Darren O’Day isn’t your typical submariner. While most pitchers with down-under arm angles live down in the zone, O’Day features a lot of four-seamers up, and he’s thrived while doing so. Over his 12 big-league seasons, the 37-year-old right-hander has logged a 2.55 ERA and fanned better than a batter per nine innings. Since the start of the 2015 season, his K/9 is an eye-opening 13.1.

O’Day, whose best seasons have come with the Baltimore Orioles, is currently with the Atlanta Braves. He discussed his pitching M.O., and explained why his “Jenny Finch” is such an effective weapon, in a recent phone conversation.

———

David Laurila: You’re atypical in that you work up in the zone from a low arm angle. How did that come to be?

Darren O’Day: “When I was a rookie — kind of a scared rookie — I did what the team told me to do. My short time with the Mets, as well. I pitched down in the zone, because I’m a sidearmer, a submariner, and they wanted groundballs. They didn’t care about strikeouts as much back then; they just wanted quick outs, which was kind of the philosophy of the game.

“Then I bounced to my third team, the Rangers, about a year after [breaking into the big leagues]. I kind of said, ‘Forget about that. I’m going to pitch the way I want and figure out if I’m good enough to be here.’ That’s when I started pitching up in the zone, in 2009, and you saw the strikeout numbers go up a little bit.

“That’s really been the big paradigm shift in baseball, and it’s kind of ‘the chicken or the egg’ — did the high damage come first, or did the need for the swing-and-miss come first? But that’s what everybody wants, even if it costs you a couple more pitches per inning.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds have been eagerly awaiting Hunter Greene’s return from Tommy John surgery. And for good reason. Prior to going under the knife 15 months ago he was hitting triple digits with his heater. Drafted second overall by the Reds in 2017 out of a Sherman Oaks, California high school, Greene is No. 77 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

According to Kyle Boddy, his return is nigh. Cincinnati’s pitching coordinator recently spent time with Greene in California, and he deemed the 20-year-old’s rehab “basically done.” Throwing in front of a Rapsoto, Greene was “an easy 97-plus [mph], reaching 100-101 when he was rearing back.”

More than a return to health is buoying the return to form. With the help of technology — “he’s really getting into the metrics and analytics” — and a former Chicago White Sox pitcher, Greene has made a meaningful change to his delivery. What had been “long arm action with a big wrap in the back” is now a shorter-and-cleaner stroke.

“That’s a credit to people like James Baldwin, who was the rehab coach and is now our Triple-A coach,” Boddy told me. “JB has worked with Hunter extensively, leaning on materials from Driveline Plus. Hunter has had a tendency to cut his fastball, so we’ve relied on a lot of video to show him how to fix that and get more carry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Many species of shark, most commonly lemon sharks, give birth in shallow, nutrient-rich mangroves teeming with small sea life that can easily sustain their offspring while also insulating them from the predators typically found in deeper, open waters. Most young sharks spend years feasting in these hazy, sandy green mangroves until they’ve grown, then head out to sea. Some leave the safety of the roots and reeds early and enter the blue black depths at greater risk of a grisly fate. Many of them won’t make it. The ones that do will likely become the strongest of all the adult sharks.

Now that teams have announced their 60-player pools for the upcoming season, we can see how they’ve balanced rostering players who can help them compete this season with prospects for whom they’d like to ensure playing time, while avoiding prospects whose service time clocks they don’t want to risk winding. Below, I have analysis of the prospects in the player pools for the AL East clubs. I’ll be covering every division in the coming days, with some divisions requiring their own piece and others combined where appropriate.

Two of our site tools go hand-in-hand with this piece. The first is The Board, which is where you’ll want to go for scouting reports on all of these players (click the little clipboard), as this piece focuses on pathways to playing time and potential roles and strategic deployment rather than on scouting. Perhaps the more relevant visual aid are Jason Martinez’s RosterResource pages, which outline the player pools that have been dictated by all 30 teams in a depth chart format, and also include columns that indicate where the prospects in the pools rank within each club’s farm system.

A couple roster mechanics to keep in mind as you read: Teams are allowed a 60-player pool. They don’t have to roster 60 guys from the start; not doing so allows them to scoop up released or DFA’d players without cutting someone. Within those 60 players still exists the usual 40-man roster rules from which teams will field an active roster of 30 players, a number that will shrink to the usual 26 as the season moves along. Big league clubs are allowed a three-man taxi squad that can travel with the team but isn’t part of the active roster; that squad must include a catcher (this is clearly to mitigate the risk of some injury/COVID/travel-related catastrophe). Players not invited to big league camp, or who aren’t on the active roster (40-man players and beyond) when the season begins, will train at an alternate location, typically a nearby minor league affiliate. Lastly, only players in the 60-man pool (including prospects) may be traded during the season. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re not familiar with Don Buford, perhaps the first thing you should know is that he was quietly very good. He averaged 4.5 WAR from 1965-1971, and in the last three of those seasons he logged a .405 OBP for Baltimore Orioles teams that captured American League pennants. A speedy switch-hitter who spent the first half of his career with the Chicago White Sox, Buford had a 117 wRC+ and 200 stolen bases from 1963-1972. He played on three 100-plus-win teams, and four more that won 90-plus. A spark plug throughout his career, he never played for a losing team.

Prior to breaking into pro ball in 1960, Buford excelled on both the diamond and the gridiron at the University of Southern California. USC’s first African-American baseball player, he followed his 10 big-league seasons with four more in Japan. Then came Stateside stints as a coach, manager, and front office executive, as well as time spent running MLB’s Urban Youth Academy in Compton, California.

———

David Laurila: You played both baseball and football at USC. Where did you see your future at that time?

Don Buford: “I was leaning toward baseball, because of my size. I was 5-foot-7, 150 pounds, so I didn’t see much of a future in football. I had an offer from the Pittsburgh Steelers — they were interested in me as a kickoff and punt return guy — but I wasn’t interested. That’s the suicide squad in football.”

Laurila: What do you remember about breaking into professional baseball?

Buford: “Coming out of college, I thought I was well-prepared as far knowledge of the game, because I’d had such an outstanding coach in Rod Dedeaux. He was a legendary college coach. We won the NCAA championship in 1958.

“I had offers from the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the White Sox. The Dodgers and Yankees were offering such a minimum — a $1,000 bonus and a $400 salary — and coming out of college, I said, ‘No way; I could make that teaching school.’ That’s why I selected the White Sox. Hollis Thurston and Doc Bennett were the scouts who had followed me, and they felt I had the ability to make it.” Read the rest of this entry »

When I first wrote about José De León — this in a May 2015 Sunday Notes column — he was a 22-year-old prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. He was also a shooting star. Piggy-backing on an emergent 2014 season, De León was dominating the hitter-friendly California League to the tune of a 1.69 ERA, and 50 strikeouts in 32 innings. His heater was a crisp and clean 94-96 mph.

Misfortune has followed those halcyon days. De León went on to debut with the Dodgers in September 2016, then was dealt to the Tampa Bay Rays four months later. Shortly thereafter, things began to go haywire. First it was discomfort in his forearm. Then came a lat strain followed by elbow tendinitis. The coup de grâce came in March 2018 when he was diagnosed with a torn UCL and underwent Tommy John surgery. Out of action until last May, De León took baby steps upon his return. He hurled just 60 innings, four of them at the big-league level, over the course of the campaign.

“The last few years have been rough,” admitted De León, whom the Cincinnati Reds acquired from the Rays over the winter in exchange for a PTBNL. “But I’ve grown a lot. I’m way stronger mentally, and I basically have a brand new arm, as well.”

His “new arm” doesn’t feel foreign to him. The Isabela, Puerto Rico native recalls former Tampa Bay teammates Alex Cobb and Nathan Eovaldi saying that theirs did feel different after surgery, but he hasn’t experienced that sensation. What he has experienced is a velocity rejuvenation. When I talked to him a few days before camps were shut down, De León told me that he’d been 95-96 in his most-recent outing, the firmest his heater had been in years. Moreover, he didn’t recall ever throwing that hard, that early. Read the rest of this entry »

While we can hope there’s a 2020 season that provides both quality baseball and sufficient safety protocols for players, team personnel, and those who work in the game’s orbit, a lot of things have to come together to make such a season happen. A number of COVID-19-related health concerns and continued issues between labor and ownership could cause the season to stall before it ever starts.

In a very real sense, if this happens, everybody loses. But in a baseball sense, the consequences of a lost 2020 season won’t weigh equally on every team. While we maintain the fiction that every team enters the season with a real chance to win the World Series, our story’s ending is more like that of one of those German fairy tales; even if Ron Gardenhire is unlikely to be eaten by a wolf, the Detroit Tigers were always long shots to go 70-92.

Teams had different ideas about what they wanted to accomplish in 2020, and for some teams, this season was more crucial for their long-term goals — in one way or another — than it was for others.

Cincinnati Reds

Many analysts, myself included, have bemoaned the lack of ambition many teams have displayed the last few offseasons, with winning clubs seemingly most concerned with not paying luxury tax penalties or spinning tales of financial hardship too fanciful even for the Brothers Grimm. Read the rest of this entry »

Asher Wojciechowski has had a weird career. The 31-year-old Orioles right-hander has been with eight different organizations in 10 professional seasons. Moreover, this is his second stint with Baltimore in less than two years, with a pair of teams sandwiched in between. All told, Wojciechowski has worked 161 innings over 47 big-league appearances, with a 5.76 ERA and a 5.13 FIP.

He was a supplemental first-round pick in 2010. But while the Toronto Blue Jays liked the Citadel product enough to draft him 41st overall, they didn’t like him enough to let him be. The following spring, Wojciechowski was asked to change his identity.

“At the time, their philosophy was sinkers at the bottom of the zone, and sliders and cutters off of that,” Wojciechowski explained. “Everything was bottom of the zone or below. I’d never pitched like that. In college, I’d been a four-seam/slider guy, a swing-and-miss guy. The Blue Jays tried to turn me into a sinkerballer.”

That happened a month into the season. Following a bad outing, Wojciechowski was asked to sit down with his pitching coach and Toronto’s pitching coordinator.

“They were like, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about dropping your arm slot and having you throw two-seamers, start really sinking the ball,’” Wojciechowski recalled. “I figured, ‘All right, they did this with Roy Halladay and it worked tremendously with him; I guess they’re trying that with me, too.’ Being in my first [full] season of pro ball, I wasn’t going to say no.” Read the rest of this entry »

You know the legend of Steve Dalkowski even if you don’t know his name. He’s the fireballer who can summon nearly unthinkable velocity, but has no idea where his pitch will go. His pitches strike terror into the heart of any batter who dares face him, but he’s a victim of that lack of control, both on and off the field, and it prevents him from taking full advantage of his considerable talent. That, in a nutshell, was Dalkowski, who spent nine years in the minor leagues (1957-65) putting up astronomical strikeout and walk totals, coming tantalizingly close to pitching in the majors only to get injured, then fading away due to alcoholism and spiraling downward even further. Dalkowski, who later sobered up but spent the past 26 years in an assisted living facility, died of the novel coronavirus in New Britain, Connecticut on April 19 at the age of 80.

Ron Shelton, who while playing in the Orioles’ system a few years after Dalkowski heard the tales of bus drivers and groundskeepers, used the pitcher as inspiration for the character Nuke LaLoosh in his 1988 movie, Bull Durham. In 2009, Shelton called him “the hardest thrower who ever lived.” Earl Weaver, who saw the likes of Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, and Sam McDowell, concurred, saying, “Dalko threw harder than all of ‘em.”

“It’s the gift from the gods — the arm, the power — that this little guy could throw it through a wall, literally, or back Ted Williams out of there,” wrote Shelton. “That is what haunts us. He had it all and didn’t know it. That’s why Steve Dalkowski stays in our minds. In his sport, he had the equivalent of Michelangelo’s gift but could never finish a painting.”

In 1970, Sports Illustrated’s Pat Jordan (himself a control-challenged former minor league pitcher) told the story of Williams stepping into the cage when Dalkowski was throwing batting practice:

After a few minutes Williams picked up a bat and stepped into the cage. Reporters and players moved quickly closer to see this classic confrontation. Williams took three level, disciplined practice swings, cocked his bat, and motioned with his head for Dalkowski to deliver the ball. Dalkowski went into his spare pump, his right leg rising a few inches off the ground, his left arm pulling back and then flicking out from the side of his body like an attacking cobra. The ball did not rip through the air like most fastballs, but seemed to appear suddenly and silently in the catcher’s glove. Read the rest of this entry »

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 — Anthony Kay, Pablo López, and Zac Lowther — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

———

Anthony Kay, Toronto Blue Jays

“I’ve been throwing this changeup ever since I’ve been pitching. I never really had a curveball until I was 16 or 17 years old. Growing up, it was mainly just fastball-changeup because my dad didn’t want me [throwing curveballs]. My older brother played, and he also didn’t have a curveball until he got older.

“I first learned a circle change, and I still pretty much throw it to this day. Of course, there has been a little bit of variation. When I came back from [Tommy John surgery] in 2017 it was pretty inconsistent, and I was trying to find a grip that made it more reliable. I used to be on the seams, like a two-seamer, and now I’m kind of moved over to where it’s almost the same, but just off the seams. I was cutting it a lot, and I think being on the seams was a big reason for that. Now that I’m off them, I feel I get a truer release to it.

“It was mostly an inconsistency issue. There were some days where it would be really good, and there were days where it wouldn’t be good at all; it would cut. So I figured I might as well just mess around with it a little bit and try and get it more consistent. I don’t know that I really understand why [the adjustment makes made it more consistent], but it did. Read the rest of this entry »

Zac Lowther was described as having “vexing funk” when he was profiled here in August 2018. That hasn’t changed. The 23-year-old southpaw — now No. 12 on our Orioles Top Prospects list — still disrupts timing with his delivery. Moreover, he continues to flummox hitters. In 148 innings last year at Double-A Bowie, Lowther logged a 2.55 ERA, fanned 154, and allowed just eight gophers.

Prior to last season, Eric Longenhagen described how Lowther “hides his arm behind his body… and has nearly seven feet of down-mound extension.” Last week, the 6-foot-2, 235 pound lefty shared that his recent developmental strides have been more mental than physical in nature.

“A lot of it is working on consistency and how I approach everything,” Lowther told me. “I’m not throwing 96 [mph] — I’m that funky guy who kind of goes against the scouting reports — so I have to place to ball and rely on all three pitches. I need to stay within myself; I need to be in the present, but also know how that pitch takes me to the next pitch.”

Lowther’s repertoire consists of a fastball, a curveball, and a changeup. The first of the three is his best weapon, despite its pedestrian (88-93) velocity. And more than deception is at play. The erstwhile Xavier Musketeer gets good carry, and as Longenhagen pointed out, sometimes sinking and tailing action. Read the rest of this entry »