Archive for Research

Originally a 36th-round pick in the 2013 draft by the Yankees, Nestor Cortes spent time with the Orioles and Mariners before returning to the Bronx and putting it all together toward the end of the 2021 season, his age-26 year. Even upon breaking out, he was dubbed an “everyman” by the New York Post, overlooked by scouts because he didn’t stand as tall as other hurlers and because he lacked overpowering velocity. Yet in 2022, Cortes mowed hitters down to the tune of a 2.44 ERA and 20.3% K-BB rate. Far from an everyman, he was a standout athlete.

The southpaw’s breakout wasn’t a product of a mid-career growth spurt. If anything, his emergence came in spite of his 5-foot-11 height; his 159 ERA+ in 2022 tied him for the 27th-best mark among sub-six-foot hurlers since the Live Ball era began in 1920. Rather, the most concrete reasons for Cortes’ improvements include a velocity jump in both 2021 and ’22 (though his velo is still below average) and the introduction of a cutter paired with a revamped slider. Yet despite the ambiguous impact it has on his game, what perhaps differentiates Cortes the most from other pitchers is his approach on the mound, including but not limited to his varying arm angles.

The hurler’s drop-down moves have been the subject of many an article, including Lucas Kelly’s piece on this very site. The discussion on arm angles more broadly, however, has been rather muted, save for Logan Mottley’s (now of Fanatics, previously of the Texas Rangers) post describing how they can be calculated from Statcast data and Ben Palmer’s piece for Pitcher List digging into the Mottley data.

Even in these articles, there is no mention of how stature might play into the effectiveness of certain arm angles. Instead, there seems to be an implicit assumption that if one arm slot proved more effective on average (which, to be fair, no one has concluded), it should automatically be utilized more, without regard for what might feel most natural for a given pitcher. What would happen if we tried to convert more pitchers to a sidearm slot, or at least push them to vary their arm slots a la Cortes? Using Mottley’s calculations, I took a crack at these questions myself. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I spent a few articles idly hunting for hitter breakouts. I centered my search on players with admirable top-end power numbers but who reached that summit rarely. I found that when those players increased their contact rate, they improved their overall line significantly. I think that finding tracks with intuition in addition to having data to back it up, so I’m overall pleased with that research.

That said, all this downloading and scraping of exit velocity data made me wonder about the opposite side of this spectrum: can hitters add power and break out from the other direction? Hitters who make a ton of contact but don’t hit the ball with much authority feel somewhat capped offensively; in my head, Luis Arraez has a 0% chance of turning in a 20-homer season. I didn’t have the numbers behind that, though, so I gathered up the same pile of data I’d used before and started hunting.

The main thing I learned from the data is something that you’ve heard over and over again: maximum exit velocity (and 95th-percentile exit velocity, which I’m using) is sticky. How hard you hit the ball in one year does a great job of determining how hard you’ll hit the ball in the next year.

More specifically, I took a sample of players with at least 100 batted balls in two consecutive seasons. I sampled from 2015 to ’22, which gave me seven year-pairs, though the ones involving 2020 were light on qualifying players thanks to the abbreviated season. From there, I asked a simple question: how much did each player’s 95th-percentile exit velocity change from one year to the next? Read the rest of this entry »

Growing up a Yankees fan, I quickly became familiar with many Michael Kay-isms. Every home game starts with a “let’s do it here in the Bronx,” every home run elicits a “see ya!” and every caught stealing followed by a home run prompts a lecture on the fallacy of the predetermined outcome. Some of these sayings are worthy of further examination. For example, Kay’s favorite “fallacy” — assuming that the runner who was caught stealing would have scored had he not failed to swipe a bag — warrants a second look, but there’s another one that I’ve always been especially intrigued by, one more ripe for analysis.

When a hitter expands the zone on two strikes, waving in the wind to try to extend the at bat with a foul, Kay describes their swing as an “emergency” or “defensive hack.” There’s no doubt that hitters chase more with two strikes: in 2021, they pulled the trigger on 39.0% of two-strike balls but only 22.0% of other wild ones. In 2022, those numbers were 40.3% and 23.5%, respectively. But given the ever-present nature of strikeouts in today’s game, I’ve wondered if some players have lost any semblance of two-strike panic, not minding the K and not bothering to try to fight off pitches. On the other hand, maybe the increase in strikeouts indicates a further expansion of the zone in tandem with less contact in this era rife with three true outcomes types (see Gallo, Joey). Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to an article where I’m wrong about everything. Like literally all of the things. Here’s what happened. I was thinking about the long, glorious farewell tour of Albert Pujols. After a five-year stretch during which he posted a wRC+ of 84, he put up a 151 wRC+ in 2022. That was the best he’d hit since his age-30 season. Pujols largely put up those numbers by smashing lefties. His 113 wRC+ against righties was good, but against lefties that number was 214. MVP Paul Goldschmidt was the only batter who performed better against lefties (minimum 130 plate appearances vs. southpaws).

Pujols’ resurgence really started in 2021, when he had a 145 wRC+ against lefties and a 35 against righties. That’s the season I was more interested in. As I thought about it, I started wondering whether the last part of his journey — established veteran defies the aging curve by settling comfortably into a platoon role — is happening more frequently. I had the sense that it was happening more frequently.

I was wrong. It is not happening more frequently. Here’s a graph comparing the last 11 years to the previous 10 years:

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I wrote up a side project I’ve been working on recently: looking through exit velocity distributions to find interesting hitters. You can read that if you’d like (obviously, that’s how the internet works), but as a refresher, I looked through 2022 batted ball data for hitters whose 95th-percentile exit velocity was high but whose average exit velocity was low, as well as hitters who hit the ball hard consistently but didn’t have the results to show for it.

With a little more time to monkey around with the data, I’ve come to a few conclusions about this line of analysis. If you just want to read the article for those conclusions, no sweat: just search for the words “phenomenal cosmic power.” It’s been too long since I’ve used an Aladdin reference in an article, so I promise to shoehorn that one in somehow just before I explain my conclusions.

Okay, great, now that we’ve dispensed with the casuals, let’s talk through a bunch of procedure. You nerds (I say this with affection) love the procedure, I know. First things first: I took Baseball Savant data for all batted balls and grouped them by player and season. I skipped 2020 due to sample size issues and last season because we don’t have subsequent-year data. That left me with approximately 3,000 player-seasons of at least 50 batted balls. Read the rest of this entry »

Insofar as I’ve given thought to who my favorite manager of all time is, my favorite manager of all time is Earl Weaver. He exemplified the ideal shouting, dirt-kicking, umpire-haranguing baseball boss; every image and video of a red-faced Weaver screaming up at an umpire a foot taller than him is a blessing upon our society. But the man was legitimately a tactical mastermind; if baseball could be influenced by coaches the way other sports can, we’d talk about Weaver the way soccer people talk about Rinus Michels.

A lot of “great managers” really just manage a lot. Weaver, despite his hyperactive and combative personality, knew to keep his hands off his offense and let the multiple future Hall of Famers on his roster cook. Weaver’s overall recipe for success usually gets cited as “pitching, defense, and three-run homers” or something similar.

Take it from the man himself, in a (mock) radio interview for a Manager’s Corner segment with Tom Marr in 1982:

Marr: Bill Whitehouse…from Frederick, Maryland, wants to know why you and the Orioles don’t go out and get some more team speed.

Weaver: Team speed! For Christ’s sake, you get [expletive] [expletive] little fleas on the [expletive] bases gettin’ picked off, tryin’ to steal, gettin’ thrown out, takin’ runs away from you. Get them big [expletive] who can hit the [expletive] ball out the ballpark and you can’t make any [expletive] mistakes.

Marr: Well, certainly this show is gonna go down in history, Earl!

Read the rest of this entry »

I think I might be on to something. While fiddling around with some 2022 batted ball data in an attempt to improve my programming skills, I created a list of players whose 95th-percentile exit velocity most outstripped their average exit velocity. If you want that in plain English, that’s players who hit the snot out of the ball when they connect, but whose average exit velocity is weighed down by a pile of mishits. Second on this list among players with at least 200 batted balls? Oneil Cruz, a poster child for cartoonish maximums and frequent contact issues.

With Cruz coming in near the top of this list, I thought I might have a bead on something cool. Jo Adell (only 162 batted balls, but still), Michael Harris II, and Pete Alonso are all high up there, and they’re the kind of players I would expect to see. They’re also interesting players from a breakout perspective; if something clicks and they start making more consistent contact, they could turn into monster hitters overnight.

That’s unfair to Alonso, who is already a monster hitter, but there’s even some instructive value there. Alonso and Mookie Betts had strikingly similar lines in 2022 by strikeout rate, walk rate, isolated power, BABIP, and wRC+:

One category where they weren’t similar? Alonso’s top end exit velocity is far superior to Betts’s. I mean, obviously. Have you seen Mookie Betts? Have you seen Pete Alonso? If Alonso were getting to his power as often as Betts gets to his, he’d be putting up Yordan Alvarez numbers. Indeed, Alvarez and Alonso have nearly identical 95th-percentile exit velocities, but Alvarez hits the ball 5.5 mph harder on average. He’s consistently hitting the ball on the screws, in other words. No wonder, then, that he posted an isolated power 60 points higher than Alonso. Read the rest of this entry »

Apart from “outside,” the most frequent word to follow “just a bit” in the baseball lexicon is probably “foul.” How many times has your favorite hitter sliced one down the line, only for the first or third base umpire to frantically wave their hands and scream the dreaded four-letter f-word? (I mean “foul” — get your head out of the gutter.) Here’s a Kyle Schwarber example from the World Series:

The Phillies were inches away from avoiding just the second no-hitter in World Series history. Instead, Schwarber was punched out two pitches later. Unfortunately for Schwarber, this situation was all too familiar. Among the 419 hitters with at least 100 fouls in the 2022 regular season, he ranked fifth in foul barrel rate, coming in at 4.6%. That meant 18 total foul barrels; he would go on to strike out after seven of those. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about the handful of pitchers who drop their release points significantly when facing same-sided batters. Today I’m going to highlight a few who change their release points by a different method. Before we get to them, I’d like to talk a bit about why anybody would risk messing with their release point in the first place. This is an article about the potentially transformative power of scooching over.

I started thinking about arm angles with a very blunt test. For the last seven years, I pulled every pitcher’s average release point and their wOBA against lefties and righties, then calculated the correlation between them. I also pulled average velocity as a control variable of sorts. The correlation coefficients are small, but they line up with what we’d expect:

Unsurprisingly, it’s always good to throw the ball hard. Against same-sided batters, pitchers who release the ball lower and wider fare better. Against opposite batters, a wide release point is associated with poor results. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last article on swing-mirroring, I detailed how, on average, one hitter’s result impacts the first-pitch swing decisions of the next hitter. I was inspired by Asch Conformity, or social influence, something I’ve experienced in my own life whenever I’ve been the last among family and friends to tune into a TV show or movie series. Usually, I cave and watch because I either want to be able to join cultural conversations and/or I convince myself that if everyone else likes a piece of media, so will I. These reasons typify the two general types of social influence: Normative, or when you are enticed to conform for the sake of fitting in; and informational, or when you conform because you think doing so is the right course of action (i.e., maybe I’ll actually enjoy the TV show).

Going back to baseball, each offensive result didn’t fall neatly into either category of social influence (nothing in life truly does). Additionally, for some results like double plays, other psychological factors such as reference dependence played a part. So I instead went very general and ended up categorizing outcomes based on whether they tended to increase, decrease, or have no consistent impact on the subsequent hitters’ first-pitch swing rate (FPS%).

This process served as a lesson in how difficult it can be to disentangle individual psychological drivers of behavior from the broader workings of the environment and the mind, especially when using observational data. But at the same time, I also noticed that the general trends varied based on the first-pitch swinger in question. This opened up another avenue to explore: Examining the patterns of individual differences in swing-mirroring could get me closer to isolating the effect of social influence. Read the rest of this entry »