Every spectator sport has its own tradeoffs between watching on TV and going to a game in person. And while there are some that can only be truly appreciated live, I personally think television does a pretty good job of portraying baseball at its best. This is a game of inches, and inches can be hard to perceive from the cheap seats.
One exception is exceptional center field defense. By the time the camera angle turns around on a fly ball, the outfielders have already covered dozens of feet in their pursuit of the baseball. To appreciate the speed and timing required to play this position well, you really have to see it live.
There aren’t many guys who can really go out and get it. There definitely aren’t 30 who can hit well enough to stick in a major league lineup every day. Most center fielders, therefore, fall into two camps: Good hitters who can kind of hang but should probably be in a corner, and the genuine article. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
As a massive roster construction and player usage wonk, I probably spend more time than anyone looking at lineups and bullpen usage, especially for someone who’s not in a single fantasy baseball league. My latest focus has been on the incredulity with which some teams construct their lineups, specifically the Yankees’ continuing to bat Alex Verdugo leadoff. But for as much as some Yankees fans may want to believe that lineup construction is a failing of their manager specifically, this problem isn’t limited to one team.
I wish I could say this was just Boone but almost every manager makes wild lineup decisions stick for weeks, no matter if the team is good (CLE cycling through no. two hitters, none of them good) or bad (Nationals cleanup hitters) https://t.co/DWF5Trx6JW
To be clear, putting together a perfectly ordered lineup is not the most important part of a manager’s job, and more than just the Yankees, Guardians, and Nationals run with questionable batting orders, but few things irk fans more than poorly constructed lineups. So today, let’s focus on the lineup-construction woes of these three teams, because their issues represent crucial spots at [insert Rick Dalton pointing meme here] … the top of the order:
The Yankees’ Leadoff Spot
No team has gotten less production from its leadoff spot than the Royals, but Yankees leadoff batters have been downright dreadful in their own right (80 wRC+).
Whereas the Royals’ woes there can be pinned on mostly one guy (Maikel Garcia, who’s batted first in 96 of the team’s 132 games), the Yankees have given four players significant run there: 76 starts for Anthony Volpe, 17 each for Verdugo and Gleyber Torres, and 10 for Ben Rice.
Of those four, only Rice has been above average batting first, with his 133 wRC+ in that spot buoyed by his three-homer game against the Red Sox in early July.
There’s also Volpe and Torres, neither of whom has taken to the leadoff spot well. Both players have been below league-average hitters overall this season — Volpe’s wRC+ is at 94, Torres’ 88 — but they’ve been even worse hitting leadoff. Volpe has an 83 wRC+ batting first; Torres’ leadoff wRC+ is 59. That’s more small sample funkiness than anything, but it seems that, at least for the time being, the Yankees are better off having the two of them bat lower in the order.
Verdugo, as mentioned in the intro, has been the guy lately, leading off in each of the Yankees’ last six games, including against three fellow lefties. In that small sample he’s hit just .240/.310/.280, giving him a 77 wRC+ in his 17 games in the leadoff spot, even worse than his overall season line.
While there’s really nothing redeeming for Verdugo himself out of that spot, the Yankees have managed to win when he’s there regardless; New York is 12-5 when he leads off. And since Verdugo started hitting mostly leadoff on July 26, his wRC+ (including in other spots) is 106, 16 points better than his 87 mark for the season. The Yankees have gone 12-6 in that time, and Verdugo has led off in 14 of those 18 games. So I don’t necessarily blame Boone for rolling with him, but it’s not like Verdugo is lighting the world on fire batting first. Rearranging the order shouldn’t be out of the question.
Aaron Judge wouldn’t get first-inning intentional walks batting leadoff (at least, I don’t think so), and he’s taken just fine to batting first in the past, with a gaudy .352/.466/.711 line across his 35 starts as the leadoff man. Juan Soto has led off just twice in his career (one start as a rookie in 2018 and another in ’21), but his OBP-heavy approach would certainly play well there. Still, the Yankees are vying for the best record in baseball this season because Soto and Judge have dominated for them batting second and third, respectively, all year, and I can understand why Boone wouldn’t want to change that up. That said, why not move current cleanup batter Austin Wells up to the top spot?
As long as we’re talking about not moving hitters away from where they’re doing well, we have to acknowledge how good Wells has been since his first game in the cleanup spot on July 20. Including a couple pinch-hit appearances and three games hitting fifth against lefties, Wells has hit .341/.404/.524 (160 wRC+) since then.
Even just at a glance, Wells looks like a great candidate to bat leadoff, with a .347 OBP and 12% walk rate giving him ample opportunity to reach base ahead of Soto and Judge. Zooming into more recent games, though, he looks even better: Since the start of June, well before he began hitting fourth, his OBP is .382. He’s walking about as frequently, but over the past two and a half months, he’s having much more success on the balls he puts in play (.336 BABIP, compared to .238 through the end of May). Wells seems to enjoy hitting cleanup, for what it’s worth, even though his hot stretch began well before that:
“[Hitting cleanup has] actually helped me,” Wells told the reporters. “Getting to watch Soto and Judge before me allows me to see a lot of pitches up close and gives me a lot of confidence to have a quality at-bat and try to put a good swing on a good pitch. For me, I welcomed it and enjoyed it.” But knowing that Wells has been hitting well in different lineup spots for months now, he shouldn’t have to be anchored there.
Hitting a catcher leadoff may not be traditional, but I’d argue it’s the best option for the Yankees and may even give Judge better protection hitting behind him in the form of Giancarlo Stanton, who came off the IL nine days after Wells began cleaning up.
All of these machinations underscore the unfortunate loss of Jazz Chisholm Jr., whose excellent beginning to his Yankees career has been halted by a UCL injury. If he’s able to return this season, he could be another leadoff option if Boone wants more dynamism than Wells, Verdugo, Volpe, or Torres atop the lineup. At the time of the trade, Boone seemed to like the idea of Jazz in the middle of the lineup.
Aaron Boone said he sees Jazz Chisholm Jr. hitting in the middle of the order, since they are seeing good signs from Alex Verdugo & Gleyber Torres at leadoff. Chisholm will soon begin working out at 3B, as will Torres.
The depth that Chisholm provided in his handful of games as a Yankee was obvious, and his is a tough loss to paper over, but that doesn’t change the issues I have with how the Yankees lineups are being constructed, with or without him. Yes, the Yankees are winning again after their abysmal month-and-a-half skid, and they might not want to switch things up too much while things are going well, but that doesn’t change the fact that they should be hitting their best four batters — Judge, Soto, Stanton, and Wells — in the top four lineup spots.
The Guardians’ Second Spot
Stephen Vogt has done a fantastic job managing the Guardians this year, to be clear. I watch a lot of their games, and the rookie manager really knows how to get the most out of his bench and bullpen; he pinch-hits aggressively to get the platoon advantage and presides over the league’s best bullpen by ERA. Where there’s room for improvement, though, is in writing the initial lineup card.
Cleveland is getting the fourth-worst production out of its two-hole hitters, but we can’t blame Vogt for not trying. Eight — count ’em, eight! — different players have started at least four games there, and the team’s most frequent no. 2 hitter, Andrés Giménez, hasn’t started there since June 26.
This comes with an even more straightforward solution than the Yankees’ leadoff woes: Bat your best hitter second. For the Guardians, that means moving José Ramírez up from third to second. That may just create further issues lower down the lineup — Josh Naylor would probably move up to third in this scenario — but the key words there are “lower down.” Wouldn’t you rather have Ramírez hitting rather than left in the on-deck circle in a key spot? David Fry can mash lefties and makes perfect sense to hit fourth in that scenario, and big Jhonkensy Noel is hitting well against everyone to start his major league career and is certainly formidable enough for the cleanup spot. If Vogt doesn’t want to mess with his three-four duo of Ramírez and Naylor, Noel could also fit batting second too, even if he’s more of your prototypical cleanup-hitting masher.
The Nationals’ Cleanup Spot
Of the lineup spot/team combos I highlighted in my initial tweet, the Nationals actually fare best, with a group of cleanup batters that ranks 23rd in baseball.
So this is more anecdotal and just an opportunity for me to vent about my displeasure with Dave Martinez’s lineups, which have lately included hitting Keibert Ruiz fourth in seven of his last nine starts, even as the switch-hitter has a 72 wRC+ with no real advantage from either side of the plate. His 80 wRC+ in 13 games as a cleanup hitter isn’t much better, and batting someone who is 20% worse than league average — who hits a ton of ground balls and doesn’t have much pop — in a key run production spot just defies logic. Over the last two games, Martinez has finally moved Ruiz down to sixth, and the catcher has responded well there so far; he hit two home runs last night’s game, which the Nats lost 13-3. Hopefully, Martinez doesn’t use that as a reason to move Ruiz back to batting fourth, a role for which he is not well suited. Instead, Ruiz should remain in the six-hole, because Washington isn’t lacking for quality clean candidates.
The obvious man for the job is rookie James Wood, who surely is more fearsome to opposing pitchers than is Ruiz. Just as Joey Meneses hit cleanup basically up until he was sent down to the minors, Martinez stuck far too long with a struggling bat right in the middle of things. Rookies Wood and Andrés Chaparro should be anchoring things instead as the Nats work to develop their next winning team.
I typed the command “high-leverage reliever fangraphs.com” into Google over the weekend and set the search range to the past month. About 130 results came up. Next, I ran the same search, except with “low-leverage reliever” instead. This time, Google told me there weren’t “many great matches” for my search and suggested I try “using words that might appear” on the page I was looking for. Message received, Google. Apparently, our coverage here at FanGraphs is biased toward players who actually hold meaningful influence over the outcomes of games. That just won’t do!
All joking aside, there’s a very simple reason we don’t write about low-leverage relievers that often. Low-leverage relievers don’t really exist, at least not in the same way high-leverage relievers do. For one thing, relievers are naturally going to enter games in higher-leverage spots because pitchers are more likely to exit games in higher-leverage spots. The average leverage index when entering games (gmLI) for relievers this season is 1.12; that’s 0.12 higher than a perfectly average-leverage spot. Moreover, the low-leverage relief opportunities do exist are more likely to go to the revolving door of replacement-level arms at the bottom of each team’s bullpen depth chart, rather than an established pitcher whose full-time job is that of a low-leverage reliever. Consider that the median gmLI for active, qualified relievers this season is 1.21. By design, most relievers who stick around long enough for you to know their names are going to be pitching in higher-leverage spots. Yet, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any full-time low-leverage relievers. If anything, it just means those guys are more unusual – and therefore pretty interesting.
With all that in mind, I set out to find a low-leverage arm worth writing about. The qualified reliever (0.3 IP per team game) with the lowest gmLI this season is Thyago Vieira, with a 0.29 gmLI. That would be the lowest gmLI in a season for a qualified reliever since rookie Johan Santana’s record-setting 0.27 gmLI in 2000. Yet, with all due respect to Vieira, he’s hardly the most fun part of that fun fact. (Although, if Vieira goes on to win two Cy Young awards and a Triple Crown I will gladly eat my words.) The 31-year-old Vieira perfectly fits the mold of the replacement-level/revolving-door reliever I described above. He has played for the Brewers, Orioles, and Diamondbacks this season, and he’s currently on the restricted list at Triple-A in the D-backs organization. It seems highly unlikely he’ll get back to majors and pitch the necessary 10.2 innings he would need to remain qualified at season’s end. And, unfortunately, his 0.29 gmLI isn’t nearly as noteworthy without the “qualified” qualifier. If I lower the threshold to 30 innings pitched, 25 other relievers have had a lower-leverage season on record (since 1974).
Funnily enough, however, it was when I looked just beyond the qualified names that I struck gold iron (help me out here metal enthusiasts, is that the right metaphor?) in my search for low-leverage relievers. Tanner Rainey of the Nationals is in the midst of what could be the lowest-leverage relief season of all time: Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
Last week, I explained how players can still change teams even as trades are no longer allowed. Now that we’re a week-plus into August, I’d like to run down the list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers before the month ends, which is the latest that a team can claim them and still have them be eligible for the playoffs. Players placed on waivers are first offered to the worst team in the league, then to the other clubs in ascending order all the way up to the one with the best record at the time of the waiver placement.
I’ll be focusing on teams with playoff odds below 5%, though contending teams teams could see if a rival wants to bite on an onerous contract. (Spoiler alert: they will not.) As a reminder, when a player is claimed off waivers, it’s a straight claim. The team that loses the player gets nothing more than salary relief, as the new team is responsible for the remainder of the contract. Read the rest of this entry »
“Good luck,” I thought to myself. Thomas is a good player — a 3.1 WAR guy with 28 homers last year. This season, he’s nearly doubled his walk rate and has 28 stolen bases. That’s the third-most in baseball, more than Corbin Carroll and Byron Buxton put together. Thomas is on his second straight season of a wRC+ bumping up against 110 — this is a good player. But it’s also a guy who’s hitting .224/.299/.364 against right-handed pitching, which is most of the pitchers in the league.
Well, we have not because we ask not. Nats GM Mike Rizzo had a weekend to play with before the deadline, and it only takes one team to meet his price. And I’ll be darned, Big Rizz actually pulled it off. Read the rest of this entry »
Generally speaking, late Saturday night is not the time for rational decisions. Late Saturday night is when people make the kinds of decisions that they won’t even remember until halfway through their eggs on Sunday and whose logic they’ll struggle to puzzle out for years to come. But just before midnight on Saturday, Jeff Passan revealed that the Nationals and the Mets made a perfectly reasonable swap. The Mets, currently half a game ahead of the Diamondbacks for the final NL Wild Card spot, bolstered their outfield and added a much-needed left-handed bat by sending 24-year-old right-handed pitching prospect Tyler Stuart to the Nationals in exchange for half a season of the resurgent Jesse Winker. After putting up a dreadful -0.8 WAR in an injury-shortened 2023 campaign, Winker is running a 126 wRC+ and has put up 1.3 WAR, fourth-best among Washington’s position players. Winker also spent his early childhood in upstate New York and has been vocal about his appreciation for Mets fans.
Winker got into Sunday’s game with his new team, entering as a replacement and playing left field, though his ultimate destination might be in right. Winker hasn’t played more than 100 innings in right field since 2019, but with Starling Marte out since June 22 due to a knee injury, that seems like the most logical fit. The Mets are currently platooning Jeff McNeil and Tyrone Taylor out there. Against righties, Winker could allow McNeil to move second base, pushing Jose Iglesias, who started out red-hot but has just one hit over his past six games, back into a bench role. Read the rest of this entry »
I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »
CJ Abrams is one of the blossoming stars in today’s game. Entering play Friday, the 23-year-old shortstop who recently made his first All-Star appearance is batting .260/.333/.467 with 15 home runs, 16 stolen bases, a 122 wRC+, a .344 wOBA, and 1.9 WAR over 422 plate appearances. During the first month of what’s turned out to be his breakout season, I wrote about Abrams’ stellar offensive start. About a month-long slump followed, but he bounced back in late May and is showing that his plus-offensive profile is here to stay.
Now in his third season, Abrams is proving he can be the centerpiece that the Nationals can build around. Beyond his bat, his aggressive baserunning and speed make him one of the most dynamic young players in the game. Last year, despite his inconsistencies at the plate, Abrams was a menace on the paths. Thanks to his 28.6 ft/sec sprint speed (82nd percentile), according to Baseball Savant, he was worth +3 runs on the bases; he swiped 47 bags and had a 9.2 BsR.
This year, Abrams has been just as fast, but at least according to BsR, he is no longer a plus baserunner. (Baseball Savant says he’s been worth +1 run on the bases this year, which ranks 71st; he was no. 23 on last year’s leaderboard.) That’s because he’s been caught stealing 10 times already, with five of them coming via pickoffs, plus another pickoff that didn’t come on an attempted steal.
In 2023, Abrams went 47-for-51 on stolen base attempts. If he took off, the odds were in his favor. Pitchers weren’t exposing him for taking too big of leads or being overly aggressive. This year, his precipitous drop to 16-for-26 has been staggering. When a player who was so recently a great basestealer runs into a slump like this, it warrants a deep dive into understanding what exactly is going on. There are a few components of the steal that we have to pay attention to when trying diagnose this type of issue: the lead, the jump, and the situation. Let’s go through each piece and find out what’s gone wrong for Abrams. Here is a compilation of his pickoffs this year:
None of these look particularly great. He was either off balance or out by a good margin on almost every play. We can trace some of this back to his leads, so let’s start there. There are two main ways to take a lead against a lefty if you are thinking about attempting to steal second. You can take a normal 12-foot lead like Abrams did against Sean Manaea and then run on the pitcher’s first movement (as soon as the pitcher lifts his leg). Or, you can take a larger, one-way lead to possibly draw a throw over and get a feel for the pitcher’s pickoff move.
For the first one, you want to stay close enough to the bag so the pitcher doesn’t pick you off, but you want to get far enough out there that you have a good chance to be safe at second even if he does throw over; as soon as the pitcher lifts his leg, you break for second. For the one-way lead, you are an extra step or two toward second, but you are not attempting to steal on the upcoming pitch. Instead, you put all your weight on your left foot, toward first base, so you can dive back safely if the pitcher attempts to pick you off. If the pitcher doesn’t throw over, you are timing up his delivery so you can get a better jump if you decide to steal later. That doesn’t appear to be what Abrams was doing in the video above. All three times he has been picked off by a lefty this season have come early in the count, twice on the second pitch of the plate appearance and once on the first pitch.
In the 1-0 count against Manaea, Abrams took a standard 12-foot lead. He attempted to go on first movement but realized he would’ve been dead to rights, so he hesitated into shuffles instead. He should have just kept going and forced Pete Alonso to make a play. This was the most obvious mental mistake of the three. Against left-handers Kirby Snead and Alex Vesia, Abrams went on first movement, but because each pitcher expected him to go and was well-prepared to throw over, the defense caught him easily. As a pitcher, you know Abrams is an aggressive runner, but why in these two cases was it so easy? Well, this is a good time to point to Abrams’ tendencies.
Eight of his 16 swipes this season came on the first pitch, and of his six pickoffs, four were on the first pitch. If you’re a pitcher looking to control Abrams’ aggression, do it early. For lefties, it’s even easier to execute because you’re facing him as he leads off first. This goes back to the situational aspect I brought up before. Pitchers are smart, and these are the exact types of tidbits they become aware of as they prep for a good basestealer. Combine the early counts with pitchers being more willing to throw over if they haven’t yet used their allotted disengagements, and you have tough recipe for success. A potential solution here is for Abrams to wait for deeper counts before trying to steal.
The right-handed pitchers in these clips are equally prepared for Abrams to run early. He often uses the vault lead against righties. As a reminder, the vault lead is when you take your primary lead at about nine or 10 feet instead of 12. You take your same athletic stance and shuffle about 2-3 feet just as the pitcher lifts his leg. The momentum from your vault helps you accelerate into your sprint quicker than you would with a traditional, static lead, albeit with risks. The key to a successful vault lead is not the size of your shuffle; it’s your timing. If you venture too far out before or after the shuffle, or you mistime your vault and are in the air when the pitcher disengages to throw over, you risk getting picked off.
At times this season, Abrams has made both mistakes on his vault leads: Either his primary leads or his shuffles are too large. The vault lead is more technical than physical, based more on mechanics than reflexes and pure speed. Abrams is fast enough and reacts quick enough to steal bases with a traditional lead against favorable matchups, so if I were him, I would temporarily abandon the vault lead and work on getting the fundamentals down again before bringing it back in games.
Before letting you go, I also want to look at the plays on which Abrams was thrown out by a catcher to see if these caught stealings were because of bad decisions, poor jumps, or good defense. Here is a quick reel:
Off the rip, there are three plays that stick out. If you’re going to attempt steals against Gabriel Moreno and Patrick Bailey – perhaps the two best throwers in the sport – you have to pick your spots wisely. In the Arizona game, the Nationals were up two runs and the count was 0-2, providing a good opportunity to run and try to avoid a double play; against the Giants, my guess is he wanted to get into scoring position with two outs. These are valid enough reasons to run despite the poor matchups and are not comparable to the pickoff mistakes.
In the game against the Red Sox, righty Brayan Bello, who has an extremely quick slide step, was on the bump. Even runners who are faster than Abrams would have trouble reaching second safely when a pitcher delivers a 96-mph heater in the middle of the zone on a slide step. And perhaps not surprisingly, this came on the first pitch of the at-bat.
On the first play in the clip, against the Rockies, Abrams attempted to swipe third with a left-handed batter up. Even without seeing the quality of the lead that Abrams took, this was a bad decision. Dakota Hudson never took his eye off of Abrams before he delivered his pitch, making it much more difficult for him to get a good jump. On top of that, catchers love when this happens because with a lefty batting they have a clear throwing lane to third base; when righties are hitting, catchers have a more difficult play because they need to step back and around the batter before firing. Even with an inaccurate throw from catcher Jacob Stallings, Abrams was canned.
Abrams is an aggressive runner. Without his aggressions, he wouldn’t be able to steal nearly 50 bases in a season like he did last year. This isn’t something you want to take away from him. However, he does need to learn from these mistakes so he can use his speed and aggression more effectively. Most of these pickoffs and unsuccessful steals resulted from some a combination of being predictable and getting too jumpy. The good news is he is talented enough to make the necessary adjustments. Once that happens, we’ll get to see a much more complete version of Abrams, one who can swipe 40 bags at a high clip and pepper the gaps with line drives.
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The parenthetical part of the title is largely just a nod to Zach Lowe, whose ESPN basketball column inspired this one. He occasionally mentions flaws or foibles holding a particular team or player back, in lovingly GIF’ed up detail. I’m more of a rah-rah type, and plenty of weeks I don’t have a single Didn’t Like in the column at all. This week, though, I can’t help it; mental lapses, baserunning errors, and overall sloppiness are all over the column. That’s not to say I don’t love watching it, because part of what’s fun about baseball is when a theoretically staid game gets messy, but let’s be clear: A lot of these plays are not good plays. We’ve got superstars getting confused, on-field collisions, and absolute howlers. Let’s get started.
1. The Profligate Nationals
The Nats are one of the unheralded fun stories of the baseball season. They’re hanging around .500 and playing like better days are ahead. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore look like franchise mainstays. James Wood, another part of the return from the Juan Soto trade, isn’t far off. Mitchell Parker and Jake Irvin might be mid-rotation starters. Jacob Young is an elite defender. They have plenty of interesting role players, and the whole team plays with reckless and joyful abandon.
That’s particularly true on the basepaths, where the Nats rank third in steals but only 11th in total baserunning value. They’re always angling for how to advance another base, whatever the costs. Sometimes that ends in tears. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in January, I expressed grave concern over the state and direction of the Washington Nationals. They’d followed their World Series title with four straight last-place finishes, jettisoned most of their good players, and watched a series of prospects flame out. It wasn’t just a matter of waiting for Dylan Crews and James Wood to hit the majors; I argued that Washington needed to build a foundation of strong supporting players. Wood and Crews could be the difference between the Nats winning 80 games a year and 90, but if the infrastructure wasn’t ready, they’d turn a 70-win team into an 80-win team. And at that point, why did we even bother?
I’m pleased to report that the Nationals — no doubt sobered and inspired by my pessimistic appraisal of the situation — have answered the call. They don’t stink anymore. I don’t know if they’re good right now, as 38-41 and fourth place in the division isn’t exactly reminding anyone of the Big Red Machine. But on the journey from cheeks to championships, mediocrity is the first waypoint. Besides, with the NL Wild Card race being what it is, the Nats look like they’re going to be within a couple games of a playoff spot halfway through the season. Read the rest of this entry »
