Archive for Featured

Read the rest of this entry »

Astros, Yankees, Game 7. This should be fun. This has been a pretty terrific ALCS already, and with a winner-take-all contest to decide it tonight, this could end up being one of the best league championship series we’ve seen in a while.

For the Yankees, the plan seems pretty obvious. CC Sabathia is going to start the game, and given how he’s pitched so far this postseason, Joe Girardi will probably ride his veteran until he gets in real trouble. And then the Astros will deal with Tommy Kahnle and Aroldis Chapman, probably for at least a couple of innings each, with David Robertson around to try and redeem his disastrous Game 6 performance if Sabathia-Kahnle-Chapman isn’t enough to get through nine innings. If anyone besides one of those four take the mound for the Yankees, it will probably be because one of the two teams turned it into an early blowout.

The Astros, though, head into a potential season finale without as much clarity.

Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, the Cubs were baseball’s most dominant team, first putting up 103 regular-season wins and then capping the achievement with their first World Series win in 108 years. (So I was told a few times along the way.) The question wasn’t whether the 2016 Cubs were the best team in baseball — that was obvious — but whether the 2016 Cubs were one of the best baseball teams we’ve ever seen.

No one is going to ask that question of the 2017 Cubs.

Read the rest of this entry »

The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, behind seven brilliant innings of work from Masahiro Tanaka, the Yankees blanked the Astros 5-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the ALCS. After that shutout, Houson has now scored just nine runs in the first five games of this series, and they are hitting an anemic .147/.234/.213 so far in the ALCS. This isn’t what anyone expected from a club that produced baseball’s best batting line in the regular season and then thoroughly pummeled Red Sox pitching in the first round of the postseason.

So, how has a team that scored nearly 900 runs in the regular season gotten so thoroughly shut down against the Yankees?

Read the rest of this entry »

A little later today, Jeff will have a post about the most amazing play we’ve seen all postseason: Yu Darvish drawing a bases-loaded walk — on four pitches — from Carl Edwards Jr. last night. How did a quality reliever throw four consecutive balls to a career AL pitcher who had zero intention of ever swinging? In the NLCS? For the defending champs?

But in this post, I’m going to ask a different question about that at-bat: why did we ever see it in the first place?

Read the rest of this entry »

My wife and I were driving from the west side of Cleveland to my parents’ place on the east side of the city over the weekend. During a lull in the in-car conversation, I elected to carry out a small-sample experiment.

Before I detail the finer points of that experiment, though, a bit of context. As you’re likely aware, there’s been much discussion about and handwringing over the increasing frequency of the Three True Outcomes in the game, over the decline of balls in play, and, by extension, the greater amounts of downtime between moments of action.

Consider this remarkable nugget from Dan Hirsch:

What we see here is an effect with a number of causes: fewer balls in play, greater stretches of time between pitches, and longer commercial breaks. It took John Lackey about five minutes to throw six pitches on Sunday night.

That’s a remarkable trend, and I think we all understand why the commissioner’s office has been concerned about the dwindling number of balls in play while also wanting to experiment with pitch clocks and pace rules.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the Cubs lost Game 2 of the NLCS to the Dodgers and now head back to Chicago down 2-0 in the series. They lost on a Justin Turner walk-off home run, but the big story after the game was who threw the pitch that Turner drove over the center-field fence. John Lackey, a career starter who had never pitched on back-to-back days, was brought in to face Chris Taylor with a man on in the ninth inning. Wade Davis, the team’s best reliever, did not pitch.

Last year, Buck Showalter was excoriated for leaving Zach Britton in the bullpen to watch Ubaldo Jimenez end the team’s season, and given the drastic shift we saw in postseason reliever usage after that happened, it seemed like no one was in any hurry to be the next guy to lose a road game while holding his closer for a save situation that would never come. After a few weeks of pretty aggressive reliever usage — Maddon called on Davis in the seventh inning of Game 5 on Thursday, after all — this was a pretty surprising decision, and Maddon is taking a lot of heat for going to Lackey to face the middle of the Dodgers order in a situation where a run ends the game.

But of all the decisions he made last night, I actually think that one is one of the more defensible.

Read the rest of this entry »

Corey Knebel has come a long way since I first talked to him four years ago. At the time, the hard-throwing right-hander was wrapping up an Arizona Fall League season, five months after the Detroit Tigers had drafted him 39th overall out of the University of Texas.

Knebel is now 25 years old and coming off a season where he logged 39 saves and a 1.78 ERA for the Milwaukee Brewers. In January 2015, the NL Central club acquired him from the Texas Rangers, who’d earlier procured his services from the perpetually-bullpen-deficient Tigers.

According to Knebel. while some things have changed since our 2013 conversation, overs haven’t. By and large, he’s the same guy on the mound.

“I guess I’ve kind of grown into this new role,” the 6’4″ 220-lb. fastball-curveball specialist told me in September. “Other than that, I’ve just tried to perfect two pitches. I like to focus on what I know I can do. My delivery is the exact same — I’m still herky-jerky — although I don’t go from the windup anymore; I’m just straight stretch.”

There has been a velocity jump. Knebel’s heater averaged 97.8 MPH this season, up a few ticks from previous seasons. He didn’t have an explanation for why that is, but he does know one thing — it’s not because of a weighted-ball program. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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.
Read the rest of this entry »