Buck Farmer is flying under the radar while making an impact in Cincinnati. Baseball’s hottest team went into yesterday having won 12 straight games, and the 32-year-old reliever had pitched in seven of them. Moreover, the Reds had been victorious in 14 of the last 15 contests he’d appeared in. Over those outings, Farmer was credited with two wins and a save while allowing just a pair of runs in 15 innings.

He’s been solid from the start. On the season — his second in Cincinnati after eight in Detroit — the Conyers, Georgia native has held opposing hitters to a .188 average while logging a 2.41 ERA over a team-high 35 appearances. Consistently pounding the zone with a three-pitch mix, he’s issued just 10 free passes while fanning 33 batters in 37-and-a-third innings. By most statistical markers, he’s never been better.

Farmer credits Cincinnati’s pitching program for much of his success.

“I think it’s the development here,” Farmer replied when asked what differentiates his current and former clubs. “[The Tigers] were starting to change over to a more analytical approach before I left, but I don’t think they’d quite made that adjustment yet. When I came here, they were already tuned in. DJ {Derek Johnson] and the other coaches are fully invested in us. They want us to grab a little bit more here and there, and that includes taking what we’re good at and trying to make it great.”

For Farmer, that meant reworking a pitch that has become a lethal weapon. Augmented by a four-seam fastball and a changeup, his slider has flummoxed hitters to the tune of an .091 average and a .212 slug. His whiff-rate with the offering is a heady 45.3%. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that Andy Warhol didn’t actually say “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”? I was shocked to learn the truth. Apparently, two museum employees invented the quote when they were working on a Warhol exhibit. That makes the saying more interesting to me, actually: two anonymous people creating the work of someone famous for the democratization of art is enjoyable. But I digress: the point of bringing that quote up is that Nick Anderson is well into his second fifteen minutes of fame, and I’m pretty sure that this, too, is something Warhol would approve of.

It’s hard to imagine a better pitcher getting a worse contract than the one Anderson signed this offseason. He was one of the best relievers in baseball, period, from his 2019 debut until tearing his UCL in 2021. Heck, he was top 15 in reliever WAR from 2019 to ’21, and he basically didn’t play in one of those years. Sub-3 ERA, sub-3 FIP, the fourth-highest strikeout rate in baseball (39.6%) — Anderson was an elite closer, and the Rays used him accordingly. The Braves are paying him only $875,000 this year. That’s some kind of bargain.

As Esteban Rivera detailed last November, there were reasons to doubt that Anderson would come back strong. He looked diminished in his last few appearances before hitting the IL; his biggest weapon, a fastball with excellent carry that left batters flummoxed, lost its usual carry. Vertical approach angle is all the rage in pitch design these days, and that’s the case because it neutralizes the biggest weapon hitters have: power on contact. You can’t hit a home run if you can’t hit the ball, and flat-angled four-seam fastballs are great at doing just that. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Olson is striking out a lot. Exactly 30% of the time, to be precise. His swinging strike rate has never been higher. He’s only posted a lower contact rate once, in his disastrous 2020 campaign. Obviously, then, you know how he’s doing this year: incredibly well. His 140 wRC+ is the second-best mark of his career. Clearly, something interesting is going on, so let’s take a look at what it might be.

Honestly, the strikeouts are nothing new for Olson. His career 24.1% strikeout rate isn’t ideal for a top-tier hitter, particularly one with limited defensive value. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of his game. You can succeed while striking out a lot, but you have to do a lot of other things well to strike out a quarter of the time and be a great hitter.

Throughout his career, Olson has mostly done that. Take his 2019 season, when he struck out 25.2% of the time. He hit for a ton of power – even playing in the cavernous Coliseum, his ISO was in the top 15 in the majors – and walked enough to post a reasonable OBP. But you can see the downside easily. Consider 2022, for example. Olson again struck out roughly a quarter of the time – 24.3% – and walked a similar amount. He again posted a top-15 ISO; a lower number, to be sure, because 2022 had far fewer homers than 2019. But he ran a .274 BABIP, and that along with the fact that he was playing in a better offensive environment but putting up similar numbers meant he was only 20% above average rather than 35% above average.

Seen next to each other, these two seasons explain the chief worry with Olson. Without much change in his underlying skills, he was only 20% above average offensively last year:

That’s still a nice player, but a first baseman with that kind of batting line is hardly an All-Star. It was the 13th-best batting line for a first baseman in the majors, hardly better than his replacement in Oakland, Seth Brown. That’s the kind of tightrope that a player with Olson’s skill set is always walking; a slight dip in power or BABIP can be the difference between average and excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s got four thumbs and is set up for a real doozy of a pitchers’ duel in Arlington this evening? That’s right, Nathan Eovaldi and Spencer Strider. These two are second and third in baseball in pitcher WAR, and have many things in common besides: They’re both right-handed starters with big fastball velocity who are pitching well now after struggling to stay healthy at times… Okay, that’s about all they have in common.

It’s a bit early in the season for any individual game to be a must-watch, particularly an interleague matchup between two teams with basically no history apart from the Mark Teixeira trade. But if you’ve got time to kill and no strong preference about which game to scroll down to on MLB.TV, this is set to be the best pitching matchup of the night, and one of the best of the entire season so far.

Strider has become one of the most internet-popular pitchers out there for three reasons. First and most important, he’s good. Second, Strider has the vibe of a cool nerd from the early 2010s. He and a friend, inspired by their frustration with Pitchfork’s album grades, maintain a detailed Google Sheet where they rank indie rock records. Baseball Twitter is full of lapsed emo kids with too much liberal arts education for their own good (including me), and these folks love nothing so much as a ballplayer who gives the impression of having read a book once. Read the rest of this entry »

Bad injury news for a member of your rotation is always unwelcome, so the Braves had a very unhappy Wednesday, with two starting pitchers hitting the IL to go along with a loss in their series closer with the Red Sox.

In Atlanta’s current era of success since its last rebuild, there’s no pitcher that has been more crucial to the team’s fortunes than Max Fried. Since his debut in 2017, he has amassed 14.4 WAR, more than double that of any other pitcher on the roster (next up is Charlie Morton at 6.5). He’s already missed time this season due to an injury, a hamstring strain that cost him two weeks in April. The current injury, however, is far more serious, one that will measure in months rather than days or weeks.

Expectation has been Fried and Wright will both be sidelined for at least two months. With this being his second shoulder ailment of the year, Wright thinks he could be out longer than Fried.

— Mark Bowman (@mlbbowman) May 10, 2023

A forearm strain is usually enough to cause serious and forlorn eyebrow-raising, but the silver lining here is that the MRI on Fried’s elbow didn’t reveal an injury severe enough to require surgery. This is especially important given that he already had Tommy John surgery back when he was a prospect with the Padres. That previous procedure cost him part of 2014 and all of ’15, and the basic truth is that though medicine has made progress and that Tommy John surgeries aren’t career-enders to the degree they used to be, repeat procedures have considerably less success. In this 2016 study of so-called revision Tommy John surgery, less than half of the pitchers looked at even pitched in 10 major league games afterward, and they saw their average career length drop in half compared to first-time patients. Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Murphy does not get cheated when he swings. No matter the count, he is going to put up his A swing in hopes of barreling up the baseball. His profile is one of my favorites to watch. Although this type of hitter can be more prone to strikeouts than most, Murphy has managed to maintain a respectable strikeout rate in the last few seasons due to solid bat-to-ball skills and above-average plate discipline. Add solid raw strength on top of that, and you have yourself a career 116 wRC+ hitter. But this year, he has blown that mark away with a 182 wRC+ through 119 plate appearances. That’s an incredible jump that warrants some investigative work.

If I were a hitter looking to improve, I would focus on two things. The first is tweaking my mechanics to make myself less prone to exploitation. In other words, I’d make sure my bat path could cover different heights and depths of the zone so that I can be adjustable to different speeds and locations. The other approach would be to learn with what pitches and in which zones I’m already good at making flush contact and adjust my swing decisions to cater to those tendencies better. These two things are often intertwined, but depending on where a hitter is at in their career, they may focus on one more than the other or have an equal split.

For Murphy, it seems the focus has been more on matching his swing decisions to his strengths, and that has worked very well thus far. Below is a table with his swing rates by pitch type in the last few seasons:

This year, Murphy is swinging at fewer fastballs and breaking balls than he typically has, leading to an overall Swing% decrease. In 2021 and ’22, he swung at fastballs and breaking balls 47.6% and 49.3% of the time, respectively. This year, that number is down to 43.0%, the lowest since his best offensive year in the shortened 2020 season, where his Swing% was 41.3%.

The bulk of that change comes from not chasing as often. Murphy’s chase rate on fastballs and breakers have both seen notable drops. For somebody who had a chase contact rate of 61.1% in 2022, this is a big improvement. Most hitters aren’t good at finding the barrel outside of the zone, and Murphy is no different. If you chase less frequently, you take away opportunities for more whiffs and barrel suppression.

As a hitter, if you get better at targeting locations where you know you have more room for error in terms of getting your barrel to the ball, then you can move your batted ball profile towards its optimal form. And that is exactly what Murphy has seen happen so far this season. For the first time since his cup of coffee debut in 2019, he is pulling half of his batted balls (50.7%). In the previous two full seasons, he pulled the ball 39.7–41.5% of the time. Pulling the ball isn’t always the right prescription for every hitter; for some, it risks too much top spin that can drag down your batted balls in the air, or it can mean not making contact when your bat path is in an upward trajectory (rolling over). But Murphy’s best contact has always come when he pulls the ball. Below is a table of all of Murphy’s batted balls greater than or equal to 95 mph and between an 8–32 degree launch angle; the former is Statcast’s definition of hard hit, and the latter is its definition of the sweet spot:

The most ideal way to display this data would be bucketing by spray angle, rather than using Statcast’s directional definitions, but that data is not publicly available. If this were separated by spray angle, it’d be easier to see that batted balls to the left side of the field are most ideal for Murphy. Either way, the percentages clearly show that he doesn’t have the kind of opposite field power that would justify trying to make that a main part of his game. His best chances of hitting the ball hard in the air is by hitting it to the left side. The following spray chart shows you what this group of batted balls looks like on the field. (The venue chosen for the dimensions is Truist Park.)

If you couldn’t see it on the table, you can definitely see it here: Murphy’s home run power is from the pull side gap to the left field foul pole. Unfortunately for him, this wasn’t ideal for a right-handed hitter in Oakland. According to Statcast’s park factors, Oakland Coliseum has been the third-least hitter-friendly park for right-handed hitters in the last three seasons in terms of wOBACON, whereas Truist ranks seventh. And while home/road splits analysis doesn’t always tell the entire story of a hitter, Murphy’s 106 wRC+ at Oakland compared to 126 elsewhere during his tenure there is notable. Perhaps he feels more comfortable with this approach in his new home, but no matter what, it’s clear this is something that should be a permanent change.

Typically, this is the point in a piece where I introduce mechanical changes as a complement to the swing decision and batted ball analysis. But when I was watching Murphy’s tapes from this year and last year, he didn’t look all that different. See for yourself: The first three swings are from his final month in Oakland last year, and the other three are from his first month in Atlanta, all on fastballs in the heart of the plate:

2022 Swing 1

2022 Swing 2

2022 Swing 3

2023 Swing 1

2023 Swing 2

2023 Swing 3

The setup and finish are both very similar, the leg kick hasn’t undergone any significant changes, and the stride direction is almost identical. All I can say is that things look smoother and more connected. There might be slightly different timing mechanisms going on with the leg kick that has led to a more connected swing between the upper and lower body, but again, there haven’t ben any significant changes. That tells me that the change in swing decision is the leading factor in this early hot streak.

As hitters get older, they often better understand who they are and what their swing can do. There are multiple variables at play with Murphy, but it seems as if he has gotten to the point where he understands the exact approach he needs to have to be the best version of himself. We’ve seen this happen with hitters in Atlanta before, and he is most likely another example. Will pitchers adjust to his changed approach? Probably; that’s just life in the big leagues. But from his perspective, it can take years to get to this point where you know your recipe for success. Even when he sees his inevitable regression from his exorbitant .340 ISO, he will still know what his blueprint is to optimize his profile, and that is huge for himself and his team.

Let’s dive right into a few incremental changes to the Top 100 prospects list, as well as a couple of non-Top 100 additions.

Cardinals lefty Matthew Liberatore has had a velo spike — he’s frequently reaching back for 96 and 97 when he wants, and his fastball is averaging 94.5 mph. That’s up about a tick and a half from his average in 2022, when he ran an ERA well north of 5.00 across about 150 combined innings split mostly between Triple-A and seven big league starts. Libby has had frequent enough velocity fluctuations during his time as a prospect to anticipate it will be a thing he deals with throughout his career, but his repertoire depth and the long-haul projection for his command will enable him to compete even when he doesn’t have his peak stuff. That’s largely why he was kept on the Top 100 this past offseason even though he had a poor 2022.

His FV isn’t changing in light of the spike (again, it’s fair to bet Liberatore’s peak velo will continue to yo-yo), but his report has been updated and he’s sliding up about 20 spots, from the very back of the list (where he sat with other bounce-back candidates) into the part of it that includes the other major league ready fourth starters. He’s probably better than Jake Woodford is right now, but St. Louis would be burning Woodford’s last option to swap them one-for-one. Woodford was effective in relief last year and could shift into that role again while a current ‘pen occupant is sent down instead, but the Cardinals don’t have an obvious candidate for that, as their big league relievers are largely either pitching well or are out of options. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Atlanta Braves. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Billy Wagner was the club’s closer when Craig Kimbrel joined the Atlanta Braves in 2010. Thirty-nine years old by season’s end, Wagner logged the last 37 of his 422 career saves, and he was as dominant as ever while doing so. Over 69-and-a-third innings, the left-hander fanned 104 batters while allowing just 38 hits.

Kimbrel, who was just 21 years old when he debuted that May, was every bit as overpowering. In 21 appearances comprising 20-and-two-thirds innings, the rookie right-hander fanned 40 batters while allowing just nine hits. Along the way, he recorded the first of what is now 395 saves.

I’ve had a Hall of Fame vote for three years, and in each of them I’ve put a checkmark next to Wagner’s name. This coming winter, I plan to do so again in what will be his penultimate year on the ballot (assuming he doesn’t get voted in; Wagner received 68% of support in his last go-round).

Kimbrel will soon celebrate his 35th birthday, and while the end of his career is fast approaching, he’s still pitching. Will he likewise be getting my vote once his name appears on the ballot? And what about Kenley Jansen? Still going strong at age 35, he’s also got 395 saves, tying him with Kimbrel for seventh on the all-time list, directly behind Wagner.

Let’s compare some of their numbers:

Wagner: 422 saves, WPA 28.40, 187 ERA+, 2.73 FIP, 6.0 H/9, 11.9 K/9.
Kimbrel: 395 saves, WPA 22.99, 174 ERA+, 2.38 FIP, 5.2 H/9, 14.3 K/9.
Jansen: 395 saves, WPA 24.72, 161 ERA+, 2.44 FIP, 5.8 H/9. 13.0 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

Orlando Arcia getting the nod for the starting shortstop job in Atlanta raised some eyebrows this spring. After all, he had looked more like a utility infielder in recent years than a viable starting shortstop, and it felt a bit like that ship had long since sailed. The present and future was Vaughn Grissom, our top Braves prospect last year after the graduations of Spencer Strider and Michael Harris II. Grissom didn’t exactly struggle in his debut last fall, whomping pitchers to the tune of a .293/.353/.440 line, a triple-slash that would be viable for a first baseman, let alone a guy who can handle short. Yet it was Arcia who ended up with the job in the spring. It didn’t even seem like the typical service time shenanigans, such as the Cubs swearing that Kris Bryant needed a couple weeks to learn to be a better player than Mike Olt; Grissom already had nearly a third of a year of service time, which would have made it a bit arduous to maintain that façade.

Arcia didn’t disappoint in early play: In 13 games, he hit .330/.400/.511 and looked fairly comfortable playing short regularly for the first time in a few years. Unfortunately, a Hunter Greene fastball had other plans for the position; his upper-90s heat hit Arcia’s wrist during an at-bat, knocking him out of Wednesday’s game against Cincinnati, replaced by Ehire Adrianza. Initial x-rays didn’t reveal a fracture, but an MRI and CT scan on Thursday showed a microfracture, sending him to the injured list. This appears to be a minor injury, and it appears as if Arcia will only miss a couple weeks of play. Cookies don’t crumble in identical ways, but Nick Castellanos suffered this injury in 2021 and only missed a couple of weeks.

If there were service time issues involved, the Braves could have very easily plugged in Adrianza or Braden Shewmake for a couple of weeks and continued to let Grissom work on his defense in the minors (he was so-so at best in the majors last year with the glove). But finding time at short for Grissom, who by all reports took his demotion with humility, was still the upside play. Just as Arcia didn’t disappoint early on, he performed very well for Triple-A Gwinnett, with a 1.044 OPS in 10 games. Read the rest of this entry »