Luke Jackson has blown six saves this season, tied for the major league lead. His struggles as the Braves closer have given rise to a play on the chorus from OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson”: Back in mid-May, after blowing two save opportunities in a row, fans on the Atlanta airwaves and Twitter started singing “I’m sorry Luke Jackson (oooh).” His problems — and the singing — only got worse in early June after he allowed runs in five of his first seven appearances in the month. But if you look at Jackson’s peripherals outside of their game context, the next line in OutKast’s song becomes a lot more appropriate: “I am for real.”

A first-round draft pick by the Texas Rangers in 2010, Jackson never really lived up to his pedigree with his original organization. By 2015, he had transitioned to the bullpen full-time, though he did make his major league debut that year. He was traded to the Braves in an unheralded, change-of-scenery move in December 2016 for Brady Feigl (no, the other one) and Tyrell Jenkins. He was just as unremarkable in Atlanta, getting designated for assignment three separate times, each time going unclaimed on waivers. He made the Opening Day roster this year as a fall back option after injuries decimated the team’s bullpen during spring training.

In his first appearance of the season, he gave up a grand slam to Rhys Hoskins. Luckily it was a low-leverage situation since the Braves were already three runs behind. With Arodys Vizcaino injured and A.J. Minter and Dan Winkler ineffective, Jackson found himself thrust into high-leverage situations by mid-April. But despite the aforementioned struggles, he’s been the best reliever in the Braves bullpen this year. If you compare what he’s doing this year to what he was doing before, he looks like a completely different pitcher:

Read the rest of this entry »

Our Playoff Odds page has a nice little feature that lets you display, for any two dates, the difference between a team’s playoff odds on Date A and its odds on Date B. Around the end of each calendar month, I like to use that feature to check in on which teams most improved their odds over the month that was and which lost ground. It’s a long season, and it’s easy to miss things. Here are the largest changes in playoff odds from June 1 to June 30:

There’s a story there. Let me start it by saying that 17 of 30 big-league teams saw no change at all to their playoff odds in June, or saw a change of less than 2%. Another five saw a change greater than 2%, but less than 10%. Of the eight teams whose playoff odds swung by more than 10% in June, fully half — the four teams at the top of the table — came from the same division: the National League East. To some extent, that kind of clustering is to be expected — when one team rises, another in its division must fall — but the relative quiet of every other division gives us an opportunity to reflect for a moment on what happened in the NL East in June, and what lies ahead in July. Read the rest of this entry »

After years of inconsistent production, Mike Foltynewicz finally harnessed his elite fastball and emerged as an All-Star in 2018. Across 183 innings, Foltynewicz struck out 202 hitters while notching a 2.85 ERA and a 3.37 FIP. All of those marks were easily career bests and, perhaps most impressively, he managed to miss tons of bats while also increasing his ground-ball rate. One year doesn’t make an ace, but Foltynewicz’s stock surged as much as anybody’s in baseball last season.

But Foltynewicz hasn’t built off his breakout campaign in 2019. The right-hander started the season on the disabled list, didn’t look quite right when he rejoined the rotation, and has yet to resemble his 2018 form in anything more than short bursts.

Across 10 starts this year, he’s posted a 5.53 ERA and a FIP north of 6.00. After striking out nearly 10 hitters per nine innings last season, he’s now whiffing fewer than eight. Even worse, Foltynewicz’s home run rate has tripled in 2019, and his 2.44 HR/9 ratio is the fifth-worst in the league among pitchers who have thrown at least 50 innings.

There are a few factors that explain Foltynewicz’s plummeting numbers. As always, velocity is the first thing to check when a pitcher suddenly starts getting hit around, and sure enough, Foltynewicz is down a bit relative to last season. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Brett Anderson, Anthony Swarzak, and Jimmy Yacabonis — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

Brett Anderson, Oakland A’s

“My go-to has always been my slider. I’ve evolved into more of a sinker guy now, but at the same time, my slider has kind of been my bread and butter for however long I can imagine. It’s what I get my swings-and-misses with.

“I knew I had a chance to pitch on the varsity team as a freshman [in high school]. I wasn’t going to go in there with a fastball and a changeup only, so I started throwing a curveball. It was a spiked curveball, because I have huge palms and short fingers. I’ve never really been able to throw a conventional breaking ball because of that; everything just kind of slipped out.

“I started off with that get-me-over curveball, just to have something that spun against varsity kids. It was like a 12-6. Then I started throwing one that was straighter and it cut a little bit. I kind of morphed that one into a slider. It’s the same grip essentially, but two different pitches. I get on top for a curveball, usually just to get ahead, or to get back in the count; it’s to steal strikes. The slider is more of my put-away. I spike both pitches, the slider and the curveball. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball has changed a lot in the last five years, so much so that watching a game from 2014 already feels like a blast from the past. Offense was low, sinking fastballs were everywhere, and groundballs and defense were the order of the day. 2019 hardly feels like the same game — unless you’re watching Mike Soroka, that is. Though Soroka is only 21 years old, he pitches like he’s from a previous era. In a time of four-seam fastballs, Soroka pitches off of his sinker — he’s throwing only 16% four-seamers this year and 46.3% two-seam fastballs. In a world of exciting high-velocity young aces, Soroka sits around 93 mph. In a world of home runs, he has allowed only one all year. In short, Mike Soroka doesn’t fit in 2019. How does he do it?

As is almost always the case with pitching, Soroka isn’t doing one specific thing that makes him dominant. If it were that straightforward, that easy to reverse engineer, everyone would be doing it. Still, dominant is an apt description of Soroka’s 2019 season. He’s posted a 1.38 ERA over ten starts. His FIP is nearly as jaw-dropping — fifth in baseball at 2.70. Has he been a little lucky that only 2.9% of fly balls hit against him have become home runs this year? Certainly. Still, though, his 3.5 xFIP is no slouch, 20th-best among qualified starters.

Great pitching is always interesting, but the way Soroka is doing it is what makes him unique. His 21.9% strikeout rate is below league average, not the kind of thing you can say about most excellent pitchers. His 6.5% walk rate is better than average, but not absurdly so — it’s merely 38th-lowest among qualified starters. In short, Soroka is an evolutionary Mike Leake, or 2019’s Miles Mikolas. He’s effective in a way that resists categorization, that belies the easy tropes of analysis. Why is Mike Soroka good? He’s good because he gets every little edge he can.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves and Dallas Keuchel agreed to terms on a contract Thursday night, thus ending baseball’s short free agency burst following the conclusion of the MLB Draft. Keuchel’s one-year, $13 million deal will enable him to enter the free agent market after the 2019 season with a clean slate, without any qualifying offer compensation pick baggage to reduce his value to a new team (or offer an excuse not to sign him).

We’ve seen this short-term playbook before from the Braves before, so it’s unsurprising to see them commit to a one-year (in reality, four-month) contract for Keuchel. The offseason in Atlanta was quieter than expected, with the team — or more accurately Liberty Media, the ownership group — choosing not to try to splash cash in the direction of Manny Machado or Bryce Harper like some of the other Johnny-come-soonlys in baseball. The only significant signing the team made was a one-year deal with Josh Donaldson for $23 million.

The $13 million is $13 million straight-up, something that shouldn’t necessarily be taken for granted as these types of midseason contracts tend to be a bit strange. For example, when Roger Clemens signed a one-year contract worth $28,000,022 (the beer money at the end to match his uniform number), that figure represented what it would’ve been over an entire season; Clemens only made a little under $20 million, with the money starting to flow when he made his season debut for the Yankees in June.

The reasons the Braves signed Keuchel to a short-term contract are similar to those behind their Donaldson deal: the team has a very deep stable of prospects and doesn’t necessarily want to commit to Keuchel long-term any more than they wanted to with Donaldson.The long-term solution at third base was always Austin Riley, but with the team coming off an NL East crown and still very likely to be just as competitive in 2019, they wanted a safer short-term option. Enter Donaldson The exact pitcher for whom Keuchel is keeping a seat warm is unclear, but the Braves have enough interesting candidates that the assumption is the question will work itself out over time.

The issue for Atlanta was that that question was not working itself out as quickly as the team hoped. The Braves starters have combined for a 4.38 ERA (19th in MLB) and 3.6 WAR (also 19th) and while those numbers aren’t the worst among 2019’s contenders, the rotation clearly has not been enough of a positive asset. And obviously, this matters quite a bit, with the Braves looking up at the Phillies in the NL East by a two-game margin. Atlanta’s rotation as of this moment has more question marks than they did at the start of the season.

Kyle Wright, Sean Newcomb, Bryse Wilson, and Touki Toussaint have all had brief stints in the rotation, with all four losing those jobs quickly (the latter two after their first starts). You can make a pretty good argument that the Braves have perhaps been a bit impatient with some of these pitchers, but it’s hard to blame the team for their urgency.

Perhaps more rope would have been given if Mike Foltynewicz and Kevin Gasuman were meeting expectations.

Folty’s spring was marred by elbow problems and while his health doesn’t appear to be a question, his velocity and his slider have been. His velocity has recovered, with his fastball in recent starts in the 95-96 mph range, much closer to the 96-97 mph he showed throughout 2018 than the 93-95 he initially came back with in late April. But the slider is still missing bite and that’s a crucial pitch in his repertoire. The former Astro’s breakout 2018 was mostly due to his slider, which ranked fourth in our pitch values, behind only those of Patrick Corbin, Jhoulys Chacin, and Miles Mikolas. Batters only hit .106 against his sliders last year and only mustered a .183 slugging percentage. In just over a month of pitching, he’s allowed almost as many extra-base hits on sliders (9) as he did in all of 2018 (11). And looking at his Statcast data, he’s lost three inches of vertical movement and two inches of horizontal movement from last season.

Kevin Gausman’s ERA remains above six, a disturbingly high number considering that we’re now in June. Given that his FIP is a much better 4.03, Gausman’s poor bottom-line run prevention has some mitigating factors, including a .331 BABIP and a bullpen that hasn’t had his back (58% LOB compared to 72% league-average). But as with the Braves’ lack of patience with the young pitchers hitting roadblocks, Atlanta just doesn’t have the time to hang around and hope that Gausman turns his theoretical run-prevention back into actual run-prevention. Gausman’s done himself no favors by narrowing of his repertoire; he’s essentially been a fastball/splitter-only pitcher in 2019, with his slurve largely abandoned. He’ll likely end up in the bullpen for now, which may be a better fit for a two-pitch hurler still missing his former high-end heat.

Under the set of circumstances Atlanta is facing, not only is Keuchel a good signing, but the terms make it one of the best potential buys this year. It’s still strange to call $13 million nothing, but in terms of major league free agency, these are nanoscopic potatoes. You can’t spend as much as you want on amateur free agents or draft picks. You don’t have an unlimited supply of prospects to trade for short-term gains. But you can spend all you want on free agents, with the only limitation being the luxury tax threshold, which is still a softer roadblock than the severe penalties for overspending on other avenues of talent acquisition. That’s not a problem for the Braves, who could sign James Shields to a one-year, $50 million deal and still be short of the Danger Zone. (Warning: You should probably not sign James Shields for one year and $50 million.)

Having the opportunity to sign a legitimate free agent in midseason is pretty rare, but Keuchel’s unusual market afforded the Braves the chance to add a player who might not have seemed necessary for the team in January, but who addresses an obvious need now. One remaining question, perhaps one left unanswered and lost in time: did the Braves need to wait this long to sign Keuchel? After all, given how quickly they cycled through the pitching prospects, the team certainly understood how urgent the rotation issue was. It may not have been obvious in March, but the weakness was apparent certainly by mid-April. In terms of free-agent compensation, Craig Edwards estimated that signing Keuchel would have an additional cost of $4.7 million for Atlanta, hardly a crippling loss. What part of this late signing was the draft pick value (or a more general reluctance to spend on free agents) and what part was Keuchel and his agent preferring to have more teams in the bidding such as the Yankees ($10.6 million loss), Cardinals ($7.4 million), or the Cubs ($6.8 million)? If only houseflies on walls had tape recorders, or whatever the kids are calling those today.

ZiPS has been more of a fan of Keuchel, at least in 2019, than the other projection systems, so it’s unsurprising it gave a digital thumbs-up to this signing to go along with my analog one. The penalty used for his missing time is relatively tame as there’s no injury involved, and most players out voluntarily don’t return in as brutally an inept fashion as Kendrys Morales did after ending his 2014 hiatus. That history doesn’t suggest a huge penalty is hardly surprising, as most players don’t use that time sitting around eating cookies, playing video games, and watching reruns of Press Your Luck. Even I don’t eat that many cookies working at home in a decidedly non-athletic capacity.

ZiPS projects a 116 ERA+ and 1.6 WAR for Keuchel with the assumption that he needs a few weeks to be ready to pitch in a major league game. Atlanta will take that and honestly, probably be happy with less. Because if you’re not using money to sign Keuchel, your other options for signing pitchers using just money are Shields or Yovani Gallardo or Miguel Gonzalez, and so on. Keuchel adds just a hair over a win compared to the likely other options and in the NL East, that win might actually matter.

Is adding a Keuchel a giant, season-changing move? Of course not, but those are more or less unicorns; situations like the Giants picking up Randy Winn midseason and getting 3.6 WAR in 58 games are highly unusual. From the projections, the Braves have turned about 20% of the scenarios in which they don’t win the NL East into NL East titles, and erased about 30% of their non-playoff finishes from the timeline. Without trading prospects or developing time travel technology, the Braves made as good an acquisition as you realistically can make in June. Of course, we could have said the same thing in May.

Stephen Nogosek got one step closer to the big leagues when he was promoted from Double-A Binghamton to Triple-A Syracuse On May 24. The next rung on the ladder is New York, and the 24-year-old right-hander will be bringing more than a four-pitch mix with him when he arrives at Citi Field. He’ll bring a mule-deer mindset, as well.

Nogosek was a Duck before becoming a Met. In between, he was Red Sox property, having been selected by the AL East club in the sixth round of the 2016 draft out of the University of Oregon. Thirteen months later, he was included in the trade-deadline deal that brought Addison Reed to Boston. The address change didn’t shake him up so much as wake him up.

“I was asleep on this bus,” explained Nogosek, who was with high-A Salem at the time. “We were our way to Winston-Salem, and Adam Lau nudged me and said, ‘Hey, you just got traded.’ I was like, ‘Whatever,’ and fell back asleep. When I kind of woke up a little, I was like, “OK, did I really get traded?’

Shenanigans were certainly possible — teammates can’t always be trusted on such matters — but this was no tomfoolery. Once the cobwebs cleared, Nogosek learned that he would indeed be receiving his paychecks (meager as they are in the minors) from another organization. Read the rest of this entry »

The combination of power and command has been striking. In 34 innings split between high-A Dunedin and Double-A New Hampshire, Nate Pearson has punched out 52 batters and issued just six walks. His ERA sits comfortably at 1.32. Blessed with a blistering fastball and a carve-‘em-up slider, he’s the top pitching prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays organization.

The 22-year-old right-hander doesn’t possess a long professional resume. Selected 28th overall in the 2017 draft out of Central Florida Community College, Pearson got his feet wet with 20 innings of rookie ball, then began last year on the injured list with an intercostal strain. Upon returning in early May, he was promptly nailed by a come-backer and missed the remainder of the regular season with a fractured ulna.

Pearson recovered in time to make six appearances in the Fall League, an assignment Jeff Ware, Toronto’s minor-league pitching coordinator, called “a big test given that he’d really only pitched in short-season ball.” In terms of reestablishing his high-ceiling credentials, he passed with flying colors.

Standing a sturdy six-foot-six, Pearson looks the part of a power pitcher, and that’s exactly what he is. Asked for a self-scouting report, he led with that exact definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Braves called up Austin Riley, who we ranked second in their system and 33rd in our Top 100. He continued his blazing hot 2019, going 1-for-3 in his big league debut last night, including a home run that was hit 109 mph off the bat. He put up insane numbers at Triple-A in 37 games this year, hitting 15 homers and posting a 160 wRC+ with an unlucky .286 BABIP given his quality of contact.

I’ve been in to see him a few times this spring and captured a homer (102.1 mph off the bat, 32 degrees, 405.3 feet, a homer to straight-away center field) and an off-balance but well-struck double to the pull gap in glorious 1000 frames per second below. You can reference these swings (particularly the first) as an example of the actualized version of Riley’s swing from the mechanical journey I describe below.

Riley got on most clubs’ radar as a standout on arguably the best prep team in Mississippi. He was all over the showcase circuit but was a little thicker then and was arguably a better pitching prospect. He showed some starter traits, running his heater up to 95 mph at times, but having mostly average stuff with limited physical projection. In the spring, he started shaping up his frame, which has continued through his pro career as well. He looked like he had a shot to stick at third base and was getting more athletic, to the point where he was getting to his plus power in games more often. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2018 Atlanta Braves finished their season 90-72, in first place in an NL East that saw just one other team — the Nationals, at 82-80 — finish above .500. That Braves team featured three hitters under the age of 25 with wOBAs above .320, a strong farm system, and middling pitching that could surely be remedied with an arm-heavy offseason haul. After a winter during which the Braves didn’t add those arms, we gave them a 38% pre-season chance to make the playoffs — not an exceptional mark in a competitive division in which we gave three other teams better than that chance, but substantially improved from 2018’s pre-season 3.2% shot. After 2018, expectations were raised for this season’s summer in Atlanta.

One-quarter of the way through that 2019 season, sitting at 21-20 and three games behind the Phillies, it’s not yet clear what kind of season the Braves now intend to have.

The offense, at least, has been there — for the most part. Off-season acquisitions Josh Donaldson and  Brian McCann, along with holdovers Nick Markakis, Freddie Freeman, and Ronald Acuña Jr., are all hitting well (the lowest wOBA among the group is Markakis’s .362). Ozzie Albies and Dansby Swanson are hitting passably, which for Swanson is a major victory and for Albies is about par for the course (his .334 wOBA on the season to date is almost exactly in line with his .331 career mark). Johan Camargo and Ender Inciarte have fallen off a cliff.

The resultant 104 team wRC+ is ninth league-wide and an improvement on last year’s 97 figure (15th). But Atlanta’s top-third ordinal position betrays the fact that the Braves’ overall offensive performance is as close to the 19th-ranked A’s (94) than to the fourth-ranked Mariners (114), and is certainly not the kind of overwhelming force that can cover for poor pitching. And the Braves’ pitching, while not abysmal, is also not good. More damningly for a front office that didn’t add any major arms this offseason, it’s not better than last year’s crew.

As Ben Clemens noted last week, starters league-wide are improving relative to relievers. In Atlanta, where the Braves’ starting depth chart ran at least seven men long to start the season before being shortened by injury, and where Sean Newcomb has recently come into a relief role after a disastrous turn as a starter, the pattern holds. Last year, Braves starters posted a 3.99 ERA and Atlanta relievers a 3.99. This year, both outfits are worse — by a fair margin — but the relief crew’s regression has been particularly noticeable: their 4.87 FIP is the seventh-worst in the game, and a third of a run worse than the starters’ 4.41 mark to date (18th).

If you’re willing to be charitable to a front office (and, presumably, ownership group) that made “financial flexibility” the guiding star of their offseason, you might say that the Braves’ decision not to sign Craig Kimbrel (or any other major relief arms) this winter was a savvy move in a world where all that good young pitching the team spent a half-decade stockpiling was on the cusp of reaching Cobb County. Some of it has worked out. Mike Soroka and Max Fried have been excellent, and Newcomb and (to a much lesser extent) Touki Toussaint have been effective relievers once put into that role. There were certainly enough good pitchers on the Braves’ roster this offseason to squint and see a quality staff emerging from it.

But that hasn’t really happened. Despite Luke Jackson’s emergence as a strong option in the ninth, and Toussaint and Newcomb’s mostly effective efforts to shore up the innings leading into it, the rest of the bullpen’s performance has ranged from acceptable (Jacob Webb’s 3.54 FIP) to ghastly (Shane Carle’s 9.85). And it’s not just outliers bringing the overall numbers down: Chad Sobotka, who has a 6.52 FIP, is among the team’s leaders in relief innings pitched. Josh Tomlin, who has a 4.56 FIP and hasn’t been effective since 2017, leads the team in that category.

The rotation, meanwhile, despite the best efforts of Soroka and Fried, has seen Kevin Gausman, Julio Teheran, and especially Mike Foltynewicz struggle with bouts of inconsistency or injury and consequent ineffectiveness. Foltynewicz’s case is particularly worrying (a 6.88 FIP over three starts, in which he’s allowed 15 runs), both because it stands in contrast to strong performances earlier in his career and because it comes along with a nearly 2 mph drop in fastball velocity, and equivalent (though mostly smaller) velocity drops on pitches across the board. That drop has sapped his ability to strike hitters out, even as it does not appear to have materially affected his walk rate:

It’s not a pretty chart, and exposes the degree to which Foltynewicz’s recent success was built on top of his top-10 fastball velocity. Without that velocity, which began to slump in early August last season and has plummeted in the early going this year after an elbow injury limited him to just a few bullpen sessions and a substantially limited spring training, Foltynewicz simply can’t generate the separation between his fastball and his off-speed pitches that he needs to be successful. So far in 2019, his stuff just isn’t powerful enough to fool anybody. Gausman, too, was brought along slowly during spring training due to a shoulder injury, and Gausman, too, has been slowed by injury this season, leading to similar (if somewhat less dramatic) poor results.

So if a wait-and-see-what we have approach to pitching might have been justifiable coming into spring training — and even that is debatable — it’s no longer nearly as justifiable today. Injuries have killed the depth that underlaid the Braves’ inaction. What the Braves have now, in reality rather than in expectation, is a solid if not overwhelmingly consistent offense, inconsistent starting and relief pitching around a few bright spots, and only a three-game deficit in the division despite starting the first 41 games of the season just barely over .500. They also have that prized payroll flexibility so carefully hoarded in the offseason. If this isn’t the time to go out and buy pitching, it’s not really clear to me when is. Craig Kimbrel is still available. So is Dallas Keuchel, though he may admittedly carry a higher price than would be sensible for the Braves to pay.

For now, the Braves seem content to tinker around the edges of their roster and try to see if anything shakes loose. Last Friday, staring down the barrel of a four-game losing streak after a 10-inning walk-off loss in Arizona dropped Atlanta to 18-20 on the season, Snitker changed things up, moving Acuña Jr. from the cleanup spot to leadoff, Donaldson from second into the vacated fourth slot, and the struggling Swanson from purgatory somewhere near the bottom of the lineup into the two-hole. Acuña Jr. hit a 462-foot home run, and the Braves haven’t lost since.

That’s a nice story, but the offense isn’t really the problem in Atlanta. Their pitching — particularly in relief — is what’s holding them back, and it’s teetering on the edge just as the Braves enter a stretch in which they’re going to play the Cardinals, Brewers, and Nationals 11 times in 15 games. If the Braves’ pen didn’t play all that well in going 9-5 against the Marlins (who the Braves have played six times so far), the Rockies (five), and the Reds (three), I’m not sure it’ll play out so well against the better teams to come. In short, the first quarter of Atlanta’s season has given no indication that the pitching will work out on its own, even as there are a number of good arms to build around in-house already. Few other teams, at this point in the season, have so little of the story of their 2019 campaign down in ink. The Braves’ front office still has a chance to determine the way their season will go. They should take it.