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On May 12th, in the first inning of the Cubs’ game against the White Sox, Jon Lester did something a little bit unusual: he swung at a 3-1 pitch. Now, if Jon Lester were not a pitcher, that wouldn’t be all that unusual. Since 2011, non-pitchers (another word you might use for these people is “hitters”) have swung at 3-1 pitches about 56% of the time — 55.9% of the time, to be precise. But Jon Lester is a pitcher, and he still swung at a 3-1 pitch. And the thing is, over the same time period — that is, from 2011 (when our data starts) to present — pitchers faced with 3-1 counts have swung at the next pitch just 38.3% of the time. Of those swings, just one in five was at a pitch outside the zone, like the fastball on the outside edge at which Lester swung and missed. It’s just not something you see that often.

That’s because, if you’re a pitcher, swinging at a 3-1 pitch is usually not a very good idea. If you swing at such a pitch, you might get a hit (pitchers did hit 27 home runs last year, after all!), but you might also put the ball in play and record an out. If you don’t swing on 3-1, you definitely won’t record an out. You might still get a strike called against you, which would put you that much closer to recording an out, but you might also walk or get hit by the pitch — and a walk or hit by pitch, for a lot of pitchers at the plate, is a very good outcome. Last year, pitchers took 5,277 plate appearances. They recorded outs in 4,522 of those plate appearances (85.7%). I think it’s fair to say pitchers are looking for any means to reach base available to them. Swinging at 3-1 pitches is not a good way to do that. And so, two-thirds of the time, pitchers don’t.

Everything I’ve just said applies doubly to 3-0 counts. Even regular hitters don’t swing at those pitches all that often — just 8.2% of the time since 2011, in fact. With two strikes still available, it just doesn’t make any sense not to give the pitcher a chance to walk you, and so upwards of nine times out of 10, hitters will let the pitcher prove he can find the zone on a 3-0 count. And when it’s a pitcher at the plate, the odds of a swing on 3-0 are even smaller. Vanishingly small, in fact. Thanks to a database query performed by my colleague Sean Dolinar, I’m able to report to you now that a pitcher swing on a 3-0 count has happened only seven times since 2011, or about once a season. Seven times, out of 578 opportunities. About 1 in every 100 times. Almost never. And — here’s the fun thing about this story, I think — six of those seven swings were taken by just two men, and all seven came in the span of just three seasons. Let’s investigate the history of this strange baseball phenomenon together, shall we? Come with me on a journey back to May 20th, 2014.

Whoops! I jumped ahead in the story a little bit. That there on your screen, right above this text, is Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants swinging at a 3-0 pitch in the fifth inning of a game against the Colorado Rockies. Now, Bumgarner can hit a little bit — at least as well as the worst big-league hitters can hit, that is. His career wRC+ is identical, for example, to Drew Butera’s. And he was behind in this game 1-0 in the fifth, with two runners on base and an out in the inning to spare. Perhaps he felt that his cause would be best served by a Very Large Home Run against Franklin Morales, who at this point in the game was pitching a gem (those of you who are familiar with the life and work of Franklin Morales may not be shocked to discover it did not end that way, though it wasn’t a terrible start, on the whole).

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Articles about great players have this habit of turning into articles about Mike Trout. That’s because Mike Trout is the best player in the world. I’m not certain it’s even up for debate. It will be one day, and maybe that day will be soon, but Trout has proven so much, for so long. Players sometimes flirt with Trout’s level of performance. They’ll do it for a month, or even two or three. Then they fade away, while Trout remains. That’s his big secret: never slump. Never slump, and always be awesome.

I understand that, these days, there’s a conversation comparing Mike Trout and Mookie Betts. As you could guess, despite Betts’ start, I’ll still take Trout. I’m a Trout guy. But the Betts side does raise a valid point: Betts’ offensive bar doesn’t have to be so high, because he’s so incredibly valuable in the field. Betts is baseball’s best defensive right fielder. That gives him a leg up. He doesn’t have to hit like Trout to be more valuable than Trout. That much is correct.

That much would also apply to Francisco Lindor. Lindor is a wizard at a premium defensive position. He’s a threat when he gets on the bases. And now, at the plate, Lindor has leveled up. To be clear, I’m still a Trout guy. But Lindor, at least, is closing the gap.

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In a bit of surprise, even in the year of almost no-hitters, Jordan Lyles took a perfect game into the eighth inning on Tuesday. Shortly after Trevor Story hit a single to end that particular quest, Lyles was removed, having gone 7.1 innings with one hit, one walk, and 10 strikeouts.

This start comes on the heels of a five-inning, six-strikeout, one-walk, one-earned-run performance in his first start of the season last week. Yesterday was the first time since April 2016 that Lyles pitched at least five innings and yielded no earned runs. It was the first time since June 2013 that Lyles pitched consecutive games of at least five innings and allowed one or zero earned runs. The Padres right-hander was just 22 years old at that time. He’s 27 now, and it is fair to say not a great many people have spent a lot of time thinking about Lyles in the interim.

While Lyles might not have garnered a lot of attention, he was actually a decent starter as recently as 2015. After his trade from the Astros to the Rockies in the winter ahead of the 2014 season, Lyles made 32 starts across the next two seasons, pitching 175.2 innings with a decent 4.10 FIP and 2.1 WAR. He was basically an average pitcher with a slightly elevated 4.56 ERA. He didn’t strike out a lot of hitters, but he got a lot of ground balls and kept the ball in the park.

His 2015 season ended with a sprained toe, and he got off to a poor start in 2016 that included multiple trips to the minors and an eventual bullpen stay. That reliever role continued into 2017, but he didn’t perform well and the Rockies released him. The Padres picked him up and let him start a handful of games, but those didn’t really go well, either. Lyles opened this season in the Padres bullpen and pitched well enough to get back in the rotation. Thus ends the recent history of Jordan Lyles and brings us to today.

Lyles is no longer the contact-oriented sinker pitcher of his Rockies days. To illustrate the changes Lyles has made, let’s run through his first batter faced yesterday, David Dahl.

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Back in March, I wrote about a pending case before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (“PASPA”). PASPA is a federal law which makes sports betting illegal — or, more precisely, requires states to make sports betting illegal. The Supreme Court weighed in on Monday, and we have an answer.

From Justice Alito’s opinion:

The PASPA provision at issue here—prohibiting state authorization of sports gambling—violates the anticommandeering rule. That provision unequivocally dictates what a state legislature may and may not do. And this is true under either our interpretation or that advocated by respondents and the United States. In either event, state legislatures are put under the direct control of Congress. It is as if federal officers were installed in state legislative chambers and were armed with the authority to stop legislators from voting on any offending proposals. A more direct affront to state sovereignty is not easy to imagine.

This “anticommandeering” rule is what I mostly addressed back in March. Remember that the United States is, basically, 50 separate sovereign entities (the states) which ceded power to a unifying government (the federal government) for important matters — things like a military, a common currency, social-welfare programs. But the federal government has (in theory, anyway) limits on its power: it can only do what the Constitution says it can do. And the Constitution says that the federal government can’t order the states to pass, or not pass, laws. To the Supreme Court, telling the states they couldn’t legalize sports gambling was a bridge too far.

Perhaps most importantly, however, the Supreme Court went one step farther:

[W]e hold that no provision of PASPA is severable from the provision directly at issue in these cases.

Let me explain that. When the court declares a law unconstitutional, it is, in essence, nullifying that law. That’s a principle that goes back to a 19th-century case called Marbury v. Madison. But nullifying statutes is something courts typically do very reluctantly — and so they try, whenever possible, to separate the acceptable parts of laws from unconstitutional ones. In other words, a law with both a constitutional provision and unconstitutional provision would be split in two, with the unconstitutional part nullified and the other part remaining in effect. That’s called “severing” the law. But by saying PASPA wasn’t severable, the Court decided that all of PASPA is unconstitutional, and so all of PASPA is void. That’s actually a really big deal, because part of PASPA concerned prohibiting the advertising of sports gambling, and now that prohibition is gone.

Naturally, this has caused a variety of reactions.

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Tuesday was supposed to be the day that Robinson Cano learned of the prognosis regarding the fractured fifth metacarpal he suffered on Sunday. Instead, both he and the Mariners suffered a bigger blow, as MLB suspended the 35-year-old second baseman for 80 games for violating baseball’s joint drug agreement. The news is quite a shock, to say the least, given Cano’s standing within the game. It’s also quite a coincidence given his injury.

Cano will not be paid during the suspension, which means that he stands to lose about half of his $24 million salary. If the Mariners were to make the playoffs — something they haven’t done since 2001, giving them the longest postseason drought in major North American sports — he would be ineligible to participate. He can, however, serve the suspension while on the disabled list, a loophole that should have been closed a long time ago but for some reason has not been. Edinson Volquez (suspended in 2010) and Freddy Galvis (suspended in 2012) are among the players who served their PED suspensions while on the DL. Cano will be eligible to return for the Mariners’ 121st game of the season, on August 14.

According to MLB, Cano tested positive for furosemide, a diuretic better known as Lasix. Via WebMD, the drug can be used to treat high blood pressure, fluid retention and swelling caused by congestive heart failure, liver disease, kidney disease, and other medical conditions.

Via a statement by Cano issued through the Major League Baseball Players Association, Cano claimed that the substance was given to him by a licensed doctor to treat an unspecified medical ailment. (MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reports that it was an episode of high blood pressure.)

Here’s the statement in full:

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It’s been almost a month since our last (partial) mock draft, so it’s probably time to collect all of our notes and take another try at this. Updated, expanded, and sortable draft rankings will be coming soon, but you can get an idea of the industry consensus rankings from all the clues and team connections below as a teaser. As we’ve mentioned many times before, this draft stands out most for the unusually prep-heavy concentration of talent in the picks 20 to 50 area. For reference, here’s the full draft order.

1. Detroit Tigers – Casey Mize, RHP, Auburn
Mize is still the heavy favorite here, with the backup options appearing to be Georgia Tech C Joey Bart and Florida RHP Brady Singer, while Wisconsin prep CF Jarred Kelenic has faded from contention. Teams outside the top five picks don’t expect to get Mize’s MRI (he missed time last spring with an arm issue and some clubs were worried about his health as far back as high school), and it’s possible no one other than Detroit will get it. GM Al Avila saw the Mize/Singer matchup three weekends ago; saw Bart, Georgia prep CF Parker Meadows, and Wichita State 3B Alec Bohm two weekends ago; and Oregon State 2B Nick Madrigal last week. Mississippi prep RHP J.T. Ginn is a target in the second round, as are any of the leftover prep outfielders, like Pennsylvania prep CF Mike Siani.

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Mike Clevinger is a pretty great pitcher. He throws 94 mph. He’s cut his walk rate in half since last year. He’s been the best starter so far this season in one of the league’s best rotations.

Mike Clevinger also has pretty great shoes. They’re designed by by artist Jonathan Hrusovsky. Look at these things.

Ben Zobrist is a pretty great player himself. In his age-37 season, he’s recorded a batting line about 15% better than league average. He still plays multiple positions well. He’s the eighth-best player by WAR over the last decade.

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The Cleveland Indians were looking into the future when they selected Will Benson 14th overall in the 2016 draft. The powerfully-built Atlanta, Georgia product was a week shy of his 18th birthday, and his left-handed stroke — lethal against prep competition — was going to require polish if he hoped to reach his sky-high ceiling. Two years later, that process is well underway.

“You really wouldn’t,” Benson responded when I asked if now-versus-then film footage would show the same setup and swing. “In high school, you’d see a very athletic kid just competing and somehow getting it done. What you’d see now is more efficient movement — that’s a big thing I’ve worked on — and I’m maintaining better posture throughout my swing. Mechanically, making sure I’m getting behind the baseball is huge for me.”

Hitting the ball long distances isn’t a problem for the young outfielder. His power potential is a primary reason he went in the first round, and 545 plate appearances into his professional career — keep in mind he’s still a teenager — Benson has gone yard 23 times. The youngest position player on the roster of the Lake County Captains, he currently co-leads the low-A Midwest League with seven round trippers.

While Benson’s swing is conducive to clearing fences, his mindset is that of a well-rounded hitter. While he’s embraced launch-angle concepts, his focus is on simply squaring up the baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Between Sean Manaea, James Paxton, and the Dodgers’ collective effort, we’ve already seen more no-hitters in the first month-plus of this season than we saw in all of 2016 and 2017. Not only are we seeing more no-hitters, we are seeing a lot more games with pitchers taking no-hitters into the later innings. Ben Lindbergh discussed the phenomenon over at The Ringer.

This season, we’ve seen 28 no-hitters through five, 20 through six, and nine through seven, all record totals through this point in the year. As a percentage of games, no-hitters through five and six haven’t happened this frequently since 1968, and no-hitters through seven haven’t come this fast and furious since 1967. If it seems like you’ve heard about a new near no-hitter on a daily basis this season, you aren’t imagining things. Thus far, at least one team has been held hitless through five innings in 5.3 percent of games. At that rate, a no-hitter through five is more likely than not on any day with at least 20 teams in action.

With three no-hitters in tow, that means that so far, there’s been an 11% chance of seeing a no-hitter if the pitcher gets through five innings, a 15% shot if the pitcher gets through six, and a one-in-three chance through seven innings. These odds are considerably higher than historical norms for navigating a game without a hit. Near the end of Lindbergh’s piece, he mentions the notification process for MLB apps and the AP — that is, when MLB alerts followers to a no-hitter in progress.

Of course, one is under no obligation to abide by MLB’s preferences when it comes to following along. If that’s true, though, at what point in a contest should one start treating a no-hitter as a possibility? When’s the best time to tune in?

This is, ultimately, a subjective decision, of course. That said, there’s no harm to being as informed as possible about making that decision. First, let’s examine when pitchers lose no-hitters. Even with the increase in numbers this season, the removal of a starter who has a no-hitter in progress is still relatively rare, per Jay Jaffe’s article on the subject. We can take all starts and look at when starting pitchers lost their no-hitters over the last five-plus seasons.

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