If I’ve learned anything from the new Statcast bat tracking data, it’s that bat speed alone isn’t sufficient to produce a high-quality major league hitter. Johnathan Rodriguez, Trey Cabbage, Zach Dezenzo, Jerar Encarnacion — all of these guys, at this early stage of their major league careers, swing hard but miss harder. Bat speed only matters when you make contact.

When you do hit the ball, however, it’s nice when your swing is as fast as possible. Swinging fast while making good contact most of the time — it’s hard to do, but if you can do it, you’re probably one of the best hitters in baseball.

The reason it’s rare is because these two variables — swinging hard and making solid contact — are negatively correlated. As some probably remember from when these stats originally dropped, Luis Arraez swings the slowest and squares up everything, while Giancarlo Stanton swings the fastest but seldom connects. A slow swing is a more precise swing, and so the group of hitters who can swing precisely while letting it rip are uncommon.

In order to determine who these rare hitters are, it is necessary to select some arbitrary cutoffs. I’ve picked hitters who have roughly 80th percentile bat speeds and 50th percentile squared-up per swing rates. (A “squared-up” swing is one where a hitter maximizes their exit velocity.) Here is the whole list of hitters who average over 74 mph of bat speed and have at least a league-average squared-up rate: Yordan Alvarez, Gunnar Henderson, Manny Machado, William Contreras, Juan Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and… Lawrence Butler??? Read the rest of this entry »

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. September is a magical time for baseball. Half of the games are mostly for fun, with teams playing out the string and competing for bragging rights. Those games produce some delightful nonsense, because teams are often more willing to engage in tomfoolery when the stakes are low. The other half of the games (using half very broadly here, of course) are far more important than any games from earlier in the season; they determine playoff berths, home field advantage, and statistical milestones. Those games have all the intensity missing from the other half, right down to electric crowds and locked-in benches. That duality is a ton of fun. This year, we’ve even got a truly historic statistical chase going on to add to the excitement. Zach Lowe’s NBA column, which inspired this series, always hits its stride when teams are building up for the playoffs. I think that baseball trends in the same direction. Let’s get right to it.

1. When the Ball Doesn’t Lie

This is just outrageous:

The umpire is part of the field of play. That’s just how the rule works. Umpires do their best to get out of the way of batted balls, both for self-preservation and for the integrity of the game. John Bacon wasn’t trying to insert himself into the play; he was in foul territory and focused on getting the fair/foul call right, and there was simply no way to avoid this rip. Bryson Stott couldn’t believe it:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah what the heck, let’s watch the super regional no-hitter again.

This is Kumar Rocker at his peak: A 19-strikeout no-hitter in the NCAA Tournament. (Also: Hey, look, it’s Joey Loperfido!) Watching that video, you’d get the notion that he ran up to the mound that night in Nashville and got the Duke lineup to swing at every single 59-foot slider he threw. You wouldn’t be too far off. Peak Rocker was one of my favorite college players ever, because he had everything you’d want from an athlete. He was big, he was physical, he was skilled. To watch him was to watch an excitable teenager (which he was) operate the body of a major league ace (which he had).

Pitchers like him come along only so often, guys who not only mow down college hitters but do it in a fashion that makes you wonder how even professionals will ever cope. Stephen Strasburg, Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodón, Paul Skenes, and Rocker. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time Luis Arraez struck out was August 10, a full month ago. He struck out the day before that as well. As of Tuesday morning, Arraez has played in 42 of the Padres’ 46 games during the second half of the season, and he has struck out exactly twice. No other qualified player has struck out fewer than 15 times since the All-Star break. Please take a moment to think about that. It means that the player with the second-fewest strikeouts has struck out 7 1/2 times more than Arraez. Nearly 75% of qualified players have struck out at least 30 times. Arraez, once again, has done so twice. Here’s what that looks like in a graph. Each bar represents a qualified player and Arraez is the tiny green one all the way to the right. I’ve added a dashed line to give you a sense of how far below everyone else he is.

Arraez currently has 26 strikeouts over the entire season. If he can stay below 30, he would be just the ninth qualified player in this century to accomplish the feat, and the first since Jeff Keppinger did so in 2008. Even if you do count 2020, despite the fact that Arraez has made 340 more plate appearances (and counting) than any player in that season, he currently has fewer strikeouts than all but five of the 142 qualified players. Here’s a chart of the whole 2024 season, just for good measure. Read the rest of this entry »

I first learned of the kick change while in Chicago for Saberseminar in late August. Chatting with Garrett Crochet and Jonathan Cannon in the White Sox clubhouse prior to a Saturday game, I heard the term from Cannon, who was describing a new pitch that one of their rotation mates, Davis Martin, had recently begun throwing. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

The following day, I learned even more about the atypical offering. Brian Bannister presented at Saberseminar that Sunday, and the kick change was one of the subjects he brought up. Moreover, the White Sox Senior Advisor to Pitching subsequently spoke about it in more detail while taking questions from the audience, this particular one coming, not surprisingly, from my colleague Michael Rosen.

As luck would have it, two opportunities to hear even more about the kick change were right around the corner. The White Sox visited Fenway Park this past weekend, and with Boston being my home base, I was able to sit down with Martin to get his perspective on the pitch, as well as the story of why and how he learned it. Then the Orioles arrived in town, so I talked to reliever Matt Bowman, who not only has something similar in his arsenal, but he also is Bannister-esque when it comes to the art and science of pitching. I spoke to the veteran right-hander about the kick change and its close-cousin relationship with the better-known split change.

Here are my conversations, lightly edited for clarity, with Martin and Bowman.

———

David Laurila: What is the kick change?

Davis Martin: “It’s basically for supinators. I’ve never been a pronator. It’s for guys that have really good spin talent and have always had the ability to get to that supination plane. But pronating is very unnatural for us from a physiological standpoint. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Crow-Armstrong just had a really good night. He made multiple highlight-reel catches in center field, including robbing Max Muncy of a home run with two outs in the ninth inning.

That was a great play even by PCA’s lofty standards, but his speed and defense are a known quantity. I just had to stop myself from using the word “gamebreaking,” like he’s a cornerback and punt returner from the 1990s or something. Crow-Armstrong’s glove is going to get him on SportsCenter, but it’s on the other side of the ball where he’ll determine how much he can help the Cubs while he’s there, as well as how long he stays in the lineup and how much money he makes over his career. The really exciting part of PCA’s Tuesday night only shows up in the box score: He went 2-for-4 with two RBI. Read the rest of this entry »

Relief pitching is hard work. More than that, it’s work whose difficulty builds on itself. If you’re covering a single inning in a single game, you can use your best reliever. Second inning? You’ll need your second-best guy, and so on. Second day in a row? Now your best relievers are tired. Third day in a row? Now maybe everyone is tired. And relief work never stops; through Monday’s action, there have been 4,322 starts in baseball this year and 26 complete games.

There’s an inherent tradeoff between how much teams rely on their bullpen and the average quality of the relievers who come in. No one does this anymore, but a team that was only asking its bullpen for a few innings a game could use its best arms for a high proportion of its overall innings. A team full of five-and-dive starters has to go much further down the depth chart; covering four innings per game with relievers requires more contributors.

There’s no obvious correlation between relief innings pitched and quality, for various reasons. Teams aren’t passive observers here; the teams that expect to need more relief innings tend to acquire more relievers, because they know they’ll be needed. Front offices are always on the lookout for innings eaters to lighten the bullpen load. But increasingly, this is just a cost of doing business. Teams and starters are both of the opinion that their best work is done in short bursts. If that’s the case, there will be more relief innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Verlander did not have a good night on Sunday against the Diamondbacks in Houston. The 41-year-old future Hall of Famer retired just nine of the 19 batters he faced, allowing eight runs in three innings in one of the worst starts of his 19-year career — and not an isolated one, either, as he’s been struggling since returning from his second stint on the injured list. For as difficult as it is to believe, even in a rotation that’s been beset by injuries this year, Verlander might not be one of the Astros’ starters when the playoffs roll around.

At Minute Maid Park on Sunday evening, Verlander worked a scoreless first inning, getting ahead of all four hitters he faced and allowing just one baserunner; he hit Joc Pederson on the left leg with a two-out, two-strike curveball. His second and third innings were another story, however, as he allowed seven runs on a pair of homers by Pavin Smith, and, well, you can do the math as to the traffic that preceded them.

Struggling to command his fastball and not fooling anyone with his secondaries, Verlander netted just four swings and misses from among his 75 pitches, all on his four-seamer, and got just six called strikes from his curve, slider, and changeup combined (18% CSW%). For just the fifth time in 523 career starts and the first time since July 2, 2017, he didn’t strike out a single hitter. The eight runs he allowed were one short of his career high, set on April 15, 2017; he hadn’t allowed exactly eight runs since June 26, 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

Statistically speaking, Joey Loperfido has gotten off to slow start in his major league career. Over his first 222 plate appearances, the lefty-hitting outfielder is slashing just .229/.281/.371 with four home runs and an 86 wRC+. Those numbers are split fairly evenly between two organizations; the 25-year-old Loperfido was traded from the Houston Astros to the Toronto Blue Jays shortly before July’s trade deadline as part of the four-player Yusei Kikuchi deal.

He’s projected to produce more than he has thus far. The Duke University product put up a .933 OPS in Triple-A prior to making his major league debut at the end of April, and as Eric Longenhagen explained in mid-June, Loperfido “has done nothing but perform since breaking into the pro ranks.” Our lead prospect analyst assigned Loperfido, who was selected in the seventh round of the 2021 draft, a 45 FV while ranking him third on our 2024 Astros Top Prospects list.

Loperfido sat down to talk hitting when the Blue Jays played at Fenway Park in late August.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite ice-breaker questions in this series: Do you approach hitting as more of an art or as more of a science?

Joey Loperfido: “I think it’s somewhere in between. When you look back at it, you can see the parts that would be considered more of a science. But when you’re doing it, and as you’re feeling it, a lot of it is an art. There are a lot of calculated actions and movements, and for me that’s kind of the question of feel versus real.”

Laurila: How has that perspective evolved over the years? When you’re a kid, you’re basically just up there swinging a bat… Read the rest of this entry »