Yesterday Jon Sciambi shared a tweet with a few, seemingly impossible stats:

MLB slash into today 232/310/390…BA would be lowest ever…in 2008 about 42% of swings put balls in play, this year 35.4%. In 08 the swing/miss % was 20% and this year it is 27.3%. Yikes.

— Jon Sciambi (@GoGala__Games) April 26, 2021

Yikes indeed. While all of those numbers are concerning on their own, it’s actually the batting average figure that most struck me. If a .232 league batting average sounds absurdly low to you, you’re not wrong. In fact, it’s the lowest since at least the turn of the twentieth century. The .232 mark is five points worse than the league hit in 1968, when Bob Gibson spun a 1.12 ERA, only one American Leaguer managed to hit .300, and nearly a quarter of the season’s games ended in a shutout. It’s also seven points lower than the worst collective batting average of the Dead Ball Era, a year the league slugged .305. And it’s far, far lower than anything in recent memory:

Say what you will about Three True Outcomes baseball, a batting average this low is a bit of a problem. And while the magnitude of the problem may come as a bit of a shock, the “why” is pretty easy to explain.

Much of it can be attributed to strikeouts, of course. Pitchers are fanning their opponents 24.6% of the time, up from 23.4% in last year’s shortened season. Strikeout rates seemingly only go up each year, but it’s worth noting that this is a pretty dramatic uptick even by that standard, easily the largest year-over-year we’ve seen this century. (Hat tip to Marc Webster for noticing.) Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers are relying on their best pitches more and more. And why should they not? It makes all the sense in the world. Throwing a fastball 60% of the time just so that you can “establish it” is an outdated moniker that players and teams alike are reticent to follow. Take a look at the our season stat grid tool if you want proof that the most dominant pitchers in the league are increasingly relying on their breaking pitches. Select curveballs and you will see Julio Urías, Zack Greinke, Brandon Woodruff, Anthony DeSclafani, Dylan Bundy, Walker Buehler, Corbin Burnes, and John Means toward the top of the list. For sliders, that list features Tyler Glasnow, Lance McCullers Jr. (who is also throwing a new slider), Shane Bieber, a new and improved Jeff Hoffman, Freddy Peralta, and even Clayton Kershaw, whose slider is almost 45% of his pitch diet.

These are cherrypicked examples; not every pitcher on this leaderboard has been as productive as those starters thus far. But it does point to the idea that the best pitchers MLB has to offer are increasingly leaning into their best secondary offerings and have either continued to be successful or found another level in their production.

The idea of simply throwing your best pitch has become more in vogue in recent years. Back in 2017, Eno Sarris wrote that pitchers should try making breaking balls 80% of their total pitch mix. Part of the reason is that non-fastball pitches, specifically breaking balls, have gotten increasingly harder to hit; Ben Clemens wrote about this trend a couple of years ago. Even though fastballs have become harder to hit by virtue of increased velocity, pitchers are turning away from them in favor of other offerings.

This decision raises the question: Are pitchers successful with their non-fastball pitches because they use them less? The idea is that the main driver of offspeed or breaking ball success would be that hitters see them less, making them tougher to adjust to in a plate appearance. Theoretically, then, if a pitcher goes primarily to his secondary pitches, those pitches will become less effective on a per pitch basis. Is this true?

To investigate, I took every pitch type that was thrown at least 100 times in a season from 2018 through ’20. I took the year-over-year changes in pitch usage, swinging-strike rate, and run value per 100 pitches thrown for each season pair (where in both seasons the pitch was thrown on 100-plus occasions).

The first thing I wanted to look at was effectiveness based on changes in usage for each individual pitch type. The short answer to this is that there is little relationship between marginal usage change and marginal success in either of the two measures for any pitch type.

If anything, changeups and curveballs actually induce swinging strikes as a higher percentage of all pitches with more usage. That is the strongest relationship in this dataset, and it still consists mostly of noise. Based on the data, there is no evidence that pitchers should be dissuaded from throwing their best pitches more often, and that holds true for breaking balls, offspeed pitches, and fastballs.

Sure, you may argue, throwing any pitch a little more won’t have adverse effects on its effectiveness, but aren’t there diminishing returns? At a certain point, don’t you throw the pitch too often to fool the batter? To answer that, I placed each pitcher and pitch type pair into a bucket based on usage, then separated the bucket into increments of 10% (so the first consisted of pitches thrown between 0 and 10% of the time, the second 10% and 20%, etc.). I then grouped the pitch usages across the three seasons and looked for any potential deviations in effectiveness.

Again, these relationships are mostly noise. Even for pitches thrown upwards of 70% to 80% of the time (beyond which the the data is scarce), they should not lose any per-pitch potency by virtue of increased predictability.

For those of you skeptical that fastballs make up the majority of pitches and that this lack of a relationship may not be evident with breaking balls or offspeed pitches specifically, I have bad news for you:

As with run values, there’s no strong relationship between swinging-strike rate and usage.

As noted above, fastball usage is on the decline throughout the league. But using the data I collected from ’18 through ’20, it’s clear that pitchers aren’t all now throwing breaking pitches all the time.

The vertical lines represent the 50th percentile in that specific distribution. On average, pitchers using a certain breaking ball less than 30% of the time shied away from using the pitch more. On the other hand, breaking ball usage mostly increased for players who used it more than a cursory amount. That all makes sense: If you have a breaking ball you like to use (or are comfortable using), you’re going to throw it more; if you don’t have a strong breaking pitch, then you’re not going to be tossing it all the time even if it could theoretically be more effective.

Throwing a pitch just for the sake of throwing it is not going to fly in MLB in 2021. Pitches are thrown with a purpose: generating whiffs, or at least groundballs. This is one of the fundamental factors in the ever-increasing strikeout rate: Not only are pitchers throwing harder than ever, but they are also leaning on their best stuff even more. That’s while every one of those pitches is being optimized with the help of technology to generate maximum movement and deception. And that trend will not stop until there is evidence that a pitch will perform worse upon increased usage. Barring that, pitchers across the league will rely on the pitches they deem most dominant.

On Sunday, Madison Bumgarner did what the Padres’ Joe Musgrove and the White Sox’s Carlos Rodón have already done this season: he pitched a game to its scheduled completion without allowing any hits. Yet the 31-year-old Diamondbacks lefty won’t get credit for an official no-hitter because his sterling effort took place in a seven-inning doubleheader game — oddly enough, the nightcap of a twin bill that began with teammate Zac Gallen holding the Braves to a single hit.

Because Saturday night’s game at Truist Park was postponed due to inclement weather, the Diamondbacks and Braves met for the season’s 21st doubleheader, playing under the rules put in place early in the 2020 season as a means of helping teams make up postponements in expeditious fashion, particularly COVID-19-related ones. The rule was then carried over into this season as part of this year’s health and safety protocols. In the opener, Gallen allowed only a sixth-inning single to Freddie Freeman, and afterwards waved off the thought of how his achievement would have been viewed if not for Freeman’s hit:

“Yeah, I didn’t know that it didn’t count, but it wouldn’t have really counted in my book anyway,” Gallen said. “[D-backs catcher Stephen Vogt] after was like, ‘Man, that would have been sick,’ and I was like, ‘Forget that, I want to get a legit one.’”

Read the rest of this entry »

Let me get this out of the way: Nick Madrigal is really good at baseball. Or at least, he’s really good at one aspect of it, and that aspect is one of the most important ones. Madrigal’s bat control is borderline otherworldly. Per FanGraphs’ measurements, Madrigal entered Sunday’s contest with a 100% in-zone contact rate. 100%! That’s zero swings and misses in the zone. Nearly 20 games into the season, that’s a remarkable achievement. Arguably more impressive is his 90.2% contact rate out of the zone. When he chases, he still hits the ball. Currently, only 31 qualified hitters have a higher in-zone contact rate than Madrigal has when leaving it. In terms of putting the bat on the baseball, Madrigal is a pure 80. It’s an amazing ability, and it’s one reason that, barring injury, it’s easy to see him hitting .300 or better for the next decade or more.

The question is how valuable can Madrigal be beyond his remarkable ability to make contact. He’s the ultimate “empty average” guy due to an aggressive approach and a complete lack of power. Entering Sunday’s game, Madrigal is a .327 hitter in his young, 47-game career. He has a .757 OPS to go along with that. Again good, but not as good as you’d expect from someone challenging for a batting title. ZIPS sees the weird combination of plusses and minuses and has Madrigal peaking at 2.3 WAR with a 101 OPS+. In order to go from good to really good, Madrigal is going to have to either walk more or hit balls harder, and he has a harder path than most in terms of making either happen.

Scouts call players like Madrigal “early action” players. Swing at a lot of pitches, make a ton of contact. That’s Madrigal in a nutshell. He’s not going to walk, and he’s not going to strike out. In fact, he’s going to do those two things less often than anyone in the game. We’re all familiar with walk and strikeout percentages, but what happens when we combine them? Let’s call it Early Action Percentage:

Read the rest of this entry »

With Opening Day around the corner, I wanted to update our readers on the current state of the site and make a few Membership announcements. This time last year, we weren’t sure if FanGraphs was going to last another two months, let alone survive long enough to see the start of the 2021 season. The pandemic fast-tracked what was supposed to be a much slower shift in our business model from advertising to Membership, and because of this, we are more reliant on your support than ever. So first things first: thank you! I can say with complete certainty that we would not be here without you; our readers and members literally make FanGraphs possible.

And your support hasn’t just kept us afloat; it’s helped us build a better FanGraphs. Over the past year, we’ve added a lot of new content and features to the site. We’ve incorporated Statcast stats into our player pages and leaderboards and new game and season stat aggregation capabilities to our player page dashboards. We now have KBO stats on the site, an offering we plan to expand this season. We’ve updated our auction calculator and implemented new RosterResource features. We’ve invested in behind-the-scenes improvements to make site features better and easier to use. Today, we announced a number of new contributor voices at FanGraphs and will do so at RotoGraphs soon. And as an exclusive benefit for our Members, you can now view the site in Dark mode and Classic mode.

Tuesday is the start of what is now a very important month for the site. On March 30, 2020, we asked for your help in weathering the pandemic. As such, a significant portion of our Membership base is up for renewal in the coming weeks. If you’re an existing Member and have stuck with us through the last year, we hope that you will continue to support what we do here at FanGraphs. If you’re not a Member, we hope you’ll become one. It’s the best way to support all of the content and tools you rely on to help you enjoy the baseball season, and ensure we can keep improving the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Mead announced earlier this month that he’ll be stepping down as President of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in mid-May. Who will replace Mead in that prestigious position is unknown, and to my knowledge no names have been bandied about beyond Cooperstown itself. That being the case — and with the caveat that some are less practical than others, for a variety of reasons — let’s consider a few potential candidates.

John Thorn was the first person that came to mind when this subject was presented to me recently. Currently the Official Historian for Major League Baseball, Thorn checks all of the boxes, with one possible exception. At age 73, he doesn’t profile as a long-term fit in that role. (The soon-to-be-departing Mead — formerly the Vice President of Communications for the Los Angeles Angels — is 62, while his predecessor, Jeff Idelson, is now 56.)

Josh Rawitch. who serves as Senior Vice President, Content & Communications for the Arizona Diamondbacks, strikes me as an intriguing possibility. A 1998 graduate of Indiana University, Rawitch has held multiple positions in baseball and is also an adjunct professor at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Unlike Thorn, he would profile as a long-term fit.

SABR CEO Scott Bush would likewise qualify as a long-term option. Formerly the Senior Vice President for Business Development with the Goldklang Group, as well as an Assistant General Manager for the St. Paul Saints, the 38-year-old Bush has a business background other candidates may lack. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres stockpiled starting pitching and mapped out their season, they probably didn’t count on Ryan Weathers playing the stopper. Yet in a rotation with a former Cy Young winner, a four-time All-Star, and the author of the season’s first no-hitter, it was the 21-year-old southpaw — the majors’ youngest starting pitcher — who helped the Pad Squad turn the page on a 2-7 slide, a three-game losing streak, and some sobering injury news with 5.2 innings of one-hit shutout ball against the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine on Thursday night, part of a 3-2 win.

Making just the second start of his career, and matched up against Walker Buehler for the second time in six days, Weathers kept the Dodgers off balance with an effectively wild four-seam fastball/slider combo, mixing in the occasional sinker and changeup. While his low-spin four-seamer averaged a comparatively modest 93.7 mph and topped out at 95.9 mph, its exceptional horizontal movement helped him rack up 15 called strikes and four whiffs for a 41% CSW on that pitch, and an overall 33% CSW for the night.

Weathers threw 39 pitches in the first two innings, walking leadoff hitter Mookie Betts and plunking Max Muncy to start the second, but striking out Corey Seager, Sheldon Neuse, and Luke Raley along the way. The lone hit he gave up a sharp single to Buehler to start the third inning, but he got his pitch count in order by using just eight pitches to retire Betts, Seager, and Turner to begin his second time through the order, kicking off a run of 11 straight Dodgers he retired before departing in the sixth with a 2-0 lead. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two hitters I would like to introduce. The first, Player A, has been described in terms of the classic trio of statistics: average, on-base percentage, and slugging. The second, Player B, has been described in terms of modern metrics like Exit Velocity and Barrel rate. Take a look at their numbers and try to see who’s better:

Player A: .081/.205/.162

Player B: 95.4 mph Exit Velocity, 63.6% Hard-Hit rate, 27.3% Barrel rate

Not much of a competition, right? Without additional context, you probably chose Player B in a heartbeat. Player A’s appalling triple-slash makes him a DFA candidate. Player B, on the other hand, looks like a hitting genius! Those numbers and rates would place him well above the 95th percentile of all major leaguers. The twist, of course, is that these two hitters are in fact the same person: Matt Carpenter, veteran infielder for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Traditional and modern metrics do disagree at times, but the disparity between them is seldom this wide. Through 18 games, Carpenter’s efforts to clobber the ball have not translated into actual results, much to the chagrin of Cardinals fans. There’s having a stretch of bad luck, then there’s hitting below .100. Is there something else we’re missing? Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Washington Nationals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, we’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, we’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in our opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on team lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

The strike zone doesn’t exist. Not physically, at least; it’s a rough boundary that varies based on how each umpire looks at it and how each batter stands. Catchers influence the shape, too; smooth hands can turn balls to called strikes, while cross-ups tend to do the opposite.

This year, the zone seems particularly amorphous — maybe it’s just my imagination, but I feel like I can’t turn on a broadcast without hearing about an inconsistent zone. Of course, hearing isn’t believing, and there are botched calls every year. Just because there have been some memorable ones this year doesn’t necessarily mean the overall rate of missed calls has changed. Let’s find out if it has, or if it’s merely imaginations running wild with the backdrop of fan noise.

For a rough idea of ball/strike accuracy, I went to Statcast data. For every pitch, Statcast records a top and bottom of the strike zone, as well as where the pitch crossed the plate. Armed with that data as well as some constants like the size of a baseball and the width of home plate, I measured how far out of (or into) the strike zone each pitch of the 2021 season was when it crossed the plate.

This data isn’t perfect. The top and bottom of the strike zone are approximated, and the plate isn’t a two-dimensional object, despite the fact that our data on it is represented that way. We aren’t considering framing. But we have previous years of the same data, which is great news. We can use the previous years to form a baseline, then see if this year’s data represents a meaningful change. And because we have a huge chunk of data, we can at least hope that framing comes out in the wash. Read the rest of this entry »