Ah, Labor Day. The weather is perfect (unless you’re in New York), there’s a well-placed day off of work, and playoff races are in full swing. It’s a great overall time for sports — football is starting up, and the US Open is headed toward a thunderous final. If your team isn’t in the hunt for October, it can be easy to tune out; I wouldn’t blame you for going somewhere else for your sporting needs. But don’t worry: you can still get your fix of baseball, so long as you’re willing to consume it in five bite-sized increments. Shout out, as always, to Zach Lowe, who was making lists of NBA things he likes and doesn’t like before it was cool. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers have been sputtering, losing 15 of their last 19 since August 15 to turn a 3.5-game AL West lead into a three-game deficit, with the Astros, who just swept a three-game series from them at Globe Life Field, and Mariners both above them. Yet even as the team’s offense has dried up, Corey Seager has been on a tear. Since returning from a sprained right thumb at the beginning of August, the Rangers shortstop has homered 13 times in 30 games; this past week, he finally accumulated enough plate appearances to take over the AL leads in both batting average and wRC+. If not for Shohei Ohtani, Seager would have a pretty decent case for an MVP award, even with his absences.

Seager only missed nine games due to his thumb sprain, which he suffered on July 21 sliding into second base in a game against the Dodgers. That was his second trip to the injured list this year, as he also missed 31 games from April 12–May 17 due to a left hamstring strain. Yet the interruptions haven’t hindered him at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Bobby Miller was pitching in High-A when I first interviewed him for FanGraphs in June 2021. Drafted 29th overall the previous summer by the Los Angeles Dodgers out of the University of Louisville, the right-hander possessed both a high-octane heater and a lofty ceiling. Since making his MLB debut this past May, he’s met those expectations, going 9–3 with a 3.80 ERA and a 3.67 FIP over 17 starts. The 24-year-old is also coming off of his most impressive outing. Facing the powerhouse Atlanta Braves on September 3, he allowed just three hits and one run in a career-high seven innings.

Miller discussed his continuing evolution as a pitcher and his efforts to find consistency with his slider when the Dodgers visited Fenway Park in late August.

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David Laurila: We talked two years ago when you were pitching for the Great Lakes Loons. What has changed and what has stayed the same since that time?

Bobby Miller: “A lot of stuff is the same. At the end of the day, it’s still the same game. But the competition is obviously a lot higher. The hitters are lot more disciplined and experienced. Most of them have seen the game’s best arms, so when you’re out there, you’ve got to know that they’ve faced guys just as good or better than you are.

“Game-planning comes in a lot more at this level. I feel like game-planning is super important to learn in the minor leagues, studying hitters and all that, and I wish I’d have learned more before I came up here. While I had somewhat of an idea, I still have a lot of room to improve on that. I think that’s the biggest thing for me: how much time I spend looking at the upcoming lineups I’m going to face.”

Laurila: Basically, what hitters’ hot and cold zones are, and what they hit and don’t hit in certain counts.

Miller: “Yeah. What to avoid in certain counts. When they’re aggressive and when they’re not aggressive. How aggressive they are with runners in scoring position. At some point, I could get better at learning the baserunners, too. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is getting the batter out of the box. It’s about getting outs for your team.” Read the rest of this entry »

In Tuesday’s missive on league-wide bunt tendencies, I ran out of time and space before I could single out some of this season’s standout individual bunters for special attention. As in every collection of ballplayers, there are a few outliers who skew the sample. To continue the metaphor that a bunt is baseball’s mid-range jump shot, these are your LaMarcus Aldridges. Read the rest of this entry »

This year, trade deadline season kicked off when the Rangers acquired Aroldis Chapman from the Royals at the end of June. Texas desperately needed relief help, so it pulled an early trigger in getting Chapman a full month ahead of the deadline. In today’s game, teams moving rental relievers typically do not get anything too exciting in return. That seemed to be the case with Kansas City’s part of the deal: Cole Ragans and 17-year-old outfielder Roni Cabrera. Emphasis on seemed.

Ragans had pitched 24.1 innings in relief across 17 games with the Rangers after an extended but rough debut in 2022. Like last year, things hadn’t gone well. He walked 13.2% of the batters he faced, and hitters slugged .561 against his four-seamer. In that short span, he accumulated -5.2 run value on that pitch alone. Even with a nasty changeup and a four-tick velocity jump from ’22, he was still struggling to get the results he needed.

But after his move to Kansas City and a rough first outing, everything changed. Eno Sarris’ profile of Ragans from last week does a fantastic and thorough job at explaining his career turnaround, from his training at Tread Athletics in the offseason to create his velocity jump to consulting with them and Royals pitching coach Brian Sweeney after his first start in Triple-A Omaha to add his gyro slider. I strongly urge you read the piece, because mine is as a supporting actor to that story. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Sparks had a solid playing career. The now Houston Astros broadcaster debuted with the Milwaukee Brewers two months before his 30th birthday, in 1995, and went on to toss butterflies in the big leagues through 2004. His best season came with the Detroit Tigers in 2001 when he logged 14 wins and posted a 3.65 ERA over 232 innings.

Sandwiched between the knuckleballer’s stints in Beer City and Motown were a pair of seasons in Anaheim, where his teammates included Orlando Palmeiro. According to Sparks, the left-handed-hitting outfielder wasn’t always a left-handed-hitting outfielder.

“He was originally a right-handed second baseman, but he broke his arm,” the pitcher-turned-broadcaster explained prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “He was ambidextrous to begin with, so he started playing the outfield throwing left-handed, and that’s how he remained. I played with Orlando, but he never told me that. Joe Maddon was a minor league field coordinator with the Angels, and he’s the one who told me.”

Sparks proceeded to point out that Palmeiro made the final out of the 2005 World Series against the Chicago White Sox while playing for the Astros.

Meanwhile, an outfielder whose best big-league seasons came with the Boston Red Sox played with Sparks on the rookie-level Helena Brewers in 1987. Read the rest of this entry »

Between Shohei Ohtani, Félix Bautista, and now Tony Gonsolin, the fragility of ulnar collateral ligaments has been an all-too-frequent topic of conversation within the past week. Gonsolin, in case you haven’t heard, is headed for Tommy John surgery on Friday, while we’re still waiting to hear whether the UCL injuries of Ohtani and Bautista are significant enough to merit going under the knife. Between that trio and the Rays’ Shane McClanahan going down earlier this month — and the fact that neither Gonsolin nor McClanahan are the first members of their teams’ rotations this year to need such surgery — it certainly feels as though we’re dealing with a lot of Tommy Johns lately, so it’s worth cutting through the numbers.

First, however, let’s spare a few paragraphs for Gonsolin and the Dodgers. The 29-year-old righty was coming off an All-Star season in which he posted a 2.14 ERA and 3.28 FIP in 130.1 innings, and owned similarly impressive career marks (2.51 ERA, 3.45 FIP) despite his intermittent availability due to injuries, which included a six-week absence near the end of last season due to a forearm strain, and just two appearances totaling 3.1 innings afterwards, one of them a four-out start in the 2022 Division Series. After spraining his left ankle during fielding drills in early March, he was playing catch-up and never seemed to find a comfort zone. He began the regular season on the injured list, finally debuting on April 26, and while his run prevention numbers looked good in the early going, his peripherals told another story, and his average fastball velocity was down. On June 11, manager Dave Roberts alluded to some health issues with Gonsolin, noting that his between-starts recovery “hasn’t been great,” and wondering if he was having trouble getting loose or pacing himself. In his next start two days later, Gonsolin threw six shutout innings but averaged just 91.1 mph with his four-seamer, two full ticks below last year.

To that point, Gonsolin had a 1.93 ERA but a 4.25 FIP, and soon he began to get roughed up on a routine basis. Over his next seven starts, he allowed four or more runs six times, producing a 7.25 ERA. Following a 3.1-inning, five-homer, 10-run stinker on August 18, Gonsolin’s second bad start out of three, Roberts told reporters that Gonsolin had been pitching through an unspecified “arm issue” for four to six weeks and would likely head to the injured list. On Sunday, the Dodgers acknowledged that surgery was an option, and on Monday it was revealed he’d undergo Tommy John on September 1. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think you understand. You probably think you understand, but you don’t understand. Oh, you know that Spencer Strider is a bolt of lightning, a strikeout pitcher so overpowering that he might as well have been created in a lab. You know that he’s having a good season, surely; he’s locked in a tight race for NL Cy Young with Zac Gallen and Blake Snell. You know that he’s the logical continuation of the high-strikeout ace lineage, Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax or Roger Clemens for a new age. But I doubt you grasp how much of an outlier Strider’s 2023 season is, because I didn’t either until I took a closer look.

We have pitch-by-pitch data for every major league game on our leaderboards starting in 2002. That means we can calculate swinging strike rate, the percentage of pitches that result in a swing and a miss, for all of those years. I’ll tell you right off the bat that the single-season leader in this category is Jacob deGrom in 2020. In fact, four of the top five seasons on the list are from 2020; they’re outliers that were likely aided by the inherent randomness of a shortened schedule, in other words. For a rate statistic, that makes sense; the fewer innings you can throw to qualify, the easier it is to put up a wild number. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there. Are you a major league general manager or president of baseball operations? Do you work in a front office role for a playoff-contending team? Do you wish you had another starter, a good closer, or maybe an outfielder? Well, I’ve got great news for you, my friend. Operators are waiting now for your call: the Los Angeles Angels just yelled “Everything must go!” and threw their roster on the waiver wire like a miffed fantasy owner.

More specifically, the Angels placed Lucas Giolito, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López, Dominic Leone, Hunter Renfroe, and Randal Grichuk on waivers. For the next 47 hours, any team in baseball can place a claim on any or all of their services. It’s an unprecedented maneuver that could inject talent into playoff races across the league, and in an unpredictable fashion. If you’re on the fringes, you’ll get the first bite at the apple, but there are so many players here that even some teams currently in playoff position might end up with someone. If you’re looking for more specifics on the waiver process, Jon Becker wrote a nice explainer here.

Let’s talk about the way this works for the Angels first. Coming into yesterday, we projected them for a competitive balance tax payroll of $234,398,925. The first CBT threshold for this year is $233 million. That means they need to save around $1.5 million to duck under that threshold. The players put on waivers are owed around $6.44 million over the remainder of the year, and a similar amount even when CBT tax calculations are applied. The total tax savings will be slightly less than that, because the Rockies are paying a portion of Grichuk’s salary, but assuming most of these players find takers, the Angels will end up below that threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve probably seen that the Angels put what we in the business call “Darn Near a Whole Roster Of Players” on waivers. Per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Lucas Giolito, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López, Hunter Renfroe and Randal Grichuk are all free for the salary relief taking; USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reports that Dominic Leone is on waivers as well. Meanwhile, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reports that Harrison Bader, Carlos Carrasco, Mike Clevinger and José Cisnero have also been placed on waivers by their respective clubs. What does this mean for those players? What about the teams waiving or claiming them? What about you, the reader? Let’s dive in to some of the common questions I’ve seen since the news broke.

Q: What does “being placed on waivers” even mean anyway?

In the context of post-trade deadline transactions, being placed on waivers is similar to the waiver action that occurs when a player is designated for assignment. However, since the trade deadline has passed, the option to trade a player who has been placed on waivers is gone. The only option for a claiming team is to claim the player straight-up, paying all of his remaining salary for the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »