It was weird, it was wild, it was perhaps a bit irresponsible, and it was certainly bittersweet. On Sunday in Pittsburgh, Reds rookie Hunter Greene was dominant, setting a career high for strikeouts and combining with reliever Art Warren to hold the Pirates hitless for the entire afternoon. Yet when it was all said and done, Cincinnati — which had won six out of its last nine after starting the season 3–22 — found a new way to lose, 1–0. Greene and Warren didn’t even get credit for an official no-hitter, combined or otherwise.

The game’s only run scored in the bottom of the eighth inning. After Greene issued a pair of one-out walks to Rodolfo Castro and Michael Perez to push his pitch count to 118 — oh, we’ll get to that — manager David Bell pulled him in favor of Warren, who walked Ben Gamel, then induced a chopper by Ke’Bryan Hayes. Second baseman Alejo Lopez briefly bobbled the ball, and while he still threw to shortstop Matt Reynolds in time to force Gamel, Reynolds’ throw to first base was too late to complete the double play.

The Reds themselves managed just four hits against starter José Quintana and relievers Chris Stratton and David Bednar, the last of whom set down the side 1-2-3 in the ninth. Thus they joined a short and dubious list, becoming just the fifth team to hold their opponents hitless for eight innings but lose because they were nonetheless outscored. Such efforts used to be considered no-hitters, but in 1991, MLB’s Committee for Statistical Accuracy tightened the official definition of the feat, ruling that those falling short of nine innings would not receive such a designation. That put the Reds in this company:

The most infamous of such games is that of Hawkins, who allowed four eighth-inning runs via a combination of three errors and two walks, all with two outs; he did walk five overall, so his outing was kind of a mess to begin with. Greene and Warren combined to walk six, but they were the only one of the five teams above to lose after eight hitless innings without being charged with an error as well. Congrats on discovering that new way to lose, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and once again, we’re hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features a pair of southpaws — White Sox starter Dallas Keuchel and Brewers reliever Brent Suter — on their changeups.

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Dallas Keuchel, Chicago White Sox

“A changeup was the first pitch I learned growing up. My dad never let me throw a breaking ball. He just had me split my fingers and try to throw a fastball as hard as I could. That was probably … let me think for a moment with my Rolodex here. I was maybe eight years old? Regardless, I don’t know how many miles per hour it was off, but it had some good deception and movement, so that’s what I rolled with through a lot of my childhood.

“I didn’t grip it like a palm ball, but a kid’s fingers are obviously smaller than the baseball, so we just tinkered with splitting the two fingers. What stuck was splitting three fingers together, instead of a circle change. It’s more of a three-finger prong changeup. When I say prong, what I mean is like a fork. But it worked well for me. It just kind of rolled off, and I’d get some whiffs and some weak contact. Read the rest of this entry »

Taylor Davis plans to stay in the game once his playing days are over. Currently on the roster of the Indianapolis Indians — Pittsburgh’s Triple-A affiliate — the 32-year-old catcher intends to become a coach, a manager, or a decision-maker in a front office. He’s already received overtures for one of those positions.

“The question does get asked,” said Davis, whose resume includes 22 MLB games over parts of four seasons. “It’s something that started even before I got to the big leagues. The first time I got asked if I wanted to coach was in 2017. That was early in the year, and then I ended up making my debut later that season. Obviously, I want to play for as long as I can, but after it’s done, doing something within the game is what I want.”

Managing might be his primary down-the-road goal, but the erstwhile Chicago Cub would also be well-suited for a corner-office role. Asked about that possibility, Davis said that he’d be equally happy wearing a polo shirt or a uniform. Roster construction and “the whole business side of the game” are among his interests. So is the data that influences, and often dictates, the decisions that are made.

“I dive into analytics probably more than the average player,” the veteran catcher explained during spring training. “I try to understand where teams are coming from, where agents are coming from, and where a player is going to come from in terms of analytics. It’s a piece of the puzzle that’s become increasing important.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Seattle Mariners. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s first full season in the major leagues was somehow both a success and a disappointment. League average offensive production from someone who only hit Double-A in 2019, with solid defense to boot? That’ll get you 2 WAR in just over 500 plate appearances, an impressive showing. He cranked 18 homers as well – all in all, a statistically solid debut.

On the other hand, he did it in a way that looked nothing like his minor league numbers. Chisholm’s intrigue had always stemmed from his sneaky power. Despite his diminutive frame – he’s listed at 5-foot-11, but I’d take the under – he put up impressive raw exit velocities and excellent home run numbers. He hit 25 homers in just 501 plate appearances in 2018, then followed it up with another 21 in 458 plate appearances in ’19. Those are serious numbers, and it’s no accident that Eric Longenhagen graded Chisholm’s raw power as a 60 on the 20-80 scale.

Despite his 18 bombs, though, he didn’t really display the thump he’s capable of. It’s not that he didn’t have the raw power we thought he did – he posted an 84th percentile maximum exit velocity – but quite frankly, he just hit too many grounders. You can look at his minor league GB/FB ratios, compare it to last year, and see the change:

Aside from a brief and grounder-heavy rookie ball debut, Chisholm has avoided putting the ball on the ground. You can’t hit a home run on a grounder, no matter how hard you try. That’s how he ended up with average isolated power in 2021 despite his prodigious pop. He just couldn’t elevate, plain and simple.

This season, that’s in the past. He’s come out firing on all cylinders, hitting .295/.337/.611 with six homers in his first 105 plate appearances. He’s probably not going to keep hitting .295, but he probably will keep up his power output, because he’s back to doing what he used to do best: getting the ball in the air with great regularity. His groundball-to-fly ball ratio is back down to 0.76, his 30.6% groundball rate is the 12th-lowest in the majors, and he’s elevating and celebrating as well as he ever did in the minors.

Call it rocketed-ball science: if you have Chisholm’s power, putting the ball in the air is the best thing you can do. In his major league career so far, when Chisholm can’t get the ball in the air (which I defined as launch angles of five degrees or below), he’s hitting .252 with a .289 slugging percentage, good for a .237 wOBA. That’s awful – and that’s when he puts the ball in play. That’s when the good results are supposed to come.

When he gets above the five degree mark, good things start to happen. He’s hitting .421 with an .870 slugging percentage. If you’re a wOBA person, that works out to .531. That’s the good stuff – the kind of premium production on contact scouts expected out of Chisholm. This isn’t some “oh, he’s just on a hot streak in 2022 that’s the majority of his production” nonsense, either; cut 2022 out, and he’s hitting .412 with an .848 slugging percentage.

Think my five degree cutoff was arbitrary? It absolutely was! Let’s do it again at 10 degrees. Under 10 degrees, Jazz is hitting .327 with a .375 slug. At 10 or more, he’s batting .388 with an .881 slug. No matter how you slice it, when he can keep himself from hitting the ball into the ground, good things happen.

So why doesn’t he do it all the time? Because of pitching, basically. You don’t get to hit off a tee and launch moon shots (named after Wally Moon, thanks Effectively Wild!) all day. Pitchers want grounders or whiffs, and where they locate the ball has a lot to do with what happens after hitters connect.

The lower the pitch, the higher your chances of hitting a grounder, obviously. Even as he’s made strides at putting the ball in the air, Chisholm is hitting grounders on 41.7% of his batted balls when he makes contact in the lower third of the zone. That number stood at 55.3% last year.

Make contact in the middle third, and what kind of hitter you are does more to determine the outcomes. Last year, Chisholm stayed on the ground on exactly 50% of his batted balls that were in the middle third of the strike zone height-wise. This year, that’s down to 35.7%. By the time you get to the upper third, you almost can’t help but elevate. Chisholm hit grounders on 30.2% of his batted balls that originated from the upper third of the strike zone last year, right around league average for that area of the zone. This year, that’s down to 10%.

In other words, Jazz is finding a way to put everything in the air again, like he always has. The question, then, should be what happened last year. As it turns out, he had a few stretches of productive air contact, but spent a few months with some absurdly high groundball rates, torpedoing the whole operation:

I’ll be honest with you: I can’t completely explain this one. It’s not like he’s fixing it with approach, at least not entirely. Sure, he’s swinging more at pitches in the upper third of the zone, but he’s swinging more at pitches in the lower third as well. More of his contact has come in the lower third of the zone this year, in fact.

I can speculate, though. I watched a giant pile of at-bats from the peak of his grounder-heavy spell last year and tried to pick something out that could explain the change. This is extremely non-scientific, but here, watch him hit a grounder on August 31 last year on a fastball right down the pipe:

Now, for a baseline, here he is hitting a grounder on a fastball right down the pipe this April:

Is that difference in swing responsible for the huge change in groundball rate? I’m hesitant to pin it all on that. But he clearly looks less comfortable in the first clip; he’s bouncing around, his hands are meaningfully higher at pitch release, and his lower body looks to me like it’s slightly out of sync at the point of contact.

I’m absolutely not a hitting coach. I wouldn’t take what I’m saying here as gospel. But if you asked me which hitter was more likely to do damage, I’d take the one who stayed still, kept his hands lower, and looked more balanced on his follow-through.

He’s doing other things too, of course. He’s making far more contact over the heart of the plate (61% of his batted balls this year compared to 50% last year), and those are easier pitches to hit. He’s more aggressive over the heart of the plate in general – 78% swing rate this year against 70% last year – while chasing fewer breaking balls outside the strike zone. The more you do that, the more you get pitches to hit.

It’s not resulting in more walks, but that might change. Challenging Chisholm is a tricky proposition; he still swings and misses quite a bit in the zone, but he does a ton of damage when he connects. The equation was a lot easier last year, when he was putting the ball on the ground far too often. Now, you’re liable to watch a jog around the bases if you get too comfortable with throwing him pitches in the zone. Thus far, pitchers haven’t given in. They’re getting their strikeouts, but Chisholm is turning plenty of those in-zone pitches into souvenirs.

Of course, he can hit home runs outside the zone too. Just ask Mark Melancon, Chisholm’s latest victim:

I’d like to have a better answer for you. I’d like to give you one simple statistic that explains Chisholm’s new form. I don’t have one, though. I think it’s a confluence of many things. He’s swinging at better pitches. He looks more locked in at the plate. He’s returning to his old batted ball distribution – maybe this has basically been him the whole time. Whatever it is though, it boils down to this: when Chisholm is rolling, he’s got top-shelf power and the batted ball distribution to take advantage of it. Only time will tell if he can keep it up, but things look pretty rosy in Miami at the moment.

As offense dips down, it was bound to happen. Reid Detmers of the Angels threw the first solo no-hitter of the year last night, facing only 28 batters as he beguiled the Rays’ lineup for nine innings. But this no-hitter wasn’t filled with drama, or even short on offense. The Angels put up 12 runs, powered by a two-homer game from Mike Trout. One of baseball’s unique charms is that the two halves of the game are disconnected; you can have a tense chase of a no-hitter on one side and silly season on the other. Silly season? Well, let’s get right to it.

Top of the Early Innings

Detmers didn’t exactly roll out of bed dealing. After a first-pitch ball, he laid one in there, and Yandy Díaz tagged it for the hardest-hit ball that anyone on either team managed all game. Luckily, it was into the ground and straight at shortstop Andrew Velazquez. Wander Franco followed with another hard-hit grounder, and Harold Ramirez ended the inning with a sinking liner right at left fielder Brandon Marsh.
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The month of April is now complete and the verdict is in: The in-play home run rate for the 2022 season is down from recent seasons, as shown in Figure 1. Much has already been written about this feature by a variety of authors, including Jim Albert, Rob Arthur, Eno Sarris and Ken Rosenthal, and Bradford Doolittle, Alden Gonzalez, Jesse Rogers and David Schoenfield, and various reasons have been proposed for the relative dearth of home runs. Some argue that the baseball has been deadened, resulting in lower exit velocities and therefore fewer home runs. Others have suggested that the drag on the baseball has increased, perhaps due to higher seams. Yet others have argued that it is the effect of the universal humidor.

In this article, we will address the issue of reduced home run rates and hopefully add more light to the discussion. Specifically, we will examine home run rates during the month of April for the 2018-22 seasons, excepting the ’20 season for which there was no major league baseball in April. Here is our approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the 2020 season, I wrote a series of articles that looked at how much control batters and pitchers exerted over various outcomes: home runs, strikeouts and walks, fly balls, that kind of thing. I found the conclusions helpful, if mostly as expected: batters have more to say about home runs and line drives, but both sides have input on strikeouts, walks, grounders, and fly balls.

I decided to apply the same methodology – which I’ll detail below – to check on something that I thought I already knew the answer to: do pitchers exert any control over barrel rate, and how much do hitters do the same? Barrels are essentially batted balls hit extremely hard and at dangerous angles; I think they’re a great way of thinking about hard contact.

There’s already been plenty of research on the year-over-year stability of batter barrel rate. There’s been plenty on the fact that pitchers don’t do the same. Here’s a preview of my findings: I didn’t find anything that disputes that. I still think it’s useful confirmation, however, and I’m also pretty proud of the method. Thanks to Tom Tango, there’s even a rough rule of thumb to use if you want to estimate future barrel rates. Without further ado, let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Woodruff has been good for years now, but he’s always flown a bit under the radar. In some ways, he can thank his rotation-mates for that: Corbin Burnes has overshadowed him with his ascension to ace status, and Eric Lauer and Freddy Peralta have taken big steps forward of their own. The lack of attention directed Woodruff’s way might also have something to do with him being a little boring. He’s been a polished pitcher with a diverse arsenal since his major league debut in 2017, and nothing has really changed about him since he broke out as a full-time starter in ’19; his performance, velocity, mechanics, and arsenal have all remained consistent. And while having the seventh-best ERA- and fifth-best FIP- in baseball since 2019 unequivocally makes him a great pitcher, he doesn’t seem to have been as big a part of the “best pitcher in baseball” conversations that happen around hypothetical water coolers as those numbers might suggest.

His start to 2022 isn’t helping him much in that regard, with a 5.18 ERA through five outings, though there’s some small-sample funkiness behind that number. Woodruff’s BABIP is 25 points higher than his career average, his LOB rate is an unsustainably low 60%, and his ERA estimators are all around where they typically have been (2.83 FIP/3.25 xFIP/3.07 xERA). I’m not worried about his long-term performance, and regardless, that’s not what this article is about. Instead, I want to focus on Woodruff’s changeup, a pitch that has been anything but boring this season and that was on full display in his most recent start against the Reds:

Most of the talk surrounding Woodruff focuses on his pair of elite, high-velocity, whiff-inducing fastballs, which he throws over 60% of the time. Otherwise, he mixes in a curve and a slider that have both served him well, even if they’ve never quite reached the level of his heaters. Woodruff’s changeup, though, has started to become a serious weapon:

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Brandon Marsh has an engaging personality and an innate ability to square up baseballs. He also has untapped potential. Rated as the top prospect in the Los Angeles Angels system prior to last season, the bearded, 24-year-old outfielder is building on a 2021 rookie campaign that saw him put up an 86 wRC+ over 70 games. Logging regular playing time in a dynamic L.A. lineup — this within an MLB-wide environment that is evoking memories of 1968’s “Year of the Pitcher” — Marsh is currently slashing .253/.318/.453 with four home runs and a 127 wRC+.

His offensive profile is more table-setter than bopper. Describing himself as a “gap-to-gap, doubles guy,” Marsh explained that while he’ll run into a ball from time to time, home runs are accidents. Line drives are his goal, which is precisely what the Angels want from him — and have wanted since taking him in the second round of the 2016 draft out of a Buford, Georgia high school.

“They’ve preached for me to keep my hands above the ball, and not be getting underneath and scooping it,” explained Marsh, who is listed at 6-foot-4, 215 pounds. “That type of deal. I’m not a strong, strong guy. I’m tall, but the barrel tends to lag sometimes, so I really need to stay through, and on top of the ball.”

Marsh went on to say that he views himself as a scrappy player whose role is to grind and get on base in front of “a lot of special players.” And while it’s true that he’s not in the same class as teammates such as Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, or Anthony Rendon, he nonetheless struck an excessively-humble tone when assessing his own talent level. Read the rest of this entry »