Previously on Dragon Ball Z, we discussed whether it’s better to run hot and cold like a reheated frozen burrito or show up at the plate with the comforting and consistent warmth of a hearty helping of mac and cheese. Specifically, when you’re a hitter trying to microwave some offense in the playoffs. The tl;dr of that article: When comparing streaky hitters to their more consistent colleagues, the streaky hitters came closer to replicating their regular season numbers in the postseason. Despite the fluky nature of playoff series and their bite-sized samples that leave no space for slumps, hitters prone to slumping still bring enough electricity when they do get hot to maintain a charge in their individual numbers.
But individuals don’t win the World Series, teams do. In the context of a team playing a sport where the superstars don’t necessarily factor into every plate appearance, individual performances don’t carry the same weight that they do in other sports. Not only do teams need contributions from multiple hitters in the lineup, but the sequence of those contributions matters too.
In my last article, I used wOBA, which is derived from the run values associated with specific events (i.e. walks, doubles, home runs), to measure individual output. In turn, run values are historical averages of the number of runs scored following the given event. Those historical averages assume that what follows a given plate appearance is a league-average hitter doing whatever is most statistically likely. But that’s not how it works irl. The player on deck might be better or worse than league average, might have distinct tendencies toward hitting the ball on the ground or in the air, might be 0-fer their last eleventy-billion, or might be hotter than soup in the summertime. Read the rest of this entry »
Shortly before Walter Pennington was acquired by the Texas Rangers from the Kansas City Royals at last month’s trade deadline, Eric Longenhagen wrote that the 26-year-old left-hander had “caught some helium of late after striking out 35% of the hitters he’s faced in Triple-A.” Our lead prospect analyst went on to note that Pennington had recently made his MLB debut, adding that he “has a middle relief profile with little margin for error due to his underwhelming velocity.” Longenhagen assigned the 2020 non-drafted free agent out of the Colorado School of Mines a not-overly-enthusiastic 35+ FV.
Through his first seven big-league appearances — one with the Royals and now six with the Rangers — Pennington has fanned 10 batters and allowed three earned runs while attacking hitters with an array of sinkers, sliders, and cutters (he’s also thrown a smattering of four-seamers) in eight-and-two-thirds innings of work. Down on the farm, he’d heavily featured his slider while fanning 82 batters and allowing 43 hits in 63-and-a-third frames.
His velocity is indeed underwhelming. And not only has Pennington been averaging just 91.7 mph with his heaters, his arsenal doesn’t include a breaking ball that sweeps or dips in eye-catching fashion. Your stereotypical power pitcher he’s not.
Programming note: I’m taking a break from my Five Things column this week, as I’m traveling to Chicago for Saberseminar. Five Things will return next week with events from the last two weeks. In the meantime, please enjoy a ridiculous hypothetical.
This week, someone in my chat asked me an interesting hypothetical: How different would baseball be if the fences were the same distance from home plate all the way around? It would obviously be wildly different from how the sport currently works. Center field is the deepest part of the park by far, of course, and it’s hard to picture exactly what an equidistant fence would look like. You might think it’s a triangle, but that’s not right – it looks more or less like an arc, which is what an actual stadium looks like, only with a much sharper curvature.
That sounds so darn weird that I wanted to see what it would mean for offense. I don’t have any strong analytical reason for doing so. We aren’t plumbing the depths of smart baseball analysis here; we’re making up a dumb world and wondering what kinds of dumb things would happen in it.
First things first: There would be more home runs. I picked 370 feet as the distance because it feels reasonably close to the real world average of fence depths. I picked a 10-foot tall wall for similar reasons; if we’re getting weird in some ways, I’d prefer to standardize the others. There’s an easy math trick you can use here; baseballs tend to fall at roughly a 45 degree angle by the time they’re descending, their forward momentum getting slowly blunted by air resistance. That means that a ball that clears the wall by a millimeter would travel 10 more feet before hitting ground that was at field level – in an outfield bullpen, say. In other words, every ball that travels 380 or more feet in the air is going to be a home run now. Read the rest of this entry »
Friends, I come to you today to relieve my soul of a burden I’ve been carrying. I’ve been harboring a cranky, irrational, old man opinion, and worse still, I’ve been lying to you about it.
Time and again, while evaluating pitchers, I’ve praised the slider. Dylan Cease’s slider? Incredible. Andrés Muñoz, Chris Sale, whoever. In the kayfabe my position demands, I must praise a slider that gets outs. But my heart isn’t in it. I am awed by the slider’s effectiveness the same way I’m awed by the voraciousness of a swarm of locusts.
Deep down, I detest the slider. It is a crude instrument, with none of the curveball’s grace or the changeup’s playfulness. The curveball is a calligraphy brush, all swooping lines and fine control. The changeup is a Blackwing pencil, rich and precise, its marks here one moment and gone the next.
Remember the halcyon days of April? The season had just kicked off. Aaron Judge was bad. Alec Bohm was one of the hottest hitters in baseball; Colt Keith was the worst. Blake Snell couldn’t buy an out. The Cubs led the NL Central. The White Sox… okay, the White Sox have been bad all year, but my point is that we ascribe outsize importance to the first month of the season as it’s happening.
Bohm was hitting so well that it felt like he was a completely different hitter. Since May 1, he’s been almost exactly the same as his prior career self. Snell figured things out. Judge obviously did too. But there was also signal in that first month. Bobby Witt Jr.’s breakout was center stage. Juan Soto and Gunnar Henderson set the tone for their impressive campaigns. The key to interpreting early-season results is to let a bunch of ideas in, ideas suggested by that first month, but to be willing to discard them quickly if they turn out to be flashes in the pan.
In that spirit, I’m about to get breathlessly excited about some post-All-Star break statistics. Some of what’s gone on in the last month won’t surprise you – Witt, Soto, and Judge are absolutely incandescent. Chris Sale is on his way to a Cy Young. The Brewers are cruising to an NL Central title. All of those things have mostly been true all year, so seeing them in the first month of the second half doesn’t feel strange. But there’s other stuff happening too, and the bits that feel shocking now but would have seemed normal if they’d taken place in April are what I’m focusing on today. Read the rest of this entry »
Pedro Avila might not strike you as exceptional. He’s mostly on mop-up duty in the Guardians bullpen, hoovering up low-leverage innings. His sinker was deemed the “most normal” in baseball by Leo Morgenstern earlier this year. And his 3.60 ERA and 3.92 FIP is right around average for major league relievers.
But behind this veneer of normalcy lies the weirdest changeup in baseball.
Below is a plot of the average vertical and horizontal moment of every pitcher’s changeup during the 2024 season (minimum 50 changeups, data as of August 15, vertical movement measured without gravity). You have a 50/50 shot of guessing which one is Avila’s:
The brown dot on the left of my beautifully drawn circle is Logan Allen’s changeup, Avila’s erstwhile teammate. Michael Baumann wrote about Allen’s “weird-ass changeup” last July, noting that the pitch had the least horizontal movement of any major league changeup in the 2023 season. (Unfortunately, despite Michael’s request, no “Weird-Ass Changeup World Tour” tag has since been added to the CMS.) The purple dot on the right is Avila’s changeup, which is averaging even less horizontal movement than Allen’s.
But the average movement profile doesn’t fully capture what’s weird about Avila’s changeup. To truly appreciate the weirdness, it is necessary to take a look at why it moves like that.
It starts with his crazy grip. Look at this grip!
He aligns his thumb and pointer finger in a quasi-circle-change grip while pressing on the exact opposite side of the ball with his other three fingers. The funky grip — a circle-change/splitter/forkball/vulcan-change hybrid — informs the way the ball comes out of his hand.
Scott Firth, a former performance coordinator at Tread Athletics, described Avila’s grip in a tweet from January 2023 and the movement profile that results from it.
“Looks like fosh/modified box grip, some guys will cut it hard with 3 fingers on outer part of ball,” Firth wrote. “Low spin low efficiency could catch ssw [seam-shifted wake] either direction depending on cw [clockwise] or ccw gyro.”
The contradictory forces of fade from the pronation and cut from the pressure of his three fingers results in chaos; because of that grip, the ball comes off the pointer finger and middle finger simultaneously, sending the pitch downward:
Avila’s changeup almost imitates a knuckleball in the randomness of its spin axis. A helpful way to understand this is by looking at Avila’s spin-based movement and observed movement. The spin-based movement is the orientation directly after release; the observed movement is the implied axis based on the movement of the pitch. (When the spin-based orientation does not match the observed orientation, it is generally assumed that “seam-shifted wake” is responsible. More on that later.)
The observed spin axis on Avila’s changeup nearly goes around the entire clock. Check out the green bars on the graphic below:
Avila’s changeup might ultimately move similarly to Allen’s from a “shape” perspective, but the aesthetic experience from the hitter’s vantage point is distinct. It’s a complete outlier from the perspective of spin efficiency, defined as the percentage of spin that is either sidespin or backspin/topspin. The median changeup is 95% spin efficient. Allen’s changeup has 72% spin efficiency, one of the lowest marks in baseball. Avila’s changeup checks in at 24% (!!) spin efficiency, which is more like a typical gyro slider than any changeup.
The Guardians broadcast picked up on this following a slow-motion replay of an Avila changeup. After watching the replay, Guardians color commentator Rick Manning remarked that “It’s almost like a forkball but he spins it like a slider.”
Perhaps it goes without saying, but this is not the traditional way to throw a changeup. Driveline, for instance, published an article showing five different grips for aspiring changeup-throwers to try; none of them resemble Avila’s.
The classic changeup is thrown with heavy pronation. Think Logan Webb’s changeup fading down and away from a left-handed hitter:
Some pitchers struggle to throw a changeup with heavy pronation. One key reason, as Noah Woodward pointed out in a March 2023 post, is that the act of “turning over” the ball is awkward for pitchers who don’t throw another pitch that requires turning over their wrist in the manner required of a Webb-esque changeup.
For pitchers like Tarik Skubal or Matthew Boyd with more of an inherent supination bias, the seam-shifted wake changeup is a way to throw an offspeed pitch without contorting their arms in uncomfortable directions.
“I throw a changeup just like a slider now, but using essentially the smooth part of the baseball to create no drag on one side, but seam is on the other side,” Boyd told MLB.com’s Jason Beck in March 2023. “And because of that, I get more movement than I did before, but the pattern of how my wrist is moving is like the other pitches. So it allows for the other pitches to be more consistent.”
Avila’s changeup does not fit neatly in either of these categories. It is, somehow, a pronated seam-shifted wake changeup. That explains why Avila leads the league in the gap between his changeup’s spin-based axis and his observed axis.
But that gap doesn’t tell the whole story. Most other pitchers have a similar pattern when their actual spin orientation deviates significantly from the “spin-based” orientation: It shifts to the left (or right) in a predictable pattern. Take Skubal’s seam-shifted wake changeup, for example. The “observed spin” is shifted to the left of the spin-based movement.
Avila’s changeup is not like that. Because of the heavy gyro spin that his grip produces, the pitch leaves the hand at somewhat random orientations and can either fade or cut, as the movement map of all his changeups in 2024 shows. Notice how the green dots (his changeups) can end up on either side of the pitch plot:
So Avila’s changeup is definitely weird, but is it good? It certainly produces some bizarre swings, even when it’s poorly located. Heliot Ramos, for one, looked flummoxed after whiffing on one middle-middle Avila changeup:
Avila’s changeup gets a lot of whiffs — among changeups thrown at least 100 times, his ranks in the 85th percentile in swinging strike percentage and the 78th percentile in whiffs per swing. On the other hand, he throws one out of every six changeups in the “waste” zone, which sort of makes sense to me — that grip feels prone to misfires. (Shout out to Alex Chamberlain’s pitch leaderboard for these stats.)
While Avila’s changeup has graded out as basically average from a run value perspective, I’m not always sure that run value is the best way to evaluate the quality of a given pitch. There are interaction effects between pitches — in other words, the thought of the changeup in the batter’s mind might improve the quality of his fastball — and Avila is using the changeup as his primary out-pitch and getting pretty good results.
Given that the Padres DFA’d Avila in April, this season looks like a success for him, and the changeup is without question a big part of all that. As always with pitching, weird is where you want to be.
On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on.
At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.
Every spectator sport has its own tradeoffs between watching on TV and going to a game in person. And while there are some that can only be truly appreciated live, I personally think television does a pretty good job of portraying baseball at its best. This is a game of inches, and inches can be hard to perceive from the cheap seats.
One exception is exceptional center field defense. By the time the camera angle turns around on a fly ball, the outfielders have already covered dozens of feet in their pursuit of the baseball. To appreciate the speed and timing required to play this position well, you really have to see it live.
There aren’t many guys who can really go out and get it. There definitely aren’t 30 who can hit well enough to stick in a major league lineup every day. Most center fielders, therefore, fall into two camps: Good hitters who can kind of hang but should probably be in a corner, and the genuine article. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, Michael Baumann wrote about how Kirby Yates has a chance to join Craig Kimbrel and Wade Davis as only relievers in MLB history with multiple seasons of 40 or more appearances and an ERA south of 1.25. Five years after logging a 1.19 ERA over 60 outings with the San Diego Padres, the 37-year-old right-hander has come out of the Texas Rangers bullpen 44 times and has a 1.19 ERA.
I procured subject-specific quotes from Yates for my colleague’s article, but there were a few other perspectives I wanted to glean from him as well. That he has quietly put up better numbers than many people realize was one of them. For instance, since he began throwing his signature splitter in 2017, the underrated righty has a 36.0% strikeout rate that ranks sixth-best among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.
“It’s almost like a tale of two of two careers,” Yates said upon hearing that. “It’s before the split and then after the split. Now I’m getting into a situation where you could call it three careers in a sense — since [March 2021 Tommy John] surgery and how I’ve been coming back from that. Last year was good, but also kind of shaky. The two-and-a-half to three years off, I felt that. This year I feel more comfortable. I’ve felt like I could attack some things I needed to attack.”
Yates doesn’t feel that his splitter is quite as good as it was pre-surgery, although he does believe it is getting back to what it was. His fastball is another story. He told me that it’s never been better. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re speaking with someone from Toronto who doesn’t follow baseball, they can probably tell you two things about the Blue Jays. The first is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the best player on the team. The second is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. sucks.
The first point is pretty accurate, and it’s absolutely true this season — more on that in a moment. The second point is categorically false, but alas, such is the curse of superstardom. The player who has his face on posters all around the city is going to get plenty of credit when things go right, but he’s also going to shoulder an excessive amount of criticism when things go wrong. When you’re the guy starring in the Uncrustables ads, fans expect a crust-free performance on the field, too.
Guerrero made a name for himself in 2021, which was no easy task considering the man with whom he shares his name. Yet, with 48 home runs, 111 RBI, and a runner-up finish for AL MVP, Guerrero gave the average Torontonian a reason to talk about baseball for the first time since José Bautista was punched in the face. Then, Guerrero spent the next two years corroding his golden reputation. To be clear, no one who knows what they’re talking about ever thought he was a bad ballplayer — heck, he set a new record for the highest salary ever awarded in an arbitration hearing this past offseason — but his performance certainly went downhill. If all you were comparing him to was the best version of himself (like that motivational poster in your gym always tells you to do), he really was pretty disappointing last year: Read the rest of this entry »
