Robert Stephenson looked done. After a rocky 2017 (4.68 ERA, 13.8% walk rate), he pitched poorly enough in 2018 spring training that the Reds sent him down to Triple-A Louisville. A vote of no confidence from the Reds, of all teams, is a bad sign for a pitcher. In 2016, the Reds finished 30th in pitching WAR; in 2017, they finished 29th. As Stephenson toiled in Louisville, Reds pitching wasn’t setting the world on fire — the 2018 team finished 26th in WAR, allowing more home runs than every team in baseball other than the Orioles.

When Stephenson returned to the majors at the tail end of 2018, things looked grim. In four appearances, he compiled a 9.26 ERA with more walks than strikeouts. His control, always a limiting factor, looked like it might be his undoing — even in a serviceable Triple-A season, he’d walked 12.2% of the batters he’d faced. As 2018 came to a close, the Robert Stephenson story seemed nearly written. Stuff-first pitching prospect can’t harness his command and never makes good on his promise? Seen that one before. As 2018 was Stephenson’s last option year, he started 2019 in the majors, but time very much felt short.

To understand why Stephenson’s middling major league career was something more than just a journeyman starter’s struggles, you have to look back to his prospect pedigree. In 2015, Kiley McDaniel rated him as the top Reds prospect. In 2016, Stephenson slipped all the way to second. At each turn, though, he showed every tool imaginable. His fastball touched the upper 90s. His curveball was drool-inducing. His changeup wasn’t quite there yet, but you could dream on it. He scuffled in a September call-up in 2016, but for the most part, he looked the part of a future impact arm.

If that was the whole arc of Stephenson’s career, it would be just another cautionary tale about toolsy high school pitching prospects. Sometimes all the stuff in the world isn’t enough, you could tell yourself. Player evaluation is hard! But fortunately for the narrative, that’s not where the story ends. The Reds had to find a place for Stephenson on their 2019 roster, so they turned to the bullpen. Control-challenged starters, after all, are often just relievers waiting to be discovered. What has Stephenson done with the opportunity? Here are the top five relievers this year when it comes to getting swings and misses.

Swinging strike rates this high mostly just look like random numbers, but stop and think for a minute about what this means. A quarter of the pitches Josh Hader throws result in swinging strikes. Not a quarter of the swings — a quarter of the pitches. Stephenson isn’t far behind with his 21.6% rate, and that’s almost as wild. If Stephenson throws five pitches, one is getting a swing and a miss. Hader is a game-breaking curiosity, a mythical bullpen beast who strikes out half the batters he faces and swings playoff series. Robert Stephenson had a 5.47 career ERA coming into this season, and there he is in second place.

Sometimes, relievers are easy to spot. Take a two-pitch pitcher who needs a little velocity boost. Give them an offseason to work on throwing with maximum effort. There you have it, a reliever in a can. So did Stephenson add three ticks to his fastball and start maxing out that wipeout curveball scouts loved so much? Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Stephenson has added a pinch of velocity this year, but he’s not a completely remade pitcher or anything. In 2017 and 2018, his four-seam averaged 93.1 mph in starting appearances. In 2019, he’s dialed it up to 94.2 mph. Maybe he hasn’t gotten a huge velocity boost from relieving, but it’s still something.

When it comes to a secondary pitch, though, Stephenson has made a change. In his 2016 debut, he threw a fastball two thirds of the time, mixing in changeups and curveballs in roughly equal measure. In 2017, he threw a slider for the first time. The pitch was more of a power curve than anything else, thrown with a curveball grip and wrist action closer to a fastball, and it immediately became Stephenson’s best pitch. Batters whiffed at nearly half of the sliders they swung at; not too shabby for a pitch he’d never thrown before.

By 2018, Bob Steve had made the slider his go-to pitch, and analysts noticed. Though he didn’t record many major league innings in 2018, he threw 40% sliders when he did. Of the 99 sliders he threw, 18 drew swinging strikes, a 40% whiff-per-swing rate that beat anything he’d ever done with his curveball. The fastball/slider combination still didn’t produce great results that season, but the bare bones of an impact reliever were there; a decent-velocity fastball, wipeout secondary stuff, a willingness to throw a ton of secondary pitches.

That fastball, however, it’s fair to say wasn’t ready for prime time. By FanGraphs’ linear-weight pitch values, his fastball has been 38 runs below average in his career. It’s hardly better using Pitch Info classifications, at 34 runs below average. These linear-weight pitch values take balls in play, strikes, and balls into account, but the problem with Stephenson’s fastball is pretty straightforward — when batters swing at it, they destroy it. This isn’t a one-year thing, a small sample artifact, or anything benign like that. Every year he’s been in the majors, his results and expected results on contact have been objectively awful.

As you can see, the fastball has been quite poor, even in 2019. Given how much his fastball has been shelled, though, Stephenson’s 2019 is even more impressive. He has a 3.96 ERA and a 2.56 FIP despite a fastball that essentially turns every batter into Cody Bellinger. How has he pulled off that trick? Well, he stopped throwing fastballs, that’s how. Take a look at the qualified relievers who have thrown the most sliders this year.

Want to limit the damage done on fastballs and leverage your excellent slider? Sometimes the solution is pleasingly straightforward — throw as few fastballs as possible, and replace them one-for-one with your best pitch. This play only works in relief, as you can’t exactly throw 60% sliders as a starter, but his slider is so good that even when batters know it’s coming, they can’t hit hit.

Stephenson’s slider is gorgeous when he throws it out of the zone. Jung Ho Kang surely has sliders on the brain here, but still bends the knee.

Keston Hiura manages to get the bat on the ball, but only barely, and the result is the same.

These are the kinds of sliders that end at-bats, and Stephenson is adept at hunting strikeouts with the pitch. He’s getting whiffs on 56% of swings against his slider, a frankly mind-boggling number. But as well as the slider plays as an out pitch, that’s not the only thing Stephenson uses it for.

When Stephenson first developed his slider in 2017, he used it in the way most pitchers use sliders. It came out late in counts as a hammer, a pitch that looked like a fastball early before falling off the table late. While he dabbled with it early in counts, it was largely a pitch to be used while ahead. This year, that dalliance with early-count sliders has become a full-blown romance. Stephenson is throwing sliders to open at-bats 62% of the time in 2019. If the count gets to 1-0, he still goes to his slider 43% of the time. 2-0? Still 42% sliders. On 2-1 counts, Stephenson throws 70% sliders. He’s using the pitch in every situation, whether it’s a traditional slider count or not.

This adjustment is a stroke of genius for someone who can’t afford to let batters tee off on his fastball. As a batter facing Stephenson, you desperately want to avoid a two-strike count, because a two-strike count against Stephenson’s slider is a sure way to end up in a Pitching Ninja GIF. Best, then, to swing at an early fastball. It’s the pitch you want to hit, after all. The next step in that game theoretical confrontation is for Stephenson to throw sliders in fastball counts, and either throw enough for called strikes or be deceptive enough that batters can’t just leave the bat on their shoulders.

Amazingly enough for a pitcher who came into 2019 with a 13.6% career walk rate, Stephenson has pretty good slider command. He’s locating 45% of his first-pitch sliders in the zone, enough that hitters can’t wait him out. His overall slider zone rate of 46% is comfortably better than average (43% for the big leagues as a whole). When he does miss the zone, he’s missing close — he already has nine swinging strikes on out-of-zone sliders to start at-bats this year, the most of any reliever and only three behind slider factory Patrick Corbin for most in the majors.

Though he throws the slider in the strike zone less often than his fastball, the slider has proven to be more effective at managing counts. For his career, he’s located 52% of his fastballs in the zone to open at-bats, a slim lead over the slider. The pitch generates almost no out-of-zone swings, though, which undoes the edge he gets from having more pitches in the zone, and that’s before we even get to what happens when batters do swing. When batters swing at fastballs, they might hit them, and with Stephenson’s fastball, you don’t want that. Take a look at Stephenson’s first pitch outcomes, both in his career prior to 2019 and in 2019.

Those balls in play are mostly fastballs, and letting batters put first-pitch fastballs into play isn’t where you want to be when your fastball is as flat as Stephenson’s. Emphasizing the slider has moved all three results the way you’d like to see them move, and even if it’s a small sample size, it’s encouraging to see such promising first-pitch numbers. The league as a whole has a .364 wOBA after a 1-0 count and a .267 wOBA after 0-1. Those 13% of plate appearances that Stephenson has moved from the 1-0 or in play bucket to the 0-1 bucket are like facing Brandon Drury instead of Ronald Acuña 13% of the time — that’ll do nicely.

Maybe you’re a skeptic. Maybe you think that anything can happen in 25 innings, that the dead can walk and a minor leaguer can look like an effective reliever, if only briefly. Maybe you’d prefer to point to Stephenson’s 3.96 ERA and say that even if this is a new skill level, a high-3 ERA reliever hardly merits a deep dive. I don’t see that, though. I see a celebrated prospect who was legitimately not good enough to stick in the major leagues by doing what he’d done his whole life. I see that celebrated prospect making up a new pitch on the fly, throwing that pitch 60% of the time, and excelling in the major leagues with it. Robert Stephenson was a cautionary tale, and now he’s an impact reliever with a hellacious put-away pitch he can throw in any count. In what has so far been a frustrating Reds season, it’s great to see a former prospect make good.

The combination of power and command has been striking. In 34 innings split between high-A Dunedin and Double-A New Hampshire, Nate Pearson has punched out 52 batters and issued just six walks. His ERA sits comfortably at 1.32. Blessed with a blistering fastball and a carve-‘em-up slider, he’s the top pitching prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays organization.

The 22-year-old right-hander doesn’t possess a long professional resume. Selected 28th overall in the 2017 draft out of Central Florida Community College, Pearson got his feet wet with 20 innings of rookie ball, then began last year on the injured list with an intercostal strain. Upon returning in early May, he was promptly nailed by a come-backer and missed the remainder of the regular season with a fractured ulna.

Pearson recovered in time to make six appearances in the Fall League, an assignment Jeff Ware, Toronto’s minor-league pitching coordinator, called “a big test given that he’d really only pitched in short-season ball.” In terms of reestablishing his high-ceiling credentials, he passed with flying colors.

Standing a sturdy six-foot-six, Pearson looks the part of a power pitcher, and that’s exactly what he is. Asked for a self-scouting report, he led with that exact definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Aside from the cool 1911 denim throwback uniforms worn by the home team, Sunday’s Giants-Reds game was a relatively conventional affair. The Reds ran up a 4-0 first inning lead thanks in part to a three-pitch, three-homer sequence, Luis Castillo threw some devastating changeups but also gave up a game-tying three-run homer to Buster Posey, and the Giants won, 6-5. Zzzzz, right? Monday’s game, on the other hand, featured several different flavors of wild, all of them worth savoring. Twenty years from now, somebody will do an oral history of this game, and ESPN will air a 30 for 30 feature.

Let’s start with the bees. More bzzzz than zzzzz…

You thought I was kidding? A swarm of ’em delayed the start of the game by 18 minutes, perhaps a message from above about those weird wraparound series, where teams play Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday just to mess with peoples’ circadian rhythms. Or something.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday was a rollecoaster for Reds righty Luis Castillo. At Great American Ballpark, he needed just 32 pitches to set the Giants’ starting nine down in order for the first time, faced the minimum number of hitters through five innings, and didn’t allow his first hit until he’d gotten one out into the sixth — all while staked to a four-run lead. Before he could escape the frame, however, he allowed a walk and two other hits, including a game-tying three-run homer by Buster Posey. Given that he’d thrown just 81 pitches to that point, manager David Bell sent him back out for the seventh. He put up a zero, and left with the game tied, but the Reds lost, 6-5. Bummer.

The outing cost Castillo his lead atop an NL ERA leaderboard that at first blush appears to be drunk, with guys like Kyle Freeland (5.90 ERA),Yu Darvish (5.79), Aaron Nola (5.06), and Noah Syndergaard (5.02, even after Thursday’s heroics) stumbling along while Zach Davies (1.56), Castillo (1.97, up from 1.45 after his previous start), Caleb Smith (2.00) and Jordan Lyles (2.20) shine.

A closer look at the 26-year-old Dominican’s numbers shows that his spot there is no fluke. Castillo has shaken off last year’s sophomore slump with a performance reminiscent of his tantalizing 15-start rookie season from 2017, asserting his spot among the majors’ upper echelon of starters. Prior to Sunday, he hadn’t allowed more than two runs in any start this season, a performance that earned him NL Pitcher of the Month honors for April. In 50.1 innings though Sunday, he’s second in ERA, strikeouts (59), groundball rate (57.8%), and WAR (1.4), fourth in strikeout rate (30.3%), fifth in home run rate (0.54 per nine), and sixth in FIP (2.89).

Recall that Castillo, who was originally signed out of the Dominican Republic by the Giants in 2011, and traded to the Marlins in 2014 and the Reds in 2016, was effectively treated as a lottery ticket in deals that respectively sent Casey McGehee and Dan Straily the other way. He was also dealt to the Padres and back again in a mid-2016 pair of trades that centered around whether San Diego had been forthcoming regarding Colin Rea’s elbow issues.

Though renowned for a fastball that could reach 101 mph, he cracked only one major prospect list, placing 94th on that of ESPN’s Keith Law in the spring of 2017. Law graded his changeup as plus but noted that his third pitch was a fringy slider. Baseball America, which placed him second on its Marlins list that same spring but still shy of its Top 100, praised his easy velocity, projected his slider as above-average, and noted that “he has a feel for a power changeup, but he’s still finding the right grip. It has the potential to be an average pitch as well.” Our own Eric Longenhagen, who had Castillo 10th on Cincinnati’s 2017 list, described the slider as flashing plus and the changeup as ” below average but there’s good arm speed here (that should be obvious, this guy bumps 100) and it could get to average with reps.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It all started with what I thought was an innocuous tweet.

The Reds released outfielder Matt Kemp on Saturday, and I sent a tweet with a few sabermetric stats — wRC+, WAR, and xwOBA — from his 2019 season. A few hours later, actor Chad Lowe (the brother of Rob) quote-tweeted my original post remarking that, and I’m paraphrasing here, analytics are ruining baseball. (The actual tweet contains profanity, but here it is if you’d like to see it.) My mentions filled up from there, and my original tweet ended up getting ratio’d by baseball fans who do not care for advanced stats. Lowe’s tweet started a new debate over the prevalence of sabermetric stats in mainstream baseball analysis, and it all played out in my notifications tab.

Since Saturday, Lowe and I have found a point of similarity, that being that there are some unquantifiable factors that go into the construction of a winning baseball team. It was a crazy few hours on Saturday night, to say the least.

Of course, I think we all know which side of the “saber v. Traditionalist” debate I fall upon, so this article isn’t going to be a further discussion about that. What I actually want to get into is the topic that prompted this whole debate: Kemp. 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 — Wade LeBlanc, Michael Lorenzen, and Lou Trivino — on how they learned and developed their cutters.

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Wade LeBlanc, Seattle Mariners

“I learned a cutter in 2009. I taught myself. That was after I got my brains beat in, and got sent back to Triple-A. I figured it was my last shot. If I was going to make anything out of this career, I was going to have to find something that worked.

“My fear about throwing cutters, or sliders, was always arm issues. I’ve never actually had an arm issue, but that was the fear. I didn’t want to throw something that could cause some problems with my arm, so I’d held off. But at that point, I was on my last legs. It was either figure something out, or go home. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Senzel burst onto the national scouting scene with an MVP campaign in the Cape Cod League in 2015, hitting .364 with 21 extra base hits in 40 games. He steadily rose up boards throughout the spring when it became clear his raw tools were better than many had thought at first blush, with above average raw power, speed, fielding, and throwing tools, and a 1.051 OPS, 40/21 BB/K, and 34 extra base hits in 57 games. Senzel’s baseball skills (specifically a 60-or-better hit tool with at least above average plate discipline) along with being young for his class (he didn’t turn 21 until after the draft) came together to make him a complete package as the top hitting prospect in the 2016 draft for most clubs.

The Reds took him second overall and we ranked him as the top prospect in the Reds’ system and 30th best prospect in baseball that winter after a loud pro debut, mostly in Low-A:

Senzel has above-average bat speed and bat control. His swing can get long at times and, despite simple hitting feet, his front foot sometimes gets down late which causes the rest of his swing to be tardy, as well. He was getting that foot down earlier during instructional league. He has above-average raw power, which should grow to plus as Senzel reaches physical maturity (he was only 20 on draft day and is well built), though it doesn’t play to that level in games because Senzel doesn’t incorporate his lower half into his swing especially well. If Senzel reaches a point when it would be useful to alter some aspects of his swing to generate more game power I think he’s athletic enough to make the adjustments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jesse Winker had a strange April at the plate. The Cincinnati Reds outfielder came into May with eight home runs — that’s already a career high — and a frustratingly-low .200 BABIP. As a result, his slash line is a far cry from what it was over his first two big-league seasons. A .299/.397/.460 hitter coming into the current campaign, Winker is slashing a more-akin-to-slugger .228/.311/.511.

What kind of numbers can we expect going forward? At age 25, with 574 big-league plate appearances under his belt, Winker profiles as a player well capable of merging the best of both worlds — on-base excellence and pop. That’s exactly what he’s looking to do. The sweet-swinging native of Orlando doesn’t want to be boxed in as a hitter. He wants to do everything.

Winker discussed his multi-dimensional approach when the Reds visited PNC Park in early April.

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David Laurila: How have you evolved as a hitter? I’m thinking of both your approach, and your bat path.

Jesse Winker: “I use the ball to tell me where my bat path is at. The ball gives me the best feedback I need for that. What’s changed the most for me is the knowledge I’ve gained about opposing pitchers. That, and what I’m trying to feel at the plate. I’m more aware of how I’m feeling in the box, and what I’m trying to do.”

Laurila: What do you mean by ‘what I’m trying to feel at the plate’? Read the rest of this entry »

For the first month of every baseball season, I’m a bit notorious for simply answering “April” as the convenient, one-stop-shop for questions relating to why someone’s favorite player is hitting .150. Once we start heading into May, telling people to be patient when 1/6th of the season is already over becomes an increasingly unujustifiable task. While rebuilding teams are in a place at which they can be patient, avoiding judgment is tricky for contenders, especially when every division leader is in first place by fewer than three games.

So let’s get out the guillotine and guess who can be saved and who is a lost cause.

Ryan Braun, Milwaukee Brewers

I remain quite torn about the state of doneness of the Hebrew Hammer. On one hand, he can still hit the ball with authority as seen by the fact that his average exit velocity, dipping under 90 mph, isn’t all that different from the numbers in 2016 and 2017, years in which Braun was still a contributor offensively. If you dig deeper into his pitch-by-pitch stats, Braun appears to be going dead-red for fastballs, and despite a career-low contact rate, he is actually making contact with fastballs at better-than-career-average rates (14.6% whiff/swing rate in 2019 vs. 19.8% career). But other than fastballs, he’s making much worse contact, missing almost half the changeups and sliders he’s offered at (career rate under 30%).

It makes me wonder about Braun’s bat speed. To my naked eye, it looks like he’s trying to compensate for decreased bat speed by making contact with his bread-and-butter pitch (Braun was one of the best fastball hitters in baseball in his prime). He also suggested he was changing his swing in order to hit more home runs. It’s unfortunate that swing speed isn’t one of the things you can get easily, but Alex Chamberlain identified stats that correlate with swing speed when reverse-engineering the scanty data available a few years ago. Isolated power, xwOBA, and contact rate all have a relationship, and in each of the three, Braun is at his career’s nadir.

I think there’s still hope for Braun, but if his bat is slowing down, I wonder if he’s taking the wrong approach in trying to hit for more power. A player with slower bat speed but who is also pulling the ball more (57% compared to 38% career) seems like one trying to cheat on the fastballs. I don’t think Braun’s as doomed as some on this list, but I think that he’d be better off not trying to capture his early-career power because it’s making him a one-dimensional hitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Norris has a lot of friends. They include a fastball, a slider, a changeup, and a curveball. The Detroit Tigers southpaw doesn’t actually converse with them — not in the way that Mark “The Bird” Fidrych once talked to the baseball — but they are nonetheless part of his coterie. They are his compadres. His amigos.

Norris is known for his unconventional ways. A few years back he gained a certain amount of notoriety for living in a VW van. His beard — since shorn — is often bushy, his soliloquies on life thoughtful. Moreover, his responses to reporters’ questions have rarely been of the paint-by-numbers variety. A few hours before he fanned the first big-league batter he faced — David Ortiz, in September 2014 — I happened to ask Norris if he’s imagined what his debut would feel like. His response was, “I have, and it will be like that times 10.”

A few days ago, I asked the now-26-year-old about his arsenal. The answer I received didn’t disappoint. Read the rest of this entry »