Enrique Bradfield Jr. has good wheels, and he can also hit a bit. Drafted 17th overall last year by the Baltimore Orioles out of Vanderbilt University, the 22-year-old outfielder not only slashed .311/.426/.447 over three collegiate seasons, his table-setter batting style translated smoothly to pro ball. In 110 plate appearances versus A-ball pitching, Bradfield batted .291 with a Bonds-esque .473 OBP.
The chances of Bradfield’s ever being comped to Barry Bonds are basically nonexistent. At 6-foot-1 and 170 pounds, the erstwhile Commodore is, in the words of our prospect co-analysts Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin, “a contact-oriented speedster who will also play plus defense.” Power isn’t a meaningful part of his game. Bradfield went deep just 15 times at Vandy, and not at all after inking a contract with the O’s.
He doesn’t expect that to change. When I asked him during spring training if he’s ever tried to tap into more power, Bradfield said that has never been a focus, adding that he’d “be going in the wrong direction if it was.” That seems a shrewd self-assessment. A line-drive hitter who swings from the left side, Bradfield will ultimately reach Baltimore by continuing to propel balls from foul pole to foul pole. Read the rest of this entry »
It remains a heartbreaking but immutable fact of baseball life that you cannot steal first base.
So over the weekend, Cleveland Guardians outfielder Myles Straw passed through waivers. He’s no longer on the 40-man roster and will start the season in Triple-A, despite having a guaranteed three years and $20.45 million remaining on his contract.
Even with an extra day in February this year, Matt Chapman remains unsigned, his free agency having lingered past the start of exhibition season. Admittedly, the soon-to-be-31-year-old third baseman is coming off of an uneven season marked by a late slump related to a finger injury, but he’s been reliably productive throughout his seven-year career, with good-to-great defense bolstering his value at the plate. Meanwhile, his former (?) team, the Blue Jays — who reportedly offered him a nine-figure extension before he hit free agency — have cobbled together an uninspiring solution at third base.
Chapman isn’t the only remaining free agent who could provide a significant upgrade, but he’s by far the best position player remaining on the shelves, and the combination of his absence and the Blue Jays’ needs stands out as I turn to the American League edition of my roundup of the most glaring holes on contending teams (the National League edition is here). For this exercise, I’ve highlighted the spots that per our projections — which combine ZiPS and Steamer as well as playing time estimates from RosterResource — fall below a combined 2.0 WAR on teams whose Playoff Odds sit at or above 25%.
Why 2.0 WAR? That’s the rough equivalent of average play across a full season, but because of the general tendency to overproject playing time and keep even the weakest teams with positive WARs at each position (in reality over 10% of them will finish in the red), our position player Depth Chart values at the team level are inflated by about 20%. That is, instead of having a total of 1,000 WAR projected across the 30 teams, and 57% of that (570 WAR) allocated to position players, our Depth Chart values currently add up to about 682 WAR. Thus, I am discounting the team values that you see on the Depth Chart pages by 20%, and focusing on the lowest-ranked contenders among those whose adjusted values fall below that 2.0 WAR threshold. The individual WAR values cited will remain as they are on the Depth Chart pages, however, and it’s worth noting that many of the players here — particularly youngsters with shorter track records, including some from our Top 100 Prospects list — don’t project particularly well but still have considerable upside. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Rob Manfred’s announcement that he’ll step down as commissioner after his current term. Then they preview the 2024 St. Louis Cardinals (26:01) with The Athletic’s Katie Woo and the 2024 Cleveland Guardians (1:09:24) with MLB.com’s Mandy Bell, plus a postscript (1:44:43).
Corey Kluberannounced his retirement on Friday, bringing the curtain down on an exceptional career whose later years were so often curtailed by injuries. Kluber pitched in the majors for parts of 13 seasons, but topped 100 innings just seven times, six in a row from 2013–18 and again in ’22. Within that limited timeframe, he made three All-Star teams and won two Cy Youngs, with a pair of top-three finishes and a ninth-place finish as well. His 2016 postseason run came up just short of ending Cleveland’s long championship drought. His is a career worth celebrating and putting into context, as his best work stands alongside that of a handful of Hall of Fame contemporaries.
Because he spent half a decade at the front of Cleveland’s rotation, it’s easy to forget that Kluber was actually drafted by the Padres, who chose him in the fourth round out of Stetson University in 2007. He climbed to Double-A San Antonio by 2010; on July 31 of that year, he was part of a three-team trade, heading to Cleveland while Jake Westbrook was sent from Cleveland to St. Louis, Ryan Ludwick from St. Louis to San Diego, and Nick Greenwood from San Diego to St. Louis. After a cup of coffee in late 2011, Kluber spent the first two-thirds of the next season at Triple-A Columbus, then joined the big club’s rotation in August. Read the rest of this entry »
Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
A lot of my thoughts on hitting are rooted in my own experiences playing, for better or for worse. When I was in school playing ball, I was constantly working through a particular mechanical issue. Traditionally, it is called “getting stuck on the back side,” but I always said I got stuck on a pedestal. When I got to the highest point of my leg kick (which was moderately high), I sometimes transferred too much of my weight over my back foot – it was a swing path killer. Because of my extensive experience with it, I’ve always been keen on identifying hitters who have a similar issue.
Rotational movements like hitting and pitching have linear components, but hitters need to do more than just move on the coronal plane (from left to right or right to left) in order to have a deep entry into the hitting zone. A hitter has to rotate with his hips and/or spine while moving along that linear plane to create rotational power and an ideal bat path. In the case of pedestal hitters, they reach their peak leg lift while sometimes neglecting those other aspects of movement.
Take Will Smith, for example. He uses a high leg kick to create space in his swing and fell into the pedestal hitting habit during the second half of last season:
October 9th
September 22nd
September 7th
A few hittable pitches in the heart of the zone with no barrels to show for it. On the middle-middle heaters, his path was cut off and he only skimmed the bottom of the ball, rather than hitting it flush. That led to can-of-corn fly balls to right field instead of barreled line drives. This was a persistent issue for Smith throughout 2023 – the worst offensive season of his five-year career and the first with an ISO below .200.
When you transfer too much weight over your back foot, you either get stuck and create a path which leads to lazy fly balls to the opposite field or you fall too heavy on your front side and hit grounders like Smith did against Manaea. You lose depth in your bat path and can’t cover as much of the zone with your barrel. For Smith, that negatively impacted his wOBA on outer third pitches. For the bulk of his career, he has been able to cover those pitches, so this should be something he can fix. To do that, he’ll have to get back to his early 2023 swings where he was balanced and creating space for his bat to work through the zone.
April 30th
Smith is a good enough hitter that he still posted a 119 wRC+ last year despite his mechanical flaw. Not everyone has that much room for error, though. Enrique Hernández has had a wRC+ below 75 in consecutive seasons after running a 109 mark in 2021. Like Smith, he typically relies on a big leg kick to create space, rhythm, and timing in his swing. And while the size of his leg kick fluctuates more than Smith’s, it’s still a key driver in his process. Here are a few swings from 2023 before he was traded to the Dodgers:
April 11th
June 25th
July 2nd
Even if you want to cut Hernández some slack on the high quality changeup from Shane McClanahan, that swing is still a good example of how his lack of balance causes him to land heavily on his lead leg. The heavy landing is even more obvious in his swing against Jesse Scholtens in the second clip. With that swing in particular, his leg kick works straight up and down, which causes him to force a lead hip external rotation.
What do I mean by that? If you’re trying to explode your lead leg open, you would create the counter movement (internal hip rotation) first. That way, you’re creating a reciprocal pattern that leads to smooth external rotation. Staying neutral at the beginning of the swing creates an imbalance, causing the hitter to stand on the pedestal instead of rotating into and then out of it as he swings. Hernández has hyper mobile external rotation, which is seen by his tendency to stride open. To control it, he needs to create sufficient counter rotation with his hips. Unsurprisingly, when he went to Los Angeles, he made a clear change in his leg lift that allowed him to stack his center of mass over his midpoint instead of his back leg. Pay attention to the direction he works his leg kick:
August 19th
September 9th
His leg lift started working on an angle towards his back leg, which allowed him to have a controlled explosion and balanced swing. With the Dodgers, he had a 96 wRC+ – much more in line with his career 94 mark. Yes, it was over a sample of 185 plate appearances, but the movement quality improvement is undeniable.
The last example I’ll use to portray pedestal hitters is Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan. His case is a bit more complicated. In his rookie season, he splashed onto the scene with a 126 wRC+. However, his peripherals suggested there would likely be a regression – his .341 wOBA was considerably higher than his .312 xwOBA. In 2023, those numbers almost completely converged. He had a .313 wOBA and .318 xwOBA. From a mechanical point of view, this wasn’t completely surprising.
His big leg kick is a crucial component of his swing. It keeps him stable, which plays a key role in his great plate discipline. However, the movement also makes him heavily reliant on his hands to do most of the work to get on plane. Given his elite bat-to-ball skills, he can successfully do that more than other players, but he doesn’t have much room for error. If he gets stuck on his back side, his hands can only do so much. If he identifies a pitch too late, even just slightly, then he puts himself in a tough position to make flush contact. Here are a few swings showing that:
July 9th
August 30th
September 22nd
Each of these fastballs were thrown between 96 and 97 mph, but were right down the middle. Kwan couldn’t get his hands on plane despite the hittable locations. This was a trend for him all year. In 2023, he saw 190 four-seamers with a velocity of at least 96 mph and had a .155 wOBA against them. This is another example of why rotational hitters like Kwan, Hernández and Smith need to be on top of their mechanics at all times. Pedestal hitting gives batters even less margin for error than other hitters against high velocity.
Every hitter has his weakness, and for this trio of players, theirs is directly related to how they load with their leg kick. As I watch each of them in 2024, I’ll be looking for any potential adjustments they might have made over the offseason, or might make as the season progresses.
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
2024 BBWAA Candidate: Victor Martinez
Player
Pos
Career WAR
Peak WAR
JAWS
H
HR
AVG/OBP/SLG
OPS+
Victor Martinez
C
32.0
29.0
30.5
2,153
246
.295/.360/.455
118
SOURCE: Baseball-Reference
Victor Martinez could rake. A professional hitter in the best sense of the term, he could hit for average, topping .300 eight times in the 11 seasons in which he qualified for a batting title, no small task given his lack of speed. He could also hit for power, bopping 246 home runs with a single-season high of 32. He had great contact skills, striking out in just 10.9% of his plate appearances, and he was dangerous from both sides of the plate. Had he been able to catch as well as he hit, he’d probably be bound for Cooperstown. As it was, Martinez swung a potent stick for 16 major league seasons, making five All-Star teams and helping five teams reach the postseason, where he hit a robust .315/.374/.503 in 163 plate appearances.
Victor Jesús Martinez was born on December 23, 1978 in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, the third of four children of Guillermo and Margot Coromoto Martinez. His younger brother, David Martinez (b. 1980) spent eight years between 1999 and 2007 pitching in the Yankees and Cleveland organizations as well as in independent leagues. Unfortunately, Guillermo died of a heart attack when he was 66 and Victor was seven, leaving Margot to work nursing jobs at two hospitals, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »
This all started because I posted some GIFs of José Ramírez struggling. When I was looking into Sonny Gray’s marvelous sweeper, I captured him victimizing Ramírez twice in one game, once swinging and once looking. That led Marquee analyst and overall good baseball follow Lance Brozdowski to note that Ramírez is one of the worst hitters in baseball when it comes to dealing with opposite-handed sweepers, a pitch that most batters handle comfortably.
That sounded like an interesting topic for an article, so I started looking into it. Maybe it’ll still be an interesting topic for an article – “never say never on January 16” is a rule that I live by when it comes to finding things to write about. But my heart wasn’t in it. As I watched video and called up stats trying to build a case for the article, I kept smiling and laughing. I don’t want to bury José Ramírez, as it turns out; I want to praise him. So that’s what this is: some observations on one of the strangest and yet greatest players of our generation. Read the rest of this entry »
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
2024 BBWAA Candidate: Brandon Phillips
Player
Pos
Career WAR
Peak WAR
JAWS
H
HR
SB
AVG/OBP/SLG
OPS+
Brandon Phillips
2B
28.4
24.8
26.6
2,029
211
209
.275/.320/.420
95
SOURCE: Baseball-Reference
Though he carried himself with a decidedly modern swagger, Brandon Phillips styled himself as a throwback, so much so that he wound up at the center of a battle over old school/new school thinking within baseball’s culture war, pitted against teammate Joey Votto. If the flashy, free-swinging Phillips wasn’t everybody’s idea of the ideal second baseman of the post-Moneyball era, his combination of power and above-average baserunning and defense made him a valuable and entertaining player. In a 17-year major league career that took a while to get off the ground, Phillips won four Gold Gloves, made three All-Star teams and — along with Votto and Hall of Famer Scott Rolen — helped the Reds to three playoff appearances in a four-season span.
Brandon Emil Phillips was born on June 28, 1981 in Raleigh, North Carolina, into a very competitive family. His parents, James and Lue Phillips, were both athletes at Shaw University, a Raleigh-based historically Black university. James played football and baseball before going on to work as a sales representative for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, while his mother played basketball. Jamil Phillips (b. 1975), the oldest of James and Lue’s four children, played collegiate baseball at Johnson County (Kansas) Community College and Southern University before being drafted by the Rangers as an outfielder in the 34th round in 1993. P.J. Phillips (b. 1986) was a second-round pick by the Angels out of Redan High School in 2005 and spent five seasons in the Angels’ organization, one in the Reds’ organization, and four in independent leagues before becoming an indy-league manager. Porsha Phillips (b. 1988) played basketball at Louisiana State and the University of Georgia before spending the 2011 season with the WNBA’s San Antonio Stars. Read the rest of this entry »
In 2023, Emmanuel Clase ran a 3.22 ERA and a 2.91 FIP. His 44 saves were a career high and five more than any other pitcher. Compared to the rest of the league, he was great. Compared to prior versions of Emmanuel Clase, however, he was dreadful. In 2021 and 2022, Clase was an unstoppable force of nature, running a 1.33 ERA and a top-five groundball rate while striking out more than a batter per inning. Then in 2023, Clase fell off a cliff, though admittedly, he landed on another, still pretty lofty cliff; not with a splat, but gently, into some soft, leafy bushes.
What happened to Clase? Everything happened! There were situational factors and mechanical factors. There were changes in consistency and approach. Everything is connected when it comes to pitching, with one factor cascading upon another. The fun is in following the chain. Read the rest of this entry »
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