Matt Vierling has been swinging a hot bat with the Detroit Tigers. Over his last 11 games, the 27-year-old third baseman/outfielder is 16-for-41 with four doubles, a triple, four home runs, and 13 RBIs. His slash line over the span is .390/.435/.829 bringing his seasonal mark to a solid .292/.324/.509. While by no means an offensive force, he has nonetheless been an integral part of the lineup. Since being acquired by Detroit from Philadelphia prior to last season as part of the five-player Gregory Sotoswap. Vierling has the second-most hits (175) on the team, and a respectable 106 wRC+.
Defensive versatility adds to Vierling’s value — his big-league ledger includes games at 3B, 2B, CF, RF, and LF — and there is a chance that another non-DH position could eventually be added to the list. Given the right circumstances, he might even pitch. It would be familiar territory. Vierling thrived on the mound as a prep, then was a two-way player at the University of Notre Dame from 2016-2018.
A Perfect Game showcase in Minneapolis is a standout memory for the St. Louis, Missouri native. Vierling recalls Carson Kelly’s brother, Parker, being one of his teammates, while Ke’Bryan Hayes and Josh Naylor — “I pitched against him if I remember correctly” — were among his notable opponents. Playing well against that type of talent garnered him attention from colleges and professional scouts alike, and while his bat showed promise, it was the arm that stood out the most. Read the rest of this entry »
If you read the 2,300-word NCAA Tournament preview from yesterday, you probably noticed that it only included eight regionals and 32 teams, which is only half the field. That’d leave newcomers woefully unprepared for the bacchanal of college baseball that is to come. So join me for a quick look at the other 32 teams that will set out to claim a spot in the Men’s College World Series. Remember: The goal is 150 words per region. Let’s see if I can do it this time. 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. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
For the last few years, I’ve been checking the accuracy rate of the ball-strike calls made by umpires, dividing the number of correct calls by the total number of takes. It’s a blunt approach, but because umpires make so many thousands of calls each year, it yields solid results. On Tuesday, I pulled the numbers for the 2024 season, and I found something I didn’t expect: Accuracy is going down rather than up. In every single season since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, umpires have gotten better at calling balls and strikes according to the Statcast strike zone. This is the first time I’ve ever pulled the numbers and seen a lower accuracy rate. However, this is also the first time I’ve checked the numbers this early in the season, and it turns out umpires tend to make better calls as the season goes on. Since 2017, accuracy in March, April, and May has been 0.19 percentage points lower than accuracy over the full season (though the difference in 2023 was just 0.03 percentage points). Here’s what that looks like in a graph.
You know how at the beginning of every season, there are a couple blown calls during a nationally televised game (or at least, calls that appeared to be wrong according to the on-screen strike zone), and certain people start complaining that umpires are terrible and they’re getting worse? Those people always catch me off guard. I usually forget about the missed calls when the season ends, but those people somehow manage to keep their umpire anger at a high idle through the entirety of the offseason so that the instant baseball returns, they’re ready to shout about the umpires again without any need to ramp up. I don’t know how they do it without pulling an oblique, but in a sense, those angry people are right. Even though the umpires are always getting better year after year, they’re nearly always more accurate toward the end of the season than at the beginning — so much so that when the season starts, they’re worse than they were at the end of the previous season. For a month or two, the umpires really have gotten worse. We often say early in the season that pitchers are ahead of hitters. It turns out they’re ahead of umpires too.
For each season, I broke down the overall accuracy in two-month increments, essentially dividing the season into thirds. I also broke down the accuracy during spring training and the playoffs, although there are plenty of factors that make those numbers suspect. During spring training, the umpiring pool is much wider. Perhaps more importantly, there are far, far fewer tracked pitches during spring training, both because the number of games is so small and because not every stadium is set up for Statcast. That results in a much smaller, much less reliable sample. The playoffs are also a much smaller sample, but they’re also, at least in theory, selecting for better umpires. Working the playoffs is seen as an honor and a reward for performing well in the regular season. We should expect accuracy to be at its lowest during spring training and highest during the playoffs.
Generally speaking, the results fit our preconceptions. Spring training accuracy is very low and it features the volatility that we’d expect from a small dataset. Umpires are also more accurate in the playoffs. The red line is March, April and May, and as you can see, it’s nearly always below everything but the spring training line. Not only do umpires start getting better in June, but they keep getting better right through the end of the season, which is why the light blue line for August, September, and October is usually above the yellow line for June and July. The trend is a little bit easier to see if we focus just on pitches in the shadow zone, the area that’s one baseball’s width from the edge of the zone on either side.
In the graph above, the dotted line represents that season’s overall accuracy on calls in the shadow zone. Each data point represents the number of percentage points above or below that year’s average. Not only do the calls get better as the season goes on, there’s a definite gap between the first two months and the rest of the season. Umpires are decidedly worse in those first two months. However, 2023 was a real outlier. It was first time since 2008 that umpires were more accurate in the beginning of the season than the end.
With that, I want to bring you back to 2024. So far this season, umpires have gotten 92.46% of calls right, down from 92.81% in 2023 and just two thousandths of a percentage point higher than in 2022. Based on everything I’ve shown you, we should expect umpires to get better over the rest of the season. However, the drop-off from last year is noticeable. Accuracy over the first two months of the season has only fallen once before, from 2009 to 2010, when it dropped by 0.16 percentage points. So far this season, accuracy has fallen by twice that amount: 0.32 percentage points. That’s a tiny change, on the order of one call per game, but that doesn’t make it any less real. We’ll have to wait and see how the rest of the season goes, but perhaps this year really could end up being different. Or, if it follows the pattern of the past decade and a half, accuracy will soon be in its way up.
Statcast’s new public repository of bat tracking data has been out for a few weeks now. Like every number manipulator with a sense of curiosity and middling technical skills, I’ve been messing around with the data in my spare time, and also in my working time, because messing around with data is both my job and hobby.
Mostly, I’ve been reaching some conclusions that mirror what others have already shown, only with less technical sophistication on my part. This article by Sky Kalkman does a great job summing up the biggest conclusion: Pitch location and spray angle (pull/oppo) influence swing length so much that you probably shouldn’t quote raw swing length. But I thought I’d look for something slightly different, and I think I found something.
Here’s the high level conclusion of my search: When pitchers throw harder fastballs, hitters slow down their swings to compensate. It sounds counterintuitive. Shouldn’t hitters speed up their bats to try to get to the faster pitch? But I had a hunch that this wasn’t the case. If you listen to hitters describe their approach against flamethrowers, they focus on shortening up and putting the ball in play. “Shortening up” might sound like it describes swing length, but it also surely describes swing speed. A hitter who is just punching at the ball likely won’t swing as hard as one trying to launch one. If you’re prioritizing having your bat on plane with the ball as long as possible, you probably aren’t focusing as much on raw speed. Read the rest of this entry »
The Portland Sea Dogs roster includes three Top 100 prospects, but neither Roman Anthony (15), Marcelo Mayer (42), nor Kyle Teel (83) has been the Double-A affiliate’s best player so far this season. That distinction belongs to a 23-year-old, shortstop-turned-left-fielder whom the Boston Red Sox drafted 69th overall in 2019 out of the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy. Along with playing stellar defense at a new position, Matthew Lugo is slashing .306/.404/.653 with 10 home runs and an Eastern League-best 191 wRC+.
Markedly-improved plate discipline has played a big role in his breakout. Last year, Lugo logged a 5.9% walk rate and a 27.6% strikeout rate. This year those numbers are 13.4% and 22.5%.
The key to his newfound ability to dominate the strike zone?
“Timing,” explained Lugo, who takes his cuts from the right side. “Last year, I had a lot of movement with my hands, which made me inconsistent being on time with the pitcher. My hands were very low, and then when I got to the launch position they were very high; there was a lot of distance for my hands to go through. This year, I’m closer to my launch position before I swing. I also had a [bat] wiggle and this year I just get to my spot with no wiggle. I’m getting into my spot early and have more time to see the pitch, so I’m making better swing decisions.”
The decision to move Lugo off of his natural position and into an outfield corner wasn’t based on defensive shortcomings, but rather on the arrival of Mayer. The high-ceiling shortstop was promoted to Portland last year on Memorial Day weekend, and given his first-round pedigree, he wasn’t going to be the one moving. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. By now, you surely know the drill. I credit basketball genius Zach Lowe for creating the format I’m using, make a few jokes about how much baseball I get to watch to write this column, and then give you a preview of what you can read about below. This week’s no exception! I get to watch a ton of baseball, and this week I watched a lot of birds and a lot of bunts. I also watched a lot of the Pirates, just like I do every week. Let’s get right into it.
1. Reversals of Reversals of Fortune
For most of the 21st century, no one would bat an eye if you told them the Cardinals swept the Orioles. The Cards have been good pretty much forever, and the O’s went through a long dry period. But starting last year, things have changed. The Orioles last got swept in early 2022, and they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball since then. The Cardinals fell on tough times after 2022’s Molina/Pujols swan song season. Coming into their series this week, the O’s had the second-best record in the AL, while the Cardinals languished near the bottom of the NL at 20-26. Read the rest of this entry »
On the first knuckleball thrown at Coors Field in 16 years, Matt Waldron hit home plate umpire Bill Miller right in the nuts.
Nobody — not Waldron, not his catcher Kyle Higashioka, not Miller — appeared to know where the ball was going. Despite Higashioka frequently (and understandably) struggling to track the flight of the ball throughout the rest of the night, Waldron delivered a career-best performance, allowing just one run over six innings.
Perhaps the most surprising part of his performance was the setting. Since 2008, knuckleballers have dodged outings at Coors Field, which sits 5,200 feet above sea level. Conventional wisdom dictates that knuckleballs at altitude are a bad idea, as Cy Young-winning knuckleballer R.A. Dickey told Dave Krieger back in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »
NEW YORK — On Tuesday afternoon, Gerrit Cole donned the pinstripes and took the mound at Yankee Stadium, not for his long-awaited season debut, but for a key milestone in his rehab: his first live batting practice session since a bout of nerve inflammation in his right elbow sidelined him in mid-March. The reigning AL Cy Young winner is still at least a few weeks away from returning, but in his absence — and in the face of considerable uncertainty given last year’s performances — his fellow starters have stepped up to help the Yankees into the AL East lead and the American League’s best record.
In front of an empty ballpark but an audience of teammates, coaches, and media, Cole — who eschewed his batting practice jersey in favor of the real thing “because I miss it” — faced teammates Jahmai Jones (a righty) and Oswaldo Cabrera (a switch-hitter batting lefty) from behind an L-screen. He threw 22 pitches, working through his full five-pitch arsenal, and by his own admission, the adrenaline from the setting led him to push his velocity to 96 mph, a point where pitching coach Matt Blake told him to back off. “Matt yelled at me, so I had to throw it like 90 a few times to even it back out,” he quipped afterwards.
“To me, he looked very much in control, with easy velocity,” said manager Aaron Boone of Cole’s session. The ace is eligible to come off the 60-day injured list later this month, but his rehab isn’t far enough for that to be realistic. As for a return in June, Boone indicated that it was a possibility, “but I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.” Assuming Cole’s recovery from the session goes as planned, he’ll probably throw a couple more BP sessions before heading out on a rehab assignment, which given the math of building up a pitch count points to a late June return. Read the rest of this entry »
