This is Alex Stumpf’s sixth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

Lowering the hands has become the “have you tried turning it off and back on again?” of the baseball world. Eric Thames lowered his hands and was one of the hottest hitters in April. Aaron Altherr lowered his hands and has been one of the hottest hitters of May. Miguel Sano, Jean Segura, Jake Lamb and plenty of others have done the same. If your favorite team has a slugger who’s broken out in recent years and you want to know why, check if his hand position has changed. Chances are it has.

Mechanically, it makes sense as to why it’s catching on. According to Phillies hitting coach Matt Stairs — who’s an advocate for low hands — when a batter goes to the launch position with low hands, he goes straight to the baseball. If the hands are high at the start, the batter has to drop them and then explode to the ball. Lowering the hands eliminates an unnecessary movement and allows the batter to get the ball in the air better. Bat speed also tends to go up, which is a good way to counter fastballs that are getting faster almost every year.

Stairs lived through the struggles of having poorly positioned hands during his major-league career. In his days as a pinch-hitting extraordinaire, he liked having his hands chest high. When they rose, that’s when his trouble started.

It took Stairs 10 years before he finally figured out how to keep his hands in the right spot. When he started his first spring training as a hitting coach this year, he had a simple message to his young pupils: “Don’t take as long as it took me to figure it out.”

Recently, Stairs noticed that, during Maikel Franco’s slump, his hands were too close to his face. They worked on lowering them again, and Franco rattled off hits in eight consecutive games after making the adjustment. Franco didn’t know they were a problem until Stairs spotted it.

So who could refute a swing change that is tailor-made to generate more bat speed, fly balls, and most likely more offense? Enter: Pete Rose.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s fifth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

On the whole, the Phillies’ offense appears to be taking a big step forward in 2017. Entering play Sunday, their combined wRC+ was 14 points higher than it was the previous year and the highest it’s been since 2011. The team’s batting average, slugging, and on-base percentages are all up, putting them on pace to score 113 more runs than last season.

But they’ve been doing it without much help from Maikel Franco.

After a strong rookie campaign and then slump in his sophomore season, Franco has taken another step back in 2017. His wRC+ has dropped from 129 two years ago to 74 today — the second lowest out of Philadelphia’s regulars and 25th out of 27 qualified third basemen.

The results he’s had don’t reflect the positive steps he’s taken this season, however. He vowed at the end of last year to be more patient at the plate. So far he says he’s done that, which is why his walk rate has crept up and his strikeout rate is going down. He is able to get those better numbers because is he is chasing out of the zone a lot less, dropping his chase percentage 7.2 points from a year ago. According to PITCHf/x, he was swinging at 26.5% out of the zone entering play Sunday. And while his output is down, his average exit velocity is holding steady with last year, which is still up from 2015.

Getting a couple breaks to raise his .222 BABIP average would help, too, but he isn’t worried about that at the moment. “I have to not think about that stuff,” Franco said. “…I have to do everything that I can control.”

But the good has been outweighed by one major problem. If you’ve seen the title of this post, you probably know what that problem is: he’s struggling against the slider.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s fourth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

Andrew McCutchen is struggling early in the season. If you’ve followed him for the last three years, you’re aware that this is nothing new.

In 2015, he hit .194 in April. In 2016, he slumped his way to a .719 OPS through the first four months of the season. After getting benched for a series in Atlanta, he posted an .852 OPS over the rest of the campaign, just north of the .844 career mark he’d possessed entering the year.

Last year’s strong finish created optimism for this season. So far, however, McCutchen is slashing just .212/.218/.401, with a career worst 84 wRC+.

The absence of both Jung-Ho Kang and Starling Marte — due to visa issues and a PED suspension, respectively — means that the Pirates require an excellent performance from McCutchen just to keep the offense afloat. So far, that hasn’t happened. In fact, the results have been even worse recently: entering play Sunday, McCutchen had recorded a .132/.207/.302 line in 58 plate appearances since April 29th.

As usual, though, the results only tell part of the story. The quality of contact is sloping downward, too. In 2015, McCutchens’ exit velocity averaged out to 90.7 mph. In 2016, it was 89.6 mph. Through May 13th of this year, it was 87.6. The rate of balls hit at 95 mph or above is down, from 44.8% in 2015 to 42.6% in 2016 to 39.3% in 2017. The same goes for barrels, too, dropping from 9.5% to 8.5% to 5.6%.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s second piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

For the last six years, Tom Gillespie has been scouring the world looking for future Pirates. He says it’s the same as normal scouting: getting a name from beating a bush or a word from a trusted coach. It just happens over in Europe and Africa.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s first piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well.

With one month of the season in the books, the Ivan Nova signing has been the steal of the offseason.

After performing a career 180 following his trade to the Pirates from the Yankees at the deadline last year, Nova has become even more Nova-y in 2017, recording a 1.50 ERA over 36 innings, refusing to walk batters, and working at a record-setting pace.

His 95-pitch Maddux* on Saturday night was his fifth complete game in 16 outings as a Pirate. In that stretch of 100.2 innings, he has faced 396 batters and walked only four, including just one out of the 133 who stepped into the box this season. The last starter to go at least 100 innings in a season with a lower walk rate per nine was George Bradley in 1880. That was the year the number of balls required for a walk was reduced to eight, and four years before pitchers were permitted to throw overhand.

*”Maddux” is a term coined by Jason Lukehart in 2012 to denote a game in which a pitcher records a shutout while throwing fewer than 100 pitches.

Nova has been pitching like he is double-parked all year, challenging hitters right out of the gate and getting a lot of outs early in the count. Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle uses the number of batters retired on three pitches or less as a barometer for a starter’s performance. Nova has done it 57 times over five starts this season. His first pitch has been a strike 66.9% of the time, and he’s in the zone on 51.3% of his offerings. He has said he isn’t afraid to throw strikes, but there’s a fine line between challenging hitters and going out there with a “hold my beer” mentality and daring them to go hacking at the first pitch. They haven’t had a lot of success coming out swinging, combining for a .111 average with a mean exit velocity of 80.6 mph off the bat on the first offering.

That has all resulted in an average of just 12.1 pitches per inning — the lowest since Stats LLC started keeping track in 1988. If Rob Manfred ever institutes a Pace of Play Hall of Fame, Nova would be a first-ballot inductee.

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This is Joe Sheehan’s’s second piece as part of his April residency at FanGraphs. A founding member of Baseball Prospectus, Joe currently publishes an eponymous Baseball Newsletter. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read all our residency posts here.

Two pieces ran at FanGraphs earlier this week that addressed critical issues facing Major League Baseball. Dave Cameron pointed out that, with walk rates ticking back up in the season’s early days, that the Three True Outcomes (walks, strikeouts, home runs) accounted for over a third of all plate appearances. Jeff Sullivan then wrote that early-season games were averaging a snappy 3:11, with lag time between pitches jumping by more than a second.

Scores of smart people have taken aim at both issues raised by the Wonder Twins of FanGraphs. Pace of play has replaced PEDs as Baseball’s Big Issue. What I’m not sure we’ve discussed sufficiently is how those two things — TTO baseball and lag time between pitches — are correlated, and how the style of baseball being played in 2017 directly affects the pace at which baseball is being played in 2017.

Let’s back up. Baseball, as evolved from various stick-and-ball games in the 19th century, was originally a contest in which the pitcher’s role was similar to that of a slow-pitch softball hurler. His job was to kick things off by offering up a ball that the batter could whack into the field of play, where the real business of playing baseball happened: running and throwing and fielding and even throwing the ball at a baserunner to record an out. The pitcher was the least important player on the field in the game’s early days. There were, in fact, no mechanisms to force the pitcher to give the batter hittable pitches; it was just considered his job to do so. Batters were even able to request high or low pitches, the better to fit their swing.

As the game became professionalized and more competitive at the highest levels, pitchers started trying to exercise more control over their deliveries so as to keep the batter from making solid, or even any, contact. This led to the creation of the strike zone and, subsequently, walks. Pitchers pushed the rules that mandated underhand deliveries, so as to generate more speed on the ball, and pushed them some more, until the game gave up and let pitchers throw overhand in 1884. This was a key moment in the evolution of baseball, the moment the game stopped being a battle between the batter and the defense, and became a battle between the pitcher and the batter. It also gave us this graph:

It’s not a perfectly clean line, as the deadball era saw a jump in whiffs that disappeared during World War I, but the long-term trend is clear: strikeout rates have risen throughout baseball history, and you can trace it all back to 1884, when baseball turned pitchers into the most important players in the game. So now, 133 years later, in a 7-1 game in the ninth, you have to watch some 27-year-old failed starter huff and puff for 23 seconds, catching his breath while deciding between his fastball and his fastball, all because Pud Galvin and his ilk cheated so effectively that the game gave up trying to stop them.

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This is Joe Sheehan’s first piece as part of his April residency at FanGraphs. A founding member of Baseball Prospectus, Joe currently publishes an eponymous Baseball Newsletter. You can find him on Twitter, as well.

Like a lot of fans, I watched Sunday’s and Monday’s games fascinated by the number of pitchers who seemed to be throwing harder than they did last season. So it was a relief to see Dave Cameron’s note here Tuesday about why readings were higher. It will take some mental gymnastics to compare velo figures from 2017 to previous years, but I’m sure it will be second nature aft…

… wait, what?

This is what it’s like being a baseball fan in 2017. The issues you face are ones of reconciling changes in how the velocity of every single pitch thrown in MLB is tracked. It’s not about getting that data, but rather, about sussing out the difference between measurement points of the pitch on the way from the pitcher’s hand to home plate.

We had a different set of problems when we were putting together the first Baseball Prospectus annual, back in the winter of 1995-96. The challenges we faced weren’t discerning which measure of velocity to use, but rather, when we would get access to minor-league statistics, and how soon lefty/righty splits would be in our hands, and would anyone at all talk to us about prospects we only knew by their stat lines.

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This is Kate Preusser’s fourth and final piece as part of her month-long residency. It has been a pleasure to host her work! Missed her previous posts? You can read them here. Listen to her appearance on FanGraphs Audio here.

“What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?”

–Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

On paper, it looks like Jurickson Profar had a successful WBC stint for Team Netherlands. He batted .464 during the team’s run through the Classic, with five doubles, four RBIs, and a home run — this while also playing a passable center field, a position at which he’s never recorded a start as a professional.

But Profar’s sterling performance will be overshadowed — for him, at least — by a baserunning blunder made in the first inning of an elimination game against Puerto Rico. Andrelton Simmons led off that game with a single. Xander Bogaerts was hit by a pitch right after that. When Profar followed with another single, it could have potentially loaded the bases for the Dutch. Could have, except that Simmons had just gotten picked off trying to steal third against Yadier Molina — because, I don’t know, maybe he didn’t recognize one of the best defensive catchers in the world with his blond hair?

But back to the Profar single. Even after accounting for Simmons’ caught stealing, that single still put the Dutch in a good position, with two runners on base and just the one out. The advantage didn’t last long, however. After rounding first, Profar used the opportunity to gesture towards the Netherlands crowd — an admittedly smaller contingent than Puerto Rico’s — and was slow getting back to the bag. Yadier Molina, a tiger who has the reflexes of a cobra that’s also a member of MENSA, threw him out. Which, of course he did! Yadier Molina likes throwing people out in the same way you and I like breathing. And of course Profar was celebrating his base hit, because people celebrating base hits is what makes the WBC so delightful. As an event, it’s like NES Super Punch-Out but with actual live humans doing the taunting.

There are multiple angles of the sequence in question. Here are two of them:

The Netherlands would still go on to score that inning thanks to Wladimir Balentien’s two-run homer, but it’s hard not to note that it could have been a grand slam. Profar certainly isn’t failing to note that. As he told the Orange County Register: “I just want to put this loss on myself… I made that mistake. I think we paid for it.”

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This is Kate Preusser’s third piece as part of her month-long residency. Read her previous posts here. Listen to her appearance on FanGraphs Audio here.

When Benji Gonzalez, a 27-year-old non-roster invitee for the Twins, poked a single into right field to break up a perfect game being thrown by the Rays’ pitching staff one week into spring training, I admit to sighing in relief. No need for asterisks, then. No need for the arguments about whether a perfect game thrown by multiple pitchers counts as much as one thrown by a single pitcher. No reminders that spring training doesn’t count and that this technically wouldn’t go down in the record books as a perfect game.

Of course, spring training doesn’t count, but the white whale of a perfect game, even in spring training, even thrown by multiple pitchers, is such a compelling figure in baseball that discussion of it would have been inevitable — and made more inevitable, perhaps, by the fact that baseball fans haven’t seen a perfect game, spring training or otherwise, in five years.

There has already been one recorded spring-training perfect game — a Red Sox win over the Blue Jays in the year 2000, featuring starting pitcher Pedro Martinez. Pedro would go on to have a complicated relationship with the perfect game and the no-hitter, coming close but never quite getting there. The role he played in the perfect spring-training game is rarely noted. Once more for the folks in the back: spring training doesn’t count. Even Rays pitcher Danny Farquhar thought they were playing shuffleboard:

“It was probably two outs into my first inning when I realized we had a perfect game,” Farquhar said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, we have a lot of points, and they have zero points. I’m going to try and not mess this up.'”

The eloquent Lord Farquhar receives partial credit for this response. The Rays — whose 17-run offensive onslaught managed to so confound all involved parties that even Farquhar himself didn’t realize it was a perfect game until he was two-thirds deep in his own inning — did indeed have a lot of points. The Twins, however, didn’t just have zero points, they had perfectly zero points, and the Rays staff was hurtling toward rarefied air in the baseball sphere, even if this achievement would have to ride in a little sidecar or sit at a table in the back near the kitchen.

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This is Kate Preusser’s second piece as part of her month-long residency.

It’s no secret that there’s considerable overlap between bookish types and baseball fans, all tucked cozily in the center of that particular Venn diagram. Distance readers have an inborn patience for the nine-inning drama of a baseball game. These are a people who understand the three-act structure, exposition leading to rising action leading to the climactic moment; this past World Series, in fact, felt a little like the baseball gods had taken a Khan Academy class on Aristotle’s Poetics.

But there’s a narrative that most serious baseball fans have come to reject, and that’s the one of spring training. Every year there seem to be pieces poking fun at the cliches of spring training — Best shape of his life! Swing mechanics change! Learning a new pitch/grip/arcane religious philosophy! LASIK! — and those pieces exist because these cliches persist, so much so that poking fun at spring-training cliches is now itself a form of cliche.

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