Archive for Rays

This could have been Tampa Bay’s night. In an alternate, presumably domed and cat-walked universe, starter Shane Baz shakes off a tough start, and builds on his escape from a first-inning jam. The Rays, invigorated by their five-run rally off of Chris Sale in the bottom of the first, pour it on against Boston’s beleaguered bullpen.

It didn’t go that way. Jordan Luplow’s go-ahead grand slam off of Sale was just about the last highlight of the night for Tampa, as Boston outscored the division-winners 13-1 the rest of the way. Boston’s offensive explosion pulled the Red Sox back from the brink of a 2-0 series deficit, and ensured that ace Nathan Eovaldi gets to start in front of the Fenway faithful with a chance to take the lead in the ALDS. And while Boston’s offense did the heavy lifting, the key to the game may have come all the way back in the second inning, when Alex Cora pulled Sale in favor of Tanner Houck.

For my money, Houck is the most compelling player in the series. He pitched brilliantly down the stretch, notching a 2.52 FIP over 69 innings split between the bullpen and the rotation, and capped his season off with five perfect innings in a start last weekend against Washington. For the year, he struck out more than 30% of hitters while also generating more grounders than flies. Beyond the numbers, he’s just a real bastard to face. His low slot and deadly, sweeping slider draw inevitable comparisons to Sale, and he has one of the most devastating sinkers in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Any team down 1-0 in a five-game series has problems. That’s where the Boston Red Sox find themselves after losing Game 1 of their American League Division Series tilt against the Tampa Bay Rays 5-0 in St. Petersburg on Thursday night. But before this series began, the Red Sox already had plenty of issues, and while Alex Cora did his best to mitigate them with some unexpected decisions concerning his pitching staff, he was left helpless thanks to a moribund Boston offense.

Problem No. 1: The Red Sox are all but forced to lean on left-handed starters against a team that crushes them

The Red Sox had to use Nathan Eovaldi just to get to this point. Unfortunately, the understandable decision to have their right-handed ace start the AL Wild Card game means that Tampa will likely face a left-handed starter in at least three games should the ALDS go the full five. That’s a problem when squaring off against the Rays, whose offense finished second in the AL only to the Houston Astros in terms of runs scored and features one of the most dangerous lineups in baseball against southpaws. Here’s Tampa’s Game 1 lineup, with their 2021 performance against lefties:

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The Boston Red Sox summarily dispensed with the New York Yankees in their winner-takes-all Wild Card matchup on Tuesday night, with Nathan Eovaldi cruisin’ and Gerrit Cole the subject of a bruisin’. Boston now faces the Tampa Bay Rays in a five-game American League Division Series matchup that represents just the third time the teams have ever squared off in the playoffs.

One of the interesting things about this matchup from a projections standpoint is that it features two of the teams with the largest gap between their FanGraphs Projected Standings and the ZiPS-concocted ones. Indeed, if it weren’t for the St. Louis Cardinals, these two squads would have the biggest separation in the two systems’ respective preseason outlooks, with the FanGraphs Projected Standings preferring the Red Sox and ZiPS leaning toward Tampa Bay:

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If you want to figure out who the most fearsome power hitters in the majors are, you can consider any number of criteria. The longest home runs? The hardest-hit batted balls? Those both make some sense. The raw number of home runs? Sure, why not? Personally, I like to look at barrels per swing — how frequently a given batter converts a swing into loud contact.

That’s often what we’re asking when we think about sluggers. If you hit 30 bombs but do it by swinging frequently and putting the ball in the air with average raw, that’s not really what I’d consider a slugger. Similarly, if you almost never make contact, I don’t care too much what happens when you do. Turning swings into smashed baseballs? That’s pretty much what I want to see.

The statistic has the added bonus of mostly passing the sniff test. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Shohei Ohtani are in the top 10. So are Ronald Acuña Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr., Yordan Alvarez, and Max Muncy. Some of this year’s fun surprises — Byron Buxton and Joey Votto — are on there, too. Aaron Judge is 11th. Who tops the list? I’m glad you asked:

That’s right: Mike Zunino is, by this metric at least, the best pure power hitter in baseball. He’s having a whale of a season, too, hitting .209/.296/.553, good for a strange-looking 131 wRC+. Though he’s barely above the Mendoza line, he’s clubbing enough homers (and it’s really just homers — he only has 10 doubles) and taking enough walks (9.4%) to make up for his ghastly 35.6% strikeout rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Louie Varland has been one of the best pitchers in the Minnesota Twins system this season. In 20 appearances — 10 with Low-A Fort Myers and 10 with High-A Cedar Rapids — the 23-year-old right-hander is 10-4 with a 2.10 ERA and a 2.81 FIP. Moreover, he has 142 strikeouts to go with just 30 walks in 103 innings.

In some respects, Varland has come out of nowhere. A 15th-round pick in 2019 who took the mound at a Division II school, he entered the current campaign well under the radar. His name was nowhere to be found on top-prospect rankings.

The relative obscurity doesn’t include the Twin Cities’ baseball community. The St. Paul native played close to home at Concordia University, as did his older brother, Gus Varland, who was drafted by the Oakland A’s in 2018.

The emerging Twins prospect has upped both his velocity and his pitching acumen since he toed the slab with the Golden Bears. Low-90s as a collegian, he’s now sitting 94 and topping out at 98. Varland shared that his four-seam fastball spins between 2,300 and 2,500 RPM and gets 17 inches of rise. Calling the pitch his “greatest gift right now,” he added that its effectiveness is due in part to “vertical approach angle, the riding illusion that hitters see.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned this summer after being on hiatus last year due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features J.P. Feyereisen, Zach Plesac, and Nick Wittgren on their changeups.

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J.P. Feyereisen, Tampa Bay Rays

“I started throwing a changeup in 2019, using your basic four-seam grip. It was okay. Then I went to the Brewers and got in their lab. They kind of switched my grip around, and now I have kind of a weird two-seam grip. The thought behind it is to get gravity to affect it and bring it down, so it’s nothing like the Devin Williams changeup where he spins it at 3,100 [rpm].

“Basically, I’m thinking about almost side-spinning it. The way I grip it, the top of the ball is facing up, and it spins [counterclockwise]. It comes off my middle finger. I think ‘ring finger,’ but my middle finger is the main anchor of it, for sure. When I spin it like that, I get depth and also a little bit of arm-side movement. The spin is 1,400-1,500 — nothing crazy — but the good ones I throw will act kind of like a lefty slider. I throw it upper-80s, so it’s kind of a different pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

Xzavion Curry is a prospect-on-the-rise in the Cleveland organization. A seventh-round pick in 2019 out of Georgia Tech, the 23-year-old right-hander is 8-1 with a 2.23 ERA in 18 starts between Low-A Lynchburg and High-A Lake County. With the lion’s share at the latter, Curry has allowed just 65 hits in 93 innings. Moreover, he’s fanned 118 batters and issued just 16 free passes.

Command is Curry’s forte, but it’s not his only attribute. As our own Eric Longenhagen wrote in early June, the 5-foot-11, 195-pound hurler’s “vertical arm slot creates angle and carry on a fastball that plays well at the letters.” Augmenting Curry’s 91-94 mph four-seamer are a curveball, a slider, and a changeup.

He’s only been a full-time pitcher for a handful of years. Curry came to Georgia Tech as a two-way player, having excelled both on the mound and at short as an Atlanta-area prep. That his college coaches made him a full-time pitcher is a testament to changing times. Curry is African-American, and Black players have historically been channeled into position-player roles. Black pitchers have been at a premium.

“That does enter my mind,” said Curry, who had a 17-inning scoreless streak come to an end earlier this week. “As I go around to different places, and play different teams, I don’t really see a lot of Black pitchers. So that is something I’ve noticed, but as the younger generation goes forward, those guys just keep getting better and better. We have a couple in our organization, and I’m pretty sure we’ll start to see more and more Black pitchers.”

Curry cited a different sport when addressing his plus command. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand the Tampa Bay Rays. I don’t understand how they win as many games as they do. They’re definitely good, but it never feels like they should be as good as they are, or recently have been. But at a certain point, if they are consistently better than expected, I’m the one in the wrong and it’s on me to try to understand.

The offense I get. The current American League leader in runs scored is a little over their skis, as they hold that lead despite ranking sixth in on-base percentage and fourth in slugging (they’re fourth in team wRC+ and fifth in OPS). That’s mostly due to the fact that as a team they have greatly improved results with runners on base compared to when they’re empty. That’s more likely luck-related than some kind of mysterious clutch skill they possess, but what the Rays do have is monstrous depth. Nobody in the lineup is going to garner MVP consideration, but their ability to almost never throw out a lineup with dead innings is unmatched in baseball thanks to a roster filled with average or better players. Just look at the Rays compared to the rest of their AL East competition:

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Louis Head has had a storybook season. Without a team during last year’s pandemic summer, the rookie right-hander was working a sales job, his dreams of reaching the big leagues seemingly in the review mirror. Nearly a decade after being taken by Cleveland in the 18th round of the 2012 draft, he thought his career was over. Then the Tampa Bay Rays came calling.

Head was signed off the scrap heap this past February, and on April 25, two days after celebrating his 31st birthday, he made his major league debut. The Katy, Texas native has gone on to appear in 20 games with the Rays since then — he’s also seen action in 24 games with Triple-A Durham — logging a 2.93 ERA and a 3.53 FIP over 27-and-two-thirds innings. His slider has played a big role in his Cinderella ascent. Developed since joining his new team, the pitch has helped fuel one of the better success stories of the 2021 season.

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David Laurila: You’re a 31-year-old rookie. How were you able to finally take that final step and reach the big leagues? Was pitching development part of it?

Louis Head: “I think it was mostly about there being an opportunity here. We had some guys get hurt early on in the season, and it opened up some doors for me. That didn’t really happen in the past with other organizations. I felt like I had thrown well in the past, especially for Cleveland, and I could have been a guy they brought up. But those opportunities never happened.

“Development-wise, when I did get here, working with the analytical team, and with [pitching coach] Kyle Snyder, we were really able to develop my slider into a major weapon. Before, it was just kind of a get-me-over pitch. Now it’s a legit put-away pitch, and that’s made a world of difference. Them having confidence in me has been a huge part of my success, as well.”

Laurila: Why were you able to turn the corner with your slider here, and not with Cleveland, the Dodgers, or the Mariners? Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, rookie sensation Wander Franco extended his streak of getting on-base at least once to an impressive 31 games. There’s still quite a ways to go before you make the shade of Ted Williams wonder if his 84-game (!) streak is in jeopardy, but it’s a mighty impressive feat for a 20-year-old.

That said, Franco is no ordinary rookie. As much a consensus No. 1 prospect as anyone I can ever remember, he didn’t exactly sneak up on anyone who was paying attention; his 80 Future Value grade — a first on our prospect lists — wasn’t something given out recklessly. At 18, an age at which minor league prospects are just getting started in the “real” professional leagues, he was already terrorizing the full-season Florida State League, hitting .339/.408/.464. That would be great for a first base prospect; for a young shortstop, it’s astounding.

Despite losing a key developmental season in 2020, Franco didn’t need much time to get going. Skipped right to Triple-A this year, he hit .315/.367/.586 for the Durham Bulls and was called up six weeks later. Outside of a home run in his very first game, the first week or two was an adjustment period; through 14 games, his line stood at .211/.274/.351 with 13 strikeouts in 57 at-bats against five walks. But since starting his on-base streak, he’s hit .314/.385/.504, also with 13 strikeouts but in 121 ABs.

Every streak has some element of good fortune, but in Franco’s running plate discipline numbers, you can almost see him adjusting to pitchers. And those numbers tend to be “stickier” than most other offensive numbers; short-term changes in results are more likely to be real compared to, say, batting average.

After his first two weeks in the majors, Franco’s contact rate increased despite him simultaneously swinging at more pitches. As pitchers in recent weeks have started throwing fewer strikes against him, that swing rate has responded accordingly, but his rate of contact has continued to rise. His performance during the streak isn’t exactly a galaxy away from his ZiPS minor league translation of .291/.335/.503 at Durham; combine that with the real improvements in plate discipline, and you can make a good argument that we’re seeing the bonafide Wander Franco in these waning days of summer.

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