Mason Englert throws an array of pitches. The 25-year-old right-hander’s repertoire comprises a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a changeup, a cutter/slider, a sweeper, a “big curveball,” and a “shorter version of the curveball.” He considers his changeup — utilized at a 31.6% clip over his 13 relief appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays — to be his best pitch. More on that in a moment.
Englert, whom the Rays acquired from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for Drew Sommers back in February, will also break out the occasional… lets’s call it a baby curveball.
“I threw a few that were around 60 mph when I was in Durham,” explained Englert, whose campaign includes nine outings and a 1.84 ERA for Tampa’s Triple-A affiliate. “One of them was to the best man in my wedding. It was the first time I’d faced him in a real at-bat, and I just wanted to make him laugh.”
The prelude to Englert’s throwing a baby curveball to his close friend came a handful of weeks earlier. Back and forth between the Bulls and the bigs this season, he was at the time throwing in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium.
”I was totally messing around and wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get from Snydes (Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder),” recalled Englert, whose major-league ledger this year includes a 4.84 ERA and a much-better 2.93 FIP. “I lobbed it in there, kind of like the [Zack] Greinke-style curveball, and landed it. I thought he would laugh it off, but instead Snydes goes, ‘Huh. You could maybe use that early in counts to some lefties.’ That was him having an openness to, ‘Hey, make the ball move different ways, do different things, use them all.’” Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Seattle Mariners. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »
We’ve been writing about Cal Raleigha lot lately, as we should. He’s currently on pace for 9.9 WAR, which would constitute the greatest season of all time for a catcher. Although his defense has taken a step back from its previous heights, Raleigh is running an absurd 182 wRC+ and leading baseball with 26 home runs. He’ll have to come down to Earth at some point, but he’s all but certain to lead all catchers in home runs for the third straight season. He’s nearly doubled the second-place Logan O’Hoppe’s 14. Raleigh has a real shot to break Salvador Perez’s record of 48 home runs by a catcher – if he keeps up his current pace, he’ll break it by 16 homers!
On May 19, Ben Clemens wrote about how well Raleigh’s new, more selective approach was working out. Even though Raleigh was taking more pitches over the heart of the plate in hitter’s counts (a trend that has continued in the ensuing weeks), the patience has allowed him to get ahead more often and do damage. “Does all of this mean that Raleigh is going to maintain his 170 wRC+?” Ben asked. “No way.” That was the only answer he could have given. To suggest otherwise would have been sabermetric malpractice. But, uh, Raleigh didn’t exactly regress back to the mean from there on out. From May 20 to June 8, Raleigh was the best hitter in baseball, slashing .348/.427/.894 with 13 homers for a 267 wRC+. His average exit velocity was 97.2 mph! That’s what it takes to – barely – hit better than Aaron Judge. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, I wrote an introduction to Statcast’s latest round of bat tracking metrics. MLB.com’s Mike Petriello wrote a real primer, so I tried to build on that by analyzing how the different metrics work together using a couple common pitch types. We’re still figuring out how to use these new toys, but today I’d like to explain how my first dive into the bat tracking metrics led me to one particular player who is doing something weird, which led me to learn something small about the way swings work. After all, that’s why we’re here exploring all these strange new numbers in the first place.
In my first shot at playing with the metrics, I tried to establish something simple. I pulled the overall bat tracking data for all qualified players, and I focused on Attack Direction, which tells you the horizontal angle of the bat at the moment of contact (or, in the case of a whiff, at the moment when the bat is closest to the ball). That seemed pretty straightforward to me. As with most bat tracking metrics, it’s also a timing and location metric. You generally need to meet inside pitches further out in front of home plate. If you’re behind the pitch, your bat will be angled toward the opposite field, and you won’t pull the ball. If you’re out in front of the pitch, your bat will be angled toward the pull side, and you’ll pull it. A player’s average Attack Direction should correlate pretty well with their pull rate, and the numbers pretty much bear that out. Attack Direction and pull rate have a .60 correlation coefficient:
Most of the dots are clustered around that very clear trendline. Players who pull the ball more tend to have their bats angled toward the pull side just as you’d expect. What interested me was that green dot way at the bottom. It belongs to Leody Taveras. I guess it is Leody Taveras, if we really believe in our graphs, which we probably should at this particular website.
Taveras has a moderately low Attack Direction, four degrees to the pull side, but he’s got the third-lowest pull rate of any player on this chart. I couldn’t help wondering how exactly he was doing that. Before I dug into it too deeply, I was reminded that the fact that he’s a switch-hitter might have something to do with it. So I pulled the data again, this time separating out all players by handedness. On the chart below, switch-hitters will appear twice:
The correlation isn’t quite as strong, because switch-hitters are now broken into two different players with two smaller samples (that’s how small-sample right-handed Patrick Bailey got way down at the bottom). But there are two green dots now! And they’re both Leody Taveras! From both sides of the plate, Taveras looks like he should have a pull rate that’s a bit above average, and instead has one of the very lowest pull rates in the game. At this point, I was officially curious, so I started poking around.
First, I specifically looked at Attack Direction on balls hit to the opposite field. Since the start of bat tracking midway through the 2023 season, when Taveras hits the ball the other way, his average Attack Direction is three degrees toward the opposite field. Only four players in baseball have an average Attack Direction that’s less oriented toward the opposite field. Oddly, they’re all sluggers. Salvador Perez, Yordan Alvarez, Aaron Judge, and José Ramírez are all at two degrees toward the opposite field, and Austin Riley is tied with Taveras at three degrees. Taveras is definitely not a slugger. He could not be more different from these five guys. So not only is he doing something way different from most hitters when he goes the opposite way, but the only players out on that ledge with him have completely different swings than he does. There really is something weird about him.
Next, I tried looking specifically for balls hit to the opposite field even though the bat was angled toward the pull side at the moment. Just 21% of balls hit to the opposite field have the bat angled toward the pull side at all. I ran a Baseball Savant search, setting the minimum Attack Direction at seven degrees toward the pull side. Since bat tracking started, 5.5% of Taveras’s batted balls have fallen into this category. Among the 375 players with at least 200 BIP over that period, that’s the 11th-highest rate. Elehuris Montero is the champion at a shocking 10.5%, but no player who has put as many balls in play as Taveras has run as high a rate as he has.
At that point, I decided to look at individual balls that fell into this category: balls that go to the opposite field even though the bat is angled toward the pull side at contact. How exactly does this happen? Try to picture it in your mind. If the bat is angled toward the pull side, and it’s being swung in that direction anyway, how does the ball end up going in the opposite direction? There are two main answers. Here’s the less common way:
That’s Taveras way, way out in front of a curveball, hitting it off the very end of his bat. He cued it up so perfectly that if the end of his bat were cupped, the ball might have just gotten stuck in there. So that’s one way to do it. In fact, 21% of the balls we’re looking at, hit to the opposite field even though the Attack Direction is seven or more degrees to the pull side, are squibbers hit off the end of the bat below 80 mph. That’s one way to do it.
The other way is much more common, and it looks like this:
Of those same balls, hit to the opposite field even though the Attack Direction is seven or more degrees to the pull side, 50% are classified as popups, and 65% have a launch angle above 38 degrees. Basically, when you hit a ball in that weird manner, it’s almost always going to be either a cue shot or a popup. Leody Taveras taught me that.
This has a lot to do with Attack Angle. If your bat were perfectly parallel to the ground, but angled toward the pull side, it would be pretty much impossible to hit the ball the other way. But when you pop the ball up, you’re not hitting it flush. You’re getting under it. And regardless of the situation, your bat is almost never parallel to the ground. According to Statcast, the bat is angled downward on more than 80% of swings. If you just look at popups, that number is up above 90%. About half of popups come on four-seamers and cutters, where the batter has trouble catching up and swings just under the pitch. The rest come on softer stuff, and those pitches are usually low in the zone. I need you to do some 3D visualization in your head here, because my diagram is not very good:
On the left is a perfectly level bat, parallel with the front of the plate. Now imagine you’re angling your bat downward and you get just underneath the ball. If your bat is angled toward the opposite field or, as in the middle example, straight toward center field, you’ll likely just foul the ball off behind you or into the opposite field stands. Once you angle it toward the pull side, however, it can stay fair, bouncing up and toward the opposite field. Please imagine that the bat on the right looks so funky because it’s foreshortened, pointed out toward the first baseman. Taveras can show us what that looks like in the real world:
If his Attack Direction were zero, he would’ve fouled the ball up and into the stands down the third base line. He only kept it fair because of his Attack Direction of 18 degrees.
Look, I don’t have a big takeaway here. I just think this interesting. I think it highlights the way that the angle of the bat informs even the most mundane batted balls. If you’d asked me yesterday whether it’s possible to go the opposite way while your bat was angled toward the pull side, I would’ve had to think about it, but my first reaction would’ve been to say no. The bat and ball move through space so quickly that they can be hard to track, but the bat tracking metrics help explain why exactly Taveras pops out so very, very often, and how it’s even possible to hit a ball like that in the first place.
Cal Raleigh has a lot of power. That’s always been his calling card, at least on offense. In each of his three full major league seasons, he’s posted a below-average OBP and an above-average offensive line. In cavernous T-Mobile Park, the hardest place to hit in baseball, his 34 home runs and .436 slugging percentage in 2024 were downright titanic. This year, though, he’s tapped into something new.
Or, well, his results are absolutely something new. One very interesting thing about Raleigh’s spectacular 2025: It hasn’t come from more raw power. Maximum exit velocity? Nothing new for Raleigh. Neither is his average exit velocity, nor his hard-hit rate, both of which are broadly in line with 2024. His bat speed is the same. When he’s trying to hit a home run, he’s doing it the way he always has.
But while his ability to hit baseballs hard might be the same as it’s always been, he’s demonstrating that ability more often than ever before. He’s both putting the ball in the air and pulling his elevated contact more frequently, and more of his batted balls are barrels, too. He’s striking out less frequently, with a career-high contact rate and career-low swinging strike rate.
Nothing is ever so simple that it’s driven by one thing, but I think there’s one important change driving Raleigh’s surge. It’s something he’s been working toward for a few years, in fact. When Raleigh is ahead in the count and pitchers throw him meatballs over the heart of the plate, he’s swinging less than ever before:
If you are familiar with Andrés Muñoz, the baseball player, you may know that he is good. It may be enough for you to simply witness and bask in his elite performance, and question it no further. (Rarely are we so content here.) You may not realize he is unusual; you may not care. Often in baseball, being good and being unusual go hand in hand. This is a short exploration, albeit one preceded by an exorbitantly long prologue, of why Muñoz is good and unusual.
If you are familiar with FanGraphs, the baseball website, you may know about approach angles. If not: A pitch’s approach angle is the three-dimensional angle at which it crosses the front of home plate. Broken down into its two-dimensional vectors, it becomes vertical approach angle (VAA) and horizontal approach angle (HAA).
VAA is a description of pitch shape and thus depends on other physical attributes of the pitch — namely, its velocity and acceleration in all three dimensions. While representing the most distilled measurements of a pitch’s movement through space, the velocity and acceleration vectors themselves are functions of release height, release angle, release speed, spin rate, spin axis, spin efficiency… it goes on. VAA, as it happens, is very sensitive to pitch height. Reporting a pitch’s average VAA is not especially meaningful without either providing locational context or stripping it of that context all together.
To accomplish the latter, I developed VAA Above Average. It’s a simple recalculation that communicates a fastball’s flatness or steepness irrespective of pitch height. Through this it’s much easier to see that, for example, flatter VAAs induce higher swinging strike rates (SwStr%) at all pitch heights compared to steeper VAAs (forgive the half-baked visualization):
Though they’ve lost two straight to trim their AL West lead to a single game, the Mariners are a first-place team thanks to a recent 16-4 stretch that has boosted their record to 20-14. As I noted last week, their success for a change hasn’t been driven by the strength of their rotation, which has been without George Kirby thus far due to shoulder inflammation and is now without Logan Gilbert, who landed on the IL in late April with a flexor strain. Rather, Seattle been carried by an exceptionally potent offense, a marked contrast from recent years, particularly 2024, when the team’s failure to score contributed to the August firings of manager Scott Servais and hitting coach Jarret DeHart. These Mariners have benefited not only from Cal Raleigh’s heavy hitting, but from the ongoing presence of Randy Arozarena, who was acquired just before last year’s trade deadline, and rebounds from players who struggled due to injuries last season, such as J.P. Crawford and Jorge Polanco. The return of Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez to their coaching staff has helped, and it does appear as though T-Mobile Park has been a bit more forgiving than usual.
Raleigh and Polanco are the hitters getting the headlines. Raleigh is currently slashing .240/.359/.574 with a major league-high 12 homers, and he ranks third in the AL in slugging percentage behind only Aaron Judge and Alex Bregman, and fourth in the league in wRC+ behind those two and Jonathan Aranda(!). While Polanco doesn’t have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title because an oblique strain has limited him to swinging left-handed and to DHing instead of playing the field, he’s hit a ridiculous .369/.407/.750 (233 wRC+) with nine homers in just 92 plate appearances (14 short of qualifying). Crawford is batting .294/.417/.404 (151 wRC+) and Arozarena .224/.366/.414 (136 wRC+). Both players are walking over 15% of the time, with Raleigh drawing a pass 14.4% of the time; the team’s 11.2% walk rate leads the majors.
All of that has helped the Mariners withstand a comparatively slow start by Julio Rodríguez (.206/.308/.375, 103 wRC+) and a wave of injuries that has forced right fielder Victor Robles, outfielder-first baseman Luke Raley, utilityman Dylan Moore, and second baseman Ryan Bliss to the injured list alongside the aforementioned rotation stalwarts [Update: Moore was activated just after this article was published]. Even so, the Mariners have gotten a 100 wRC+ or better from every position besides first base (where Rowdy Tellez, Donovan Solano, Raley and Moore have combined for a 60 wRC+) and right field (where six players, among them the injured Robles, Raley and Moore, have combined for a 90 wRC+). Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Nicholson, Troy Taormina, Nick Turchiaro, Jeff Curry-Imagn Images
It is well known that analytics have changed the baseball landscape. Moreover, it is widely understood that the evolution is ongoing. Embracing innovation, especially within the technology realm, has increasingly become a must for teams looking to keep up with — and ideally get a step ahead of — the competition. For front offices across the game, it’s adapt or die.
What does that mean for the general managers and presidents of baseball operations who lead those front offices? In other words, how have the ever-continuing advancements impacted their jobs over the years? Wanting to find out, I asked four longtime executives for their perspectives.
———
On how analytics have impacted the job
John Mozeliak, St. Louis Cardinals
“When I first broke in, how you made decisions was basically based on scouting reports and traditional statistics. Now it’s much more analytically driven because of the advanced metrics. If you think about it, in the old days when people would invest in stocks… it’s the same kind of thinking now. The more information you have, the better your decisions are. That’s changed quite a bit over the last 25 years.
“Two things come to mind. One is understanding the longevity of a player. In other words, how long should you be investing in a player? The other thing is prospect evaluation; how much value someone might have, even though they’re still in the minor leagues. When you think back to 20-30 years ago, a lot of times minor league players didn’t have the same type of value that you’re seeing today.
“The economics of baseball have changed drastically. There is more revenue in the game, and higher payrolls, but there is also how you think about moving talent for talent. It’s much more based on economics than just pure ‘I think he’s a good baseball player.’”
Ty France went into last season trying to be something he’s not, and the results reflected that. Over 535 plate appearances split between the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, he slashed .234/.305/.365 with 13 home runs and a 93 wRC+. Statistically speaking, it was the worst year of his career.
Now with the Minnesota Twins after inking a modest $1M free-agent deal in mid-February, France went into yesterday with numbers more in line with what he did from 2019-2023. A month-plus into the campaign, the 30-year-old first baseman has a 118 wRC+ and a .271/.341/.407 slash line.
How has he rediscovered the better version of himself?
“My swing is simple and compact right now,” France told me prior to an 0-for-4 Friday night that included his being robbed on a diving catch and lining an at-em ball at an infielder. “Instead of trying to do too much, I’m just trying to get in my best position and take a good swing.
“Guys are getting paid for homers and doing damage, so a lot of my training last offseason was geared toward trying to hit the ball in the air and drive the ball,” France added. “I kind of lost touch with what I was best at, which is using the right side of the field just collecting hits. This past offseason was about getting back to the basics and rediscovering who I am as a hitter.” Read the rest of this entry »
I never thought I’d get to use the transit method. If that phrase rings a bell but you can’t quite place it, let me remind you about NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which spent nine years pointed out into space, observing stars. By measuring tiny dips in the brightness of those stars, scientists were able to detect the existence of thousands upon thousands of planets that orbited them. Those exoplanets blocked out some of the light when their orbit brought them between their star and Earth, and Kepler was attuned to interpret the minuscule effect of those shadows. Anyway, this is as close as I’ll ever come.
It happened in Seattle on Wednesday, and it started in the bottom of the seventh inning. The score was knotted at three at the beginning of the frame, but the Mariners quickly broke things wide open. J.P. Crawford knocked in two runs with a single past the third baseman, then Julio Rodríguez knocked in Crawford with a double to the deepest part of the ballpark. That brought Cal Raleigh to the plate with Rodríguez, briefly, on second. In the dugout, tuckered out from his 270-foot journey, Crawford did exactly what a high-performance athlete is supposed to do. He focused on recovery.
Raleigh took a Reid Detmers curve for a ball, then another for a strike. Rodríguez took off as soon as Detmers raised his right foot for the 1-1 pitch. The slider hit the outside corner and Raleigh was out in front of it, chopping it down toward the third baseman. Or rather, toward where third baseman Luis Rengifo would have been standing were he not covering third base. The steal attempt forced him over to the bag and he watched helplessly as the world’s easiest chopper floated right toward the vacancy he’d created. But that vacancy was soon to be filled. Rodríguez bore down on the base, putting him on a collision course with the ball. Or not. Read the rest of this entry »
