Author’s note: Jacob deGrom was scratched from his scheduled start today after feeling tightness in his throwing shoulder. He will undergo an MRI. While that potential injury makes his availability for the start of the season murky, this article is about his spring start on March 27.

When you watch Jacob deGrom, he’ll make you question what you know about the fine art of pitching. Develop a mix of killer pitches to keep batters off balance? He has five excellent pitches, but he basically only uses two of them. Change speeds? He throws his fastball in a consistent band, his slider in a consistent band, and when he does deign to drop in a changeup, it matches his slider.

None of that is the most obviously extreme thing about deGrom, though. If you’ve paid attention through a few of his starts, you know what I’m talking about: he barely uses any of the plate. Home plate is 17 inches wide, and baseballs have a radius of roughly 1.5 inches. That means that pitchers have 18.5 inches of horizontal space to play with, from catching the edge on one side of the plate to catching it on the other. Read the rest of this entry »

So many relievers have found new homes recently that we’ve written not one, but two reliever roundups! You can find the first one from Luke Hooper here. This is part two, containing four additional relief arms who bring interesting backgrounds, stuff, and deception to the table. Without further ado, let’s get a closer look.

Brewers Sign Brad Boxberger

If you like weird, enigmatic relievers, then Brad Boxberger is the guy for you. He’s reuniting with the Brewers on a one-year, $2.5 million contract and looks to continue his success from last season. Let’s get into what makes Boxberger tick. Here’s a plot containing every reliever in 2021 who threw at least 50 innings. On the x-axis is chase rate, or how often batters swung against a reliever’s out-of-zone pitches. On the y-axis is overall strikeout rate:

That’s right. Boxberger, the point in yellow, generated an above-average strikeout rate for a reliever (31.2%) while having the fourth-lowest chase rate (20.6%). Not that more chases automatically equals more strikeouts, but this is still pleasantly odd. Boxberger doesn’t need to fish outside the zone to rack up strikeouts – he meets hitters in the middle, and more often than not, he emerges victorious. Read the rest of this entry »

Even given the lockout, the Mets have already had a banner offseason, adding three former All-Stars — Max Scherzer, Starling Marte, and Eduardo Escobar — to the roster via free agency. On Saturday, they traded for a fourth, sending pitching prospects J.T. Ginn and Adam Oller to the Athletics for 33-year-old right-hander Chris Bassitt, who made his first All-Star team in 2021, the best season of his seven-year major league career.

Originally drafted by the White Sox in 2011 and then acquired by the A’s in the December ’14 deal involving Marcus Semien and Jeff Samardzija, Bassitt is something of a late bloomer. He threw just 143.2 major league innings before undergoing Tommy John surgery in May 2016, and didn’t make it back to a major league mound until July ’18, his age-29 season. He’s been very good in parts of four seasons since then, pitching to a 3.23 ERA (76 ERA-) and 3.82 FIP (89 FIP-) in 412 innings. In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, his 2.29 ERA ranked third in the American League, his 3.59 FIP 10th, and his 1.3 WAR 14th (his 2.3 bWAR was third).

Though Bassitt pitched to a 3.15 ERA and 3.34 FIP in 157.1 innings last year, his season took a terrifying turn on August 17, when a 100 mph line drive off the bat of the White Sox’s Brian Goodwin hit him on the right side of the face. He suffered facial lacerations and a displaced tripod fracture of his right cheek, the latter of which required surgery, but thankfully, he avoided a concussion or any damage to his vision. He was able to return to the A’s after missing five weeks, making two abbreviated but reassuring starts in late September.

Before the injury, Bassitt led the AL in both innings and starts, but he wound up falling 4.2 frames short of qualifying for the ERA title. Among pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 0.86 homers per nine ranked third, his ERA fourth (Robbie Ray, the only one of those top four to qualify, finished at 2.84), his FIP fifth, and his 18.8% strikeout-to-walk differential 11th. His 3.3 WAR was tied for 11th among all AL pitchers regardless of innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember that one time Lance McCullers Jr. threw 24 curveballs in a row? It was great, and it’s part of Astros (and Lance McCullers Jr.) lore. You’re supposed to intersperse breaking balls with fastballs, to make each play off of the other. Going against that – throwing the same thing over and over again and daring the other team to hit it – is delightful.

What’s so delightful about it? Throwing the same pitch a ton of times isn’t really it. Would you care if peak Mariano Rivera threw 24 cutters in a row, or Jake McGee threw 24 fastballs in a row? Probably not. Fastballs – and for this article, I’m treating a cutter as a fastball – are the default pitch, and if batters aren’t hitting them, why throw something else?

I’d argue that when you’re feeling it, curves and sliders can behave similarly, at least when it comes to the feasibility of throwing them over and over again. McCullers didn’t bounce 24 curves in a row – he commanded plenty of them in the strike zone. His curve isn’t just hard to hit because batters are looking for a sinker. It’s hard to hit because it moves like a hummingbird hunting nectar. It’s definitely cool seeing all those curveballs in a row, but it’s not as though he was relying on the deception of curveball versus fastball to sneak it past batters. They knew what was coming; they just couldn’t do anything with it.

That’s fine, I guess, if you’re into excellent, borderline-unhittable pitches. For truly impressive streaks of identical pitches, though, I’m partial to changeups. The reason for the pitch is right in the name – it’s a change from what the batter is expecting. In Spanish, it’s even more straightforward: cambio. There’s something magical about seeing a batter gear up for a fastball, only to flail awkwardly at something 10 mph slower.

Do it twice, and you’re using the hitter’s expectations against them in a different way, betting that with the changeup out of the way, they’ll go back and look for a fastball. Do it three times, and I’m not sure what you’re looking for. In unrelated news, let’s talk about César Valdez. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I’m looking into something that doesn’t require much explaining. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I’m looking into a situation that’s so good for the pitching team that in our minds, we go ahead and write it off. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, though; it can just be hard to see why it’s interesting, which is why I’m writing about it. That’s right: let’s talk about when Jacob deGrom gets ahead in the count.

When the best pitcher in baseball has the advantage on a hitter, that hitter doesn’t do well – a real shocker, that one. With two strikes, deGrom turned batters into sub-pitcher-hitting-level zeroes in 2021:

Those aren’t typos. When deGrom hit two strikes before three balls, he struck out roughly three-quarters of the batters he faced and walked almost none. Survive until 3-2, and you stood a chance – he had a 12% walk rate and a mere 52% strikeout rate after 3-2 counts – but for the most part, facing deGrom with two strikes is a one-way ticket back to the bench. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Tech Lead, Baseball Systems

Summary:
The New York Mets are seeking a Tech Lead in their Baseball Systems department. This individual will help architect and guide the Systems group in the building of mobile and web applications to enrich the Mets data ecosystem and inform decision-making within Baseball Operations. This position requires a strong background in mobile and web development. The ideal candidate would use lessons from personal experience to build scalable baseball solutions, mentor team members in software best practices, and architect new capabilities within Baseball Operations at the Mets. We are looking for strong engineering generalists who are excited to work on greenfield software projects and design scalable systems. This is a senior IC role that will be expected to mentor, write code part-time, and weigh-in heavily on technical designs and implementation details of solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets.

Batters

It feels a little weird to be optimistic about the Mets after the season they just had (or perhaps because the Mets are one of the world’s most powerful pessimism-inducing entities). But when I look at the offense, there’s just not that much to complain about. None of Starling Marte, Mark Canha, or Eduardo Escobar are superstars — though Marte comes close at times — but signing that trio really improved how the lineup looks going into 2022. The team has a credible backup at most positions and even some upper minors depth (Brett Baty, Mark Vientos and, if you believe Steamer rather than ZiPS, Khalil Lee) they can use if the need arises. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Bench Coach, Dominican Republic Academy

Summary:
The New York Mets are seeking a Bench Coach for their Academy in the Dominican Republic. The individual will provide support to the rest of the coaching staff in numerous areas. These will primarily consist of hitting and defensive instruction, but may also include assistance in constructing the daily Academy schedule, lineups, and designing practice environments. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Director, Systems Engineering

Summary:
Our Technology department delivers all technology solutions used within the organization. Our team is comprised of individuals that are highly proficient in their respective technology platforms, articulate, solution driven, client focused and proactive in building their technology skills. We are seeking an accomplished senior manager to lead the team focused on end-to-end service delivery from solutions design to operations. In this role, you will take on a wide range of responsibilities including establishing and driving the strategic and architectural direction of the team. You will be responsible for team leadership, ensuring that your team members are efficient, happy, and have opportunities to continue to learn and grow their careers. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance over collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.

Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a hard slider learned from teammate Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 800 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA. Read the rest of this entry »