Tanner Houck’s signature pitch is a sweeping slider. The 25-year-old Boston Red Sox right-hander has gone to it 35.5% of the time this season, and with good results. There is little question that the offering is the most lethal weapon in his arsenal. That said, it’s arguably not his most important pitch going forward — particularly if his future is in the starting rotation, and not out of the bullpen.

Bedeviled by an inability to master a conventional changeup, Houck began learning a split-finger fastball last year. The pitch remains something of a work-in-progress, yet he’s begun throwing it more frequently. Houck’s splitter usage is up to 7.5% on the season, a percentage that promises to rise if he can fine-tune it further. Four years after he was drafted 24th overall out of the University of Missouri, Houck is hoping that his newest pitch will take him to the next level.

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Tanner Houck: “I had trouble throwing a changeup. I would constantly baby it — I would get on the side of it and just push it — so it was really inconsistent. They came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want you to throw a splitter.’ This was in spring training 2020, four days before we got canceled. It was a heck of a time to start learning a new pitch.

“They wanted me to keep working on the change, but also attempt to throw the splitter, and I was like, ‘OK, fine; I’ll give it a shot.’ I threw a bullpen the next day, and for every five, maybe one of them wasn’t too bad. At that time it was still 90-93 [mph]; it was essentially just a little bit worse of a two-seam. But I didn’t think anything of it. I was like, ‘This is literally day one of throwing this pitch, so it’s not a big deal.’ Then COVID happens, so I go home. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles are a very bad baseball team. In fact, by the available evidence, they’re the majors’ worst, owners of the lowest winning percentage by a narrow margin and the lowest run differential by a country mile. Yet when the book is finally closed on the 2021 season, they will have left a sizable footprint on the American League playoff picture. For as dreadful as they’ve been, they’ve played quite the spoilers — and could continue to do so.

The O’s have already lost more than 100 games for the third time in the past four seasons; obviously, they couldn’t pull that off during last year’s pandemic-shortened campaign, though had it been played to completion, they might have given the century mark a run for its money, as their their record prorated to 68-94. At 47-102 (.315) this year, they’re one game worse than the Diamondbacks (48-101, .322), and on pace to lose 111 games, second only to their 2018 team’s 115 losses in terms of the franchise’s run in Baltimore. Because they’ve surrendered a ghastly 6.00 runs per game, they’ve been outscored by 276 runs, and could become the fifth team of the post-1960 expansion era to be outscored by at least 300 runs.

The Orioles have been even worse within their division (18-52, .257) than outside it (29-50, .367), but while they lost 18 out of 19 games to the Rays — becoming the third team of the division play era to do that, after the 2019 Tigers (1-18 versus Cleveland) and Mariners (1-18 versus the Astros) — they went 8-11 versus the Yankees. Without that difference, the AL East race would be a four-team pileup:

Read the rest of this entry »

Louie Varland has been one of the best pitchers in the Minnesota Twins system this season. In 20 appearances — 10 with Low-A Fort Myers and 10 with High-A Cedar Rapids — the 23-year-old right-hander is 10-4 with a 2.10 ERA and a 2.81 FIP. Moreover, he has 142 strikeouts to go with just 30 walks in 103 innings.

In some respects, Varland has come out of nowhere. A 15th-round pick in 2019 who took the mound at a Division II school, he entered the current campaign well under the radar. His name was nowhere to be found on top-prospect rankings.

The relative obscurity doesn’t include the Twin Cities’ baseball community. The St. Paul native played close to home at Concordia University, as did his older brother, Gus Varland, who was drafted by the Oakland A’s in 2018.

The emerging Twins prospect has upped both his velocity and his pitching acumen since he toed the slab with the Golden Bears. Low-90s as a collegian, he’s now sitting 94 and topping out at 98. Varland shared that his four-seam fastball spins between 2,300 and 2,500 RPM and gets 17 inches of rise. Calling the pitch his “greatest gift right now,” he added that its effectiveness is due in part to “vertical approach angle, the riding illusion that hitters see.” Read the rest of this entry »

It didn’t explicitly come up in the Effectively Wild podcast spot I did highlighting this year’s Team Entropy series, but one reason why the Wild Card races that I covered in my second installment early this week are so wild — with five teams chasing two spots in the AL, and five more chasing one spot in the NL — is a handful of prominent collapses. The Mets, Padres, and Red Sox all spent a good chunk of the season occupying playoff positions, with New York and Boston occupying the top spots in their respective divisions for more days than any of their competitors. Yet all three teams could miss out on October baseball thanks to some of the most drastic first half-to-second-half drop-offs we’ve seen in recent years.

The Mets, despite a slew of injuries, led the NL East — at times with company in first place — for nearly four months, from April 13 to August 6, with a slight return after falling out of first that stretched the window to August 13. They somehow did that by posting winning records only in May (17-9) and July (14-13), and even after being overtaken, they remained within striking distance for about half of a dreadful August during which they went 9-19. Since the July 30 trade deadline, when they acquired Javier Báez but arguably didn’t do enough to bolster their rotation — a decision that was exacerbated by Jacob deGrom’s subsequent setback, which came to light almost immediately after the deadline passed — they’ve gone just 17-28. At this writing, they’re 72-75, 5 1/2 games behind the Braves in the NL East, and five behind the Cardinal for the second NL Wild Card spot, with cumulative playoff odds of 2.1%. I’m skeptical they’ll be relevant by the time I next cover Team Entropy.

The Red Sox had an on-and-off relationship with first place in the AL East, occupying at least a share of it from April 8 through May 23, and then again for most of a stretch that ran from June 19 through July 30. They’ve gone just 20-24 since the deadline passed, for the third-worst record in the AL; they did so while the Rays (29-14), Blue Jays (31-16), and Yankees (29-16) peeled off the AL’s top three records in that span. A wave of COVID infections has played a part, knocking 12 players — including Xander Bogaerts, Enrique Hernández, Chris Sale, and Matt Barnes — out of action since August 27; notably, the Red Sox are one of the six teams that has failed to reach the 85% vaccination threshold to loosen protocols, though the majority of those infected were vaccinated. They’re now 8 1/2 games back in the AL East, but occupying the second Wild Card spot, a percentage point behind the Blue Jays and half a game ahead of the Yankees, with Playoff Odds of 75.3%.

The Padres were projected to be one of the NL’s two best teams, albeit in a division occupied by the other one, the Dodgers. But while the defending champions have indeed been one of the top two, it’s been the Giants, not the Padres, who have provided their closest competition; San Diego has spent just 14 days in first place in the NL West. Even so, they spent nearly three-quarters of the season with Playoff Odds of 75% or better, but have gone just 16-25 since the deadline, and 10-21 since August 10. Having just won back-to-back games for the second time in the past five weeks, they’ve closed the gap behind the Giants to, uh, 18 1/2 games, but their Playoff Odds have dwindled to 32.0%.

As you can see, there’s a pretty wide spread when it comes to these three teams’ chances of playing October baseball, but each has fallen significantly from the spots they occupied earlier in the season. Depending on where I set the endpoints, their slumps might appear even more acute, which works for storytelling purposes, but is harder for comparative analysis. Since all three were riding rather high in early July, I decided to see how their declines in winning percentage from the first 81 games — a point the Padres reached on June 29, the Red Sox on June 30, and the Mets on July 4 — to the second compared to those of other teams in recent years.

As it turns out, the Padres’ drop from a .593 first-half winning percentage — the first 81 games of the season, not the uneven “halves” defined by proximity to the All-Star break — to a .422 second-half mark so far is the fourth-largest since 2012, the start of the two Wild Card team era; their dip ranked second until this two-game hot streak. Meanwhile those Red Sox and Mets rank among the dozen largest drop-offs, with yet another team from this year, one I hadn’t even considered for this piece given my apparent East Coast bias, in the top 20:

That’s not really a list you want to be on, judging by the minimal postseason impact of those teams. Obviously, we don’t yet know the playoff fates of the Padres, Red Sox, Mets (well, I think we know that one), and A’s (welcome to the party). Of the other 16 teams, seven made the playoffs; four won Wild Card games (the 2013 Pirates, ’15 Astros, ’16 Giants, and ’18 Yankees), but the only one that won a Division Series or a later round was the ’17 Astros, who, well, you know. Only one team with a drop-off of at least 87 points and a sub-.500 record in the second half won so much as a Wild Card game, namely the 2015 Astros.

Since the A’s turn up here, their arc is worth retracing as well. Despite being outscored in both April and May, strongly suggesting that they were playing over their heads, they climbed to the top of the AL West, and spent all but a single day of the next two months there, from April 20 to June 20. Despite their stellar June (17-9), an Astros team that had been lurking just behind them overtook them, and while the A’s were just 1 1/2 games back at the 81-game mark, and just 2 1/2 back at the 115-game mark (August 14) after some ups and downs, they’ve lost 18 of their last 29 and fallen seven games back. Their Playoff Odds peaked at 76.9% on June 18, and spent the next two months mostly in the 40-60% range, but they’ve plummeted from 62.5% on August 12 to just 4.3%.

So that’s two AL and two NL teams that have each taken rather dramatic tumbles this season. As you can see from the table above, it’s the second time within this span we’ve seen four teams from a single season take such falls; in 2018, the Yankees and Mariners both crumbled, as did the Phillies and Diamondbacks, with Philadelphia even sliding below .500 for the season to finish 80-82.

Not surprisingly, all four of these teams that have crashed in 2021 have underachieved relative to their Pythagenpat records during the second half. The Padres are the only ones who were underachieving during the season’s first half as well:

For the Padres, this has mainly been about the collapse of a rotation projected to be the majors’ best coming into the season; it’s been lit for a 5.52 ERA and 4.82 FIP in this second half. Yu Darvish has been battered for a 7.67 ERA and 5.74 FIP in 54 innings during this slide, that while landing on the injured list twice, for left hip tightness and lower back tightness. Ryan Weathers has completely collapsed (9.00 ERA, 7.55 FIP in 38.1 innings) after a promising beginning, Chris Paddack (5.74 ERA, 4.13 FIP in 42.1 innings) has had some bad luck, and even Joe Musgrove has regressed (3.79 ERA, 4.31 FIP). On the other hand, Blake Snell (3.03 ERA, 3.34 FIP) turned his season around, but a groin strain forced him out during the first inning of his September 12 start against the Dodgers. Adding insult to injury, the Padres reportedly were close to acquiring Max Scherzer at the deadline, only to watch as the Dodgers snatched him away, and he’s been brilliant. Scrapheap pickup Jake Arrieta? Not so much.

Run prevention has become a major issue for the Red Sox as well, with both the rotation and bullpen (4.42 ERA and 4.59 ERA, respectively) underperforming their FIPs by about four-tenths of a run. High-leverage guys such as Barnes, Adam Ottavino, and Hansel Robles have been particularly lousy. On the offensive side, the Sox have been a juggernaut, but while they’ve received a 100 wRC+ or better from nine out of the 11 players with 90 or more PA since July 1, Bogaerts (107 wRC+) and J.D. Martinez (108) haven’t been themselves, and rookie center fielder Jarren Duran (50) was over his head before landing on the COVID-19 injured list.

The Mets have continued to show holes on both sides of the ball. Offensively, Jeff McNeil (91 wRC+), James McCann (66), and Dominic Smith (56) have come up notably short even while the arrival of Báez (156), the return of J.D. Davis (118), and the upswing of Francisco Lindor (139) after a dreadful beginning to his season have helped; the last of those made the 36 games he missed due to an oblique strain a particularly big thumbs down. While late July additions Rich Hill and Trevor Williams have been pretty good, they don’t add up to a deGrom; meanwhile, the much-awaited arrival of Carlos Carrasco (5.59 ERA, 4.38 FIP) hasn’t really panned out, and Taijuan Walker (7.04 ERA, 6.90 FIP) has turned into a pumpkin. Key relievers such as Seth Lugo, Trevor May, Jeurys Familia, and Edwin Díaz have taken steps backwards of varying size at the wrong time as well.

By runs scored and allowed, the A’s have produced the same Pythagenpat winning percentages in both halves, but have gone from overachieving by 37 points to underachieving by 59 points, making for both the largest second-half shortfall and the largest overall swing relative to their expected record. The second-half fades of Sean Manaea and James Kaprielian and the frightening loss of Chris Bassitt (who’s still rehabbing his way back) have loomed large in the rotation. The bullpen — particularly Lou Trivino, Sergio Romo, and Yusmeiro Petit, three of the most four heavily-used relievers in the second half — has proven shaky as well.

For as much as these four teams have in common in terms of the severity of their second-half slides, and for as crowded as they’ve made the Wild Card races, it’s clear by now that the A’s and Mets are just hanging on, while the Red Sox are odds-on favorites to make it through, and the Padres are hardly out of it. Still, when the playoff slate is finally set, at least some of these teams will look back and wonder what might have been, and how they fell so far.

Let’s get right down to the question that all baseball analysis is asking at its core: Which of these two players would you rather have on your team, all else being equal?

It’s a close one, right? That’s largely because I decreed it to be so; these aren’t real players, just stat lines I made up that have the same wOBA. Who would you rather have? They’re extremely different, of course; one gets a ton of value from walks and singles, with some doubles sprinkled in for good measure. You can surmise that the other gets a ton of value from home runs — look at that slugging percentage — but does worse elsewhere.

Oh yeah, a few other caveats. These are underlying talent levels; you might look at Player A and say that the BABIP can’t continue, or Player B and say the HR/FB rate can’t be real, but for our purposes, these are the lines they’ll put up over 1,000 PA, or 10,000, or 1,000,000. This is their real skill level. Given that, in most cases, it doesn’t matter much which one you choose, because they’re about the same. That’s the point of wOBA, after all.

That’s not a very interesting answer, so I decided to go deeper. I constructed a generic American League lineup. I removed intentional walks so that we’re comparing apples to apples. The result looks like this:

I threw that lineup into a lightly modified version of my lineup simulator, a short snippet of code that lets you put in a lineup (based on the probability of each outcome every time they bat) and get an estimate of how many runs they’d score per game. This one comes out to 4.53 runs per contest, which is close enough to the actual AL average for my purposes. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I compiled the worst bunts of the season. They were bad in various ways — poor execution, great defense, a spot where failing was particularly painful — but they all cost their team dearly. Today, we’re looking at the opposite: the bunts that have added the most value.

As a refresher, this absolute gem was the best bunt of the first third of the season:

That perfect execution of an audacious plan is the platonic ideal of a bunt. If every successful bunt this season was like that, this would be a really fun series to write. A well-placed bunt is art; post five of those, and I could skate by with almost no commentary and let the GIFs do the talking.

Sadly, that’s not quite the case. There’s quite a bit of bad defense this time around — plenty of errors in the top five. That’s just how bunts work: they’re designed to force the defense to make a play, and while defenders are excellent, they’re not automatons. A sacrifice bunt that works as planned is never going to be one of the best plays a team can make — it’s designed to minimize variance, neither as bad as a strikeout nor as good as a single. The best bunts of the year by WPA, then, need to either score runs without surrendering outs or feature dubious fielding.

So yeah, some of these bunts aren’t perfectly placed gems that the defense has to eat. Some of them are just players making bad throws or bad decisions. As a palate cleanser, though, take a look at this beautiful honorable mention. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, I took a look at the worst (and best) bunts of the year. I couldn’t help myself. It’s simply too much fun to watch the best-laid bunting plans go down in flames, while a perfectly executed bunt is one of the most exciting plays in baseball.

Originally, I planned on waiting until the end of the season to update both lists. I forgot something, though: the end of the season is really busy and fun as it is. Playoff races, individual awards, wondering where the Mets went so wrong. There are already innumerable annual traditions to write about at season’s end. Instead, I decided to get a head start on these standout bunts, and circle back if one improbably beats them out for the worst (or best) bunt of the year.

As a reminder, here was the worst bunt of the first third of the season:

That one was really bad, both in execution and outcome. It cost the Cardinals dearly — more than a quarter of a win by WPA. It’s not easy to lose so much value in a single play on offense. With that in mind, I’ll be answering a bonus question for each bunt in this list: was it worse than José Rondón’s ill-fated attempt? Without further ado, let’s get bunting. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

Heading into July 4, at the exact midpoint of their season, the Yankees were just 41-40. Beset by injuries and underperformance, they even scraped .500 before the fireworks could go off, losing the first game of a holiday doubleheader to the Mets before rebounding to take the nightcap. From July 4 until now, they’ve gone 39-24, good for the second-best record in the entire American League, and good enough to vault them back into contention for a playoff spot, though not enough to catch the Rays, who have gone 42-19 in that stretch.

Within that impressive hot streak are two shorter, diametrically opposed streaks, however. From July 4 through August 27, the Yankees went 35-11, the hottest 46-game span of any team in the majors all season, and one capped by a 13-game winning streak, tied for the majors’ longest. The tear vaulted them from sixth in the AL Wild Card race, five games out of the second spot, and into the Wild Card lead, three games ahead of the second Wild Card team (the Red Sox), and 6 1/2 games ahead of the race’s third-place team (the A’s). Since then, however, the Yankees have skidded to an AL-worst 4-12 record, and they’ve now got company; at 80-64, they’re a game behind the Wild Card-leading Blue Jays (81-63) and in a virtual tie with the Red Sox (81-65).

That skid — aided by the Jays going 38-25 from July 4 through Monday, and 15-2 while the Yankees have gone 4-12, a situation that Ben Clemens detailed on Monday — has created quite a pileup in AL Wild Card race, where five teams are separated by just 2 1/2 games from top to bottom. The NL Wild Card race is similarly tight; while the second-place team in the NL West (currently the Dodgers) is head and shoulders above the rest of the group, five other teams are separated by just 3 1/2 games top to bottom. The chances of getting bonus baseball in each league — a do-or-die game just for the right to play in the do-or-die Wild Card game — are a bit better than one in six. As to how the various scenarios will be disentangled, that’s a job for the latest Team Entropy 2021 installment. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve read any of my articles of late, you would know that I am currently fixated on plate discipline. My piece on Jarred Kelenic sparked an article on take value and hitter approach. After that, a discovery that Darin Ruf is succeeding with one of the lowest swing rates in baseball despite not having phenomenal plate discipline on the surface inspired research into zone-swing differential and what it may tell us about a hitter.

Under the plate discipline section of player pages and on our leaderboards, we list both O-Swing% and Z-Swing%. On a handful of occasions, though, writers here have used zone-swing differential. Chet Gutwein defined this stat as D-Swing% in his piece about the NL West, and Justin Choi wrote about it in an article on the Blue Jays’ aggressiveness in early counts. In my most recent piece on Ruf, I cited zone-swing differential to conclude that while his overall swing rate is low, his discipline might not actually be that good, as he’s still swinging at a fair amount of pitches outside the zone, which you can see when you look at his below-average D-Swing rate.

The idea behind D-Swing% is simple: Hitters should be better when they swing at strikes and take balls. This isn’t the only way to succeed at the plate, but you would think that better hitters would have higher D-Swing rates on average. There were a couple comments about D-Swing rate on my Ruf piece, and that inspired me to look into it further. Is this a stat that tells us more about hitters than what we already have with the standalone O-Swing% and Z-Swing% stats?

This exact question was actually explored on the FanGraphs community blog back in 2017, where user Dominikk85 broke hitters into top- and bottom-30 groups by wRC+, ISO, OBP, and BABIP to see if O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, or what they referred to as Z-O-Swing% had the biggest impact in explaining the difference between the groups. They found that being more aggressive in the strike zone “helps the power but seems to slightly hurt the OBP,” but overall, they saw an advantage in using D-Swing% over the individual components.

I ran a similar study, but I wanted to control for more variables — zone rate and contact rate — to isolate the effect of D-Swing%, as many plate discipline metrics are interrelated. You may swing less at pitches in the strike zone if you are seeing more pitches outside, or you may choose to swing at pitches in the strike zone with which you can make contact (preferably hard), which may lower your Z-Swing% but raise your Z-Contact%. Without at least attempting to adjust for some of these variables, we may be missing out on conscious hitter tendencies that may be more the result of the pitches that they are seeing rather than their inherent swing choices. Read the rest of this entry »

Mere weeks ago, the Toronto Blue Jays were 66-61, the last of five teams in contention for two Wild Card spots. They looked the part — their +112 run differential led those five, and adding José Berríos at the deadline helped stabilize their rotation. That’s all well and good, but they were 6.5 games out of the second Wild Card, and their bullpen was undoing a lot of the rotation’s good work, especially new acquisition Brad Hand’s 8.22 ERA and 8.12 FIP.

Despite their evident talent, our playoff odds game them only a 4.7% chance of reaching the playoffs at their nadir on August 27. A one-in-20 shot isn’t impossible — less than 5% of plate appearances end in a home run, and yet we see tons of those every day — but things didn’t look good for Toronto. But here we are, three weeks later, and the Jays are in the first Wild Card spot (in a tie for it, but still). How did those rampaging Jays do it? Let’s take a look. Here’s a graph of what we’ll be talking about:

First things first: if you want to overcome a big deficit quickly, stop losing. The Jays have gone 14-2 in their past 16 games, scoring a comical 7.5 runs per game while allowing just over four themselves. That’s good for a Pythagorean record of .774 (using the Pythagenpat formulation of it), or in regular English, “Stop using a record estimator when a team is scoring twice as many runs as they allow, of course they’re doing well.” Read the rest of this entry »