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The first time I met Dodgers slugger Cody Bellinger, we didn’t have a lot of time, so I just shook his hand and said that I’d seen him enough to think “you swing really hard, every time, don’t you?” He smiled. “Always been this way.” And that part remained true when we reconnected. But he also opened my eyes to the parts of his game that were molded along the way.

The first coach that Bellinger had was his father. Clay Bellinger got some time with the Yankees earlier this century and coached his son early on. But once the son signed with the Dodgers, the father’s advice receded to “little tips and pointers.” His dad’s a firefighter now, in Gilbert, Arizona, and so he’s a little busy with his day job.

And the son had professional coaches. When he first arrived in pro ball, though, the focus was on staying afloat. “When I first signed in [2013] and Rookie ball in ’14, I wanted to learn how to hit first,” Bellinger said before a game against the Giants. “I was so young — I was 17, 18 — I didn’t worry about power at all.” You can see that there was something different about Bellinger back then.

Those professional coaches largely left him alone that first year, but going into High-A Rancho Cucamonga, they saw an opportunity. “Going into Rancho, they told me it was hitter friendly, so they made some adjustments to my swing. Damon Mashore helped me out,” Bellinger remembers. “I created a little bit more of a consistent path to the ball, just to backspin the ball. I never knew how to backspin balls before.”

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This is Alex Stumpf’s fifth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

On the whole, the Phillies’ offense appears to be taking a big step forward in 2017. Entering play Sunday, their combined wRC+ was 14 points higher than it was the previous year and the highest it’s been since 2011. The team’s batting average, slugging, and on-base percentages are all up, putting them on pace to score 113 more runs than last season.

But they’ve been doing it without much help from Maikel Franco.

After a strong rookie campaign and then slump in his sophomore season, Franco has taken another step back in 2017. His wRC+ has dropped from 129 two years ago to 74 today — the second lowest out of Philadelphia’s regulars and 25th out of 27 qualified third basemen.

The results he’s had don’t reflect the positive steps he’s taken this season, however. He vowed at the end of last year to be more patient at the plate. So far he says he’s done that, which is why his walk rate has crept up and his strikeout rate is going down. He is able to get those better numbers because is he is chasing out of the zone a lot less, dropping his chase percentage 7.2 points from a year ago. According to PITCHf/x, he was swinging at 26.5% out of the zone entering play Sunday. And while his output is down, his average exit velocity is holding steady with last year, which is still up from 2015.

Getting a couple breaks to raise his .222 BABIP average would help, too, but he isn’t worried about that at the moment. “I have to not think about that stuff,” Franco said. “…I have to do everything that I can control.”

But the good has been outweighed by one major problem. If you’ve seen the title of this post, you probably know what that problem is: he’s struggling against the slider.

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The Brewers’ Jared Hughes is the type of pitcher who’s endangered.

When Hughes was one of the more effective relievers in baseball for the Pirates from 2013 to -15, he relied on one pitch — a sinker — that he threw time after time in the lower part of the strike zone. Over the last year-plus, however, two important trends in the game have conspired against Hughes. For starters, the strike zone shrunk for the first time in the PITCHf/x era last season, according to Jon Rogele’s research. Worse, it shrunk in one particular area, down, where Hughes likes to pitch. Jeff Sullivan found that the zone continued to contract in spring training. The other trend is that more and more hitters have gone in search of fly balls, adjusting their swing planes to become more effective at lifting pitches down in the zone.

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A few years back, I was sure that throwing too many breaking balls was bad for pitchers’ arm health. I wasn’t alone — there was some decent research backing up that hypothesis. As the methods for examining the question have become more refined, however, and further work has been conducted on the matter, it looks like we’ve found that it’s not so much breaking balls as velocity that most directly affects arm health.

Perhaps teams have been on the same journey, because curveball usage — and breaking-ball usage, in general — is up to heights we haven’t seen before.

Breaking-ball usage has increased. That said, the uptick has been slow and gradual. Perhaps too slow and gradual. Maybe we should be pushing it.

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Martin Cervenka is looking to join a select group of his countrymen. Currently the lone product of the Czech Republic in professional baseball, the 24-year-old native of Prague is hoping to follow John Stedronsky (1879), Frank Rooney (1914), and Carl Linhart (1952) as the only Czech-born players to see big-league action.

Cervenka has been climbing the ladder slowly, but surely. Signed by Cleveland when he was 16, he began playing stateside two years later — the Indians wanted him to finish high school first — and he’s currently strapping on his catcher’s gear in Lynchburg. He’s also swinging a much-improved bat. In 32 games with the high-A Hillcats, Cervenka is slashing .280/.328/.407.

Competition-wise, it’s a long way from Prague to pro ball.

“Back home, it’s a bunch of clubs playing on weekends only,” explained Cervenka, who estimated there are “five or six” baseball diamonds in Prague. “There are 10 teams in the top league, and something like 14 teams in the second league. In total, they play about 55 games a year. There are some really good players, though. We have one of the top four or five (national) teams in Europe.”

Outside of Czech baseball’s small inner circle, even the best players are largely anonymous. Despite his unique standing, Cervenka is basically John Doe. Read the rest of this entry »

PITTSBURGH – Daniel Murphy spends much of his offseason in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, where he hits in the batting cages of his alma mater, Jacksonville University. He works out there alongside his brother, who is also an alumnus of the program and who is also a local high-school coach. At the university, with his brother’s high-school team, Murphy will often talk about the craft of hitting with amateur players.

Murphy is, of course, one of a number of hitters who has changed his swing, improved his launch angle, and enjoyed significant success and improvement. He was an early adopter along with the usual names mentioned like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez. But as Murphy talks to players at the grassroots level about swing concepts, he notices there are often curious looks when he discusses the idea of hitting fly-balls.

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PITTSBURGH — I entered the visiting Washington Nationals’ clubhouse at PNC Park with a theory in need of vetting earlier this week. I suspected the most likely explanation behind Ryan Zimmerman’s success this season was that he had joined the merry band of fly-ball revolutionaries.

I was suspicious because one of the early adopters, Daniel Murphy, is of course a teammate. I was suspicious that Zimmerman had changed something because he ranks as the game’s ninth-most valuable position player to date — ahead of early-season sensation Eric Thames, for example.

I was convinced that something dramatic had occurred because his setup looks different this season…

… than it did a year ago:

Moreover, his slugging-percentage heat maps (per swing) certainly have changed, as Zimmerman has expanded the area in which he does damage.

2016:

2017:

I felt quite certain Zimmerman would tell me that he made some dramatic change. But when I approached Zimmerman and asked him about his white-hot start to the season, he was nearly apologetic for not having a more interesting story behind his success.

“I feel like my swing is pretty much the same,” Zimmerman said. “Baseball is the game of adjustments, obviously. I make adjustments between every pitch. So to say you haven’t changed anything, I think, I don’t think anyone does not change anything… But it’s not like this offseason I went and completely remade my swing. If you looked at my swing and position, I would think it would be pretty much the same.

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If we can just be up front about things — I don’t think the Twins are very good. Chances are, you don’t think the Twins are very good, either. They didn’t come in as a consensus contender, and even now, the rest of the way, our projections have the Twins as the second-worst team in the American League. If they’re good, actually good, well, I know at least I will need a lot more convincing. That’s enough of that. Let’s get to the positive stuff.

I don’t know how much longer it’ll last, but right now one can find the Twins at the top of the AL Central. It’s not a division many expected to be good, but it *is* a division that includes the defending AL champs, so seeing the Twins where they are is a surprise. As long as the Twins are successful, they’re worth our attention, and for now I’d like to bring your attention to something about the team’s hitters. Recently, I noted that the Twins have experienced something of a defensive turnaround. There are also signs of progress on the offensive front. Stick with me, because you know I have plots.

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Round bat, round ball, traveling in different directions: the eight-word story of hitting really captures some of the difficulty of that practice. When you get into the art of choking up — moving the hands up the barrel and shortening the bat — you uncover a whole world of players attempting to address that difficulty. David Kagan examined the physics of choking up today at The Hardball Times. Here, we ask the practitioners what they think. It turns out, the players serve up some conventional wisdom, but also some insight into the reasoning behind the practice.

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On Tuesday, I discussed MLB’s expected wOBA (or xwOBA) metric and one of its problems — namely, that guys with great speed might have the ability to outperform their xwOBA on a regular basis. I also pointed out that, despite this drawback, xwOBA should have considerable utility. This post looks at one potential aspect of that utility when it comes to projecting future performance when we have only completed just a small portion of the season.

Comparing wxOBA and wOBA for individual players over the course of a season, one find a pretty strong relationship — a point which I establish in that Tuesday post. To take things a step further, I’d like to look here at the relationships of these stats over the course of a couple seasons and see how they correlate from year to year. In order to establish a baseline, let’s look at how players with at least 400 at-bats in both 2015 and 2016 fared by wOBA.

So we see a decent relationship between wOBA marks in consecutive season. It certainly would be strange if there weren’t some relationship between a player’s offensive statistics from year to year, as players generally don’t get a lot better or a lot worse in such a short span of time — even if the players who do meet those criteria make for more interesting stories and analysis. So we see that, from 2015 to 2016, there is a relationship with wOBA. What about xwOBA?

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