Since the beginning of the 2016 season, four pitchers who have thrown 100-or-more innings have an ERA under 2.00. Three of them — Zach Britton (1.38), Andrew Miller (1.72), Kenley Jansen (1.75) — rank among the most-accomplished bullpen arms in the game. The other name on the list might surprise you.

Since making his big-league debut on May 30, 2016, Baltimore Orioles left-hander Richard Bleier has boasted a 1.84 ERA in 112-and-two-thirds innings.

Bleier’s under-the-radar effectiveness has come over the course of 103 relief appearances, the first 23 of which came with the New York Yankees. His efforts went unappreciated in the Bronx. Despite a solid showing — five earned runs allowed in 23 frames — the Bombers unceremoniously swapped Bleier to Baltimore for a PTBNL or cash considerations in February of last year.

The 31-year-old southpaw attributes an August 2016 addition to his repertoire for his late-bloomer breakthrough. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the ninth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Brad Brach, Daniel Mengden, and Kirby Yates— on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Brad Brach (Orioles) on His Changeup

“”It’s weird. In college, my changeup was probably my best pitch, but when I got to pro ball [in 2008] I wasn’t able throw it. I don’t know if it was the minor-league balls or what, but I kept cutting it all the time. It was hard for me to throw strikes with it, so I pretty much got rid of it and started throwing a splitter.

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Brad Keller is having an impressive rookie season with the Kansas City Royals. Pumping fastballs with a bulldog mentality, the 22-year-old right-hander has appeared in 18 games and has a 1.96 ERA. He’s not afraid to challenge big-league hitters. Substantiating KC skipper Ned Yost’s assertion that he’s “been able to come in and bang strikes on the attack,” Keller has issued just five free passes in 18-and-a-third innings of work.

His path to the Kansas City bullpen was roundabout. In retrospect, it was also only a matter of time before he got there.

Drafted out of a Flowery Beach, Georgia high school by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2013, Keller changed addresses twice in a 15-minute stretch during December’s Rule 5 draft.

“My agent called to say, ‘Hey, the Reds picked you up in the Rule 5,’” explained Keller. “I hung up the phone, called my parents, called my brother, and as soon as I hung up my agent called again. ‘Hey, you just got traded to the Royals.’ Then I had to pick up the phone and call everybody back.”

Keller’s next conversation was with the D-Backs — “they told me everything that was going down” — and soon thereafter Royals assistant GM Scott Sharp called to welcome him to his new organization. A similar call almost came four years earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of us have jobs. All of us have lives. And one thing that’s true about any job, or about any life, is that sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just don’t have it. Maybe you’re groggy, maybe you’re irritable, maybe you’ve got brain fog, maybe you have a headache. For whatever reason, there are simply bad days, and they can happen at random. They can come right after normal days, and they can come right after great ones. It’s all part of the experience of existence. You learn not to let the bad days define you.

Many of us have jobs, and all of us have lives, but few of us are performers. The average employee, when necessary, can hide herself or put forth a reduced effort. You can make yourself scarce, or even call in sick. If you’re just having a regular weekend day in the dumps, you can choose to stay in, to not engage with the world. Everyone has the right to bad days, and most people have the flexibility to more or less live their bad days in private. Other people don’t have to know when you’re off.

Performers, entertainers, have no such luxury. The responsibility is to perform for an audience, an audience that will quickly realize if something’s not right. The pressure to do well is ever-present, because, one way or another, you’re going to have to do something, and the people will judge you if what you do isn’t good. The stakes can be frightening, even paralyzing, because there’s no option to hide when you’re a performer. A performer like Dylan Bundy.

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This offseason, I was tasked with preparing a writeup of right fielders in the game of major-league baseball. That was quite a difficult exercise, for it requires one to predict the future, and soothsayers are, at least to my knowledge, mythical. Still, I was quite confident when I wrote this:

There are those people who believe that Nick Markakis will make a run at 3,000 hits and the Hall of Fame. I am not among those people. Granted, Markakis has compiled 2,052 hits in his big-league career. That’s good! But Markakis, now at 34, is not good. Not at all. In fact, he really hasn’t been good since 2010. Since then, Markakis’s WAR has gone 1.4, 1.6, -0.2, 2.5, 1.5, 1.1, 0.9. In other words, of Markakis’ 25.3 career WAR, almost 17 were accrued in the first five years of his career.

Markakis hasn’t been even a league-average hitter since 2015, and that year he hit three (3) home runs. He hasn’t been even an average defensive outfielder since 2008. He hasn’t added value on the basepaths since 2009. In 2017, Markakis was below average against righties (97 wRC+) as well as lefties (91 wRC+), and his only remaining plus tool is his plate discipline and ability to draw walks. That’s all that separates Markakis from being a replacement-level player, and the projections aren’t optimistic about that, either. Markakis isn’t going to the Hall of Fame because he probably won’t get a big-league deal this offseason.

Welp.

Nick Markakis must have read that, because he has looked like a Hall of Famer so far this year. Entering Sunday, Markakis, who is 34, was slashing .344/.428/.550 (all career bests) with a 169 (career-best) wRC+. He also appears to have turned around his play afield, too, posting positive defensive numbers (that is, UZR and positional adjustment combined) for the first time since the Bush administration (2008). Nick Markakis, in 2018, has been worth roughly as many wins as his 2016 and 2017 combined.

What the hell has gotten into Nick Markakis?

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Tanking is a problem. Professional sports like baseball are built on the assumption that both sides are trying to win. Organizations putting forth less than their best efforts hurts the integrity of the sport and provides fans with little reason to engage. That said, the perception of tanking might have overtaken the reality of late. Competitive imbalance is not the same as tanking. Sometimes teams are just bad, even if they are trying not to be.

Tanking concerns are not new. Two years ago, just after the Astros and Cubs had turned their teams around, the Phillies were attempting to dismantle their roster by trading Cole Hamels. The Braves had traded multiple players away from a team that had been competitive. The Brewers, who traded away Carlos Gomez, would soon do the same with Jonathan Lucroy after he rebuilt his trade value.

The Braves, Brewers, and Phillies all sold off whatever assets they could. Two years later, though, those clubs aren’t mired in last place. Rather, they’re a combined 54-37 and projected to win around 80 games each this season in what figures to be a competitive year for each. While the Braves and Phillies could and/or should have done more this offseason to improve their rosters, neither resorted to an extreme level of failure, and the teams are better today than they would have been had they not rebuilt. While accusations of tanking dogged each, none of those clubs descended as far as either the Astros or Cubs. None came close to the NBA-style tank jobs many feared.

One might suspect that I’ve cherry-picked the three clubs mentioned above, purposely selecting teams with surprising early-season success to prop up a point about the relatively innocuous effects of tanking. That’s not what I’ve done, though. Rather, I’ve highlighted the three teams Buster Olney cited by name two years ago — and which Dave Cameron also addressed — in a piece on tanking.

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At the beginning of every season, each team has at least some kind of chance of eventually making playoffs. At the start of the present season, for example, the Orioles featured about a 5% probability of making the postseason in some form.

Those odds aren’t great. That said, there’s recent precedent for club’s succeeding from that modest starting point. Last season, the Rockies started their campaign with about a 10% shot at October. The Arizona Diamondbacks, meanwhile, were at 8%, while the Minnesota Twins begin with about a 5% probability of reaching the playoffs, just like this season’s Orioles. The Rockies and Diamondbacks got off to hot starts and jumped their chances up to around one-in-three within a few weeks. The Twins hung around .500 for a while. keeping their odds steady for a time. When no other challenger emerged for the second Wild Card, they claimed it almost by default.

The Orioles, on the other hand, are following a different trajectory. They’ve begun the season 6-17 and have lost whatever margin for error they possessed. And while the calendar hasn’t even flipped to May, it’s likely time for them to look ahead at the long-term health of the club. That means finding the best possible package for superstar Manny Machado.

Before we get to Machado, specifically, let’s consider Baltimore’s place in the standings a bit more thoroughly. The Orioles started off this season with a reasonable shot at the playoffs. As noted, however, they’ve gotten off to an awful start. That awful start has already rendered their long-ish playoff odds essentially non-existent. Here’s what their playoff-odds graph looks like since the beginning of the season.

It’s possible that graph doesn’t really do the odds justice, so here is another graph showing the odds as their chances of making it to the playoffs. For example, at the beginning of the year, the Orioles had a 5% chance of making the playoffs, which we will say is a 1-in-20. If they had a 2% chance, we’d say that is a 1-in-50 shot. Here’s how the graph has changed since the beginning of the season.

The Orioles’ chances of making the playoffs are down to about 1 in 1,000. If you prefer to look at things in terms of wins, you’d find that Baltimore is currently projected to win about 45% of the rest of their games — equivalent to about 63 more victories — to get them up to 69 for the season. Needless to say, that won’t be enough to make the playoffs. We don’t know what is enough for the playoffs, but if we give the AL East to the Red Sox, the Central to Cleveland, and the West to the Astros, that still leaves the Angels, Blue Jays, and Yankees as viable candidates for the Wild Card — with the Twins not too far behind. Given the talent and relatively positive starts from those teams, it seems like 87-89 wins will be necessary to take the second Wild Card spot. That means the Orioles — expected to play like a 74-win team (out of 162) the rest of the way — would need to play like a 94-win team to make the postseason.

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Trey Mancini did some tinkering prior to the start of the season. Hoping to “limit a bit of pre-swing movement,” he decided to lower his leg kick. The Baltimore Orioles outfielder hit that way throughout the offseason, and he continued the experiment in spring training.

Then, about a week and a half before opening day, he returned to doing what feels natural.

“I am who I am,” Mancini told me last weekend. “The leg kick is just something that works for me — there’s a comfortability factor involved — so once I realized what I was trying didn’t feel totally right, I went back to my old one.”

Mancini felt that the lower kick disrupted his timing. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a slider in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the fourth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Andrew Cashner, Drew Pomeranz, and CC Sabathia — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Andrew Cashner (Orioles) on His Sinker

“I got cut with a knife in 2013, in the offseason. I cut the flexor tendon in my right thumb. That was when I really learned a sinker. After I got cut, I had to learn a new pitch.

“My slider wasn’t the same pitch after that. I had a hard time getting extension with it, getting out front. The cut healed, but the tendon was tight. I think it just took time for the tendon to lengthen. It’s a feel pitch and it just never felt the same. It took a long time, but I’ve got [the slider] back now.

“The good thing is that I gained another pitch. And the sinker isn’t just arm-side run. Once you can learn to locate it back-door, it’s almost like a reverse slider for s lefty. You throw it at the hip and it comes back.”

Drew Pomeranz (Red Sox) on his Curveball

“It would have to be my curveball. Everybody I play with is like, ‘How the hell do you throw that?’ That’s because I flick it forward. I don’t turn my wrist like a normal person does.

Read the rest of this entry »

CLEVELAND — This spring, I’ve briefly inhabited the clubhouses of some teams that aren’t expected to do very well in 2018. I’ve been in Sarasota, Florida, to visit the Orioles. I dropped by the road locker room at Progressive Field when the Tigers and Royals were guests there last week. There are no great expectations in Baltimore, Detroit, and Kansas City this spring.

The projection systems have given those clubs little chance at postseason contention. In fact, according to FanGraphs, those three clubs each featured a 0% chance of winning the World Series as of Opening Day. The same was true for a handful of other teams, as well.

Of course, these prognostications aren’t available only to the interested public. They reach the ears of on-field personnel, too. PECOTA forecasts appear on MLB Network’s preseason coverage. Some players even visit this very web site. Our projections have the Royals winning 71 games, the Tigers 70, and the White Sox 65 in the AL Central — or 25, 26, and 31 games, respectively, behind the Indians.

In an era increasingly populated almost entirely of super teams and tanking teams, there is theoretically less possibility of contention, less reason to hope, for teams forecast to finish lower in the standings.

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