Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Alex Cobb, Ryan O’Rourke, and Carl Willis — on how they learned and developed their splitters.

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Alex Cobb, Baltimore Orioles

“I started throwing it in high school. When you’re that age, you’ll see things on TV and try to replicate them — kind of like Backyard Baseball. I thought a splitter sounded cool, so I split my fingers on the baseball, got some action on it, and got some good results with it. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Nogosek got one step closer to the big leagues when he was promoted from Double-A Binghamton to Triple-A Syracuse On May 24. The next rung on the ladder is New York, and the 24-year-old right-hander will be bringing more than a four-pitch mix with him when he arrives at Citi Field. He’ll bring a mule-deer mindset, as well.

Nogosek was a Duck before becoming a Met. In between, he was Red Sox property, having been selected by the AL East club in the sixth round of the 2016 draft out of the University of Oregon. Thirteen months later, he was included in the trade-deadline deal that brought Addison Reed to Boston. The address change didn’t shake him up so much as wake him up.

“I was asleep on this bus,” explained Nogosek, who was with high-A Salem at the time. “We were our way to Winston-Salem, and Adam Lau nudged me and said, ‘Hey, you just got traded.’ I was like, ‘Whatever,’ and fell back asleep. When I kind of woke up a little, I was like, “OK, did I really get traded?’

Shenanigans were certainly possible — teammates can’t always be trusted on such matters — but this was no tomfoolery. Once the cobwebs cleared, Nogosek learned that he would indeed be receiving his paychecks (meager as they are in the minors) from another organization. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets were one of the more active clubs this offseason, pulling off a big trade for Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz while signing Wilson Ramos, Jeurys Familia, and Jed Lowrie to free agent contracts. Through 46 games, the team is just 21-25, and multiple reports calling manager Mickey Callaway’s job “safe” have been issued, including a team meeting with GM Brodie Van Wagenen, which is never a good sign. The team had lost five straight games before their win last night, including a three-game sweep to the lowly Marlins despite both Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard pitching in the series. The final two games saw the team shut out offensively. There’s something wrong with the Mets, and a lot of people are at fault.

During the course of a 162-game season, there are going to be stretches where teams don’t play well. The Mets getting swept by the Marlins looks pretty bad because it just happened, but bad teams sweep good teams a fair amount during the season because three games represents less than two percent of the season. The Mets are at 21-25 — fewer wins than they would like — but keep in mind, what the Mets are doing now isn’t a massive departure from the team’s projections at the beginning of the season. This is what our playoff odds projections looked like before the season started.

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Things haven’t been going the Mariners’ way lately. With Tuesday’s loss to the Yankees, they fell to 19-19, thereby setting a record for the fastest plunge to .500 for a team that started the season 13-2. In the third inning of Thursday night’s contest, second baseman Dee Gordon departed the game after being hit on the right wrist by a J.A. Happ fastball, and after manager Scott Servais pinch-hit for fill-in Dylan Moore in the top of the eighth, he resorted to calling upon first baseman Edwin Encarnacion to shift to second base, a position he’d never played before during his 20-year professional career. When the Yankees’ DJ Lemahieu led off the bottom of the eighth with a 100-mph grounder towards second, the 36-year-old Encarnacion gamely dove for the ball, not only coming up empty but rolling the wrist of his left (glove) hand.

Encarnacion was able to continue, but Gordon is still being evaluated. So much for one wag’s theory that the move would improve the Mariners’ defense, which has been downright dreadful, as I noted in passing during my look at the Nationals’ porous defense and disappointing start. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — “It’s probably more rare than a perfect game, I’d guess,” said Mets manager Mickey Callaway on Thursday afternoon. “To hit a homer and win 1-0 with a shutout, that’s got to be one of the rarest things in baseball.”

Callaway was speaking of Noah Syndergaard’s two-way tour de force against the Reds at Citi Field, and he was correct. Dating back to the 19th century, major league pitchers have thrown 23 perfect games, the most recent on August 15, 2012, by the Mariners’ Felix Hernandez against the Rays. By the most generous count, just nine other pitchers have accomplished what Syndergaard did, the last of them the Dodgers’ Bob Welch on June 17, 1983, also against the Reds.

You don’t see that every day.

“Awesome,” said the 26-year-old Syndergaard when informed that he’d accomplished something that hadn’t been done in 36 years.

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The Milwaukee Brewers signed a famous lefty starting pitcher out of free agency Wednesday, bolstering the back of the rotation. No, not that famous lefty starting pitcher, but a still quite respectable one in Gio Gonzalez, most recently biding his time with the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Rail Raiders. In MLB terms, Gonzalez’s contract with the team is barely even a wallet-opener at one-year, $2 million with performance incentives.

Milwaukee’s rotation necessitated another arm after the early season struggles of Corbin Burnes. Burnes struggled to hit locations with his hard stuff, resulting in a slugging percentage over 1.000 against his fastball and a total of 11 home runs allowed in 17 2/3 innings. That’s a 58% home run to fly ball ratio! Gonzalez was brought in as an emergency option for the Yankees, and with the team’s injury emergencies largely being hitters, they never called up Gio and he exercised his out clause.

The Brewers and Gonzalez have a recent history, one that went swimmingly after the late August trade with the Washington Nationals. In 2018, Milwaukee was generally content to let Gonzalez go through five solid innings and then go to the bullpen, something that worked out well, at least during the regular season (3-0, 2.13 ERA/3.63 FIP in five starts). ZiPS projects 1.0 WAR for Gonzalez, assuming 100 innings for the rest of the season, which is comparable to the team’s other options. There’s a catch of course, in that the other options aren’t actually available at this moment; Burnes shouldn’t be working out his problems in a pennant race and Jimmy Nelson and Freddy Peralta haven’t yet returned from injury, even though they’ve made progress. Gonzalez doesn’t really add wins to the standings directly so much as serving as inexpensive insurance for other pitchers.

Gonzalez joining the Brewers is only a bit of a surprise in that they weren’t actually the team most in need of Gonzalez’s services. The buzz has been that about a third of baseball was interested in Gio, but why didn’t a team more in need blow away a measly one-year, $2 million option. After all, if you’re in desperate straits and you’re not going after Dallas Keuchel, where else are you going to get viable a starting pitcher outside of the system in late April? It’s not as if the Giants are begging (yet) to trade Madison Bumgarner. Read the rest of this entry »

It would be inaccurate to say that Jeff McNeil came out of nowhere, but unless you were a Mets fan with a deep knowledge of the team’s minor league system, chances are that you hadn’t heard of him before he was called up last July 24. Since then, he’s done nothing less than post the majors’ fourth-highest batting average (.339) as part of a contact-centric profile with echoes of yesteryear. Having additionally shown himself capable of manning multiple positions, the 27-year-old lefty swinger has become a staple of manager Mickey Callaway’s lineups, and a key cog in a much-improved offense.

McNeil arrived as a man of mystery largely because of his age and injury history. A 12th-round 2013 draft pick out of Cal State Long Beach, he hit for high batting averages with minimal power (a total of four home runs) in his first three professional seasons, most notably leading the Florida State League with a .373 on-base percentage in 2015. Just as he reached the high minors, surgeries to repair a pair of sports hernias and a torn labrum in his hip limited him to a mere three games in 2016; he played in just 48 games in 2017 due to a groin injury. Between the lack of playing time and minimal power, he barely grazed even the deepest prospect lists. Just before the injury bug bit, Baseball America included him as a 40-grade prospect, 27th in the Mets’ system, in its 2016 Handbook. He was an honorable mention on FanGraphs’ Mets list that same year.

Finally healthy, and sporting 40 pounds of additional muscle relative to his pre-injury days, the 26-year-old McNeil broke out to hit .327/.402/.626 (182 wRC+) with 14 homers (five more than his previous career total) in just 57 games at Double-A Binghamton last year, then .368/.427/.600 (165 wRC+) with five more homers in 31 games at Triple-A Las Vegas. He began garnering attention, from prospect hounds, though even Baseball America’s midseason Mets top 10, published four days before his debut, merely consigned him to the “Rising” category. He arrived in Queens in late July, just before the team traded incumbent second baseman Asdrubal Cabrera to the Phillies. As the Mets went nowhere amid an otherwise sour season, he hit .329/.381/.471 (137 wRC+) in 248 PA while playing a credible second base (0.4 UZR in 54 games), good for 2.7 WAR. Notably, he struck out in just 9.7% of his plate appearances, the second-lowest mark of any player with at least 200 PA. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso, it should first be said, really isn’t a great defender. The Mets were quick to let everyone know this throughout 2018, when they didn’t call him up early in the year, when he won Defensive Player of the Month for the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate in July, and when they didn’t make him a September call-up in a completely lost season for the big league club. Seventeen games into his major league career, however, I can say one thing with certainty: I don’t care that he’s supposedly bad at defense. Alonso’s plate appearances are turning into appointment viewing, because he flat-out crushes the ball. I’m not talking garden-variety “boy, that large man can hit,” either. Alonso might not have the best strike-zone recognition, or the best general plate discipline, but when he makes contact, he’s doing damage like almost no one else in baseball.

If you want to understand how truly incredible Alonso’s start has been, you need to look past the WAR leaderboards. Heck, you need to look past the wRC+ leaderboards — like I said, his plate discipline is a work in progress. Alonso has a near-200 wRC+ with a 31% strikeout rate — the three players at the top of the wRC+ leaderboard check in at 11.5%, 8.6%, and 15.0%, respectively. No, the magic really starts when Alonso puts the ball in play, and I do mean magic. Take a look at the top 10 players in baseball in terms of barrels (a Statcast designation that basically means a ball that is tremendously likely to be an extra-base hit) per batted ball:

Think of it this way: about a third of the time that Alonso puts the ball in play, he’s hitting an absolute rocket. Just being on this list, let alone at the top of it, tells us something. This isn’t a list of guys who have lucked into some game power. It’s not a list you can get on just by taking some walks, like a wRC+ leaderboard — Alex Bregman might have had a nice 2018 at the plate, but it’s hard to fake hitting the ball this hard and this optimally (Bregman ended 76th in barrels per batted ball last year). This isn’t just home run power, either, though it’s certainly that — Alonso has six homers already, including a 118.3-mph, 454-foot missile off of Jonny Venters that had SunTrust Park looking like a water hazard at the Masters:

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T.S. Eliot once mused that April is the cruelest month, but for me, it’s the most curmudgeonly one. While baseball returning is always a good thing, a good portion of my April job is to (partially) crush the hopes and dreams of fans excited about hot starts from their favorite players. While stats don’t literally lie, April numbers, thanks to our old friend and scapegoat small sample size, only tell a little bit of the story of 2019. But as cautious as I try to be about jumping to conclusions in baseball’s first month, at least some of those torrid beginnings will contain more than the customary grain of truth. So let’s go out on that proverbial limb and try to guess which scorching Aprils represent something real.

Yoan Moncada

I’ve been burned before touching this hot stove, but there’s something so compelling about Moncada’s early-season performances as to once again disarm the skeptic in me. In 2018’s version of this piece, Moncada’s high exit velocity and his .267/.353/.524 April line had me believing that he had finally turned the corner, the one long-expected from a young, talented player with impressive physical tools.

As the narrator meme goes, he had not turned that corner. Moncada spent the next two months with an OPS that didn’t touch .600, and his final 2018 line represented no real improvement over his 2017.

Moncada is hitting the ball just as hard as he did last year, with his average exit velocity ranking sixth in baseball. But this time around, his performance is also coming with some significant progress in his contact statistics. Moncada’s profile has always been a bit weird in that he doesn’t seem to have a serious problem chasing bad pitches, certainly not as you would expect from a player who just led the league in strikeouts with the fourth-highest total in baseball history. But Moncada was in the top 20 in not swinging at pitches outside the zone.

In 2019, he’s been more aggressive, swinging at more bad and good pitches, but there hasn’t been a corresponding contact tradeoff, and he’s in fact making more contact overall, especially against good pitches. Given that one of the purposes of plate discipline is for hitters to actually hit the good pitch they eke out of the dude on the mound, I once again return to the ranks of the believers. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the Mets’ first nine games this season, J.D. Davis has 28 plate appearances. Jeff McNeil has 27. This, despite our playing time projections; we expected Davis to make just 67 trips to the plate all season. McNeil, on the other hand, was pegged for 509.

Davis, to say the least, has made the most of his early boon in playing time. He’s slashed .280/.357/.600, with two homers, three walks, and six strikeouts. He has also hit the ball incredibly hard. And, when I say incredibly hard, I really do mean it. Of Davis’ 17 batted balls, two have already left the bat at 108+ mph. Why is 108 mph a significant figure? Because, as Rob Arthur wrote in The Athletic in April 2018, “For every mile per hour above 108, a hitter is projected to gain about 6 points of OPS relative to their predicted number.” (Arthur looked at this correlation using a hitter’s projected OPS from PECOTA, Baseball Prospectus’ player projection system.)

On Saturday, Davis hit this home run off of Patrick Corbin at a whopping 114.7 mph off the bat, the hardest hit ball he has hit all season:

Going off of Arthur’s findings, this would mean Davis could gain up to 40 points of OPS off of his projected value, which our Depth Chart projections have as .718. By no means would 40 “bonus” points take Davis into elite territory — it only ups his projected OPS to .758 — but having a max exit velocity of 114.7 mph this early in the season is clearly not a bad sign. In fact, it’s the third-highest max exit velocity of any hitter in the big leagues (minimum 10 batted ball events), behind only Aaron Judge (118.1 mph!) and Joey Gallo (115.4 mph). That is some pretty good company to be in. And perhaps it means that Davis could be tapping into new potential. Read the rest of this entry »