I wish I could come to you with news about the mass adoption of backup sliders from pitchers across the league. I also wish I could come to you with a shining example of even one player who has perfected the art of the effective mistake. There is no apparent analytical case that comes to mind; it’s largely just a fascination to me — the best hitters in the world swinging through the worst offering a pitcher could imagine throwing. Here’s an example:

Matt Wisler is the perfect guy to have here — someone who throws nothing but sliders making the biggest kind of slider mistake! And yet there are times when it just works. What I want to try to answer is what makes these mistake sliders click without diving into the rabbit hole of pitch sequencing. Are there particular characteristics of movement and velocity that make for better backup sliders?

First, we have to set guidelines on what a backup slider is. You know it when you see it, but it is more broadly defined as something that “hangs” when thrown to a batter of the same handedness. Sliders behave differently depending on whether they’re thrown inside or out, as shown by Eno Sarris on this site a few years back; those away gain almost half a foot of horizontal movement compared to ones thrown inside! Sliders need height to be considered mistakes, but the distinctions in horizontal movement are too vast for an outside-and-up slider to be as bad a mistake as one up but inside. For our purposes, let’s say that a backup slider is anything in the upper third of the strike zone, middle-to-in, in a same handedness matchup. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned this summer after being on a year-long hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features a pair of right-handers, Joe Barlow and Bailey Ober, and a southpaw, Alex Young, on one of their breaking balls.

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Joe Barlow, Texas Rangers

“I was a fastball-curveball guy until last year. The pandemic happened, then I went to Driveline to see if there was an opening for a better pitch… not even a better pitch, just any pitch in general to add to the repertoire. That way, if my curveball wasn’t on, I wouldn’t just be throwing fastballs.

“I played with changeups, two-seamers, sliders, and cutters. The pitch that I could seemingly best repeat was the slider. Even though it wasn’t good, it seemed like there was an opportunity to grow on that and get it to be a pitch that I could use. So, I went into the offseason and started throwing it. It was meant to be a third pitch — behind the curveball, behind the fastball — but I ended up getting a good feel for it and now it’s almost 50-50 with the fastball. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, rookie sensation Wander Franco extended his streak of getting on-base at least once to an impressive 31 games. There’s still quite a ways to go before you make the shade of Ted Williams wonder if his 84-game (!) streak is in jeopardy, but it’s a mighty impressive feat for a 20-year-old.

That said, Franco is no ordinary rookie. As much a consensus No. 1 prospect as anyone I can ever remember, he didn’t exactly sneak up on anyone who was paying attention; his 80 Future Value grade — a first on our prospect lists — wasn’t something given out recklessly. At 18, an age at which minor league prospects are just getting started in the “real” professional leagues, he was already terrorizing the full-season Florida State League, hitting .339/.408/.464. That would be great for a first base prospect; for a young shortstop, it’s astounding.

Despite losing a key developmental season in 2020, Franco didn’t need much time to get going. Skipped right to Triple-A this year, he hit .315/.367/.586 for the Durham Bulls and was called up six weeks later. Outside of a home run in his very first game, the first week or two was an adjustment period; through 14 games, his line stood at .211/.274/.351 with 13 strikeouts in 57 at-bats against five walks. But since starting his on-base streak, he’s hit .314/.385/.504, also with 13 strikeouts but in 121 ABs.

Every streak has some element of good fortune, but in Franco’s running plate discipline numbers, you can almost see him adjusting to pitchers. And those numbers tend to be “stickier” than most other offensive numbers; short-term changes in results are more likely to be real compared to, say, batting average.

After his first two weeks in the majors, Franco’s contact rate increased despite him simultaneously swinging at more pitches. As pitchers in recent weeks have started throwing fewer strikes against him, that swing rate has responded accordingly, but his rate of contact has continued to rise. His performance during the streak isn’t exactly a galaxy away from his ZiPS minor league translation of .291/.335/.503 at Durham; combine that with the real improvements in plate discipline, and you can make a good argument that we’re seeing the bonafide Wander Franco in these waning days of summer.

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Which players have helped their Hall of Fame cases the most this year? The question comes up in almost every chat of mine, and sometimes in radio spots as well. You’d think I’d be used to this by now, but I rarely have more than an answer or two at the ready unless one of those players has recently been in the headlines for reaching a milestone. But with the end of the 2021 season in sight, and with the COVID-delayed Class of 2020 Hall of Fame Induction Day ceremony just a week away, it’s worth digging deeper for answers.

For this exercise, I’m focused mainly on mid- or late-career players rather than early-career ones. Yes, the five-win seasons of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Juan Soto, and Fernando Tatis Jr. are solid steps towards attaining the ceilings we envision — and likewise for Shohei Ohtani given his singularly remarkable two-way season — but all of those players are at least half a decade away from the point when we can start to get real about their chances. JAWS and seven-year peak WAR gains are the major drivers of my selections in this piece and a companion one for pitchers, but positional standards, traditional milestones, and ordinal rankings are considerations as well. With one exception, all of the players below have surpassed 35.0 JAWS; roughly speaking, that’s the equivalent of seven five-win seasons, a point at which I start to take mid-career position players seriously. All WAR figures here refer to the Baseball Reference version, unless otherwise indicated.

One other thing to note: since my reference point for “old” WAR and JAWS figures dates back to January 2021, some portion of these players’ gains may be due to updates to bWAR itself, particularly via changes to 2019 and ’20 park factors and tweaks to 2017-20 Defensive Runs Saved that were announced in March, but also due to a second update to 2020 park factors that just went live on Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been paying close attention to my writing recently, you’ll notice a hidden theme running through my last month or so of work: frequent and bad jokes. But there’s a second theme, too: batters do really well when they swing at pitches over the heart of the plate. Splitting the plate up into the center and the corners does a lot to explain where hitters do best; when you swing at something there, it’s hardly a surprise that the results, on average, are excellent.

Will Smith is a great hitter. He gets my vote as the best catcher in the game, and while I wouldn’t fault you for picking Buster Posey, Smith leads all catchers in WAR and is doing it at a young age. He’s a perfectly acceptable defensive catcher, but he’s valuable because of his hitting, with a .267/.377/.510 line that’s good for a 140 wRC+. Those numbers are great for any hitter, but particularly for one playing the hardest defensive position.

With that in mind, you’d assume Smith is great against pitches in the middle of the plate. That’s how hitters succeed! Well, you’d be wrong. Take a look at his Swing/Take runs, a neat Statcast tool that shows the run value a player has accrued on pitches in each zone:

That’s not how this is supposed to work. What the heck is going on?
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The Royals aren’t going anywhere this season, but that doesn’t mean they’ve thrown in the towel. In the second half of August alone, they’ve taken series from the Astros, Cubs (a sweep), and Mariners and won 10 of 14 games. One big reason for their surge has been Salvador Perez, who’s homered eight times in that span and gone deep in his last five straight games. After a stellar showing in the shortened 2020 season — his first back from Tommy John surgery — he has already set a career high with 38 homers and appears on his way to several other full-season highs in counting and rate stats.

Indeed, the 31-year-old backstop has been on quite a binge lately. After hitting 21 homers in the season’s first half, Perez participated in the Home Run Derby, losing out to eventual champion Pete Alonso in the first round. His 17 homers since the All-Star break are tied with Joey Votto for the major league lead, and he’s second overall to only Shohei Ohtani (41).

Within that stretch, Perez homered in three consecutive games from July 28 to 30, his longest streak since 2017, then separately matched and surpassed his career-best streak of homering in four straight games, which he did April 6–9, 2017. What’s more, on August 26 against the Mariners’ Joe Smith and a day later, against Logan Gilbert, he hit two grand slams, the first of which erased a 4–1 deficit and the second a 5–1 deficit. In doing so, he became the 25th player in major league history and the first since the Brewers’ Tyler Saladino in 2019 to hit slams on back-to-back days. Here’s a supercut of the homers from his five-game streak:

In the wake of the first home run in that clip, one of the announcers notes that Perez is on pace to become just the sixth catcher to hit 40 home runs in a season, but that’s not quite correct. A player has hit at least 40 homers while spending the majority of his time as catcher six times; he is on track to become the seventh. However, a player has hit at least 40 homers while in the lineup as a catcher — as opposed to getting a breather at another position, whether it’s first base or designated hitter or pinch-hitter — five times, and Perez isn’t anywhere close to becoming the sixth:

Bench, man. In that 1970 season, when he was 22, he homered 38 times in 137 games as a catcher, five times in 14 games as a left fielder, and once apiece as a first baseman and right fielder, that while playing each of those positions seven times. In 1972, he homered 34 times in 127 games as a catcher, four in 17 games as a right fielder, and two in four games as a third baseman. He won the NL MVP award in both seasons.

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Shohei Ohtani does something amazing virtually every time he sets foot on a baseball field, and Thursday was no exception. Leading off the afternoon’s contest against the Orioles in Camden Yards, he connected with Keegan Akin’s second pitch of the day, a hanging curveball in the middle of the zone, and hit a towering homer:

It wasn’t just the fact that this was Ohtani’s 41st homer of the year, extending his major league lead, or that it was the third time he’s led off a game with a homer, which he did on June 25 against the Rays in Tampa Bay and on August 14 against the Astros in Anaheim. No, what stood out to these eyes was the combination of the Statcast specs — a 45-degree launch angle and a 110.7-mph exit velocity — on this shot that made it such a majestic drive, and one that particularly caught the eye of this launch angle aficionado.

I have a thing for what I’ve sometimes termed “launch angle porn,” one that predates the Statcast era. Even amid the unending barrage of home runs and their resultant highlights, I find that the visceral thrill of watching the beginning of a sky-scraping home run is the best part. Particularly when viewed on a two-dimensional screen of whatever size, we have no idea of the final distance that struck sphere will travel, but after the sight and sound of contact — and particularly, the mellifluous melody of a ball hitting the sweet spot of a wooden bat — launch angle is the first feedback we get, whether or not there’s a number attached to that steep ascent. As for exit velocity and distance, those come later, whether it’s a couple of seconds after when we see where that ball lands, or once the Statcast numbers are in.

Wherever you sit along the spectrum of baseball observers, from newcomer through casual fan, diehard, junkie, nerd, and professional, you are by no means obligated to care about such numbers. But if you’re the type that gets a kick out of at least an occasional peek at them, not for their own sake but because they increase our understanding of the game (and of ourselves): welcome to the club, and to today’s tour of the season-to-date’s Statcast extremes. This ride isn’t for everyone, but if it’s your thing, buckle up.

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Eugenio Suárez is not a major league caliber shortstop. That’s no knock on him — pretty much no one in the entire world is, and he picked the position up out of necessity rather than because it was in his range. The Reds simply had no one to play there, and he looked like the least terrible option. The experiment didn’t last long — 32 games was enough to say that he was better suited for third base — but the team’s changed infield construction gave Jonathan India a big league shot, so it wasn’t all bad.

The hitting, on the other hand? That’s been all bad. Suárez has been restored to his natural spot at third base, and the Reds are mounting a playoff charge — but they’re doing so despite an absolutely abysmal season from the player we projected as their best before the season started. He’s hit .172/.259/.373, good for a 68 wRC+, and it’s worth asking whether this is just a blip on the radar or the beginning of the end for one of the sneakiest power hitters of recent years.

Let’s start with something that doesn’t seem to have gone wrong: Suárez is still hitting home runs at a solid clip. A full 18.3% of his fly balls have turned into homers this year, and while that’s not quite the rate he managed in 2019 or 2020, it’s still an excellent number, one that makes sense given how hard he hits the ball and the bandbox park the Reds call home. And he’s doing so despite a nagging shoulder injury that has plagued him since the start of the 2020 season.

In 471 plate appearances so far this year, Suárez has cranked 23 bombs. Plug those home run numbers in and use previous career rates to fill in the rest of his statistics, and he’d be doing just fine; he’d be hitting roughly .263/.344/.480. There’s all kinds of absurd math in there, and I’m not claiming that’s a reasonable projection for the season, but the power certainly hasn’t been the problem this year — at least at first glance. Read the rest of this entry »

At the trade deadline, the Nationals cleaned house. Max Scherzer and Trea Turner went to the Dodgers, Brad Hand to the Blue Jays. Kyle Schwarber? He’s now on the Red Sox. Daniel Hudson? A Padre. Josh Harrison and Yan Gomes are Athletics, and for some reason, the Cardinals decided to acquire Jon Lester. What’s left of the Washington Nationals are bits and pieces from their 2019 World Series run, some young prospects, franchise mainstay Ryan Zimmerman, and Juan Soto.

It’s probably too soon to ask when the Nationals will find themselves contending again. However, both their retention of Soto and their acquisition of major league-ready prospects Josiah Gray and Keibert Ruiz potentially indicates that the front office at least hopes the team will play meaningful baseball sometime in the near future. While things may look a bit hazy in the immediate wake of the deadline, one player whose performance could influence the timing of the Nationals next competitive window is Patrick Corbin, who still has three years left on his contract after 2021.

Over the last two seasons, Corbin hasn’t been especially good. After a sparkling debut season with Washington, one that culminated in the aforementioned championship, Corbin has been average or worse since. He pitched 202 innings in 2019 to the tune of a 3.25 ERA, a 28.5% strikeout rate, and a 8.4% walk rate. He was worth 4.7 WAR, a figure that ranked 14th in the majors (it was good for third on his own team). The Nationals assembled a super-staff that year, and as I asserted on this very website, the pickup of Corbin the prior offseason made a huge difference in the team’s success not only in the regular season, but in the postseason as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2021 Los Angeles Dodgers might be having one of the greatest disappointing seasons in MLB history. Despite being on a 97-win pace, an accomplishment that nearly every team in baseball would celebrate most seasons, they find themselves in second place in the National League West, four games behind the surprising San Francisco Giants. They’re even underperforming their preseason expectations, a notable feat considering how rare it is for projection systems to forecast a team to have more than 97 wins.

One of the primary components of this terrific-but-underwhelming paradox is Cody Bellinger, 2019’s NL MVP. Just 24 at the end of the 2019 season and sporting an ultra-spicy .305/.406/.629, 7.8 WAR line, Bellinger was quite rightly considered one of the best young players in baseball. A slugging first baseman who somehow converted into being a solid center fielder, little seemed out of reach in those salad days. Yet just two years later, at the ripe old age of 26, Bellinger is currently a platoon player.

Entering the season, ZiPS projected Bellinger for a 133 wRC+, a notable bounce-back from the decidedly middling 114 wRC+ he posted in the shortened 2020 season. And ZiPS was actually the grumpy one here; the other projections housed here at FanGraphs pegged him for a wRC+ of anywhere from 141 to 148. The results haven’t been in the same galaxy as those forecasts, or even his 2020 results. Bellinger’s 65 wRC+ is a shining beacon of misery. To put this in context, Chris Davis put up a 63 wRC+ from 2017-20 and a 60 the last time he got significant playing time in 2019. You don’t want history to rhyme, let alone repeat, when the comparison is Davis.

Of course, one mitigating factor is that Bellinger has suffered a string of injuries over the last year. First, there was a dislocated shoulder while celebrating a World Series dinger. Then this season, he’s missed time with a hairline fracture in his left fibula and a hamstring strain. We’ve seen players struggle while coming back from shoulder injuries in the past, and his maladies this season haven’t allowed for much of a run. So case closed, he’ll be fine? Not really. Read the rest of this entry »