Tayler Scott is having a career-best season, and the primary reason is equal parts straightforward and confounding. Thirteen years after being drafted by the Chicago Cubs out of a Scottsdale, Arizona high school, and five years after making his major league debut with the Seattle Mariners, the 32-year-old native of Johannesburg, South Africa is finally featuring his best pitch. Now with the Houston Astros — his 10th big league organization — Scott has put his two-seamer in his back pocket and is throwing a heavy dose of four-seamers.

The numbers speak for themselves. Coming into the current campaign, the right-hander had made 39 big league appearances and logged a 9.00 ERA over 46 innings. This year, Scott has come out of the Astros bullpen 53 times and boasts a 1.86 ERA over 58 innings. Moreover, he has allowed just 32 hits and has a 26% strikeout rate. His seven relief wins are a team high.

Again, the four-seamer — a pitch he’d thrown sparingly in the past — has played a huge role in his success. Per Statcast, he’s throwing the pitch 47.4% of the time to the tune of a .120 BAA and a .265 SLG. Augmenting the offering is a new-ish splitter that has yielded a .122 BAA and a 184 SLG, as well as a slider (.220 BA,.339 SLG) he views as his third option.

Scott shared the story behind his fastball changeover, including why his four-seamer is so effective despite ranking in the 29th percentile for velocity, when the Astros visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: You began featuring a four-seamer this year and are having by far the best season of your career. Given that your 92.6 mph velocity is well below the big league average, what makes it so effective?

Tayler Scott: “I learned about vertical approach angle, which is guys with lower slots throwing four-seams up in the zone and creating a flatter angle for the four-seams coming to the plate. They’ve discovered that gets a lot of swings and misses. That’s when I started to throw four-seams. Over the last couple years, it was a pitch that I kind of only used late in counts to strike guys out; I would never really throw it at other times. One reason is that I tended to have a hard time locating it in the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Michael Baumann wrote about how Kirby Yates has a chance to join Craig Kimbrel and Wade Davis as only relievers in MLB history with multiple seasons of 40 or more appearances and an ERA south of 1.25. Five years after logging a 1.19 ERA over 60 outings with the San Diego Padres, the 37-year-old right-hander has come out of the Texas Rangers bullpen 44 times and has a 1.19 ERA.

I procured subject-specific quotes from Yates for my colleague’s article, but there were a few other perspectives I wanted to glean from him as well. That he has quietly put up better numbers than many people realize was one of them. For instance, since he began throwing his signature splitter in 2017, the underrated righty has a 36.0% strikeout rate that ranks sixth-best among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.

“It’s almost like a tale of two of two careers,” Yates said upon hearing that. “It’s before the split and then after the split. Now I’m getting into a situation where you could call it three careers in a sense — since [March 2021 Tommy John] surgery and how I’ve been coming back from that. Last year was good, but also kind of shaky. The two-and-a-half to three years off, I felt that. This year I feel more comfortable. I’ve felt like I could attack some things I needed to attack.”

Yates doesn’t feel that his splitter is quite as good as it was pre-surgery, although he does believe it is getting back to what it was. His fastball is another story. He told me that it’s never been better. Read the rest of this entry »

In early April, an article titled “Astros Pitching Prospect Spencer Arrighetti Is All in With Analytics” ran here at FanGraphs, and given what the 24-year-old right-hander had to say, the headline was wholly accurate. In a conversation that took place during spring training, Arrighetti displayed nuanced knowledge of his pitch metrics while comfortably addressing topics like seam-shifted wake and vertical approach angle. He presented as a bona fide pitching nerd.

Four months into his rookie season — he made his major league debut with Houston on April 10 — Arrighetti is a nerd with an altered approach. The evolution of his M.O. has taken place over the course of an up-and-down campaign that currently has him on a high. Over his last two starts, the 2021 sixth-round pick out of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has allowed just three runs while fanning 25 batters in 13 innings. On the year, he has a 5.14 ERA, a 4.18 FIP, and a 27.9% strikeout rate in 105 innings.

Arrighetti explained how and why his approach has changed when we sat down to chat at Fenway Park this past weekend. My first question elicited an expansive, five-minute response, after which we shared a handful of additional exchanges.

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David Laurila: What’s changed since we talked in spring training?

Spencer Arrighetti: “I have a much better perspective now. When we talked in Lakeland, I was speaking with three big league spring training games under my belt. This is a very different game than I thought at that time. The conversation we had, as great as it was, left out a really big piece of what successful pitching is in the modern era. Obviously, shapes and velocity are really important. Arsenal design is really important. There are people who believe those are primary, but after my time up here, I’m not convinced that chasing shapes is the way to go. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas White is having an impressive first full professional season. Drafted 35th overall last year by the Miami Marlins out of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the 19-year-old left-hander has a 2.84 ERA, a 2.99 FIP, and a 29.6% strikeout rate over 76 innings between Low-A Jupiter and High-A Beloit. His late-May promotion to the higher of those two levels came for a simple reason. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen explained when assigning him a 45+ in early June, White’s stuff was simply too good for the Florida State League.

I had an opportunity to talk to the promising youngster when Beloit played at West Michigan earlier this week, and one of the things I made it a point to learn about was the mindset that augments his arsenal. I began by asking him how much of a role analytics are playing in his development.

“I’m starting to learn more about the actual numbers and how all that stuff works,” White told me. “At the end of the day, I like to just go out and get outs — I’ve never been a big tech guy — but I definitely know a lot more about my pitches now that I have access to all the data. So, I’m still learning, and I want to learn, but the best measurement for me is how hitters react to them.”

The pitches that hitters are reacting to include a four-seam fastball that has been averaging, according to White, 95.6 mph and 17.5 inches of vertical ride. He is also throwing a two-seam changeup and a sweeper-slider. Currently in the works, but not yet part of his repertoire, is “a shorter gyro pitch,” either a cutter or a hard slider. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is always a down period for me when it comes to baseball watching. July has everything now. There’s the All-Star Game, the draft, and the trade deadline. Our trade value series comes out sandwiched in between. From late June through July 31, it’s full tilt baseball, and the first few weeks of August are a letdown by comparison. This year, the Olympics fit into that gap perfectly, and I’ve been watching whatever random event catches my eye the same way I usually flip between baseball games. But fear not: There’s plenty of baseball still going on, and I can’t stay away for long. I’m back in the saddle, and this week has a ton of great plays to choose from. And thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format I’m borrowing here.

1. Twists and Turns in Pittsburgh
What kind of lunatic would say that August is the baseball doldrums? Oh, me? Well, ignore me, because some of the games this week have had juice. The Pirates are clinging to the periphery of the Wild Card race, while the Padres are roaring toward October with an absolutely scalding month of baseball. When the two teams faced off for their series opener in Pittsburgh this week, the Pirates were a game above .500, and after dropping that first game, they came back strong on Wednesday.

Some early offense staked the Pirates to a 6-5 lead even after starter Marco Gonzales got roughed up. Their best relievers were available. It looked like they might wriggle through. But Aroldis Chapman was a bit wild, and the Padres put two runners in scoring position with Manny Machado at the plate. No problem – Chapman just pulled out maybe the best pitch I’ve ever seen: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a little insight into my writing process. When I turn on my computer in the morning, my mind completely devoid of ideas apart from the knowledge that Meg is going to message me in a couple hours asking if I plan on working today, the first thing I do is look at our leaderboards. Maybe just seeing a name will jog something loose, or maybe I’ll learn about someone doing something exceptionally good or bad.

It’s fun to write about the extremities of baseball, and fun to read about them. It’s why we fight over who gets to write about Aaron Judge, or Paul Skenes, or the White Sox. We aim to please.

But I also have a soft spot in my heart for the unremarkable. My very first week on this job, I wrote an ode to Cal Quantrill, declaring him “the averagest pitcher north of the Rio Grande.” Well I’ve been noodling on averageness. Who’s the anti-Judge or anti-Skenes? The anti-Jose Altuve? Who is the least remarkable player in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

On June 17, I wrote about the Mariners’ consistent success in overperforming their run differential and winning close games. The day after, they won their fourth game in a row, raising their record to 44-31 and their division win probability to 86.3%. Sitting 10 games above the second-place Astros, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that Seattle would claim the division crown. But six weeks later, the landscape looks far different. The Mariners blew that 10-game lead in just 24 games, the quickest that any team has ever surrendered such a large divisional lead, and the Astros even pulled ahead for a bit. The Mariners are now back in first, but just one game separates the two clubs.

The Mariners have gone 15-23 since their June 18 win that brought their division odds to an apex (12-23 if you take out a sweep of the White Sox, who are currently riding a 20-game losing streak). Some of this regression was to be expected – specifically, an offense that seemed to always find the timely hits stopped doing so. Seattle’s .388 BABIP in high-leverage situations fell to .225 over the past six weeks, and as small-sample good luck turned to small-sample bad luck, the team’s run scoring cratered. The Mariners have seen small improvements in low- and medium-leverage situations thanks to a recent offensive outburst — they’ve scored 6.3 runs per game over their nine games since they acquired outfielder Randy Arozarena — but it hasn’t been enough to fully right the ship. Their 94 wRC+ over their cold stretch and 95 wRC+ overall rank last among playoff hopefuls. Read the rest of this entry »

Another year, another frenetic trade deadline. This year’s bonanza was light on top talent relative to recent years, but it made up for that in volume. With tight races in both leagues and plenty of teams looking to shore up clear weaknesses, it was a seller’s market, particularly when it came to pitching. Now that the dust has settled, I’m here to hand out some judgment.

These are going to be inherently subjective, but that doesn’t mean I don’t put a little rigor into my system. I’m focusing on two things here when I look at individual teams. First, and more important: Did a team’s moves match up with its needs? This is easy to gauge, and since it’s the whole point of the deadline, it carries the most wait. Second: How’d teams do on the trades they made? I think this part is inherently more subjective – there’s no unified prospect ranking or database where we can see how traded players will do the rest of the season, and we’re working with less information than teams have. That doesn’t mean I’m not crediting teams for trades I like or docking them for moves I don’t, just that I’m weighting it slightly less than the first category. Let’s dive right in.
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You didn’t really think teams were done swapping relievers after Friday and Saturday, did you? If you thought maybe they were tapped out for late relief help on Sunday and Monday, well, you thought wrong! If your bullpen doesn’t look like there are enough dudes to capture Helm’s Deep, you’re woefully short-armed.

The San Diego Padres acquired LHRP Tanner Scott and RHRP Bryan Hoeing from the Miami Marlins for LHSP Robby Snelling, RHSP Adam Mazur, 3B/2B Graham Pauley, and 3B/SS Jay Beshears

As one of baseball’s elite closers on an expiring contract, Tanner Scott was arguably the best short-term option available among relievers. His walk rate has peeked up a little to the numbers of the bad old days, but his first-strike percentage has stayed firmly in positive territory, which is an important indicator of where walk numbers will settle. Scott is likely to help the Padres in a very tight NL Wild Card race, but he’ll probably be even more important for them in the playoffs if they can get there. In San Diego, he teams up with Robert Suarez to asphyxiate opposing lineups late in the games. As far as elite closers who occasionally walk a few too many batters go, Scott is one of the less stressful of the genre, because he’s so hard to hit against with any authority, giving him a good shot at escaping jams following those free passes.

Bryan Hoeing is a sinker/slider reliever who has never quite clicked, as he’s never really been able to induce many swings-and-misses, nor has he mastered the art of inducing weak groundballs. He strikes me mostly as a depth guy who has plenty of years of club control left, and barring a breakout, he seems destined to be shuffled back and forth between San Diego and Triple-A El Paso a lot over the next few years. This trade is about Scott. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been pondering Yusei Kikuchi’s trade deadline fate for months. That sounds overly specific – there are so many players that get traded every year. Why wonder about this one guy? He has a 4.75 ERA this year and a 4.72 mark for his career. He’ll be a free agent at year’s end. Months? Shouldn’t I have been doing something more useful with my time? Probably. But hey, now I’m in a better position to write about this particularly astounding deadline transaction: Last night, the Blue Jays traded Kikuchi to the Astros in exchange for a bountiful crop of young players: Jake Bloss, Joey Loperfido, and Will Wagner.

Kikuchi turns analysts like me into Fox Mulder: We want to believe. We’re talking about a guy with one of the prettiest fastballs in baseball, period. It has great shape. He throws hard, sitting 94-96 mph and topping out around 99. Stuff models love it. PitchingBot thinks it’s the nastiest fastball thrown by a starter, and tied for the overall best (with Sonny Gray’s fastball) after considering location. Stuff+ is skeptical, relatively speaking – it thinks the fastball is the third-best among starters, behind the heaters of Kutter Crawford and Zack Wheeler.

Kikuchi throws a nice slider to complement the fastball, 88-90 mph and with sharp bite for a gyro slider. He rounds out his arsenal with a hard, two-plane curveball and a bizarre slider that seems to float and fade simultaneously. He does it from a funky arm slot and with a deceptive delivery. When Kikuchi is on, he’s capable of torching opposing lineups singlehandedly. His first 10 starts of this season were phenomenal: 2.64 ERA, 2.61 FIP, a 26% strikeout rate, and a minuscule 5.5% walk rate. He’d been steadily improving in Toronto, and this year looked like his breakout.
Read the rest of this entry »