What’s wrong with Edwin Díaz? In a single GIF, this is what’s wrong with Edwin Díaz:
I don’t want to tell him how to pitch, because he’s Edwin Díaz and I’m an anonymous person on the internet. But putting a slider right in Josh Bell’s nitro zone is not a great way to approach a high-leverage at-bat. Bell put a good swing on it, which was hardly a given, but Díaz put himself into that situation and paid the price for it.
On a superficial level, there’s not a lot of uncertainty over what’s wrong. During the 2023 World Baseball Classic, Díaz tore his patellar tendon, and then he missed the entirety of the season recovering from surgery that repaired that tendon. He’s back on the mound, but he’s clearly not the same pitcher that he was in his dominant 2022 season. Read the rest of this entry »
The Houston Astros are in an unfamiliar situation: five games under .500 with Memorial Day approaching in the distance like a looming mountain out an airplane window. And they’ve won nine of their past 11 to even get that close.
The Astros have had their ups and downs during their ongoing run of seven straight ALCS appearances, including a season in which they finished under .500 but came within a game of making the World Series anyway. But barring another pandemic — which might well happen if you jokers keep drinking unpasteurized milk — that isn’t going to cut it in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »
Jordan Weems was in his 10th professional season when he was featured here at FanGraphs for the first, and heretofore only, time in July 2020. His story was one of resilience, but also of change. Then 27 years old, Weems was a converted catcher soon to make his big-league debut as a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics. Drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2011 out of Columbus (GA) High School in 2011, he moved to the mound five years later after dwelling in Mendoza-line territory while wearing the tools of ignorance.
Weems is now in his third season with the Washington Nationals, and by and large he’s forged a decent career as a reliever. The 6-foot-4 right-hander has made 118 appearances at baseball’s highest level, and his numbers include 140 strikeouts in 130 innings. The first of his Ks came against Trevor Story, the first batter he faced while toeing a big-league rubber.
I recently asked the personable hurler if he ever thinks about that initial punch out.
“Absolutely,” replied Weems, who has a 3.94 ERA over 16 innings in the current campaign. “You have to kind of stay where your feet are in this game — what you did in the past is in your past — but at the same time, if you’d have told me early on in my [professional] career that I’d be a pitcher in the big leagues, I would have laughed. Looking back, what I’ve done is pretty cool.” Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the St. Louis Cardinals. 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 »
The phrase outer space has been around since 1842, but I’ve always thought that it’s a strange one. Space is the catchall word we use for any empty area. It’s a little bit silly that someone looked up at the unknowable vastness of the universe and decided to refer to it in the same way you’d describe a spare bedroom to a friend who needs a place to crash. Either way, there’s plenty of space out there. There’s space between planets and space between galaxies. Cosmic voids, the vast empty spaces between gravitationally linked galaxies, make up more than 80% of the universe.
Saturday was Space Night at LECOM Park in Bradenton, Florida. While Paul Skenes was dazzling a packed house in Pittsburgh, the Bradenton Marauders, the Pirates’ Low-A affiliate, held a stargazing session after the game and played “Space Oddity,” “Man in the Moon,” and “Mr. Spaceman” over the PA between innings. Staff members wore NASA flight suits. On the field, the Marauders overcame a two-run deficit to beat the Port St. Lucie Mets, 4-3, extending their winning streak to nine games. Also on the field: a turtle.
In the top of the second inning, with a 1-2 count on leadoff batter Yohairo Cuevas, the home plate umpire called time out and turned his head toward left field. It took a while for the rest of the heads in the park to follow, but when they did, they were rewarded with a show. A turtle roughly the size of home plate walked into left field as a defensive replacement. The human outfielders wanted no part it. Center fielder Sergio Campana gently pushed his teammates toward the turtle, and as they cautiously approached it, the turtle started hauling shell toward center field. Left fielder Esmerlyn Valdez waved to the bullpen for help. Eventually, reliever Magdiel Cotto jogged out, hoisted the creature from behind, and hauled it back to the bullpen. The whole saga lasted just over a minute, or as Reptiles Magazine put it, “Turtle’s Minor League Debut Short-Lived.” Read the rest of this entry »
Statcast releasedbat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago Cubs. 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 »
Clarke Schmidt has a thing for spin. This season, there are only 14 breaking pitches in the entire league that average 3,000 rpm or more; Schmidt throws two of them. To find another South Carolina alum with such mastery of spin, you’d have to go all the way back to Andrew Card, who was George W. Bush’s chief of staff during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Schmidt’s breaking balls would fit perfectly in a turn-of-the-century alt-rock milieu, alongside the Spin Doctors, or Lifehouse’s “Spin,” or the Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl.
Baseball Savant recently started publishing bat tracking data, and the public sabermetric community is currently working out what this new avalanche of dataactually means. So it was in the early days of spin rate: How much is too much, and how little is not enough, and how does it vary pitch by pitch? It took a minute to actually sort this stuff out, and as ever, the characteristics of a pitch don’t matter very much if it’s poorly located.
For example: Last year, Schmidt spent his first full season in the Yankees’ big league rotation. And he was fine. His ERA was 4.64, his FIP 4.42. Even though he achieved that vanishingly difficult feat of starting 32 games and throwing 159 innings, he was only a 1.8 WAR pitcher on the season. Opponents hit .265 against him, and his two outrageous breaking pitches landed him smack dab in the 50th percentile for breaking ball run value. Read the rest of this entry »
The bat tracking era is here, and nothing will ever be the same again. Wait, no, that’s not right. Baseball is going to continue pretty much exactly as it was. Pitchers will throw the ball, hitters will swing at it, and then people will run around the field either trying to catch it or touch bases. But baseball analysis is going to start looking different, because we analysts have new shiny toys and a plethora of new ideas to test out. That’s very exciting, and also possibly a little overwhelming. So today, I thought I’d take you on a tour of what the high-level summary numbers do and don’t say about hitting, as well as stump for more granular analysis. I’m sure I’m not alone on either of those points, but still, it’s good to say it out loud. So let’s talk about average swing speed, average swing length, squared-up rate and blast rate, shall we?
There’s no way to say this without sounding snarky, so I’m not going to try: The Oakland A’s, who were supposed to be abysmal, have shocked the baseball world by being merely mediocre. They’re in third place in the AL West, with a full series’ worth of buffer between them and their pursuers. The Angels are suffering the mother of all post-breakup hangovers, and it appears that the Astros have finally been caught by Mephistopheles. Reports say a sinister-looking goateed man has been seen pounding on the door to Minute Maid Park, saying, “I gave you your two World Series, now I’m here for your soul!”
Nothing gold can stay.
The key — or at least one key — to Oakland’s surprising ascent to averageness has been a superb bullpen. Closer Mason Miller has grabbed most of the headlines; some people are saying he’s the best reliever in baseball now. I don’t know if that assertion will hold up over a full season, but the hyperbole will continue until the FIP doesn’t start with a minus sign.
Miller’s emergence has sucked up all the air in the room — insofar as there was ever a ton of air in the room for discussing Oakland’s bullpen — to the detriment of his teammates. So I wanted to highlight Lucas Erceg, who’s been very good this season, and is also kind of weird.
The first thing to know about Erceg is that he was, until very recently, a third baseman. As a sophomore at Cal, Erceg hit .303/.357/.502 with 11 home runs in 57 games, but was ruled academically ineligible the following season, which kicked off a circuitous path to the majors. First: A year at NAIA Menlo College, alma mater of former MLB… standout is probably too strong a word, even if he won a World Series and made an All-Star team… Gino Cimoli. Erceg went in the second round to Milwaukee, becoming Menlo’s highest draft pick ever in the process, and slowly worked his way through the minors with a series of unremarkable batting lines.
In 2021, the Brewers gave Erceg, who’d pitched occasionally at Cal, a shot as a reliever, and by that summer he was good enough to get an honorable mention on Milwaukee’s prospect list. (Even if it was only one sentence in a section labeled “Arm Strength.”)
In 2023, the A’s — who have had some success with converting college infielders into relief pitchers, or who at least brought Sean Doolittle through — purchased Erceg from Milwaukee. This furthers my long-held belief that everyone who plays for the Brewers will one day play for the A’s, and vice-versa. We’d save a lot of hassle by merging the two franchises and having them play on a barnstorming circuit called the John Jaha Highway.
But I digress.
Erceg’s surface stats look pretty pedestrian right now, but about half of his 3.38 ERA comes from one three-run blown save against the Rangers on May 6. At the end of April, he was on a run of nine consecutive scoreless appearances, the last eight of which were also hitless. It’s not as impressive as a hidden perfect game, but Erceg did throw a hidden no-hitter (with 13 strikeouts and three walks on 120 pitches) from April 11 to April 30. I regret not getting to this topic two weeks ago, because I would’ve hammered the “more like Lucas Goose-egg” joke until you all started sending me rotten vegetables in the mail.
Puns and unusual development plan withstanding, there are two things I want to highlight about Erceg: His unusual repertoire and the significant step forward he’s made in missing bats from last year to this year.
As you might expect from a conversion project, there are elements of Erceg’s game that might be considered crude. He’s a hard-throwing one-inning reliever, to start, and even after taking a substantial step forward in this department, his walk rate this year is 11.9%. That’s in the “survivable, but not ideal” bucket for a pitcher, even a reliever.
Nevertheless, Erceg has a legitimate four-pitch repertoire. And this isn’t some fastball-slider guy who has a show-me curveball and a changeup he occasionally throws to opposite-handed batters. He throws four pitches between 18.9% and 30.5% of the time, and while he has specialist offerings to both righties and lefties, he throws his four-seamer and slider against everyone, giving him a three-pitch repertoire against any opponent.
There are 15 pitchers this year who qualify for Baseball Savant’s leaderboards, throw at least four pitches 15% of the time, and have no more than a 20-percentage point spread between their most-used pitch and their least-used pitch. (Erceg’s spread is 11.6 percentage points, the third-lowest of his cohort.) Of those 15 pitchers, 10 have thrown most or all of this season out of the rotation. That makes sense, because the more times a pitcher goes through the lineup, the more pitches he needs.
Here are the five relievers, with the number of pitches they throw, the spread between their highest and lowest pitch usage rate, and the average velocity of their hardest fastball. (Hardest, because all five of these pitchers throw at least two types of fastballs.)
These guys aren’t soft-tossers — Brent Suter came up in the net I originally cast before I narrowed the parameters some — but Erceg is on a different planet, velocity-wise. His changeup is averaging 91.4 mph, which is just 0.3 mph slower than Farmer’s sinker. That changeup is getting knocked around — five of the seven extra-base hits Erceg has allowed this season have come off the changeup, including his only home run — but it’s also missing bats at a rate of 37.5%.
In fact, I’m going to combine arbitrary-endpoint theater and small-sample-size theater to give you a fun fact: Through the weekend, only three pitchers in baseball were running whiff rates of at least 28% on four different pitches they’d thrown at least 49 times: Zack Wheeler, Pablo López, and Erceg.
Now to the really fun part. Erceg has experienced a massive uptick in chase rate, from 23.2% to 31.0%, while at the same time lowering his in-zone swing rate from 62.9% to 56.1% and his in-zone contact rate from 79.3% to 67.2%.
In other words, hitters are swinging less at pitches in the zone, and when they swing they’re not making as much contact. And simultaneously they’re chasing pitches a third more than they did last year. It’s not immediately clear to me why this is happening; Erceg’s in-zone rate is down a couple percentage points, and while his overall opponent swing rate is up, it’s by about two swings at this point in the season. That’s nothing.
As with any reliever performance before the All-Star break, it bears monitoring before we start to count on it going forward. But for now, Erceg is getting whiffs on four different pitches, and is one of the best relievers in baseball both at missing bats and avoiding hard contact. Not bad for a converted infielder, and at best the second-most important reliever on the Oakland A’s.
