For years, the baseball offseason had a predictable rhythm. When the World Series ended, we’d hit a lull. Around the Winter Meetings, a few Scott Boras clients would sign while he spouted strange, vaguely nautical similes. A few more marquee names would get caught up in Boras’ wake (see what I did there?) and sign as well. Then we’d have a lull around year end, and contract activity would pick up again in the new year.

That pattern hasn’t held even a little bit this winter. As of this writing, 45 of our top 50 free agents have signed, including the entire top 30; many guys who just missed the cut have signed as well. Four years ago, plenty of teams were still looking for free agent help in the first week of January. This year, your options are Johnny Cueto, Jurickson Profar, and then tumbleweeds.

This feels different than previous years of free agency, but I wanted to put some quantitative rigor behind that. I set out to compare this offseason to each previous one. I’ll spend plenty of time going through my methodology below, but first, let’s give the people what they want. This year really is different. Here’s the percentage of all free agents, weighted by previous year WAR, that had signed new deals by December 31 of each offseason since the conclusion of the 2000 season, excluding last year’s lockout weirdness:

The 2022-23 offseason (which I’ll be calling 2023 for simplicity’s sake for the remainder of the article) is tied for the most front-loaded offseason of this millennium. Given that offseasons had been getting progressively slower, that’s a meaningful change. Now, let’s talk about how I got to this conclusion, and come up with a few takeaways about the new landscape of free agency. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry, but this is going to be kind of a bummer. Our topic today is the crushing weight of statistical determinism. In researching this article, I learned something that increased my knowledge but also decreased my sense of the possible, and it made me a little bit sad. I would now like to share my sadness with you. We’re going to be studying the Victor Robles Problem.

You might not remember the days when Victor Robles was a star prospect. After short, impressive stints in 2017 and ’18, he had a breakout season in 2019, putting up a 92 wRC+ and 3.5 WAR, and finishing sixth in NL Rookie of the Year voting. ZiPS projected him for 3.3 WAR in 2020. If he could take the next step offensively, he’d be a star; if his offense remained just a bit below average, he’d still be a very productive center fielder. Instead, he turned in three straight seasons with a wRC+ under 70. Here are the Statcast gearboxes for his rookie season and 2022:

There’s a whole lot of blue in the top two rows. Plate discipline was the concern when Robles was first called up, and that was certainly an issue, but the lack of power stands out much more. Although his max exit velocity indicates that he has the capacity to hit the ball hard, Robles’ average exit velocity has been in the first percentile in each of his big league seasons, and his hard-hit rate has never been better than fifth percentile. The Victor Robles Problem is a question: Can a player who didn’t hit the ball hard as a rookie ever turn into a good hitter? Read the rest of this entry »

During the playoffs, Nick Castellanos made a few noteworthy catches, darting and diving to his left. I wondered whether the Phillies’ right fielder, with his mitt on his left hand, was alone in relishing plays to his gloveside. After all, Castellanos didn’t have to reach across his body to make the catch when moving in this direction. I also wondered what, if any, implications this would have on outfield positioning and alignment.

In terms of directional Outs Above Average (OAA), my findings demonstrated that right-handed outfielders actually performed marginally better moving to their armside than their gloveside. But they were considerably stronger to their left than left-handers, who in turn performed much better to their own gloveside. If that word salad confused you, not to worry. These numbers might be easier to digest:

Read the rest of this entry »

You might want to buckle up. This is an article about small sample sizes, so there’s a statistically significant chance that things are about to get rowdy. It was supposed to be an article about which outfielders are better or worse than you’d expect them to be based on their sprint speed.

Just for fun, here’s the chart I started with. I turned Outs Above Average into a rate stat I’ll call OAA/150. It’s a player’s OAA per 1,350 innings, or 150 games. (I tried several other metrics, dividing by chances instead of innings, and working with UZR and DRS range metrics. This worked best for my purposes.) The sample is 544 outfielder seasons in which the fielder had at least 50 chances on balls with a catch probability below 96% (hereafter known as starred chances). I’ve labeled the two players who stood out the most in either direction in 2022.

Daulton Varsho good, Andrew Vaughn catastrophically bad. No surprise there, but I love charts like this, thick at the bottom and thin toward the top. They show how many paths there are to each outcome. Speed is a big component of OAA; the correlation coefficient of the two is 0.54. But outfielders also need to get good jumps, make plays at the wall, and be able to run down balls in all directions. There are lots of different combinations of skills that can land you in the bottom or middle of the chart. To get to the top, you need to be good at all of them. You also need to be lucky. Read the rest of this entry »

“He made a mistake, and Trout made him pay.” No doubt you’ve heard some version of that sentence countless times. Maybe the announcers called it a hanging slider, or a meatball, or any number of other ways of describing a poor pitch. But what exactly does it mean, and how can you know one when you see one?

I’ve discussed that question with my colleagues frequently, but we’ve never come up with a satisfactory answer because the pitches that get classified as mistakes aren’t always intuitive. Sometimes a pitcher hits the inside edge of the zone, only for a hitter sitting on just such a pitch to unload on it. Sometimes a backup slider ties up the opposing hitter. There’s bias to these observations, too: You’re far more likely to remember a pitch that gets clobbered for a home run than one that merely results in a take or a loud foul.

I still don’t have a definitive answer. I did, however, make an attempt at answering one very specific form of the question. One pitch that really does feel like a mistake, regardless of intent and irrespective of circumstance, is a backup slider over the heart of the plate. Spin a slider wrong, and it morphs into a cement mixer, turning over sideways without movement. Leave one of those middle middle, and the result is a slow and centrally located bat magnet. Read the rest of this entry »

Falling behind in the count puts an enormous amount of pressure on the pitcher. It’s in his best interest to throw a strike and retake control, but knowing this, hitters are more likely to swing. Aiming outside the zone is dicey: It’s great if the hitter bites but disastrous if he doesn’t, and the risk generally outweighs the reward. A pitcher would ideally execute a borderline strike that hitters can’t help but pass up, but that’s easier said than done. Navigating this situation is tricky, and just from a numbers perspective, whoever’s on the mound is pretty much always in trouble. The question isn’t “can the pitcher emerge victorious,” but rather, “Can he escape with minimal harm?”

For decades, pitchers have relied on their fastballs to fight these uphill battles. Part of that is because long ago, some of them actually believed throwing a slider or another secondary pitch wasn’t very manly. You ain’t tough unless you blow a 2–0 heater by your opponent, I guess. But really, it’s because a fastball is the pitch a majority of pitchers are comfortable with, and it’s the one they can most reliably lob in for a strike. If your goal is to equalize the count, why risk using an erratically moving curveball to achieve it?

Unfortunately for those old-timey hurlers, they’re probably rolling in their graves at the apparent cowardice of modern pitchers. Rather than adhere to axioms, pitchers today are challenging notions of what’s “right” or “wrong” in pitching, aided by advancements in pitch- and body-tracking technology. One example of such sacrilege is the continuously increasing rate of breaking balls — sliders, curveballs, and the like — thrown in disadvantageous counts:

It’s true that breaking ball usage is up no matter the count or situation, but I find it particularly interesting that the trend remains strong even when pitchers fall behind. The name of the game is optimization. If teams didn’t think opting for breaking balls when behind in the count granted them an advantage, we wouldn’t see this happening. Granted, just because teams do something doesn’t necessarily means it’s effective, but a league-wide jump of eight percentage points in pitch usage is significant and worthy of investigation. Read the rest of this entry »

During Game 3 of the ALCS, Jeff Francoeur noted that 10 of the 12 pitchers who had surrendered postseason home runs to Alex Bregman were All-Stars, eliciting a comment about how Bregman hits well against good pitching. That’s undoubtedly a fun fact, but the notion has been rattling around my brain for the last couple weeks. I’ve definitely heard stories about players who hit good pitching, but I’ve never heard of anyone looking at splits based on the quality of the pitcher on the mound.

The main problem with that idea is a logical one. Break down any batter’s performance into its constituent parts, and you’ve entered a zero sum game. If you’re at your best against great pitchers, that means you’re hitting worse against everyone else. It’s hard for me to imagine that there are many players who fare better against Justin Verlander than they do against, well, anyone on the Nationals.

There could be players who are less bad than average, but if I had my choice of superpowers, I’m not sure that’s the one I’d pick. It would definitely help out in the playoffs, but over the course of the season, batters see a lot more average and poor arms than they do great ones. I’d rather perform well the majority of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Castellanos was not good during the 2022 regular season. He was especially bad on defense, costing the Phillies an estimated eight runs. In the playoffs, however, he made a few impressive catches. In fact, his four best plays of the season came in the postseason. His October excellence began in Game 1 of the NLDS, when he made this snag in the bottom of the ninth inning to help preserve a one-run Phillies lead:

He would go on to make two similar grabs in the World Series. This one came in Game 1, with two outs and the winning run on second the bottom of the ninth: Read the rest of this entry »

After coming up short in 2021, the Astros are back on top of the sport with their second championship in six years. Come playoff time, Houston consistently executed its gameplan better than any other team. This year, dominance came in the form of historically effective relief pitching and timely hitting. On the whole, the Astros’ hitting wasn’t strikingly better than any other team, but when given the chance to put up enough for their bullpen to hold it down, they did that with no problem.

That last part is what has lingered in my head for the past week or so. Over the last six years, it feels as if Houston’s hitters have figured it out in big moments while other teams have stumbled. Even in this year’s tournament, when there was dominant pitching across the board, Astros hitters made the most of mistakes. And Houston could rely on a large group of guys, including but not limited to Jeremy Peña, Alex Bregman, Yordan Alvarez, and Kyle Tucker. Compare that to teams like the Yankees and Phillies, who had to rely on just a few players throughout.

But why is that? How can Houston get timely production from any guy in the lineup while others can’t overcome their holes? I still haven’t gotten close to a definitive answer, but I think I’m making progress on a reason why. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to conclude the series on position player arm strength with the most impressive of them all: catchers. It was a joy covering infielders and outfielders, but it’s time for backstops to have the spotlight. They might now throw quite as hard as their position player counterparts, but let’s keep in mind that they do what they do out of a squat with no room for error. They can’t bobble, hesitate, or mess up their footwork and need to receive the ball and deliver it to second base in less than two seconds.

Let’s set some ground rules for the next iteration of this exercise. Baseball Savant sets their default minimum number of attempts to qualify on the pop time leaderboard at five, so we’ll stick with that. There’s thorough research that explains arm strength as the main component in pop time; because of this, I put strong value into it. Exchange speed still matters, but in this case, it’s more interesting to see how a player moves his body to take advantage of his arm strength.

Anyway, after sorting through the top of the leaderboard, I searched for clips of plays where the catcher especially needed his arm or just made so perfect of a throw that I couldn’t resist talking about it.

Christian Bethancourt (no. 1 overall, 88.3 mph)

There is a new king on top of the catcher arm strength throne, and his name is Christian Bethancourt. That’s not too shocking; he threw in the mid-90s off the mound.

One thing about this particular caught stealing that I find very cool: we get to see how big of a jump Will Brennan got off Corey Kluber. With that jump and a 78-mph sweeper to handle, Bethancourt had no business making this play. The difference is how he perfectly cheats with a slight quarter turn of his torso as he’s waiting for the pitch to come in. It’s usually difficult to do this move in the heat of the game, but he knew it was the only chance he had to catch the runner.

Typically a catcher would let the ball travel further than this, but Bethancourt’s loopy, pitcher-like arm swing means his low transfer is the most efficient for his body and mechanics. After the smooth transfer, he placed a seed right on top of the bag for Wander Franco. Impeccable mechanics with no room for error. Read the rest of this entry »