I owe George Springer an apology. Back in March, I wrote an article with a very simple premise: If Springer got off to a terrible start, the Blue Jays needed to be ready to sit him down. He was godawful at the beginning of spring training, he’d been a below-average player for two seasons in a row, and ZiPS saw him as the seventh-best outfielder on the team. Not the seventh-best defensive outfielder; ZiPS projected that Springer would put up 2.2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, a bounce-back campaign, but still worse than the projections of six other Blue Jays outfielders. I wasn’t saying he was washed or anything, but I was concerned that Springer might deliver more of the same, and that the Blue Jays would keep running him out there even though they had better options available. I needn’t have worried.

“I feel great, actually,” Springer told MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson while he was putting up those abysmal spring training numbers. “For me, it’s about the process. It’s not about the results. I want to make sure that I’m swinging at the right pitches and getting my swing off. Yeah, obviously everyone would like to see the ball hit the grass, but for me specifically, I’m working on the mechanical side of it.” Then the season started, and Springer went out and backed those words up. He’s having a renaissance. A couple months shy of his 36th birthday, he already has 1.8 WAR, and his 143 wRC+ is the best mark he’s put up since he was a fresh-faced 30-year-old Astro in 2020. He’s on pace for his highest home run total since 2019, and he’s running a career-best 12.4% walk rate. So Springer is walking more and hitting for more power, and because of a .303 BABIP, his best since 2016, he’s also running his best batting average in years. How is he doing all this? Read the rest of this entry »

Starting pitchers prepare for games in three-stage fashion. A few days after taking the mound, they throw a bullpen session under the watchful eye of the pitching coach, typically with a Trackman recording each throw. At the start of every series, there is a pitchers’ meeting with all arms present, as well as the catchers and pitching coaches. On the day of a start, the pitcher will go over that day’s game plan with the catchers and coaches.

And then there are the talks pitchers have among themselves. While informal, they can likewise play a meaningful role in preparedness. Every time a hurler takes the hill, he brings with him knowledge gleaned from his peers. That was a big part of what I was interested in when I approached three starters — Lucas Giolito, Kevin Gausman, and Ryan Pepiot — to learn how they get ready for an outing from an information perspective.

Here are excerpts from my conversations with the pitchers:

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PRE-SERIES AND PRE-START MEETINGS

Giolito: “You go over a lot of things in the pre-series meeting. You go over guys who like to run — stealing bases and things like that — and you obviously go over the hitters. Considering that you have a bunch of dudes in the room that have wildly different stuff and attack plans, that’s more surface level. You’re not going down the line and saying, ‘This is how we’re going to attack this guy,’ because we’re all different. That’s for when you have your pre-start meeting.

“In the pre-start meeting — that’s with the coaching staff and the catchers — we go over each hitter, talking about strengths, weaknesses, and attack plans. The attack plans are based on the individual pitcher’s stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »

A piece that ran here at FanGraphs just over a week ago elicited a good suggestion. Commenting on A Conversation With Max Scherzer on the Importance of Conviction, reader muenstertruck wrote the following:

“If you’re taking follow up questions, I’d like to hear how he differentiates intention and conviction from physical effort. How difficult is it to mentally commit to the pitch but only give it 90% so you keep some gas in the tank? Is it even possible to do so?”

Fortuitously, an opportunity to circle back with the future Hall of Famer came just a few days later when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park for a weekend series. As expected — Scherzer likes talking ball — he was amenable to addressing said followup.

“Effort level and conviction are different,” Scherzer answered. “You can throw a pitch at 100% effort and still be mentally indecisive about it. You can also put out less than 100% effort and be mentally convicted in what you’re doing. Can things go hand-in-hand? Yes, but it’s not ‘more effort means more conviction.’ You can just be more mentally convicted.”

Scherzer had opined in our earlier conversation that you’re more likely to miss your spot when not fully convicted. What about throwing with full conviction at a 90% effort level? Does that make it easier to pinpoint your command? Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into 2025, you might not have expected Alejandro Kirk and Ernie Clement to play central roles on a playoff contender. Neither player was an above-average hitter last season; in fact, each hit for a 93 wRC+ while playing regularly for a team that won just 74 games. Yet the pair rank first and second in position player WAR on the Blue Jays, thanks not only to improved offense but exceptional glovework, with Kirk battling the Giants’ Patrick Bailey for the top spot in two catching metrics, and Clement ranking among the best third basemen while also posting strong metrics in limited duty at the three other infield positions. The pair have not only helped the Blue Jays to a 47-38 record and the top AL Wild Card position, but also the top ranking in my annual midseason defensive breakdown.

Kirk and Clement aren’t Toronto’s only defensive stalwarts. Second baseman Andrés Giménez and center fielder Myles Straw, a pair of light-hitting glove whizzes acquired from the Guardians in separate trades this past winter, have been strong at their respective positions, with the latter helping to cover for the absences of Daulton Varsho. A Gold Glove winner last year, Varsho missed the first month of this season recovering from right rotator cuff surgery, and returned to the injured list on June 1 due to a strained left hamstring. Even in limited duty, Straw, Varsho, and Giménez — who missed about four weeks due to a quad strain, with Clement filling in at second for most of that time — have all rated as three to five runs above average according to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value (FRV), and five to eight above average according to Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). Clement has totaled 12 DRS and 10 FRV at the four infield spots; in 359.2 innings at third, he’s second in the majors in both DRS (7) and FRV (5).

This is the third year in a row I’ve taken a midseason dip into the alphabet soup of defensive metrics, including Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our own catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages). One longtime standby, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), has been retired, which required me to adjust my methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

Last December, 33 years after he last played, Dave Parker was finally elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The lefty-swinging, righty-throwing “Cobra” had once been regarded as the game’s best all-around player, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound slugger who could hit for power and average, had plenty of speed as well as a strong and accurate throwing arm, and exuded as much charisma and swagger as any player of his era. But injuries, cocaine use, and poor conditioning curtailed his prime, and while he rebounded to complete a lengthy and successful career, in 15 years on the writers’ ballots, he’d never drawn even one-third of the support needed for election. He hadn’t come close in three tries on Era Committee ballots, either, but buoyed by the positive attention he had generated while waging a very public battle with Parkinson’s Disease, and backed by a favorable mix of familiar faces on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, he finally gained entry to the Hall, alongside the late Dick Allen.

Unfortunately, Parker did not live to deliver the speech he said he’d been holding for 15 years. Just shy of one month from the day he was to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, he passed away at age 74 due to complications from Parkinson’s Disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2012.

Parker is the third Hall of Famer to die between election and induction. Eppa Rixey, a lefty who pitched in the National League from 1912 to ’33, was elected by the Veterans Committee on January 27, 1963. He died one month and one day later, at the age of 71. Leon Day, a righty who starred in the Negro Leagues from 1934 to ’46, and later played in Mexico and in the affiliated minor leagues, was elected by the Veterans Committee on March 7, 1995. He died six days later, at the age of 78. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” Maybe because your Aunt Debbie shared a post from her favorite social media influencer. Maybe because you passed the time during a layover at the airport perusing the self-help books in the Hudson News near your gate. Like most self-help tropes, whether or not it hits for you depends a little on your life circumstances and a little on how you choose to apply it. When it comes to sports fandom, emotional hedging can be a useful tool to avoid disappointment, or maybe you prefer projecting confidence to manifest a desired outcome. And if you’re a Phillies fan, you’ve perfected the art of oscillating wildly between the two over the course of a single game. You even have a handy meme with a meter that only ever points to one extreme or the other:

(Please excuse the mismatched needle sizes and logo alignment. These images are precious internet relics that have been downloaded, clumsily edited, re-uploaded, compressed, and decompressed hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The pixelation is earned like callouses on the hands of a skilled laborer.)

But the formula seems to assume that expectations are set and controlled by the person in search of a happy existence. The entire notion is upended when mathematical models based on historical outcomes become the source for baseline expectations. In this scenario, if your team is outperforming expectations, then you can enjoy the banked wins, but you do so in fear of the rainier days that surely lie somewhere in the team’s future forecast. Whereas if your team is underperforming expectations, things might feel dire, but there’s reason to believe sunnier days lie ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Scherzer was an early adoptee of analytics. When I first interviewed him for Baseball Prospectus back in August 2010, the right-hander called himself “a very mathematical guy,” adding that “the advanced metrics that are coming out throughout the game… have helped me to understand and simplify the game.”

Fifteen years later, Scherzer is an elder statesmen — and a three-time Cy Young Award winner — who approaches his craft differently than he once did. That’s not to say he no longer values analytics — he does — but a decade and a half of facing big league hitters has altered his perspective. (He addressed that evolution in an interview that ran here at FanGraphs two summer ago.) Now with the Toronto Blue Jays and on the back stretch of a career that should land him in Cooperstown, the 40-year-old Scherzer highly values an aspect of pitching that can’t be quantified.

The subject at hand was one he volunteered. Knowing Scherzer possesses both a wealth of pitching knowledge and well-formed opinions, I approached him with an open-ended question: What should we talk about?

Here is the conversation that followed, edited lightly for better clarity.

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David Laurila: You mentioned conviction…

Max Scherzer: “Yes. Guys now are flooded with information, and what they really need to be doing is going out there and competing, and understanding that when you do get beat, it’s not the shape of the pitch. It’s actually the sequence, or the conviction, or it could be 1,000 other things. Talking to lot of young guys, that’s what they care about, their pitch shapes. There’s so much more to pitching than that. Those are the discussions we need to have with the next generation.”

Laurila: Is there are a relationship between shapes and conviction? Do pitches that aren’t thrown with full conviction tend to be less sharp? Read the rest of this entry »

Something weird is happening with Alejandro Kirk. It’s not that he’s having a great season. That’s not weird at all. Kirk ranks third among catchers with 2.4 WAR and 21st among all players. He’s also hitting much better than he has in the past two seasons, but that’s not necessarily weird either. After combining for a wRC+ of 95 in 2023 and 2024, Kirk has a 129 wRC+ this season, the same as he ran in 2022, when he was an All-Star and won the Silver Slugger. He’s always been great with the glove, and it now looks like his bat is back. His .370 xwOBA and 119 DRC+ are also his best since 2022.

What’s weird is that he’s hitting the ball harder – much, much harder – but he’s not necessarily hitting for more power. Let me show you what I mean with a table. Below are a bunch of contact-quality metrics for the five full seasons of Kirk’s career. On the far right is his isolated power. Usually, contact quality and power are pretty much synonymous. If you hit the ball hard, you’re going to end up with doubles, triples, and homers. Usually.

This season, Kirk is running the highest average exit velocity, 90th percentile exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and slugging percentage of his entire career, and not by a little bit. These are huge jumps. Everyone’s favorite 5’8” catcher is in the 97th percentile in hard-hit rate! Yet his ISO is merely the third best of his career, a mere nine points above last season’s mark. I’m curious about why Kirk is hitting the ball so much harder all of a sudden, and I’m curious about why it’s not resulting in a massive power spike. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I turned on the tail end of a Blue Jays-Phillies clash. I was hoping to get some notes for an article on Alec Bohm that didn’t really come together. The game was a complete laugher, with Philadelphia leading by five runs in the ninth. All I wanted was to see Bohm put a ball in play, but instead this happened:

Braydon Fisher came out firing in that low-leverage chance. He came out firing curveballs, to be specific – 12 of his 18 offerings in the inning. The Phillies swung at them like they were learning how physics works on the fly. But so what? Anyone can look that good for one game. Major league pitchers have good stuff, more at 11.

Then I started looking at Fisher’s prior games, and I started getting more intrigued. Wait, this guy almost never throws his upper-90s fastball? Wait, he has two different plus breaking balls? Wait, his walk rate was what in the minors last year (14.2%, and above 15% in Triple-A)? I started watching more at-bats and started getting interested. The slider? It’s nasty:

The key characteristic here is velocity. At 88 miles an hour, sliders don’t give opposing hitters much time to adjust. The tight gyro shape of the pitch means it works against lefties and righties alike. His over-the-top release gives the pitch a ton of downward plane, too: Though he doesn’t induce much break on the pitch, it seems to vanish downward when he locates it around the knees.
Read the rest of this entry »

Few things tickle my fancy like a baseball player up to no good. Blue Jays reliever Brendon Little presently holds this distinction. Take a gander:

That’s Ramón Laureano swinging at Little’s knuckle-curve, which Little bounced off the front edge of home plate. Here’s another (pardon Matt Olson’s cameo):

Read the rest of this entry »