This is Michael Rosen’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. You may have read his previous work at the site, including his article about the Kirby Index, a metric he created to measure command using release angles. He lives in Los Angeles and works as a transportation planner.

Earlier this year, I tried to solve the riddle of how Shota Imanaga threw his invisible fastball. The pitch had (and still has) a rare combination of traits: At the time of writing, only Imanaga and Cristian Javier threw fastballs from super flat vertical approach angles (VAA) with elite induced vertical break (IVB). A fastball with a flat VAA or high IVB plays a trick on the hitter’s perception; a fastball with both qualities becomes nearly unhittable, or invisible, when located at the top of the zone. I posed two questions in that piece: Why was this invisible fastball so rare? And what was Imanaga specifically doing to throw a fastball with these traits?

The first question can be answered, my research shows, by looking directly at release angles. Release angles reflect the direction that the pitcher is aiming the ball at release, which I wrote about at length in my article on the Kirby Index from May. That act of aiming — specifically, the direction the ball is oriented out of the pitcher’s hand — also affects the amount of backspin on a four-seam fastball. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a secret to tell, one that might surprise you. I think that baseball analysis is too complex. I can’t keep track of it all. There are too many numbers, too many ways to approach things, too many parts of the game that might be good in one context, bad in another, and neutral in a third. My whole job is to analyze baseball, and yet I find myself drowning in data more often than controlling it. My solution is to simplify. I look for players’ superpowers – carrying tools, in baseball parlance. Aaron Judge is power personified, with the rest of his game building off of that. José Ramírez is a bat control genius. Mookie Betts is the most coordinated man alive. Luis Arraez could hit soft line drives the other way in his sleep. These shortcuts help me think about how the rest of a player’s game fits in. But I have a problem: I’m trying to analyze Jackson Chourio, and I can’t figure out what his superpower is.

You might think it’s his speed. You wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. He’s one of the fastest players in baseball, and he uses that to his advantage all over the place. He’s an excellent baserunner and defender. He eats up ground in the outfield in huge loping strides, the kind of quick you only notice after the fact. I watch him and think he’s an above-average center fielder. The Brewers have only played him in the corners this year, since they’re overrun with excellent defensive outfielders and Chourio has the least experience, but he’s so good that if he ends up in a corner, he might be peak Jason Heyward there.

I guess we could stop the article there, but speed isn’t really a superpower for many great players. Sure, Bobby Witt Jr. and Elly De La Cruz are the current kings of sprint speed, but you don’t look at their games and say, “Oh, the main thing about them is that they’re fast.” That’s the territory of Billy Hamilton or Victor Scott II, and those guys just aren’t stars in the way that I think Chourio will be. I’m looking for an offensive weapon that makes everything work for him, one that explains how he’s hitting major league pitching at age 20. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas White is having an impressive first full professional season. Drafted 35th overall last year by the Miami Marlins out of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the 19-year-old left-hander has a 2.84 ERA, a 2.99 FIP, and a 29.6% strikeout rate over 76 innings between Low-A Jupiter and High-A Beloit. His late-May promotion to the higher of those two levels came for a simple reason. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen explained when assigning him a 45+ in early June, White’s stuff was simply too good for the Florida State League.

I had an opportunity to talk to the promising youngster when Beloit played at West Michigan earlier this week, and one of the things I made it a point to learn about was the mindset that augments his arsenal. I began by asking him how much of a role analytics are playing in his development.

“I’m starting to learn more about the actual numbers and how all that stuff works,” White told me. “At the end of the day, I like to just go out and get outs — I’ve never been a big tech guy — but I definitely know a lot more about my pitches now that I have access to all the data. So, I’m still learning, and I want to learn, but the best measurement for me is how hitters react to them.”

The pitches that hitters are reacting to include a four-seam fastball that has been averaging, according to White, 95.6 mph and 17.5 inches of vertical ride. He is also throwing a two-seam changeup and a sweeper-slider. Currently in the works, but not yet part of his repertoire, is “a shorter gyro pitch,” either a cutter or a hard slider. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles have had their ups and downs lately. Since July 7, a point at which they led the American League East by three games, they’ve gone 11-15, briefly dropping out of the top spot; as of this writing, they’re currently tied with the Yankees at 68-48. They were among the busiest teams ahead of the trade deadline, but their approach was geared more towards quantity instead of quality, as none of their additions rate as an impact player. They’ve dealt with a handful of injuries lately, but in the absence of infielders Jorge Mateo and Jordan Westburg, top prospect Jackson Holliday has gotten another look, and so far he’s been quite impressive.

Recalled on July 31, more than three months after his abortive first stint in the majors ended, Holliday made an immediate impact by hitting a 439-foot grand slam off the Blue Jays’ Yerry Rodríguez for his first major league home run. He went hitless the next day, then peeled off three straight two-hit games against the Guardians; in the last of those, on Sunday, he hit a solo homer off Gavin Williams. He homered in his next two games as well, with a solo shot off the Blue Jays’ Chris Bassitt on Tuesday and a two-run blast off Ryan Burr on Wednesday:

That last homer turned a 3-2 deficit into a 4-3 lead in what wound up as a 7-3 victory. It also made Holliday the youngest player in AL history to homer in three consecutive games, at 20 years and 247 days old. His streak ended on Thursday with an 0-for-4 night against the Blue Jays, though Holliday did collect an RBI for the sixth game in a row, driving in a run on a ninth-inning groundout.

Like teammates Adley Rutschman in 2022 and Gunnar Henderson in ’23, the 20-year-old Holliday entered the year as the consensus no. 1 prospect. He appeared on track to break camp with the Orioles given a strong performance in the Grapefruit League, but the team instead optioned him to Triple-A Norfolk in late March, with his limited experience at that level (18 games last year), at second base (26 games), and against upper-level left-handed pitching all apparently factoring into decision, as did a roster crunch.

Some of that may have been typical front office lip service, however, as Holliday didn’t have to wait long for his first opportunity. With a stretch of facing five lefty starters in their first nine games behind them, the Orioles called up Holliday, who had hit .333/.482/.595 through his first 10 games at Norfolk. He debuted on April 10 with an 0-for-4 showing against the Red Sox, striking out twice but driving in a run on an RBI groundout. Unfortunately, things didn’t get much better; in fact, he was utterly overmatched, going 2-for-34 with two walks and 18 strikeouts in 10 games. While general manager Mike Elias and manager Brandon Hyde both publicly expressed confidence that Holliday would still become an impactful player soon, the Orioles optioned him to Norfolk on April 26.

“I think the bright side of this is he got very intense, very specific feedback from major league pitching,” Elias said at the time. “He’s a brilliant talent and a very sharp kid, and I expect he’s going to go implement those adjustments really quickly. But we felt that Triple-A and steady playing time in Triple-A was the place for that.”

Back at Norfolk, Holliday put up respectable numbers (.252/.418/.429) before missing two weeks in June due to elbow inflammation. Just days after he returned, colleague Eric Longenhagen noted some disconcerting aspects of his performance:

In a way, the IL stint was comforting because it offered a potential explanation for why Holliday’s performance and ferocious bat speed had tapered off a bit. Holliday’s spray chart shifted away from his pull side and moved toward left field and the third base line in the weeks leading up to his shelving. He was inside-outing lots of contact the opposite way, including pitches on the inner third of the plate that he typically turns on, and it was taking what appeared to be an uncomfortable and excessive amount of effort for him to swing hard.

Once he came off the IL at Norfolk, Holliday showed more power, but he was limited to DH duty until after the All-Star break. On July 29, a day before the trade deadline, Longenhagen further noted some defensive concerns, writing in his Top 100 Hitting Prospects Update, “He looks rather rusty and uncomfortable, if not still compromised to some extent. He’s making a lot of routine plays look harder than they need to be, and the quality of his hands has backed up.”

“[H]e does look like a 20-year-old lost in a sea of adults, and it’s become tough to make a strong argument for Holliday over James Wood right now,” concluded Longenhagen, who downgraded Holliday from a 70 FV prospect to a 65, which allowed Wood to take over the top spot on The Board.

While all of that was going down, so were Orioles infielders. On July 23, Mateo — who has made a team-high 52 starts at second base plus three at shortstop and two in center field — injured his left arm in a collision with Henderson. The 29-year-old infielder was diagnosed with an elbow subluxation and placed on the IL, while prospect Connor Norby was recalled from Norfolk. Five days and five starts at second base later, Norby was traded to the Marlins in a deal for Trevor Rogers; that same day, Mateo was transferred to the 60-day IL.

The next day, Holliday returned to the majors, but immediately before he hit his grand slam, Rodríguez drilled Westburg — who has made 64 starts at third base, 35 at second, and one at shortstop — in the right hand with a 95-mph fastball. The 25-year-old infielder suffered a fracture, interrupting a breakout season in which he’s hit .269/.317/.497 (129 wRC+) with 18 homers and earned All-Star honors. The hope is that he’ll be back in mid-September, in time to get tuned up for the postseason, but even given the Orioles’ depth, his absence looms large.

Those injuries have cleared a path for Holliday to get a long look at second base. As he’s still climbing out of the statistical hole he dug in April, his overall slash line looks pretty grim (.177/.239/.387, 76 wRC+ in 67 plate appearances), and the sample sizes for his splits are even smaller. But with the caveat that these numbers mostly haven’t reached the point of stabilizing, within those numbers we can at least discern some positive trends:

The first big thing to note beyond the fact that he’s been productive since returning is that Holliday has gotten his strikeout rate under control. Mind you, he has struck out at least once in all 18 of his games, putting him one short of Austin Jackson’s 2010 record of 19 consecutive games with strikeouts to start a career.

The second thing to note is that Holliday has taken a more aggressive approach at the plate since returning. While he’s swinging at more pitches both in and out of the zone, he’s coming up empty less often:

I don’t think there’s much to be gleaned from his pitch-type splits since returning given that Holliday has seen fewer than a dozen examples of every offering besides four-seamers and sliders. His four homers have each come against a different pitch (four-seamer, slider, curve, cutter), so that’s something.

The third thing to note is that Holliday’s contact since returning has been loud:

Of Holliday’s 20 batted balls since returning, 14 have been hard-hit balls with exit velocities of 95 mph or higher, 11 of them 100 mph or higher. Granted, six of those hard-hit balls have been grounders (five of at least 100 mph), but he’s turned three into singles, and even with his high groundball rate, he’s barreled half a dozen balls in this short time. His total of 36 batted balls is still short of the point of stabilization, but those barrel and hard-hit rates would both rank among the top half-dozen if they were maintained over (much) larger samples.

One more note on batted balls: Where Longenhagen was concerned with how often Holliday was hitting to the opposite field, his 55% pull rate and 20% oppo rates since returning — not to mention the fact that all four homers were to his pull side — suggest he’s moved past that issue. As for his defense, Holliday did make a nice pick to start what upon review proved to be a game-ending double play on July 31, but the jury is still out on his transition.

It’s premature to suggest Holliday has everything ironed out, but at the very least, he’s given the Orioles a most welcome boost. That still leaves them with numerous issues, however. Prospect Coby Mayo, who is no. 12 on The Board, was called up on August 2 to play third base, but so far he’s 0-for-13 with eight strikeouts; this week’s signing of free agent J.D. Davis, who hit just .218/.293/.338 (85 wRC+) for the A’s and Yankees, to a minor league contract suggests Mayo’s leash may not be long. Heston Kjerstad, who landed on the 7-day concussion IL after being beaned by a 97-mph Clay Holmes fastball on July 12, is back on the IL with lingering concussion symptoms after going just 2-for-18 upon returning. The reserve outfielder fitting into his roster slot, Austin Slater, has hit just .205/.331/.250 (77 wRC+) in his three-team odyssey this year.

More concerning is the rotation, which has already lost Kyle Bradish and John Means to Tommy John surgery and Tyler Wells to UCL brace surgery, and which has been lit for a 5.19 ERA and 4.66 FIP since the start of July, and has a 5.10 ERA even after the acquisitions of Rogers and Zach Eflin. Earlier this week, Grayson Rodriguez landed on the IL due a mild right lat strain. “He’s going to miss some time,” said Hyde. “We’re going to shut him down for a little while, get him some rest and recovery, get him some rehab. I think we’re optimistic about it.” His absence leaves a rather unimposing rotation behind ace Corbin Burnes, with Rogers and Eflin joined by Dean Kremer and swingman Albert Suárez. Of that group, only Burnes has an ERA below 4.00 since the start of July, with Kremer and Suárez well above 5.00. Fortunately for the Orioles, the Yankees have problems of their own, including a rotation that’s been even worse (5.59 ERA, 4.81 FIP) since the start of July, and unlike Elias, Brian Cashman did nothing to try to fix it at the deadline.

At this point, the division race looks like one between two rather flawed teams, and any advantages with regards to depth and player health could swing the balance. After a rough start, Holliday is not only fitting in but making an impact, and that can only help the Orioles.

On Thursday morning the White Sox sat at 28-89, recently having broken a 21-game losing streak. Which looks bad, but consider that Chicago is on pace to lose three more games than the 1962 Mets did. Or that over a comparable period — their last 117 games — the Vanderbilt Commodores football team is 40-77. (Vanderbilt’s past 117 games includes a winless season.) So the White Sox cashiered manager Pedro Grifol.

Yeah, that’ll fix the problem.

Immediately, thoughts turned to which unfortunate would be handed this hospital pass of a team. Especially because the traditional next man up for an in-season firing is the bench coach, and Charlie Montoyo (who has recent MLB managerial experience with the Blue Jays) was among the casualties.

As it turns out, the next skipper on this voyage of the damned, apparently, is Grady Sizemore. Read the rest of this entry »

The other week, I was talking to a friend as she fretted over her lack of productivity. Her struggle wasn’t with laziness or a lack of motivation, but rather a severe case of burnout, following her around the way No-Face follows Chihiro in Spirited Away. In the moment, I could see her desperately reaching for more energy to get through the day, like when the chip bag is nearly empty, so you bring it to your mouth and tilt your head back to suck down whatever salty goodness remains.

But instead of encouraging her to power through, I went a different way.

“Y’know, it’s okay to take a break.”

She laughed and said, “That’s what my therapist keeps telling me.”

If you’ve ever described yourself as a perfectionist or a people pleaser, or tied your self-worth to your measurable output, you know taking breaks can be hard.

Athletes learn from the beginning to idolize hard work. Hard work is the salve for every ailment. Wanna get stronger? Work harder. Wanna play better? Work harder. Wanna go pro? Work harder than everyone else. The hardest workers earn their own dedicated titles and recognition, separate from their actual production. Cal Ripken Jr.’s consecutive games played streak earned him the Ironman title. MLB gives out a Heart and Hustle award to whichever player’s heart tells him to hustle the hardest. And every year, we read stories about players and coaches who are the first to arrive to work each morning and the last to leave at night. Read the rest of this entry »

This probably isn’t a problem for most people, but I’m plagued constantly by the memory of frustrating baseball arguments from days past. I probably get into these arguments more than most people, partially because of my (and I hope it doesn’t sound immodest to say this) vast knowledge of the sport, but mostly because I’ve lived most of my life in New Jersey, which his home to the most stubborn, tendentious people you’d ever have the misfortune of meeting.

One such argument took place probably close to 15 years ago, when I ruined what was supposed to be a relaxing Friday evening down the shore by getting into a shouting match over the issue of Alex Rodriguez vs. Derek Jeter. I preferred A-Rod, who would go on to finish his career with a slugging percentage more than 100 points higher than that of his Yankees teammate. I was arguing against someone whose case rested on Jeter being “more clutch.”

If you’re old enough to remember what “analytics bloggers” like me thought about that argument in the 2010s, you can understand my quickness to anger and probably imagine the colors my face turned. When the dust settled, Jeter — who, it turns out, was actually an exceptional hitter all along — did finish with a better career postseason wRC+ than A-Rod. But it was close: 121 to Jeter, 116 for Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2024 season started absolutely terribly for the White Sox. After 25 games, the team’s record stood at 3-22, thanks in large part to an anemic offense that barely scored two runs per game. At the time – the Sox were 3-21 when I wrote the piece – I posed the question of whether the White Sox had a real shot at losing 120 games. I concluded that it was possible, with ZiPS projecting an 8.1% chance that Chicago would lose 120 games, better odds than even the Oakland A’s during their brutal 2023 season. That appeared to be the end of the story, at least until July.

After the awful start, things got slightly sunnier for the Sox for awhile. They swept the Tampa Bay Rays, a team expected to be a contender, and over the next not-so-nice 69 games, they went 24-45. While a .348 winning percentage isn’t in the same zip code as competence, that’s a 56-win pace, a level of lousiness that is fairly commonplace for the worst teams in the league, not the stuff of legend. But as the trade deadline approached, things again turned grim.

The White Sox won the first game of a doubleheader against the Twins on July 10, improving their record to 27-67. That date, almost a month ago, was the last time the White Sox won a game. The team’s 21 straight losses ties them with the 1988 Orioles for the second-most consecutive losses in modern baseball history (since 1901), just two losses behind the biggest loser, the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies. In some sense, the current one might be the most impressive losing streak, simply because the differences between the best and worst teams in baseball has shrunk over the years, making streaks like this more challenging to achieve.

And no, the White Sox haven’t been unlucky. Using a modified Pythagorean winning percentage (I use 1.83 for the exponent rather than two, as it’s been slightly more accurate historically), the White Sox have been the fourth-worst team since 1901.

If the season ended today, the White Sox would have the worst modified Pythagorean win percentage in more than 80 years, since the Philadelphia Phils in 1942. No, that’s not a typo; the Phillies officially shortened their team name for a season in 1942, apparently because they decided they didn’t want to have the same name as the line of cigars.

Problem is, the season doesn’t end today, so the Sox haven’t closed the deal yet. Regression toward the mean is a real thing, and one of the primary reasons why people overrate teams when things are going very well, and vice-versa. At the end of the day, a .235 winning percentage or the .272 in modified Pythag are likely – though not guaranteed – to go up over the remaining games. Projections represent a more stable description of a team’s ability, as well as one that’s generally more predictive of the future, and even with the diminished post-deadline roster, ZiPS sees the White Sox as “only” a .355 team, a 58-104 pace that represents merely a ho-hum level of awfulness.

But it’s also likely that given more games, these other terrible teams likely would have played better ball as well, for similar reasons. (Remember, Major League Baseball didn’t implement the current 162-game schedule until 1961.) While ZiPS projections date back to 2005, I have a quick little estimator for a team’s underlying ability that correlates fairly well with projections; it’s a mix of actual record, a team’s “wRC Pythagorean” — which uses wRC rather than runs score and allowed — and a model of regression toward .500. So I calculated the worst teams by this method and compared them to Chicago’s .356 estimate.

Whew, the White Sox once again fall to satisfyingly hurlicious levels as the worst team since the 1952 Pirates. And the thing is that for the Sox, a .355 record is lousy enough that they stand an excellent chance at losing 120 games anyway with the number of losses they already have banked. With 47 games to play, a .355 record would net them only 16.7 wins, leaving them at just under a 44-118 record, tantalizingly close to the 1962 Mets standard. And since we know that projections aren’t perfect, or at least maybe reality isn’t, that gives the White Sox ample room to continue to underperform and take the grand prize. Luckily, ZiPS can take care of that estimate.

Even with things projected not to go quite as badly, ZiPS gives the White Sox a slightly better than one-in-three chance (34%) to lose 120 games. And it could get even worse, with a 1% projected shot of finishing with a 35-127 record (or worse). That is championship brutality right there. The amusing thing is that this probability could’ve been even higher, but the White Sox didn’t trade Garrett Crochet or Luis Robert Jr. at the deadline, leaving the team encumbered with an additional 2-3 wins. If I remove Crochet and Robert Jr. in favor of their likely sub-replacement replacements, ZiPS projects the Pale Hose to have a 66% chance of losing at least 120 games!

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it a silver lining, but hope remains even for the most woeful teams in baseball. The last team to make a serious late run at 120 losses, the 2003 Tigers, improved quickly in the following seasons and made it to the World Series just three years later. Those 1952 Pirates were in the middle of a full rebuild helmed by legendary general manager Branch Rickey, hired in ’51, and though health problems forced him to step down in ’55, the organization assembled many of the key players who were on the World Series-winning team in ’60. And let’s not forget that seven years after losing 120 games, the Mets won the 1969 World Series. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf isn’t one to embrace change, but a disaster of epic proportions could, in theory, be the one thing that would prompt him to overhaul the organization. I wouldn’t say I’m terribly optimistic about this actually happening, but with an improved farm system – we now rank Chicago’s farm as the third best in baseball – and maybe a better front office assembled, the Sox could turn things around.

Whether the White Sox have a brighter future is something we’ll have to wait to find out. For now, enjoy these Sox as they reach new levels of ineptitude, because they may be the worst major league team you’ll ever see.

Last Friday, Davy Andrews put Aaron Judge into context. That’s fun for the usual reasons – “Wow, look how dominant Aaron Judge is!” never gets old. But his final conclusion – Judge hits like most batters do when opponents hang a bad slider middle-middle – got me thinking. We have a pitch-level model that estimates the worst pitches. Can we use it to get an idea of what it looks like to throw a pitch so bad it turns your opponents into Judge-esque offensive producers?

There’s an easy way to sort this out. When you look at a pitcher’s player page here at FanGraphs, you can see how we model each pitch. There are a ton of scores, but I’m going to be focusing on PitchingBot today, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. The player pages break each pitch down by command and stuff. In our internal database, it’s even better: You can look at any individual pitch and get a grade on it. I set out to find the worst pitches on the year to see whether they made hitters look invincible.

Ironically, the worst pitch thrown this year made the batter look extremely vincible. Here it is in all its glory:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout will not play baseball again this year. Last Thursday, Angels general manager Perry Minasian told reporters that the three-time MVP, who underwent surgery to repair the torn meniscus in his left knee on May 3 and who had recently begun a rehab assignment, had suffered another tear of the same meniscus. The 32-year-old slugger will need a second surgery, and once again, he’s finished for the season at far too early a point. Where we once anticipated speaking of Trout’s place in history alongside the likes of Willie Mays or Barry Bonds, his difficulties staying on the field during his 30s bring another superstar to mind: Ken Griffey Jr.

Trout played in just 29 games this season, the fewest in his career even including his 2011 cup of coffee. He was off to a flying start, albeit something of an uneven one, hitting 10 homers and stealing six bases. His home run total up to the point of his injury put him on a 55-homer pace, at the very least giving him a shot at topping his career high of 45 homers, set in 2019. Thanks to a more aggressive mindset, his stolen base total not only matched what he did from 2020–23 combined, it put him on pace for his first second 30/30 season; he hit 30 homers and stole 49 bases in his 2012 rookie season, then narrowly missed repeating in ’13 (27 HR, 33 SB) and ’16 (29 HR, 30 SB).

Despite those gaudy counting stats and the milestones they might portend, Trout was hitting an out-of-character .220/.325/.541, driven by an absurdly low .194 BABIP, 104 points lower than any of his seasons besides 2011, and 141 points lower than last year, when he played 82 games and totaled 362 plate appearances. His batting average and on-base percentage were respectively 43 and 42 points lower than the post-2011 career lows he set last year, but his .321 ISO was comparable to the marks he put up in 2017, ’18, and ’20 (he had 241 PA that year). Though he wasn’t hitting the ball as hard as usual, his .273 xBA and .599 xSLG suggest that he would have wound up in more familiar territory, slash line-wise. Read the rest of this entry »