About two weeks ago, Kyle Kishimoto wrote about a shift in the AL West race as the Astros, who had been trailing the Mariners all year, pulled level in the division. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t revisit a topic so soon, especially because Kyle was himself issuing an update to his own previous appraisal of Seattle’s success. But between Kyle’s two posts, the Mariners blew a 10-game division lead to Houston. And in the two weeks since then, well at the risk of steering directly into stereotype, let’s take a look at a graph.

On the morning of August 5, when Kyle’s second piece ran, the Mariners were still actually slight favorites to win the AL West. In the ensuing 15 days, their division title odds dropped by 43.4 percentage points, to just 10.8%. Seattle’s odds of making the playoffs in any fashion are now just 16.4%, which is down 41.6 points. Only three other teams have seen their playoff odds move even 20 points in either direction in that time. One is the Padres. The other two are the Astros and Royals, two of the major beneficiaries of the Mariners’ ongoing slide. Read the rest of this entry »

You can add two more stars to the game’s unfortunate tally of injured players, as Braves third baseman Austin Riley and Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte were both added to the 10-day injured list on Monday. Riley, who has been one of Atlanta’s hottest hitters after an ice-cold start to the 2024 season, was removed from Sunday’s game against the Angels after a 97-mph Jack Kochanowicz sinker went very high and very inside, connecting with his wrist. Marte’s injury appears less serious than Riley’s, but a re-aggravated sprained ankle has put him on the shelf at a key moment in Arizona’s playoff run.

When I ran the numbers on baseball’s most injured teams last week, Atlanta came out second in terms of the most lost potential value, “beaten” by only the Dodgers. Riley, who has gotten MVP votes in each of the last three seasons, has had a bit of a down year, posting a .256/.322/.461 slash line and 2.4 WAR, which represents his weakest performance since before his 2021 breakout. But even if he hasn’t had a particularly sterling season overall, he’s become very important lately, especially as the injuries have piled up and the rest of the team’s offense has swooned. Riley’s seasonal line was as low as .220/.288/.330 back in mid-June; he’d gone more than a month without a homer and had only hit three on the season. Since June 13, however, Riley has led Atlanta’s lineup in WAR and hit 16 round-trippers:

Monday’s MRI, which revealed a broken wrist, puts Riley out of action for 6-8 weeks, meaning that unless the Braves go deep into the playoffs, his 2024 season is probably over. While there’s never a good time to lose a middle-of-the-order hitter, Riley’s loss comes at a particularly awkward point for the Braves, as their seven games against the division-leading Phillies over the next week-and-a-half likely represent their last, best chance to seize the NL East, long-shot though it may be. The Braves seem to have arrested their fall in the standings, winning five of their last seven, but they’re still barely clinging to the last Wild Card spot, as they’re only 1 1/2 games ahead of the Mets and 3 1/2 in front of the Giants.

The silver lining — or arguably a dull gray one — is that Gio Urshela was suddenly available in free agency after being released by the Detroit Tigers on Sunday; the Braves signed him to a major league deal earlier today. The problem, of course, is that the only reason Urshela was available is that he’s having such a poor season that nobody wanted to risk picking up the pro-rated dollars remaining on his one-year, $1.5 million contract. Urshela had a solid little peak, putting up a 118 wRC+ and 8.1 WAR for the Yankees and Twins from 2019 to 2022, but after a fractured pelvis in 2023 and a miserable .243/.286/.333 line this year, he appears to be on the downslope of his career.

While I still think Nacho Alvarez Jr. would have been the best replacement despite his weak debut stint, Atlanta appears to want to play it safer, opting for the veteran Urshela over Luke Williams and maybe a bit of Whit Merrifield if Ozzie Albies returns in September. Without the Riley injury, ZiPS projected a 73% chance of the Braves holding off the Mets and Giants and making the playoffs; replacing Riley with Urshela drops that probability to 68%, while playing mostly Williams at third would cause it to dip a little further to 67%. Despite Urshela only being projected at replacement level or a hair above, paying $400,000 for 1% of a playoff spot is actually a reasonable value. To make room for Urshela on the 40-man roster, A.J. Minter, who is out with hip surgery, was moved to the 60-day IL. However, that doesn’t change the team’s projection, as I had already baked in the assumption that, at best, Minter was very likely to only get a few outings in the season’s final days.

As I mentioned above, Ketel Marte’s injury is far less serious than Riley’s. Marte originally sprained his ankle on August 10 after a Garrett Stubbs slide into second base. The Diamondbacks didn’t place him on the IL, opting to use him carefully in the last week, with a couple late-inning appearances and a game at DH. They’re taking no chances this time, though, and the hope is that he’ll be able to make a quick return after taking some time to recuperate.

As with Riley’s injury, Marte’s comes at a key point in the season for his team. After treading water earlier this season, the Diamondbacks have been one of baseball’s hottest teams, and along with the Padres, they’ve actually made the Dodgers feel at least mildly uncomfortable at the top of the NL West. Before the injury, Marte had been on the hottest run of his career, hitting .333/.422/.652 with 20 homers since the start of June. His 3.9 WAR over that timeframe ranked behind only Francisco Lindor’s 4.2 WAR among NL hitters. Combined with Arizona’s surge, Marte was putting together a reasonable MVP case. Assuming he only requires a minimum stay on the IL, the significant downgrade to Kevin Newman doesn’t represent a serious hit to the Snakes’ playoff hopes; ZiPS has them at 90% odds to make the playoffs, only a 0.5% drop from their projection without the injury. In the best-case scenario, the Diamondbacks would get Marte back just in time for a key four-game series against the Dodgers next week, their last opportunity to directly inflict punishment on their division rival in the standings.

The injuries to Riley and Marte don’t doom their teams to 2024 oblivion, but they do make their respective team’s challenges this year a bit more daunting. But hey, nobody said it would be easy.

I will always have an affinity for hitters with a knack for vertical bat variability. To effectively cover pitches at different heights in the strike zone, a hitter has to vary the angle of their bat relative to the ground to create lift. To hit a pitch at the top of the zone for a line drive, the bat should be flatter, and to lift a pitch at the bottom of the zone for a line drive, the bat should be steeper. It’s a simple concept that some hitters can execute with more consistency than others. Jackson Merrill is one of those guys.

When I first really started getting into the mechanics of hitting, Mike Trout was the dude who made it easy to understand vertical bat variability. Vintage Trout’s lower half looked almost identical across all swings, but depending on the height of the pitch, his entire torso angle would adjust. Through the years, players like Michael Brantley, Freddie Freeman, and Trea Turner have all executed impressive levels of vertical bat variability, too. And unsurprisingly, they all maintained (or still do) strikeout rates well below the league average with great gap-to-gap line drive skills. When Eric Longenhagen first compared Merrill’s swing to that of Brantley, I became very impatient anticipating what the Padres outfielder would do in the big leagues. So far, he’s exceeded expectations.

Through his first 121 career games, Merrill has hit for a 125 wRC+ with a .290/.321/.484 slash line. Over the past month, he’s found his power stroke to go along with his superb line drive swing, and during that span, he’s been one of the best hitters in baseball, with a 182 wRC+ across 104 plate appearances. It’s come at a good time for the Padres, who have picked it up and are only three games behind the NL West-leading Dodgers.

Merrill’s sound mechanics and production at the plate are all the more impressive considering that he is still just a 21-year-old rookie who is also learning a new position. Although his outfield experience in the minors was limited to 45 innings in left field last year at Double-A, he’s already turned into one of the top defensive center fielders in the game (6 OAA).

His ability to go down and get it with the best of them while still covering the top of the strike zone is the key to his success so early in his career. Below is a table highlighting his performances in both the upper and lower thirds of the zone:

Elite hitters have all different shapes of production. Juan Soto mashes everything at the top of the zone, Aaron Judge crushes everything in the heart, and Yordan Alvarez demolishes everything down low. But it’s uncommon for hitters to be this productive on both high and low pitches. In fact, among the 194 hitters who’ve seen 1,250 pitches this season, only two other players have xwOBAs that rank in the top 30 on pitches in both the upper and lower thirds of the zone, Ketel Marte and Marcell Ozuna, who are two of the best 11 hitters in the game by wRC+. Merrill and Ozuna are the only two hitters with top-30 xwOBAs in all three vertical thirds.

As I said before, a hitter needs to employ a flatter swing path at the top of the zone and a steeper one at the bottom. Sounds easy enough, but the tricky part is generating enough bat speed across a range of bat angles to make it work from a damage perspective while maintaining the body control to make contact. What’s notable here is how Merrill does this: Unlike most hitters, Merrill keeps his bat vertically oriented against low and high pitches, which allows him create enough lift to shoot the gaps no matter the height of the pitch. It’s a balance of strength and finesse that Merrill seems to have mastered.

I could throw a bunch of numbers at you to explain this particular skill, but the best way to understand this is by watching what he does with his body and bat. Let’s take a look:

Upper Third

Before watching the lower third swings, here are a few quick notes. He maintains his posture and shoulder plane during all three of these swings. Because of that, he keeps his bat on the same vertical plane as these pitches so he can square up the bottom part of the baseball to create backspin but not get so far under it that he pops them up. Also, his torso backbend on the second swing is fantastic. This move is most noticeable from a hitter like Shohei Ohtani, who right before contact bends his upper body backward to give his barrel space to get behind the ball. Few hitters have the necessary upper body or t-spine flexibility to do this; Merrill is one of them. Okay, now onto some swings in the lower third:

Lower Third

Pay attention to his back shoulder on each of these swings. Merrill’s body and bat are moving together as he swings, and he uses his back shoulder as a guide to get his barrel on plane with pitches in the lower third. Whether it’s a back-foot breaking ball or a dotted heater away, his back shoulder angle lines up his swing.

The important thing to take away from all of this is Merrill has a great understanding of how to use his upper body to get his bat on plane with pitches at different heights. That’s the elite skill carrying his game right now. He has the talent to develop additional tools and sharpen the ones he currently owns as he gains more experience. He’s already started tapping into his power more over the last month or so. He still chases too many pitches and struggles against lefties, albeit in a small sample of plate appearances (70 wRC+, 127 PA), but again, he is 21 and figuring things out in his first big league season. What we’re seeing from him right now is essentially his starting point as a hitter, and that’s really exciting.

Pedro Avila might not strike you as exceptional. He’s mostly on mop-up duty in the Guardians bullpen, hoovering up low-leverage innings. His sinker was deemed the “most normal” in baseball by Leo Morgenstern earlier this year. And his 3.60 ERA and 3.92 FIP is right around average for major league relievers.

But behind this veneer of normalcy lies the weirdest changeup in baseball.

Below is a plot of the average vertical and horizontal moment of every pitcher’s changeup during the 2024 season (minimum 50 changeups, data as of August 15, vertical movement measured without gravity). You have a 50/50 shot of guessing which one is Avila’s:

The brown dot on the left of my beautifully drawn circle is Logan Allen’s changeup, Avila’s erstwhile teammate. Michael Baumann wrote about Allen’s “weird-ass changeup” last July, noting that the pitch had the least horizontal movement of any major league changeup in the 2023 season. (Unfortunately, despite Michael’s request, no “Weird-Ass Changeup World Tour” tag has since been added to the CMS.) The purple dot on the right is Avila’s changeup, which is averaging even less horizontal movement than Allen’s.

But the average movement profile doesn’t fully capture what’s weird about Avila’s changeup. To truly appreciate the weirdness, it is necessary to take a look at why it moves like that.

It starts with his crazy grip. Look at this grip!

He aligns his thumb and pointer finger in a quasi-circle-change grip while pressing on the exact opposite side of the ball with his other three fingers. The funky grip — a circle-change/splitter/forkball/vulcan-change hybrid — informs the way the ball comes out of his hand.

Scott Firth, a former performance coordinator at Tread Athletics, described Avila’s grip in a tweet from January 2023 and the movement profile that results from it.

“Looks like fosh/modified box grip, some guys will cut it hard with 3 fingers on outer part of ball,” Firth wrote. “Low spin low efficiency could catch ssw [seam-shifted wake] either direction depending on cw [clockwise] or ccw gyro.”

The contradictory forces of fade from the pronation and cut from the pressure of his three fingers results in chaos; because of that grip, the ball comes off the pointer finger and middle finger simultaneously, sending the pitch downward:

Avila’s changeup almost imitates a knuckleball in the randomness of its spin axis. A helpful way to understand this is by looking at Avila’s spin-based movement and observed movement. The spin-based movement is the orientation directly after release; the observed movement is the implied axis based on the movement of the pitch. (When the spin-based orientation does not match the observed orientation, it is generally assumed that “seam-shifted wake” is responsible. More on that later.)

The observed spin axis on Avila’s changeup nearly goes around the entire clock. Check out the green bars on the graphic below:

Avila’s changeup might ultimately move similarly to Allen’s from a “shape” perspective, but the aesthetic experience from the hitter’s vantage point is distinct. It’s a complete outlier from the perspective of spin efficiency, defined as the percentage of spin that is either sidespin or backspin/topspin. The median changeup is 95% spin efficient. Allen’s changeup has 72% spin efficiency, one of the lowest marks in baseball. Avila’s changeup checks in at 24% (!!) spin efficiency, which is more like a typical gyro slider than any changeup.

The Guardians broadcast picked up on this following a slow-motion replay of an Avila changeup. After watching the replay, Guardians color commentator Rick Manning remarked that “It’s almost like a forkball but he spins it like a slider.”

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this is not the traditional way to throw a changeup. Driveline, for instance, published an article showing five different grips for aspiring changeup-throwers to try; none of them resemble Avila’s.

The classic changeup is thrown with heavy pronation. Think Logan Webb’s changeup fading down and away from a left-handed hitter:

Logan Webb, Nasty 87mph Changeup. ?

7th K pic.twitter.com/TGSkcD98Pu

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 15, 2024

Some pitchers struggle to throw a changeup with heavy pronation. One key reason, as Noah Woodward pointed out in a March 2023 post, is that the act of “turning over” the ball is awkward for pitchers who don’t throw another pitch that requires turning over their wrist in the manner required of a Webb-esque changeup.

For pitchers like Tarik Skubal or Matthew Boyd with more of an inherent supination bias, the seam-shifted wake changeup is a way to throw an offspeed pitch without contorting their arms in uncomfortable directions.

“I throw a changeup just like a slider now, but using essentially the smooth part of the baseball to create no drag on one side, but seam is on the other side,” Boyd told MLB.com’s Jason Beck in March 2023. “And because of that, I get more movement than I did before, but the pattern of how my wrist is moving is like the other pitches. So it allows for the other pitches to be more consistent.”

Avila’s changeup does not fit neatly in either of these categories. It is, somehow, a pronated seam-shifted wake changeup. That explains why Avila leads the league in the gap between his changeup’s spin-based axis and his observed axis.

But that gap doesn’t tell the whole story. Most other pitchers have a similar pattern when their actual spin orientation deviates significantly from the “spin-based” orientation: It shifts to the left (or right) in a predictable pattern. Take Skubal’s seam-shifted wake changeup, for example. The “observed spin” is shifted to the left of the spin-based movement.

Avila’s changeup is not like that. Because of the heavy gyro spin that his grip produces, the pitch leaves the hand at somewhat random orientations and can either fade or cut, as the movement map of all his changeups in 2024 shows. Notice how the green dots (his changeups) can end up on either side of the pitch plot:

So Avila’s changeup is definitely weird, but is it good? It certainly produces some bizarre swings, even when it’s poorly located. Heliot Ramos, for one, looked flummoxed after whiffing on one middle-middle Avila changeup:

Avila’s changeup gets a lot of whiffs — among changeups thrown at least 100 times, his ranks in the 85th percentile in swinging strike percentage and the 78th percentile in whiffs per swing. On the other hand, he throws one out of every six changeups in the “waste” zone, which sort of makes sense to me — that grip feels prone to misfires. (Shout out to Alex Chamberlain’s pitch leaderboard for these stats.)

While Avila’s changeup has graded out as basically average from a run value perspective, I’m not always sure that run value is the best way to evaluate the quality of a given pitch. There are interaction effects between pitches — in other words, the thought of the changeup in the batter’s mind might improve the quality of his fastball — and Avila is using the changeup as his primary out-pitch and getting pretty good results.

Given that the Padres DFA’d Avila in April, this season looks like a success for him, and the changeup is without question a big part of all that. As always with pitching, weird is where you want to be.

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 we’ve covered in this column a few times, the only way to acquire major league players from other teams for the rest of the season is via waivers. We have yet to see an Angels-level dumping of impact players en masse this season, but there has still been some movement since the trade deadline passed. Let’s take a look at some of the notable players who changed teams recently, as well as some guys in DFA limbo who could get claimed in the coming days.

Read the rest of this entry »

On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on.

At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Earlier this week, Michael Baumann wrote about how Kirby Yates has a chance to join Craig Kimbrel and Wade Davis as only relievers in MLB history with multiple seasons of 40 or more appearances and an ERA south of 1.25. Five years after logging a 1.19 ERA over 60 outings with the San Diego Padres, the 37-year-old right-hander has come out of the Texas Rangers bullpen 44 times and has a 1.19 ERA.

I procured subject-specific quotes from Yates for my colleague’s article, but there were a few other perspectives I wanted to glean from him as well. That he has quietly put up better numbers than many people realize was one of them. For instance, since he began throwing his signature splitter in 2017, the underrated righty has a 36.0% strikeout rate that ranks sixth-best among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.

“It’s almost like a tale of two of two careers,” Yates said upon hearing that. “It’s before the split and then after the split. Now I’m getting into a situation where you could call it three careers in a sense — since [March 2021 Tommy John] surgery and how I’ve been coming back from that. Last year was good, but also kind of shaky. The two-and-a-half to three years off, I felt that. This year I feel more comfortable. I’ve felt like I could attack some things I needed to attack.”

Yates doesn’t feel that his splitter is quite as good as it was pre-surgery, although he does believe it is getting back to what it was. His fastball is another story. He told me that it’s never been better. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re speaking with someone from Toronto who doesn’t follow baseball, they can probably tell you two things about the Blue Jays. The first is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the best player on the team. The second is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. sucks.

The first point is pretty accurate, and it’s absolutely true this season — more on that in a moment. The second point is categorically false, but alas, such is the curse of superstardom. The player who has his face on posters all around the city is going to get plenty of credit when things go right, but he’s also going to shoulder an excessive amount of criticism when things go wrong. When you’re the guy starring in the Uncrustables ads, fans expect a crust-free performance on the field, too.

Guerrero made a name for himself in 2021, which was no easy task considering the man with whom he shares his name. Yet, with 48 home runs, 111 RBI, and a runner-up finish for AL MVP, Guerrero gave the average Torontonian a reason to talk about baseball for the first time since José Bautista was punched in the face. Then, Guerrero spent the next two years corroding his golden reputation. To be clear, no one who knows what they’re talking about ever thought he was a bad ballplayer — heck, he set a new record for the highest salary ever awarded in an arbitration hearing this past offseason — but his performance certainly went downhill. If all you were comparing him to was the best version of himself (like that motivational poster in your gym always tells you to do), he really was pretty disappointing last year: Read the rest of this entry »

As the man who inspired Brad Pitt’s most memorable role once said, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.” Assuming Billy Beane wasn’t explaining an October Metamucil purchase to a grocery store cashier who simply asked how his day was going, what Beane likely meant was that the statistics used to construct his major league rosters don’t accrue large enough samples during postseason series to eventually even out in his favor. Over the course of 162 games, a team’s production settles into a reasonable representation of the squad’s true talent. But zoom in on any random seven-game stretch and the team on the field might look like a bunch of dudes in baseball player cosplay.

What applies to team outcomes applies just as well to player outcomes. A player with a perfectly respectable stat line in the regular season might morph into a pumpkin as the calendar shifts to fall, or on the flip side, an unlikely hero may emerge from the ashes of a cruel summer and put the whole team on his back.

With the law of averages in mind, I’d always assumed that the more consistent hitters would be better positioned to perform well in the playoffs. My thinking went like this: The natural variation in these hitters’ performances would never wander too far from their season-long average, making them the safer, more predictable options. Whereas streaky hitters — the ones with high highs, low lows, and steep transitions between the two — would be too reliant on “getting hot at the right time” to be the type of hitter a front office should depend on in the postseason.

Reader, I was incorrect. Read the rest of this entry »