Every year I have to remind myself that Gold Glove snubs aren’t worth getting worked up about. It’s exceedingly difficult to measure defense objectively, especially in a single season’s worth of games. It’s even harder for voters to make judgments about players’ defensive capabilities when they only watch them play a handful of games each year. Beyond that, the Gold Gloves have gone to “unworthy” players so often before that it’s foolish to be bothered by one more bad choice. Sometimes the wrong guy wins the Gold Glove, and that’s just how it goes. The players know it, the fans know it, and we all go on living.

Yet here I am, about to spend the next thousand or so words rattling on about how Jorge Mateo was snubbed for a Gold Glove. Because as troublesome as it is to evaluate defense, we do have some pretty great statistics available to help accomplish that task. And while Gold Gloves are awarded to undeserving fielders almost every season, they tend to go to those who need them the least: established stars with impressive offensive numbers. This year, the metrics make an ironclad case for Mateo at shortstop, and he would benefit from the recognition more than any of the three finalists. So against my better judgment, I’m here to write about a Gold Glove snub. If Rawlings won’t honor his dazzling defense, I’m going to have to do it myself. Read the rest of this entry »

Adley Rutschman batted .304 with a .581 slugging percentage against four-seam fastballs this season, and learning how to handle heaters up in the zone played a big part in that success. Prior to being drafted first overall by the Baltimore Orioles in 2019 out of Oregon State University, the 24-year-old catcher wasn’t used to being attacked with elevated offerings. That changed when he entered pro ball. As a result, Rutschman found himself having to make both mental and mechanical tweaks as a hitter, and he’s done so with aplomb. The switch-hitting catcher is coming off a rookie season during which he logged a 133 wRC+ with 49 extra-base hits in 470 plate appearances.

Rutschman discussed his up-in-the-zone approach when the Orioles visited Fenway Park in late September.

———

On adjusting to professional pitchers:
“Comparing the pitching styles of college versus pro ball, one of the biggest changes I’ve seen is guys pitching up in the zone. Another is that, analytically, teams are more so taking into account what guys do well and working off of those strengths. In college, I feel like how teams pitched was very program-dependent.

“Up here, if guys have a good four-seam fastball, they’re usually pitching up in the zone. If they’ve got a good two-seam fastball, they’re attacking you horizontally. That was a big adjustment, learning to cover top to bottom instead of just in and out. Not that guys here don’t ever thrown in and out. They will, so there’s more variation. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years before being hired to manage the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Joe Maddon interviewed for the job in Boston. The winter-of-2003 vetting by the then Red Sox decision-makers — a subject I broached with Maddon in a 2007 interview — didn’t bear fruit… but what if it had? Earlier this week, I asked the proud son of Hazleton, Pennsylvania what might have happened had he started his big-league managerial career in Boston.

“I don’t think it would have turned out as well,” responded Maddon, who spent nine years in Tampa before going on to manage the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Angels. “I wasn’t ready for that; I wasn’t ready for that market. Theo [Epstein] and Jed [Hoyer] made a great decision. Tito was the right guy.”

History bears that out. Four years removed from managing the Philadelphia Phillies for the same number of seasons, Terry Francona led the Red Sox to their first World Series title since 1918. While Maddon went on to win a World Series of his own, with the Cubs in 2016 — the team’s first since 1908 — hiring a first-year manager as Grady Little’s replacement wouldn’t have been in Boston’s best interests. Nor in Maddon’s.

“I needed more time to really develop what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it,” explained Maddon, whose managerial resume includes nine 90-plus-win seasons. “I really did need more of an expansion team than a tradition-based team at that point. I could experiment. I could try different things that weren’t very popular, or that nobody had thought about. I needed that wider berth, and the support that I got from Andrew [Friedman] at that particular time. So, thank God for unanswered prayers. I wanted the Red Sox job, but it was so much better for me to start out with the Devil Rays.” Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 996

We bring you a trio of AL East-flavored interviews this week as we find ourselves in the middle of the divisional playoff round.

• At the top of the show, David Laurila welcomes Eve Rosenbaum, assistant general manager for the Baltimore Orioles. The former director of baseball development, Rosenbaum shares how her responsibilities have changed in her new role as she puts much more focus on the major league club. We also hear about the Orioles’ player development machine, the details of how waiver wires and DFAs work, how the team is making pitchers better after acquiring them, what they saw in Jorge Mateo, and insight as to why they made so many transactions during this encouraging season. [5:30]
• After that, Jay Jaffe welcomes David Cone in his return to the podcast. The pair were both in attendance at Yankees-Guardians Game 1 on Tuesday night, and they discuss Gerrit Cole’s impressive performance and playoff legacy. Cole recently said being the ace of the Yankees is “the hardest job in the league,” and Cone offers his insight, adding that it can also be the most rewarding. The pair also discuss Cone’s own career (and Hall of Fame chances), and how things like pitch counts have changed the game over time. [31:24]
• Finally, David Laurila returns in the third act with Julian McWilliams, reporter for The Boston Globe. We get the story behind McWilliams’ Baseball-Reference page and short indy ball career, including how long it took him to realize he was joining a team in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The duo also talk about Xander Bogaerts‘ importance to Boston, the comparison between Rafael Devers and Matt Olson, making a comparison between Olson and Triston Casas, being in awe of Yordan Alvarez, and the difference in consistency versus championship success between the Yankees and Red Sox in recent years. [56:51]

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Riley Greene was 18 years old and only three months removed from being drafted fifth-overall when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in September 2019. Harking back to our earlier conversation, I asked the Detroit Tigers rookie outfielder what he knows now that he didn’t know then.

“When I first started, I didn’t really think about much,”replied Greene, who celebrated his 22nd birthday four days ago. “I kind of just went up there, and was free-swinging almost. I was a young kid who didn’t really know anything. Since then, I’ve come up with a routine and am more educated on what I need to do at the plate. I have a plan. Whether it works or not is up the baseball gods.”

The extent to which the baseball gods have been on his side is relative. Greene isn’t exactly setting the world on fire — he has a 100 wRC+ and five home runs in 400 plate appearances — but again, he’s been old enough to take a legal drink for barely over a year. He also came into the season with just 198 professional games under his belt, only 55 at the Triple-A level. His potential far exceeds his present.

In some respects, Greene is much the same player Detroit drafted in the first round out of Oviedo, Florida’s Paul J. Hagerty High School. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 1, one day after baseball’s no. 5 overall prospect made his major league debut, Dan Szymborski wrote that the Baltimore Orioles “showed mercy to minor league pitchers … officially calling up infielder Gunnar Henderson.” As my colleague pointed out, the 21-year-old left-handed hitter had slashed .297/.416/.531 with 19 home runs over 112 games between Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk. His wRC+ was a healthy 154.

Henderson has continued to impress at the big-league level. In 110 plate appearances with the O’s, the young slugger has punished pitchers to the tune of a 139 wRC+, with 12 of his 27 hits going for extra bases. He’s left the yard four times, with the latest of those blasts leaving his bat at 111.1 mph and traveling 428 feet into Fenway Park’s center field bleachers.

Henderson sat down to talk hitting on Tuesday, one day before he was named Baseball America’s Minor League Player of the Year.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with your evolution as a hitter. What do you know now that you didn’t when you were drafted by the Orioles [42nd overall in 2019 out of Selma, Alabama’s John T. Morgan Academy]?

Gunnar Henderson: “I would say that it’s the number of good pitches you get to hit. In high school, you’ll get multiple pitches to hit within an at-bat, and then as you progress, at each and every level, it’s less and less. Especially here in the big leagues. You really have to take your walks and not give in to what the pitcher wants you to do. You’ve got to hunt for that one pitch, because you might only get one, maybe two, a game.”

Laurila: How do you go about doing that? Read the rest of this entry »

Though he’s not the only reason that the Orioles are above .500 and still have a non-zero chance of claiming an AL Wild Card spot, Adley Rutschman has been at the center of Baltimore’s return to relevance. The top pick in the 2019 draft and the top prospect in the game entering this season has been nothing less than the Orioles’ best player. He’s already staked his claim as one of the game’s top catchers and put himself among notable historical company.

After splitting last season between Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk, the 24-year-old Rutschman began this season at High-A Aberdeen, not for performance reasons but because he was rehabbing a right triceps strain that he suffered in mid-March. He played five games there, starting on April 26, then three games at Bowie and 12 at Norfolk before being called up to the majors on May 21.

At the time, the Orioles were just 16–24 for the AL’s third-worst record. They were already 13 games behind the Yankees in the AL East race and 5.5 games out of the third Wild Card spot; their Playoff Odds registered at zero. Since then, they’ve gone 57–43 for the AL’s fourth-best record behind the Astros (65–35), Mariners (62–38), and Blue Jays (58–43), and ahead of the Yankees (57–46), Guardians (57–46), and Rays (55–45) — right in the middle of the six teams that would qualify for the playoffs if they began today.

The Orioles have improved markedly on both sides of the ball since Rutschman’s debut. Not all of that can be attributed to him, but when it comes to the team’s catching situation, the bar for upgrades was particularly low. Consider that Robinson Chirinos and Anthony Bemboom combined to “hit” .125/.233/.211 for a 32 wRC+ through May 20; Rutschman has replaced that by hitting a robust .251/.358/.442 for a 131 wRC+. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the change in catchers alone (which includes Chirinos’ continued work as a backup) was worth about 0.44 runs per game on the offensive side: Chirinos and Bemboom combined to produce all of five Weighted Runs Created in 40 games (0.13 per game) where Rutschman and Chirinos have produced 51 in 90 games (0.57 per game). That’ll turn your season around.

Rutschman has been a boon on the defensive side as well. The framing-inclusive version of Defensive Runs Saved, which Baseball Reference publishes but does not use in its WAR calculations, credits the new guy with being 16 runs above average, second in the majors behind only Jose Trevino; Chirinos, at 10 runs below average, is third-worst (Bemboom is right at average). By Baseball Prospectus’ measure of catcher defense, Rutschman (7.3 runs) ranks 12th in the majors, and Chirinos (-15.0) is second-to-last, with Bemboom (0.1) right at average. FanGraphs’ measure of framing runs echos those two estimates: Rutschman fourth overall at 6.3 runs, Bemboom at 0.1, and Chirinos second-to-last at -12.8. Again using a back-of-the-envelope estimate, and assuming Chirinos has been uniformly subpar across the season (we don’t have defensive splits), the upgrade in catcher defense has been worth another 0.17 runs per game. That takes us to a swing of about a 0.61 runs per game by my admittedly rough estimate — and we haven’t even begun to discuss all of those Orioles pitchers outperforming their projections. That’s a story for another day.

Though he collected a triple in his major league debut and a single the next night, Rutschman started rather slowly, hitting just .143/.226/.196 (23 wRC+) though his first 15 games. He’s ramped up to .274/.384/.494 (152 wRC+) over the past three months, good enough to place in the majors’ top 20 in that admittedly arbitrary stretch of time.

Beyond his first few weeks in the majors, only twice has Rutschman failed to produce a 100 wRC+ over a 15-game span, and even then he wasn’t far off, with a 95 wRC+ around the 45-game mark and a 98 wRC+ at the 86-game mark. In an offense that can use all the help it can get, he’s been the team’s best hitter. Having said that, it’s worth noting that the 6-foot-2 switch-hitter has struggled mightily against lefties, hitting just .164/.303/.233 (64 wRC+) without a homer in 89 PA. Against righties, he’s raked at a .276/.375/.504 (152 wRC+) clip, with 10 homers in 288 PA. His platoon splits largely went unremarked upon as a prospect, probably because he hit .350/.439/.621 in 165 PA against lefties last year, though he fell to .169/.306/.225 in 108 PA this year before being called up. If there’s an area where he needs work, it’s this.

I’ll get back to the splits, but what stands out most on the offensive side is Rutschman’s exceptional command of the strike zone, with a 24.8% chase rate and 91.2% zone contact rate; those are in the 89th and 88th percentiles, respectively. His 6.4% swinging-strike rate, meanwhile, is in the 90th percentile. Overall, he’s walking 13.5% of the time and striking out just 17.8% of the time. On the other hand, Rutschman’s contact stats are less impressive, and rather anemic when he’s hitting righty:

Percentile-wise, only Rutschman’s barrel rate and xwOBA are above average, the latter thanks mainly to his plate discipline. One factor in those splits is that he pulls the ball quite a lot (46.3% overall) and has faced the shift on about 95% of his balls in play. He’s less pull-happy as a lefty, less prone to hitting the ball on the ground, and handles the shift pretty well. As a righty, that’s not the case:

Given the coming rule change regarding defensive positioning, it will be interesting to see how much this affects Rutschman’s production; I don’t think he’ll bemoan the prohibition of infield shifts, to say the least.

With the caveat that the sample sizes for the bookend months are about half the size as the full ones even if I don’t split them by handedness, you can get an idea of Rutschman’s improvement against various pitch groups:

Rutschman struggled against fastballs initially but soon was managing an xwOBA in the neighborhood of .400 against them and lately has been even better. In all, he’s seven runs above average against four-seamers according to Statcast, and two above against sinkers. As he’s settled in, he’s improved considerably against offspeed stuff, though he’s been three runs below average against changeups overall. He’s had trouble with the curve (three runs below average) but not the slider (three above).

Even given his late arrival and the fact that there are still about three weeks to go in the season, Rutschman is third in WAR among catchers, behind only J.T. Realmuto (5.6 WAR) and Sean Murphy (4.6 WAR), and both of them have at least 100 more plate appearances. Meanwhile, he’s put together one of the great rookie seasons for a catcher:

I’ve highlighted the WARs of catchers for whom we have pitch-framing data (2008 onward), making it easier if you want to limit the comparison to more contemporary catchers. It’s worth noting that Baseball Prospectus’ framing data, which goes back further than ours using Max Marchi’s retroframing methodology, credits Mauer with an additional 13.2 framing runs in 2005 and Piazza with an additional 8.9 runs in 1993 — about an extra 1.3 WAR for the former and 0.9 for the latter. Rutschman isn’t in Piazza’s league as a rookie, but he’s dead even with Posey in less playing time and not that far behind the framing-inclusive measure of Mauer, who had about 47% more playing time. Piazza is already in Cooperstown, and the other two should be once they become eligible. I’m not suggesting that Rutschman — who’s about the same age as the rookie Piazza was (both were in their age-24 seasons), about a year older than Posey, and about two years older than Mauer — is headed to the Hall of Fame just yet, but as points of comparison go, he could hardly do better.

As for whether Rutschman will take home this year’s AL Rookie of the Year honors, he trails Julio Rodríguez in WAR (4.5 to 4.0), but the Mariners’ center fielder has about a 40% advantage in playing time and is going to wind up with more impressive offensive numbers; he already has 25 homers, 24 steals, and a 141 wRC+. I suspect he’ll take home the hardware, but given Rutschman’s impact on the Orioles’ season, they ought to be quite pleased with the way their top draft pick from three years ago is panning out.

The Orioles showed mercy to minor league pitchers this week, officially calling up infielder Gunnar Henderson, relieving those hurlers of the terrible burden of having to pitch to him. The team’s top prospect wasted little time making his impact felt, hitting his first major league home run in his second time up at the plate, a long drive off Cleveland starter Triston McKenzie. And if the ZiPS projections are to be believed, adding Henderson down the stretch is about as valuable an offensive boost as anyone made this summer, with the obvious exception of a certain southern California team sporting mustard-and-brown colors.

So just how good is Henderson? That’s a question that has shifted notably over the course of the minor league season. If you go back to the winter, he was considered an excellent prospect, ranking 66th in the FanGraphs Top 100 list and 53rd in the ZiPS Top 100. We weren’t outliers, either; among others, Keith Law at The Athletic and Baseball Prospectus also put him in their top 100s.

Henderson’s stock wasn’t poorly valued, but it shot up so quickly this year that you might think that it was a Reddit meme stonk like GameStop and AMC. Minor league translation printer goes brrr! Before the season, ZiPS only projected Henderson to amass 1.5 WAR in 2023 with a wRC+ of 87. We’ll get to that updated 2023 projection in a minute; let’s just say for now that it’s better.

The improvements made by Henderson in the minors this year were across the board, from power to plate discipline to defense. Combining his performances for Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk, you get an overall line of .297/.416/.531 with 19 homers and 22 stolen bases in 112 games. That would be enough to make him the best first base prospect in baseball, considering he didn’t turn 21 until late June, but as a player who can legitimately play shortstop, that’s the kind of performance that puts you in the ultra-elite category. Read the rest of this entry »

At this point, it’s becoming a meme. The Orioles chug along, at or around .500, and our playoff odds continue to say that they’ll almost certainly miss postseason play. Across the internet, sites like Baseball Reference and FiveThirtyEight give them a higher chance. The headlines write themselves: “Why doesn’t FanGraphs believe in the Orioles?”

Just to give you an example, after the games of July 29, the Orioles were 51–49. Baseball Reference gave them a 34% chance of reaching the playoffs; we gave them a 4.6% chance. Ten days later, on August 8, Baseball Prospectus pegged them at 22.2% while we had them at 5.4%. On August 11, FiveThirtyEight estimated their playoff odds at 16%; we had those odds at 5.7%. Another week later, on August 19, Baseball Reference pegged them at 35.5% to reach the playoffs; we gave them a 4% chance. You can snapshot whatever day you’d like and you’d reach the same conclusion: we don’t think the Orioles are very likely to make the playoffs, while other outlets do.

Now, we’re getting down to brass tacks. The Orioles are 68–61 after Wednesday’s games. Baseball Reference thinks they are 43.6% to reach the postseason. FiveThirtyEight isn’t quite so optimistic, but still gives them 23% odds, while Baseball Prospectus has them at 29.9%. Here at FanGraphs, we’re down at 6.6%, even after they called up top prospect Gunnar Henderson. Why don’t we believe? Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles were nine games under. 500 when I talked to Jordan Lyles in late May, and they were only a smattering of games better when the veteran right-hander was featured here in Sunday Notes on June 26. Not much changed over a month’s time. Moreover, most signs pointed to the rebuilding Birds’ going on to have a sixth straight losing season.

A revisiting of what I wrote seven weeks ago is in order. Not only has Baltimore morphed into one of baseball’s hottest teams, the crux of that column was Lyles’s bad-club background. Now in his 12th big-league season, the journeyman hurler came into the current campaign having never played a full year with a team that finished above .500.

That might be about to change. With 24 wins in their last 33 games, the Orioles went into last night with a record of 59-53, in third place in the American League East and in possession of the final wildcard slot. Earlier this week, I asked Lyles about the team’s unexpected ascent in the standings.

“When we talked, there was a different atmosphere around our ball club, our clubhouse,” said Lyles. “Things definitely turned around and got moving in a better direction for us. It’s been a joyful ride. It’s been fun to see these young guys start to grow, and to grow quickly.”

Amid that growth, the Orioles front office saw fit to take one step backward in hopes of taking two steps forward. In moves that weren’t well-received by much of the fan base, Baltimore traded Trey Mancini and Jorge Lopez. On back-to-back days, an impact bat and a closer departed town in exchange for a further influx of promising, yet mostly-unproven, talent. Read the rest of this entry »