Used to be, people would argue about whether Stephen Strasburg was really an ace. There was no right or wrong answer, since there is no consensus definition of an ace starting pitcher, but aside from that, where Strasburg was concerned, there was disagreement. Some people thought he was amazing; some people thought he was a letdown. Some people could squint and see both. That all concerns past Stephen Strasburg. There was no disagreement over 2015 Stephen Strasburg. That version sucked, and by some measures he was one of the very worst pitchers in baseball. It wasn’t like him, and after a start in late May, Strasburg hit the DL. He didn’t feel great. He also needed to work on his mechanics. The DL stint was a chance to work on both.

And a few days ago, Strasburg came off the DL and threw 94 pitches against the Braves. Many of them were pretty good pitches, and while this was a Braves lineup without Freddie Freeman in the middle of it, I’d still say it wasn’t easy for Strasburg to throw his five shutout innings. That was still a major-league opponent, so the outing was positive from start to finish. What sorts of things was Strasburg up to? We can make this easy, with just a few pictures. In some ways, Strasburg was his classic self. In some ways, he was completely different.

Read the rest of this entry »

A little over a month ago, I wandered into the depths of the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards, looking to see who had the most increased movement on their breaking pitches through the first month of the season compared to last year. As you might imagine, increased movement doesn’t always mean increased success, and so many of the names that turned up were interesting but inconclusive: seeing names like Rick Porcello and Ross Detwiler leading best-of lists tells us that the article was a fun exercise, if not a totally meaningful one.

However, there were a couple of interesting names when it came to right-handed pitchers with increased horizontal movement on their sliders. First, there was Sonny Gray, who is now the proud owner of a top-three slider by run value this year. Then, coming in a close third after Seth Maness, was Drew Storen. Unlike Gray and Maness, Storen has been around for a while, so the prospect of him tinkering with pitches (especially after four mostly successful years), drew some attention.

That attention was, and is, warranted: Storen’s slider (PITCHf/x calls it a slider; some say it’s a cutter. For ease, we’ll go with slider) now has over two inches of greater horizontal movement than last season, and at least one inch more than his previous career-high. Take a look at the horizontal movement change of his slider over his career, courtesy of Brooks Baseball:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday, Nationals fans had the season flash before their eyes when Bryce Harper’s leg buckled while attempting an aggressive throw. The Nationals, to this point, have managed to withstand certain injuries, but no injury would be more crippling than a big one to the best hitter in the game. Thankfully for those with an interest, Harper’s issue was minor, and he was back in the lineup Saturday. In his return, he hit a home run; in his return, Max Scherzer no-hit the Pirates.

For all the Nationals have already been through, Harper’s been there all along, and Scherzer has too. That either player is having success is by no means surprising. The Nationals gave Scherzer a big giant contract, and Harper’s been hyped since he was still in the womb. The two were expected to be two of the best players on the team. But where the Nationals find themselves now is in a particularly unusual situation. That is: Bryce Harper has been the best position player in baseball. And Max Scherzer has been the best pitcher in baseball.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whether or not you think Jose Tabata intentionally moved his elbow into the path of Max Scherzer’s two-out, ninth-inning curveball this past Saturday, the final result stood as an example of a very rare phenomenon: a perfect game broken up on the would-be final out of the game. While still securing the no-hitter put Scherzer firmly into the record books, the history of the almost-perfecto is incredibly interesting in its own right, as is the unparalleled dominance the Nationals right-hander has shown in his past two starts.

Scherzer now has a distinct place in the discussion of historic pitching performances. We should make sure to put the emphasis on the plural of the word performance, because Scherzer just put together arguably the best back-to-back outings by a starting pitcher since at least 1914. His final combined line for his starts on June 14th and 20th:

18.0 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 1 HBP, 26 K

Scherzer faced 57 batters over his two starts: he struck out just under 46% of them. To put that in context, he had a better strikeout rate over the entirety of two consecutive complete games than Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, or Dellin Betances have in their relief appearances this season. By the numbers, he was more or less the equivalent of facing the best closer in baseball on a particularly dominant day for two entire games.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

When Chris Heston threw a no-hitter, it was a good reminder that, on any given day, any given pitcher might shut down any given lineup, that baseball history isn’t limited to being made by those names you find on team shirjeys. When Max Scherzer threw a no-hitter over the weekend, it was a good reminder that, while any given pitcher can throw a no-hitter on any given day, the probability favors the best ones. Few pitchers in the game are better than Max Scherzer; few pitchers carry higher no-hitter odds than Max Scherzer. It’s not that this sort of thing was going to happen, but no one should’ve been surprised that it did.

The enduring conversation is about the elbow that potentially turned a perfect game into something a little less perfect, and that’s understandable, because it’s different. We never really see that happen, so it’s what we want to talk about. But if you take a step back, that one pitch does little to diminish Scherzer’s brilliance, and he still didn’t allow a single hit. And that’s going to be the focus here, as it was after Heston’s game. Many have argued that the no-hitter has lost some of its sheen over the years, with strikeouts up and offense down and with a greater understanding of DIPS theory. Yet a no-hitter is still a special and memorable performance, and we’re able to analyze them differently than ever before. In the course of throwing his no-hitter, Scherzer struck out 10 Pirates. What happened in the 17 other at-bats?

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I was out getting a drink with our own Matthew Kory. His favorite team is the Red Sox. My favorite team is the Mariners. The bar we went to was showing the Mariners game, and while the Mariners were actually winning, that did nothing to stem the tide of jokes at our own expense. They’re two very different teams in two very similar situations — they came in with a lot of hype and promise, some people labeling them World Series contenders, and to this point they’ve more or less sucked. I don’t know which team has been the bigger disappointment. There’s still time yet, but while that means things could get better, that means, also, things could get worse.

The conversation turned to looking ahead. It was just last week I wrote about the meaning of the standings through a couple months, relative to the meaning of the projections. The numbers suggested that the Sox and Mariners would be pretty good. They continue to suggest that, and, my brain knows it should believe that. But it can be difficult to fully accept, when you’re watching a team playing different from the expectations. It feels like a bad team is just a bad team. It feels like a good team has something special going on. There are feelings you’re supposed to feel, and feelings you actually feel. Actual feelings, you could say, are greatly prone to recency bias.

The conversation has led to this post. It’s another post with an assortment of polls, asking for your participation. The idea: do you see something, in the teams you follow, the projections don’t? Do you see reason to doubt the projected records? The polls will ask about five teams: the Red Sox, Mariners, Royals, Cardinals, and Nationals.

Read the rest of this entry »

The thing about Max Scherzer is he’s really good. We knew that. You knew that. This Sunday the Milwaukee Brewers learned about it firsthand when Scherzer threw a complete game one-hit shutout against them. Well, okay, they probably knew it already thanks to scouting reports and whatnot. On the off chance the Brewers don’t use scouting reports or whatnot — and considering their record this is possible — they know it now. Scherzer is really good.

The lone Brewer hit was a broken-bat muscle job over the outstretched glove of second baseman Anthony Rendon. A few innings later Scherzer issued a walk. It was okay. His 16 strikeouts and nine shutout innings overshadowed it. Great as he was, the start was an outlier, of course. Nobody strikes out 16 guys against one walk and one hit every time out. But Max Scherzer is, as we know, quite good, and this start was emblematic of his season.

Against the Brewers, Scherzer threw all four of his pitches for strikes more than 60 percent of the time. He got swings and misses on each of them, including 12 on his fastball, nine on his slider, four on a curveball he threw only 16 times (according to MLB Gameday’s data, at least), and two on his changeup. When a pitcher can throw as hard as Scherzer and throw three other good pitches, well gosh. That’s about the definition of an ace.

Most importantly, that kind of pitch mix allows him to get both right-handers and left-handers out. Against right-handers Scherzer, throws fastballs and sliders with the occasional changeup when he gets ahead in the count. Against left-handers he abandons the slider and becomes a fastball, changeup, curveball pitcher. He also throws a cut fastball (rarely) against lefties but never against righties. Sunday, Scherzer struck out 12 right-handed batters. Those came on six sliders, three curveballs, and three fastballs. He also struck out four left-handed batters on two fastballs and two changeups. It’s a varied enough repertoire of pitches that he effectively becomes two different pitchers against different-sided batters, Pat Venditte style, though with much better pitches than Venditte throws.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think we’ve established by now that it’s the year of Bryce Harper. He’s the current major-league leader in Wins Above Replacement, and in case you’re not a real big fan of WAR, Harper’s also the leader in wRC+, and wOBA, and slugging percentage. This is the year we’ve been waiting for, and this is the year that makes it exponentially less silly to draw comparisons between Harper and Mike Trout. This healthy version of Harper has climbed within sight of his ceiling, and he’s still 22 years old. He’s younger than Kris Bryant, Joc Pederson, Jorge Soler, and Noah Syndergaard. Harper-is-young facts are the oldest of hats, but then, they’re almost as old as Bryce Harper, who is young.

Harper’s been written about. We’ve all taken our turns, digging into his breakout that at this point appears undeniable. No one would dare pass up an opportunity to get into detail on baseball’s newest emerging superstar, so by now you should consider yourself mostly informed. Yet now I feel like there’s more that needs to be added. Since getting hot, Harper hasn’t really cooled off. He has, however, changed what he’s been doing. You could say he’s performed more like himself.

Read the rest of this entry »

We all know, entering the season, that the WAR leaderboards in the early part of the year reveal less about the players contained within them than those same WAR leaderboards at the end of the year. That knowledge doesn’t stop me, personally, from compulsively looking at the leaderboards just as soon as the season begins. Remember Freddy Galvis? He was tied for the National League lead among shortstops with 0.9 WAR — and “on pace” for a great season at the end of April. A month of replacement-level production has placed him considerably lower among major-league shortstops. What about Devon Travis? At the end of April, his 1.4 WAR was sixth in all of baseball. Unfortunately, an injury slowed him down and he has been unable to add to his impressive April totals.

Now that we have reached the second week of June, the leaderboards begin to look a little more familiar. Mike Trout, Josh Donaldson, and Paul Goldschmidt have continued great runs of production. Bryce Harper has emerged and Jason Kipnis has returned to form after a poor 2014 season. There are still surprises at this point, though. The production of Harper and Kipnis was not expected to reach these levels, Joc Pederson has been far more impressive than anyone could have expected, and Dee Gordon is still slapping and running his way into the top ten. We will see more changes as the season wears on, providing a more accurate depiction of player value as more games are played. However, since we are all looking at the leaderboards now, it might be worthwhile to point out a few anomalies in WAR totals due to the small sample sizes we have with defensive statistics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hitting and pitching may seem equally complicated, but consider this: when it comes to hitting, you have to use both of your hands in one place. By necessity, that adds a wrinkle, and can make hitting analysis difficult. In order to focus on something we can bite off and digest, let’s just ask Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Joc Pederson what they think about the top hand.

Read the rest of this entry »