If you remember my writing earlier this season about Brent Honeywell Jr.’s changeup-screwball combo or Hurston Waldrep’s splitter, you can probably imagine how much I love a weird-ass changeup-like thing. So much so I’m starting to wonder if it might be worth it to ask Meg for a “Weird-Ass Changeup World Tour” tag in the CMS.

Until then, consider Logan Allen. No, the other Logan Allen. The one who came back up from the minors to replace Shane Bieber in Cleveland’s rotation and completely barbecued the Pirates on Tuesday night. Seriously: Five innings, no runs, one hit, one walk, eight strikeouts. That’s some heavy stuff.

The key to Allen’s whole shtick is his changeup, which is unlike any other pitch in baseball. It’s slow, even by the standards of a pitch that’s defined by its slowness: just 82.9 mph on average, though since he doesn’t throw very hard by modern standards, that’s not as extreme a number as it seems on first glance. What is extreme is the way the pitch moves. Read the rest of this entry »

The road has been long for Adbert Alzolay. Signed as an international free agent out of San Felix, Venezuela in 2012, the right-hander worked his way diligently through the Cubs’ minor league system as a starter, making homes everywhere from Eugene, Oregon to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and eventually rising as high as second on the Cubs’ prospect list as a 22-year-old in 2018, Wrigley squarely in sight. Since then, injuries have plagued him: first a lat injury ended his 2018 season that May, then more core complications that delayed the start of his 2019 campaign, and most recently, another lat issue that cost him nearly all of last year, limiting him to only six late-season outings out of the bullpen.

This spring, having played just one full season since his 2019 debut, Alzolay’s health was his “only goal” for 2023. For the first time, he was preparing to work out of the Cubs’ bullpen, an assignment that some former high starting pitching prospects don’t take favorably. But he was firmly on board. “I really wanted to be in the bullpen,” he told reporters. “I feel really comfortable, just bringing the best I have right away.”

His enthusiasm for the role has shown. In 34 relief outings, Alzolay has posted a 2.63 ERA, 2.66 FIP, and 3.17 xFIP with 10.10 K/9 and 1.54 BB/9, racking up 1.0 WAR in just 41.0 innings. His Savant percentile rankings have surged in the bullpen; from 2021 to 2023, he’s gone from the 56th percentile to the 91st in HardHit%, 36th to 88th in xBA, 23rd to 95th in xSLG, 32nd to 98th in xERA, and 15th to 93rd in barrel percentage. His .270 wOBA against is 54th among 370 pitchers qualifying for Statcast’s leaderboards, but that seems to be underselling him; his .245 xwOBA against is ninth. Read the rest of this entry »

To the extent that the term actually makes sense, Garrett Cooper might best be described as a professional hitter. Consistently solid yet never a star, the 32-year-old first baseman/DH has slashed .272/.341/.444 with a 116 wRC+ since becoming a mainstay in the Miami Marlins lineup in 2019. Establishing himself took time.

Selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft by the Milwaukee Brewers out of Auburn University, Cooper was subsequently swapped to the Yankees in July 2017 — he made his big league debut a day after being dealt — only to have New York flip him to the Fish that November. Six years later, the Los Angeles-area native is firmly ensconced in Miami as a middle-of-the-order cog on an up-and-coming team.

Cooper discussed his evolution as a hitter when the Marlins visited Fenway Park in late June.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your formative years in the game. How did you learn to hit?

Garrett Cooper: “I grew up in a family where I was the baby of seven kids and had four older brothers who played baseball. That certainly helped, and my dad also paid for hitting lessons, probably two or three times a week starting when I was 9-10 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

For the next two weeks, we’re going to spend a lot of time and energy debating Shohei Ohtani’s trade market, just in case the Angels continue to backslide and Arte Moreno can be extricated from his fortress of solitude and cajoled into trading his franchise player. And it should be so; Ohtani is the most interesting player in baseball, and once the trade deadline passes, I’m sure we’ll move on to talking about where he’ll land next year and how many hundreds of millions of dollars he’ll earn over the next decade.

But Ohtani is not the only free-agent-to-be who’s playing out the string on a disappointing team. As much as the Angels are taking on water, they’re not sunk yet. And the Padres are even less sunk than the Angels are. With that said, I’m sure they’re not happy to be in fourth place in their division during the last week of the Tour de France, with open questions about whether Blake Snell will be a part of the team’s future.

Snell obviously can’t do all that 60-homer pace stuff Ohtani does, but he’s going to be one of the most sought-after pitchers in the forthcoming free agent class. Read the rest of this entry »

I experience baseball in many different forms. Writing is obviously one of them. Watching (both in person and on television) is another. Playing doesn’t happen as much as I’d like to, but it’s still one of them. The last one, which has become the most accessible to me, is through data: performance, expected stats, projections, etc. Data serves as a conversation starter or a thought provoker for me, and I rely on it heavily in my writing to tell the story of a player’s triumphs or struggles, especially Statcast data.

When working with Statcast information, it’s important to understand the inputs that create the data points. For example, I know that xwOBA is formulated using a combination of exit velocity and launch angle (and sometimes sprint speed). Perhaps it would be helpful if there were more inputs such as batted ball spin or spray angle, or perhaps it would complicate things. But what is important is that I know those are not included in the formulation — knowledge that I can use when assessing players for whom those inputs could be statistically important. I’m specifically thinking of the profiles of Isaac Paredes and Cody Bellinger.

Neither Paredes nor Bellinger have big power in terms of raw exit velocity, and neither is a batting average king (although Bellinger is over .300 at this moment in time). Instead, they rely on consistent contact to the pull side in the air to make up for their lack of raw power. I have an idea in my head of what a good hitter is. One of my most general criteria is the ability to hit the ball consistently hard, but it’s important to leave wiggle room there so you don’t exclude the edge cases, like Bellinger and Paredes. Both are below the 20th percentile in terms of average exit velocity and below the 10th percentile in HardHit%, but both have ISOs over .200 with double-digit home runs and doubles. That’s unusual, but it brings me back to stressing the importance of spray angle for a certain group of hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Strider currently leads all qualified starters in strikeout rate. When I learned that bit of information, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, that tiny little guy’s on track to throw enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, good for him!”

But Strider is way out in front of the field. His K% is 38.9%; Kevin Gausman is second at 32.6%, with a small group of pitchers clustered behind him in the low 30s. Strider isn’t particularly walk-averse — his BB% is 40th-lowest among 67 qualified starters — and yet his K-BB% of 31.4% would be the fifth-best strikeout rate in the league.

I don’t want to say this is happening without anyone batting an eye — here we are, after all, batting our eyes at Strider’s strikeout rate. But we’ve become so inured to this kind of performance, and so quickly, that it’s worth taking a step back to consider the gravity of what he’s doing. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor May is a Miguel Cabrera fan. Moreover, he has some favorite Miggy moments. I learned as much when I caught up to the always-engaging 33-year-old right-hander on the Sunday leading into the All-Star break.

“I got my first jersey from another player in our last series,” said May, who broke into the big leagues with the Minnesota Twins in 2014 and now plays for the Oakland Athletics. “We were in Detroit and I got a Miggy Cabrera jersey signed. I’m not a huge memorabilia guy, but he was my first, ‘Oh wow, I’m in The Show.’ It was like, ‘That’s Miguel Cabrera in the box!’ He’s one of the greatest of this generation.”

Nine years later, both players are nearing the end of the line. Cabrera, whose career has him Cooperstown-bound, is set to retire after this season. May, whose accomplishments have been far more humble, faces an uncertain near-term future. He has a 5.32 ERA in the current campaign, as well as a career-low 17.0% K rate.

May’s post-playing-days future is media-focused, and he’s already begun establishing himself in that realm. The Longview, Washington native has been an active podcaster and streamer — gaming is a noteworthy interest, Pat McAfee a notable influence — and just this past week he was part of MLBNetwork Radio’s All-Star Game coverage. His newly-signed jersey is ticketed for his home studio. As May explained, “the background has been kind of sparse, and I wanted to make sure that baseball has a spot there, along with all the nerdy stuff I’m into, whenever I’m in front of the camera.”

May has pitched in front of ballpark cameras many times, and while that includes more than two dozen appearances against the Detroit Tigers, a few of his Miggy moments likely weren’t captured. Even if they were, they went unnoticed by the vast majority of viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Lance Lynn was phenomenal in his final start before the All-Star break, going seven innings, striking out 11 batters, and allowing just three baserunners. By game score, his outing against Toronto was among the top 20 starts of the year. But if you prefer to focus on factors solely within a pitcher’s control — strikeouts, walks, and home runs — it wasn’t even the best of Lynn’s season. By FIP, his most dominant performance was a 16-strikeout gem against the Mariners a few weeks prior. Over seven frames, he walked only two and kept everything in the ballpark. Even more impressive, all but one of his strikeouts came on a swing and miss, as Lynn collected 33 whiffs on the evening, the most by any pitcher in a single outing this season. His 16 strikeouts were also the most in a single game this year; no other pitcher has topped 13.

Lynn has two more double-digit strikeout games this year, one each against the Rays and the Twins. Only eight other pitchers have four or more double-digit strikeout games, and only four have multiple starts of seven-plus innings, double-digit strikeouts, two or fewer walks, and zero home runs: Kevin Gausman, Zac Gallen, Logan Webb, and Pablo López. (The White Sox, being the 2023 White Sox, went on to lose all four contests, but that’s hardly a reflection of Lynn’s efforts on the mound.) Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite kinds of baseball trade is the one that sends major league talent both ways, between teams ostensibly interested in being competitive, each giving from surpluses to meet immediate needs. It’s certainly the safer option for a front office just to take the passive route and stick with the guys you’ve got, but I appreciate the boldness of swapping a player who’s poised to contribute to your club for one you think might give you more, solve some piece of the positional puzzle, or be able to be a more significant part of your plans down the road.

Such was the case for the Marlins and Twins in January when Luis Arraez (who seems poised to defend his title) was dealt to Miami in exchange for Pablo López and prospects Jose Salas and Byron Chourio. This wasn’t a straight big leaguer-for-big leaguer swap, but both teams were trading for the present. López, 26 at the time, had been the Marlins’ second most productive starter in 2022 and a stalwart of their rotation for the better part of five seasons; the 25-year-old Arraez was coming off a batting title and had been one of the game’s truly elite contact hitters over four seasons of his own. The Twins needed pitching, the Marlins an offensive jolt, and a deal was struck.

If it weren’t a fun enough swap to begin with, it got better when López and Arraez represented their new clubs at the All-Star Game, with Arraez staying true to form with a 2-for-2 night on the winning NL side and López throwing a scoreless ninth inning for the AL. In doing so, the duo became the first pair of players to be dealt for one another and make the next season’s All-Star Game since Josh Hamilton and Edinson Vólquez, who were swapped by the Reds and Rangers in 2007 and emerged as All-Stars the following summer. Read the rest of this entry »

Dane Dunning is excelling in Texas. Now in his third season with the Texas Rangers after debuting with the Chicago White Sox in 2020, the 28-year-old right-hander is 8–2 with a 2.84 ERA over 92 innings. And though he’s fanned just 59 batters, that suits him just fine. It’s not that he doesn’t like strikeouts; he very much does. It’s just that he lacks the power profile of your prototypical modern-day ace. Epitomizing the term “crafty righty,” he effectively limits damage by mixing and matching with one of baseball’s most expansive repertoires.

Dunning discussed his atypical approach, and the arsenal that goes along with it, when the Rangers visited Fenway Park prior to the All-Star break.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your repertoire. How many pitches do you throw?

Dane Dunning: “Sinker, four-seam, cutter, changeup, slider, curveball. So six. I guess you could say that I’m a jack of all trades, master of none.”

Laurila: How long have you had such a diverse repertoire?

Dunning: “Well, the four-seam is kind of new this year. I’ve thrown it on certain occasions, probably in my last four, five outings. The cutter I started focusing on last year, and this year it’s kind of come into its own. The sinker and slider I’ve had my entire life. The curveball has kind of been my entire life. I’ve always thrown a curveball, but it’s been like, ‘Let’s throw the curveball, let’s not throw the curveball.’ It’s sort of gone back and forth. I brought it back this season, because last year I was throwing two different sliders and they kept blending together. I had to get rid of that.” Read the rest of this entry »