both. Thomas, who will be an interesting Rule 5 case this offseason, is one of these. He’s striking out a lot as a 24-year-old at Double-A, but some teams may view the context of his performance differently because Thomas was a two-sport college athlete who hasn’t focused on baseball for as long as other prospects his age. The Dodgers will need to add several other players from Thomas’ draft class to the 40-man (Will Smith, Mitch White, Jordan Sheffield, Tony Gonsolin), so Thomas would seem to be a candidate for trade if a team loves the tools, ability to lift the baseball, and has some 40-man space/time to spare to let him develop further.

Oscar Mercado, CF, Cleveland Indians
Level: Triple-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: 12   FV: 45
Line: 3-for-4, 2B, BB, 4 SB

Notes
Cleveland outfielders, aside from Leonys Martin, are struggling right now. Mercado has begun to heat up at Triple-A with hits in five consecutive games. If he starts seeing more time in a corner, it may be an indication a call-up is imminent, because he’s not supplanting Martin in Cleveland’s center field. He’s only started 23 games in either left or right field during his career, and it might behoove Cleveland to get him more acclimated.

Ty France, 1B/3B, San Diego Padres
Level: Triple-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 40
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR

Notes
The Hosmer and Machado deals almost certainly make France a burgeoning trade chip. He’s exactly the kind of hitter to whom the PCL is extra nice, but he’s hit at every level since college and, save for one season, has also hit for power, and his current SLG% is more caricature than mirage. France also had a great spring with the big league club and is on the 40-man, so he’s likely to debut this year if one of the big league corner bats gets hurt, though San Diego might view that as a way to clear their outfield logjam by playing Wil Myers in the infield again.

Tyler Ivey, RHP, Houston Astros
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 14   FV: 40+
Line: 5 IP, 2 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 8 K

Notes
A quintessential Houston four-seam/curveball pitching prospect, Ivey at least projects as a good multi-inning reliever and his four-pitch mix gives him a great chance to start. He was ejected two innings into his last start for having a foreign substance on his glove. He’s a sleeper 2020 Top 100 candidate.

More on Keoni Cavaco
There’s background on Cavaco in yesterday’s Notes. I saw him again yesterday against Torrey Pines High School and he had a tough day at the plate, swinging over multiple changeups from TPH’s funky lefty starter. There are going to be questions about his hit tool because of both the swing (inconsistent, arguably ineffectual stride length, odd hand path) and his lack of track record against elite high school pitching, and maybe about what his ultimate defensive position will be, but he’ll be somebody’s toolsy sandwich round pick.

Also of note from the game was Torrey Pines CF Mac Bingham, a 2019 committed to USC. He’s a strong, compact 5-foot-10, 185, and was the football team’s running back in the fall. He made strong contact with two hittable pitches, and ran a 55 time from home to first while legging out a double. The frame makes the power projection less exciting and one area scout told me the general consensus is that Bingham will go to school, but he’s at least an interesting, tools-based follow for 2022 if he does.

The Philadelphia Phillies are off to a more-than-reasonable start in 2019, standing at 11-6 and currently in first place in the NL East. In the early weeks of the season, the division has been as tight as expected, with only 2.5 games separating the four teams that had a reasonable preseason claim to 2019 relevance. What’s unexpected about Philadelphia’s early lead is that it has little to do with the performance of their ace pitcher, and 2018’s third-place finisher in NL Cy Young voting, Aaron Nola.

Nola has thrown four starts so far this season and has been terrible in three of them, all losses. Even more damaging is that all four starts have been against the NL East competition, meaning every loss in those games is a guaranteed win for the team’s direct rivals, no scoreboard-watching needed. Add it all together and you have a pitcher who is already nearly a third of the way to what would be his career-high for home runs allowed in a season, with a 7.45 ERA and a walk rate double what he posted in 2018.

So what’s happening with Nola? The obvious thing to do is to look is at his miserable walk and home run rates, and see if there’s any chance he’s not getting what he “deserves” from his pitching.

For a quick look at a pitcher’s walk rate, you can actually make a simple model that estimates that rate knowing just his plate discipline numbers. Knowing just that, you can get a surprisingly adequate estimation of what a walk rate “should” be. In this case, my very basic non-linear model with observations weighted by number of batters faced, gets the r-squared to 0.65. In layman’s terms, that means that approximately 65% of the pitcher-to-pitcher variance in walk rate is explained by the pitcher-to-pitcher variance of the inputs.

That’s a pitcher who’s largely earning a poor walk rate. One might think that Zone% is the a key statistics here, but it’s actually not; first-pitch strikes and swing percentages are far more relevant when predicting walk rate, with the r-squared for Zone% by itself only being 0.05. For the other two variables, it’s 0.41 and 0.29, respectively. Nola’s not throwing first-pitch strikes and batters are not swinging at his stuff at the usual rate. And when they do swing, especially at out-of-zone pitches, they’ve been far more likely to make contact than in the past. At a cursory glance, batters are taking a more patient approach with Nola, waiting him out, and largely getting the pitches they want.

This number tends to stabilize fairly quickly (52% of pitchers with at least 10 innings pitched are already within two percentage points of their actual walk rate), so it’s a statistic I tend to use when deciding whether to panic about a pitcher’s early walk rate. Since someone will no doubt ask, here are the top 10 departures from expected walk rate so far in 2019 (both good and bad).

A simple look at Statcast also suggests that Nola’s getting hit a lot harder than in the past. His average exit velocity has jumped from 85.9 mph to 90.0 mph and his barrel-percentage has doubled. The algorithms of Willman, Petriello & Friends predict that a player with Nola’s profile ought to be allowing a .490 slugging percentage; hitters are actually slugging .533 against Nola. So while one can say he’s getting hit a little harder than expected, you still don’t want any of your starting pitchers to be that crushable. In 2018, only a single qualifying pitcher allowed a slugging percentage worse than .490: Dylan Bundy at .523, with a shocking difference between him and Jakob Junis in second place at .455.

So why is it happening? That’s a tricky question, in that there’s no giant red flag, no significant dip in velocity or worsened movement on his pitches. You can see a lot of what’s going on with that first-pitch strike percentage, which shows a troubling difference from 2018. Last year, batters swung at 29% of Nola’s first pitches, whiffing on 28% of those swings. This year, those numbers are 18% and 19%. Nola’s started off 32 plate appearances this year throwing a curveball and he’s gotten a swing-and-miss on…zero. It’s a similar story with his fastball. 27% of his first-pitch fastballs resulted in a 1-0 count last year. This year, that number is 55%.

From this graphic, Nola’s thrown 60 pitches outside the strike zone on 0-0. Batters have swung at only three of them.

At least in the early going, batters seem to simply be taking a more passive approach to Nola after his breakout 2018 season, and he hasn’t adjusted. And he’s getting away from some of the things that he did successfully in 2018, such as daring to throw curves to lefties when behind in the count (he’s dropped from 39% to 20%). Batters are more patient and Nola’s been more predictable.

With the division expected to remain a tight race, every loss is of enormous consequence. ZiPS estimates that Nola’s four starts, when you combine what he’s already done and the decline in his projection, will eventually cost the Phillies 1.2 wins from their preseason forecast. To get an idea what this costs the Phillies in terms of their October fate, I set ZiPS to project the Phillies with Nola performing as predicted before the season (3.9 WAR prorated over the remaining games) and how Nola is predicted to perform now (3.4 WAR), along with a few worse projections, based on how long it takes Nola to get back to where he should be.

The Phillies are surviving so far without Nola in top form, but the longer it lasts, the more damaging it becomes to the team’s playoff hopes. It’s not time for Philadelphia to panic about their star pitcher, but with it unlikely that there’s a pitcher equally as good available for trade, it’s time to mix in some serious concern with the cheesesteaks.

(Please note that I don’t mean ketchup. Please don’t do that ever.)

The summer of 1962 was one of political turmoil. Within the United States, the civil rights movement continued to fight for an end to racial segregation, and outside the United States, the globe-consuming tension of the Cold War continued to intensify. The Vietnam War continued to escalate, with Robert F. Kennedy declaring in February that the United States would not leave Vietnam until Communism was defeated. The Space Race proceeded apace, with both Americans and Russians being launched into orbit. And the brewing conflict between President Kennedy’s administration and the still-new Castro regime in Cuba was reaching a fever pitch. In February, President Kennedy extended the embargo on trade with Cuba to include almost all exports; in March, the participants in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of the previous year were put on trial by the Cuban government, and in May were sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment. Both the United States and the USSR continued to test new kinds of nuclear warheads. The Cuban Missile Crisis loomed on the horizon; by midsummer, it was already clear that the pressure was about ready to boil over.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that this conflict found its way into the relatively uneventful world of American professional baseball, where the most interesting thing going on was the Mets’ 120-loss inaugural season. Baseball in the United States, after all, is embedded in the national mythology, from the legends surrounding the sport’s invention to its status as America’s Pastime. The cultural significance of baseball was not lost to either side of the Cold War Conflict. New York Mirror columnist Dan Parker wrote that he was sure the world would be a better place “[i]f more ambassadors used sports instead of double talk as their medium of expression,” and that he’d “like to see the new envoy to Moscow introduce himself in the Kremlin by fetching Uncle Joe Stalin a resounding whack on the noggin with one of Joe Dimaggio’s castoff bats.”

Soviet paper of record Izvestia, meanwhile, in an attempt to undermine baseball’s status as a pillar of American values, claimed baseball was actually a descendant of the old Russian game lapta. In Cuba, where baseball had been the country’s most popular sport for almost a century, the game had developed yet another ideological purpose as a nationalist symbol, with the excellence of Cuban baseball demonstrating the values and victory of the revolution. 

In August of 1962, the ideological tensions existing in baseball manifested themselves in the form of one unlikely person: a 17-year-old boy in a 16-foot boat.

***

On August 5th, 1962, the Associated Press ran a curious news item. The headline read “Cuban Baseball Player Branded as Traitor,” and opened with this paragraph:

A Cuban baseball player who signed a U.S. major league contract but kept it a secret so he could disqualify his nation’s entry in the Central American Games has been denounced as a traitor, Havana Radio said yesterday.

The story identified the player as one Manuel Enrique Ameroso Hernandez. There was no other information about him, no age or identifying characteristics. All that was known was what he had done, and what he had planned to do: He had signed a contract with a major league team, which made him a professional baseball player, and had intended to identify himself as such and claim political asylum in Jamaica, where the Central American Games were being held. The Cuban team, then, having had a professional play for their team, would be disqualified from the competition.

Given baseball’s cultural importance to Cuba and the revolution, this would have been a stunning act of sabotage if it had been successfully carried out. But Hernandez’s reserved, apathetic demeanor leading up to the competition drew suspicion, and he eventually admitted his plan to his teammates. His actions were condemned in the strongest possible terms. Teammates were quoted as saying that they “would prefer death a thousand times before selling ourselves for the bloody dollars of the Yankee monopolies,” and the team issued a statement condemning “the traitorous and miserable attitude of Ameroso Hernandez for having signed as a professional and keeping this secret for the ruinous and cowardly object [of giving] our enemies the opportunity to disqualify our invincible team.” There was no clarification of what was to happen to Hernandez, nor of which major league team he had signed with in the first place.

In the coming days, as the story spread in the American media, more information came out about Hernandez. There was, first, the fact of his talent: Raul Castro had only recently sung Hernandez’s praises on the national stage as Cuban baseball’s finest player, and assessed his annual value at $60,000. (The highest salary in the major leagues in 1962 was $90,000, earned by both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.) This revelation was followed by one that made the former all the more surprising: Hernandez was only 17 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Boyd has been around for a bit. He was drafted by the Blue Jays in the sixth round of the 2013 Draft out of Oregon State University. He made the majors with the team but was traded to the Tigers at the 2015 trade deadline along with Daniel Norris and Jairo Labourt in exchange for David Price. As a prospect, he wasn’t too highly regarded. While he was a regular on Carson Cistulli’s Fringe Five column, he wasn’t highly ranked. Baseball America, for instance, included him in their organizational rankings only once (he was the 29th prospect in the Jays system after the 2014 season); he received sporadic mention at Baseball Prospectus.

After splitting time between the majors and Triple-A in 2016 and 2017, 2018 showed some promise for Boyd. His strikeout rate went up and his walk rate went down. His home run rate also went up and while overall he took a step forward as a decent rotation guy for the Tigers, there was room to improve. As my friend Brandon Day over at Bless You Boys noted, Boyd showed an extreme home/road split, which is one pitfall of being a flyball pitcher whose tendencies can be masked by playing in the pitcher-friendly Comerica Park. Boyd himself wasn’t satisfied either. He spent his offseason basically finding every way he could to improve himself. He lost 15 pounds, maintained his muscle mass, and even did DNA-based testing to find out what works and doesn’t work for his body.

And so far in 2019, Boyd has been a strikeout machine. In three starts, Boyd has racked up 40.3% strikeout rate, the second highest rate the majors behind Blake Snell. Yes, there’s the obligatory small sample size warning here. Boyd will likely not keep that rate up for the rest of the season. But looking at the changes he’s made and how the hitters have responded to them, there are reasons to believe that he could be taking the next step as a pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Chris Archer, Kyle Crick, and Jameson Taillon — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

Chris Archer, Pittsburgh Pirates

“In [high school], I was dating this girl whose brother played in the minor leagues with the Red Sox. His name is David Penny. He had some shoulder issues and didn’t make it beyond Low-A, but he was a prominent figure, baseball-wise, in my hometown [Clayton, North Carolina]. He thought that I had the right arm slot for a slider — at the time I was only throwing a curveball — and taught it to me.

“When I got drafted, the Indians scrapped it. I didn’t throw one slider in 2006, ’07, or ’08. What happened was … it was interesting. First day, I was with the rookie-ball pitching coach, and he saw all four of my pitches. He was like, ‘OK, we need to develop your fastball command and your changeup.’ He said the only way to do that would be by eliminating one of my pitches, which would force me to throw the other ones. That particular bullpen, my curveball appeared to be better than my slider, so he said, ‘Curveball, fastball, changeup — that’s it.’ So for those three seasons, I was curveball-fastball-changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

The bottom of the eighth inning of last Wednesday’s Brewers-Angels game was, at first glance, fairly uneventful. Down 4-2, the Brewers called on converted starter Junior Guerra to keep the game in reach. He delivered — two strikeouts sandwiched a groundout, and the team went to the ninth down only two. Guerra is the fourth or fifth option out of the Brewers bullpen; he’s also a perfect embodiment of modern pitching. He threw 16 pitches in the inning, and less than half were heaters — six fastballs, four breaking balls, and six splitters. When he did throw fastballs, though, he put some mustard on them — two hit 96 on the gun, and he’s averaging about 95 mph so far this year.

These two trends — fewer and faster fastballs — are spreading like wildfire across the game. Sometimes it happens in jumps, like the Twins hiring a progressive pitching coach this offseason. Sometimes it happens organically, like Junior Guerra leaning on his splitter and slider a little more out of the bullpen. It’s a game-wide trend, though, and it seems likely to continue. This year, starters and relievers are both throwing their lowest share of fastballs since we’ve had pitch-level data. When they do throw fastballs, though, both groups are throwing them harder than ever before.

Without looking at a single piece of data, you could have convinced me that those two trends were likely true, but I wanted to look into the numbers to know for certain. First things first — we’ll need a consistent sample across years. Taking this year’s stats and comparing them to previous full-year averages won’t work, because pitchers consistently throw at lower velocities in March and April than they do in the year as a whole. In 2018, for example, March and April four-seamers were .2 mph slower than the year as a whole. Thus, we’re going to use data only through April 10th for every season to properly account for this systematic bias. Let’s take a look at that data, shall we? A quick methodological note: I’m excluding cut fastballs, as classification systems have real trouble differentiating them from sliders:

Read the rest of this entry »