If you’re a baseball nerd like me, you’ve likely seen this graph (or a variation of it) before:

wOBA by Launch Angle

The focus should be on launch angles between 0 and 36, or better at 8-32 degrees.

Once you get below 0 or above 36, it's hard to be productive. Again, we don't care about "average" launch angle, but the frequency you can get into the "sweet spot". pic.twitter.com/7JYOPGAd4c

— Tangotiger ? (@tangotiger) October 14, 2018

Yep, it’s an illustration of how launch angle affects wOBA. And Tango’s iteration, like many others, is told through the hitter’s perspective. That makes sense – we seldom think about launch angle with respect to pitchers, since it’s trickier for them to control the contact they allow. We do know in a broad sense that there are groundball pitchers and fly ball ones, hence why metrics like xFIP and SIERA remain relevant.

But specific launch angles can also be useful in assessing pitchers. About a week ago, I shared this graph with my Twitter followers:

Here, I should clarify that what’s being measured is the year-to-year correlation of the percentage of batted balls within select launch angle ranges. What can we take away from this? It turns out that pitchers are much better at controlling the amount of extreme contact they allow. Going down the list, line drives are a capricious bunch. What we regard as standard groundballs and fly balls are a bit more manageable. When it comes to slap hits or pop-ups, though, pitchers surprisingly account for about half the variance. Go pitchers! Read the rest of this entry »

Through 18 starts and 111.1 innings pitched, Zack Greinke has compiled a 3.64 ERA. To say those figures play at the top of a major league starting rotation would be an understatement. The mere fact that Greinke remains a good pitcher at the age of 37 in his 18th season is an accomplishment in itself. Arriving in Kansas City as a 20-year-old, just two years after being drafted sixth overall out of high school, Greinke has put together quite the career, accumulating 64.2 WAR (which ranks 42nd all-time and third among active players), winning a Cy Young Award in 2009, and finishing in the top-10 of Cy Young voting on four other occasions (’13, ’14, ’15, and ’17). His Cy Young campaign was 12 years ago and he is still an important cog on a club with World Series aspirations, a testament to Greinke’s greatness and longevity. And that’s to say nothing of what he has battled to become and remain one of the best pitchers in the sport for over a decade.

I prefaced this piece with a brief rundown of Greinke’s amazing career because I am going to be throwing up some red flags in regards to his performance thus far. Despite the excellent ERA I referenced to start, his strikeout rate is down to 18.5% (league average is 23.8%) after posting a rate of 24.5% in 2020 and 23.7% from when he signed in Arizona in 2016 through last season. His walk rate is up to 5%, still almost half the league average of about 9% but an increase compared to his 3.7% and 3.3% walk rates in 2019 and ’20, respectively. Greinke is inducing fewer groundballs than in any season since his Cy Young Award-winning 2009. From 2010-19, he allowed a groundball rate of 46.8%. In 2020, that plummeted to 41.2% and this year he is down to 40.9%. That means 59.1% of the contact he has allowed has been in the air. He has maintained his ERA with the help of a below-average HR/FB ratio and a HR/9 rate about 9% less than the rest of the league. His FIP remains at a solid 4.07, buoyed by his aforementioned home run fortune. Regress that HR/FB ratio towards league average and you get an xFIP of 4.14. Put a little more emphasis on his strikeout struggles and the types of batted balls allowed and you get a SIERA of 4.39, which is a tad less than 8% worse than league average.

So what gives? In his last four seasons, aging curve be damned, he has thrown 3.68 SIERA ball over a not insignificant sample of 685.2 innings, which placed him third in the majors behind only Jacob deGrom (690.1) and Gerrit Cole (688.2). Obviously Greinke is at the point in his career where we expect degradation in his performance, but this dip in his peripherals seems noteworthy given all his success, both in terms of surface-level numbers and those under-the-hood, in recent vintage. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

Let’s start with the American League standings.

I was making a “do not panic” argument on behalf of the Yankees back when they were 5–10 and some people were digging for their doomsday preparedness kits, and while it might not be time to find where you left those water purification tablets, the situation is bleaker now than it was three months ago. Not that the team is actually worse; New York has been on an 88-win pace in the games since that reference point. But an 88-win pace isn’t nearly enough to get out of an early-season hole in a division where there are three other teams with more than detectable pulses. Even projected to play solid baseball the rest of the season, the Yankees have gone from the favorite to the projected fourth-place team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Barefoot initially struggled to get a foothold in pro ball. A sixth-round pick by the Houston Astros in 2019 out of Campbell University, the now-23-year-old outfielder slashed a woeful .155/.241/.159 that summer in the New York-Penn League. On the heels of that abysmal debut, and with no 2020 minor league season in which to redeem himself, Barefoot was an afterthought on our 2021 Astros Top Prospect list.

He’s proceeded to make people stand up and take notice. Fueled by mechanical changes and a relaxed mental approach, Barefoot has been one of the best hitters in the Houston system this season. In 190 plate appearances split between the Low-A Fayetteville Woodpeckers and the High-A Asheville Tourists, the former Campbell Fighting Camel has socked a dozen home runs while slashing .329/.384/.618 with a 167 wRC+. Befitting his plus athleticism, he has 15 steals to boot.

Asked what was behind his his boffo numbers, Barefoot alluded to an age-old baseball adage: You can’t think and hit at the same time.

“This year, I’m able to just go out and play and let the results take care of themselves,” explained Barefoot. That’s been a real key for me. In my first season, I was working on a bunch of swing-mechanics stuff, so I really wasn’t competing how I wanted. I was more or less trying to make swing changes in-game, which made it really hard. Mentally, I wasn’t in a great spot every game.”

Organizations often don’t ask newly-drafted players to make meaningful adjustments until they report to instructional league. The initial months are mostly a hands-off acclimation period, allowing a player to simply get his feet wet in pro ball. That wasn’t the case with Barefoot. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros are good. Whatever you might’ve thought of their depth after losing George Springer, there was still such an overabundance of talent in their lineup as to patch up whatever variance you could imagine with any individual player. Alex Bregman is the only non-catching starter to be trailing his projected wRC+ by 10 or more points, and he’s still holding a 119 wRC+ this year. Maybe as expected, Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve lead the team in WAR, but coming in third is ageless Yuli Gurriel. In his age-37 season, Gurriel is running a career-best 147 wRC+ and is one of only four qualified batters to have more walks than strikeouts (all stats for the rest of the piece are through June 29). It’s such an aesthetically pleasing statistical line, especially in this strikeout era, and is a step forward even for someone like Gurriel who has seldom struck out.

Gains in plate discipline are happening under the hood as well, which is surprising given both the type of hitter Gurriel has been and the fact that this is coming from a 37-year-old. Gurriel has never been one to strikeout or walk too much, so shifts in his plate discipline can certainly fly under the radar, or they had at least to me. But in his sixth year in the majors, we can see rather clear evolutions in his plate discipline that feel more purposeful than pure happenstance. Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Altuve had the worst season of his career in 2020, hitting .219/.268/.344 in 48 games for the Astros for a 77 wRC+ and a near-replacement 0.2 WAR. It didn’t keep Houston from making the playoffs — albeit in a 16-team format with the Astros finishing below .500 — but his annus horribilis was one of the reasons the team dropped to 14th in the majors in runs scored, their worst showing since 2016. As a franchise cornerstone, the organization’s longest-tenured player, and the target of still-mysterious buzzer allegations, he naturally absorbed quite a lot of the heat generated by the sign-stealing scandal. To many, it was a case of just deserts, a cheater watching his legacy fade before his eyes. But reality cares not for made-for-TV storylines. In 2021, Altuve — and by extension the Astros — is having a great year.

A star falling off a cliff in their early 30s isn’t typical, but it does happen, and without any complications from getting caught stealing signs. One of the many cases that jumps out to me is that of Steve Sax, who went from having a nearly 50% chance of 3,000 hits in Bill James’ Favorite Toy to losing his job in the space of about a year; Sax faced more comical allegations of chicanery than Altuve. And one of this generation’s shining beacons of weapons-grade awesomeness, Albert Pujols, had a turning point in his early 30s when he transformed from Jimmie Foxx into Darin Ruf. Altuve did have a couple of relatively minor leg injuries in 2020, but neither could explain a season dreadful enough to have no silver lining.

Like Sax 30 years ago, a projection system (ZiPS in this case) had Altuve on an approach pattern to 3,000 hits. The combined effect of a shortened season and a performance that raised serious concerns about his future more than halved that milestone probability, from 40% to 19%. ZiPS, like the other projection systems, projected Altuve to have a significant bounce-back season in 2021, forecasting a .289/.355/.478, 3.6 WAR campaign. Most players would be quite happy with that result, but that line would only be a return to Altuve’s 2019 level, a drop from his 2014-2018 peak. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitchell Kilkenny is quietly having a stupendous season. A second-round pick by the Colorado Rockies in 2018 out of Texas A&M, the 24-year-old right-hander boasts a 1.47 ERA over eight starts with the Low-A Fresno Grizzlies and the Spokane Indians. Moreover, he’s fanned 54 batters and issued just five free passes in 43 innings.

His plus command is a much-needed asset. Kilkenny is more finesse than power, his fastball ranging from the upper 80s to the low 90s. At least for now. Kilkenny threw harder as a collegian, but then came Tommy John surgery shortly after he was drafted, and last year’s cancelled minor-league season only muddied the waters. No matter. He fully expects his velocity to tick back up in time, and even if that doesn’t happen, his ability to mix, match and tunnel two- and four-seam fastballs, a slider, a curveball, and a changeup has proven to be plenty effective. As Kilkenny put it, “I might not be bright and flashy, but I’m having success.”

Prior to matriculating at Texas A&M where he double-majored in Renewable Natural Resources and Forestry, he excelled in English class at Houston Christian High School.

“My one fun fact is that I won two awards in creative writing contests,” Kilkenny told me. “One was for a class project where we were to write to a favorite author of ours. I picked Bill Watterson, for Calvin and Hobbes, because that was my favorite comic growing up, I love Calvin and Hobbes. Anyway, it was just a little piece about what the author had given me, which was some of the insights you can get out of a simple comic.” Read the rest of this entry »

After losing Gerrit Cole in free agency after the 2019 World Series and Justin Verlander to a torn UCL just six innings into the season, the Astros found themselves in desperate need of pitching help last year. Zack Greinke helped fill the void left by Charlie Morton’s departure, and Lance McCullers Jr. returned after missing all of 2019, but besides those two pitchers, there were more questions than answers in Houston’s rotation.

Insert a quintet of young pitchers with varying degrees of experience: Framber Valdez (107.2 MLB innings to his name), José Urquidy (41 MLB innings and a stellar upper-minors track record), and three pitchers with a lot of blank space on their résumés in Cristian Javier, Enoli Paredes, and Luis Garcia. With the help of these five and some clever piggybacking, the Astros overcame a mediocre regular-season record to oust Minnesota in the wild-card round and Oakland in the ALDS before falling to Tampa Bay in the ALCS.

Of that group, I want to focus on Garcia, for two reasons. First, he is the team’s current leader in pitching WAR, narrowly edging out Greinke, with a 2.82 ERA supported by a 28.1% strikeout rate and 7.7% walk rate. Second, his rise to the big-league club was the most surprising of the five guys I mentioned above. He signed with Houston out of Venezuela at age 20 (which is old for an international amateur) for a mere $20,000. He had not pitched above high-A before his MLB call-up, though he did dominate the opposition at every level. In 2019, he saw a velocity bump and struck out almost 36% of the hitters he faced in 43 innings pitched at low-A, then whiffed 39.4% of batters he faced in 65.2 innings one level up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chas McCormick has already exceeded expectations. A 21st-round pick in the 2017 draft out of Division II Millersville University, the 26-year-old outfielder is getting semi-regular playing time with the Houston Astros, and he’s been sneaky good. His .226 batting average is nothing to write home about, but his 114 wRC+ and 0.5 WAR (as of Sunday night) are those of a rookie contributing to MLB’s highest-scoring team. That couldn’t have been predicted a few years ago — or even a few months ago. Coming into the current campaign, the West Chester, Pennsylvania native was No. 18 on our Astros Top Prospects list.

McCormick discussed his underdog-makes-good story when Houston visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

———

David Laurila: In many ways, you’re a classic overachiever. What is your background in that respect?

Chas McCormick: “When I was younger, like high school — even before — and maybe a little bit of college, I was never the best. If I had to try out for a team… I wasn’t very good at tryouts. I got cut from some summer-ball teams because I wasn’t the fastest player, I didn’t have the strongest arm, I didn’t hit the ball the farthest. I wasn’t the biggest guy, either. That’s why I really didn’t get Division 1 looks, just a couple Division II, Division III. But the more I played, especially in college, the more people realized that I was a gamer. I wouldn’t take batting practice and have scouts saying, ‘Wow, he’s putting on a show,’ it was more, ‘You’ve got to watch this kid play nine innings.’”

Laurila: When did you realize you had a legitimate shot to play pro ball?

McCormick: “Not in high school. I was thinking about playing basketball in college — or baseball — but again, just Division II, Division III. I wasn’t really on anyone’s radar. So out of high school, I wasn’t really thinking about pro baseball at all. Then I got to college, and that was [as] a pitcher. I was a little erratic and didn’t throw strikes very well, so that ended quickly.

“Anyway, freshman year, an outfielder got hurt and I ended up starting. I played really well — I batted leadoff a couple times and hit close to .340 — but I still didn’t think I could play pro ball because I didn’t really have the power. Then I ended up hitting some home runs in my sophomore year, and had a good average as well — I hit around .350. So after my sophomore year, I was like, ‘You know what? Maybe I could play professional baseball.’”

Laurila: You then didn’t get drafted after your junior year. Read the rest of this entry »

Braxton Roxby was an unpolished gem when the Cincinnati Reds signed him as a non-drafted free agent last summer. A 6-foot-3, 235-pound right-hander, Roxby possessed projectable stuff, but his resume was anything but shiny. In three collegiate seasons with the Division-II Pittsburgh-Johnstown Mountain Cats, he logged a 7.31 ERA. Moreover, that number was 9.68 in his junior year.

Then came Kyle Boddy and the Reds pitching-development machine.

In what is shaping up as one of the best underdog stories in recent memory, Roxby has been shoving in his first professional season. Pitching in a relief role for the High-A Dayton Dragons, the 22-year-old hurler has surrendered just four hits and one run in 16 innings. He’s punched out 28 batters.

How he ended up signing with Cincinnati is a story in itself. Roxby talked to 20-plus teams after being bypassed in last year’s truncated draft, and the tenors of the conversations were largely the same… with one notable exception.

“The Reds were the only team to take it a step above,” said Roxby, who majored in Civil Engineering at Pittsburgh Johnstown. “They had me on a Zoom meeting — [Director of Pitching] Kyle Boddy and [Assistant Pitching Coach] Eric Jagers were both on there — and they had video breaking down my mechanics, as well as the analytics of my pitches and how I can use them better. That made it hard not to choose them.” Read the rest of this entry »