There are two predominant fastball types in the majors these days: the four-seamer and the sinker. The cutter usually gets categorized as a fastball too, and for some pitchers, like Corbin Burnes and Kenley Jansen, it certainly is one. Then again, most pitchers use their cutter as a secondary or tertiary offering, and the average cutter comes in at 89 mph; that’s closer to the average changeup than the average four-seamer. The cutter defies simple classification. Then there’s the split-finger fastball, which is nothing more than a misnomer. It’s an offspeed pitch, no doubt about it, and therefore “splitter” is the more widely accepted label nowadays.

So, back to those two fastballs. The four-seamer is essentially the “throw it as hard as you can” ball; if you hear someone use the generic term “fastball” to describe a particular pitch, this is the one they’re talking about. In terms of grip, a four-seamer isn’t all that different from the way any other fielder throws the baseball. The sinker, on the other hand, is a more specialized weapon. As the name suggests, it has more movement than a four-seam fastball, and it’s more useful for inducing weak contact than blowing the ball past the opposing batter. Yet, modern pitchers have been taking that “throw it as hard as you can” approach with their sinkers as well. Over the past four seasons, the average sinker is only 0.6 mph slower than the average four-seamer.

Thus far in 2023, 52 starting pitchers have crossed the 50-inning threshold while using both a four-seam fastball and a sinker at least 3% of the time. Of those 52, 83% throw both pitches within 1 mph of one another. All but two throw both pitches within 2 mph of one another. As you might have guessed, I’m here to write about the two exceptions, the two starting pitchers who throw their four-seamer and sinker nearly 3 mph apart: Shohei Ohtani and Dean Kremer. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

I think people tend to overestimate their ability to avoid disappointment. We try to temper our excitement so that we won’t feel let down when something goes wrong, but it doesn’t really work. The bad times are always going to hurt. More importantly, tempering your excitement can limit the joy you experience when things finally go right. Nothing strangles happiness in the cradle like that little voice in your head that keeps whispering, “It’s probably going to fall apart.”

I’m not saying we should all be walking around puffed up with unfounded optimism. I just think that some things warrant excitement, that we should trust ourselves to recognize them, and that we should allow ourselves to enjoy them fully. To borrow a line, I think you ought to follow your heart. That’s all I ever thought about anything.

Last year, over 32 games and 115 plate appearances, a 21-year-old Corbin Carroll put up a wRC+ of 130. Excelling in the outfield and on the basepaths as well allowed him to rack up 1.4 WAR. That’s a 7-win pace. He wasn’t perfect: his walk and strikeout rates were nothing to write home about, and while his .358 wOBA said Alex Bregman, his .293 xwOBA said Raimel Tapia. But in all, it was enough to make Carroll our No. 2 prospect in baseball, net him a downright effervescent ZiPS projection and an eight-year, $111 million contract extension, and establish him as our staff’s runaway favorite for NL Rookie of the Year. Corbin Carroll in 2022 was a first date where you’re talking and laughing and then all of a sudden you look at your watch and realize five hours have passed. He was worth getting excited about. Read the rest of this entry »

OAKLAND – The Coliseum was rocking for the first pitch of last night’s game. A crowd of 27,759 roared as Yandy Díaz grounded out to first. “Sell the team! Sell the team! Sell the team!” The coordinated chant broke down into roars and cheers as Ryan Noda gathered up the grounder and stepped on first, kicking off the wildest Tuesday night game you could ever imagine.

The fans – 23,000 more than attended Monday night’s fixture – came out to protest owner John Fisher’s attempt to move the A’s to Las Vegas. They came out to protest Fisher’s management of the team in general. More than either of those causes, however, they came out to cheer for the A’s. As much as the team’s recent trajectory makes them hard to root for, as much as ownership and the front office seem to be steering into the skid, Oakland fans remain some of the most passionate in baseball.

If you’ve never heard of a reverse boycott before, that’s not surprising: the fans more or less improvised the idea on the fly. Jeremy Goodrich, a college student and lifelong A’s fan, created a change.org petition calling for Fisher to sell the team instead of relocating. Stu Clary, a longtime fan, saw the petition and floated the idea of selling out a weeknight game as a signal that fan support for the A’s is merely dormant, not extinct. The concept caught on almost immediately. Read the rest of this entry »

We are only a few weeks away from the midpoint of the season, and so far, there have been a fair share of surprises across multiple divisions. One of those comes from the NL East. No, it’s not the Braves, who sit atop the division with the second-best winning percentage in the National League; that was expected. The surprise is the Marlins, who are second in the division with a 37–31 record, 3.5 games ahead of the Phillies and 5.5 games ahead of the Mets. These are not insurmountable gaps, but it’s still impressive given what the projections were for Miami in particular.

With the ninth-worst run differential in the game, it’s not clear if the Marlins will sustain this winning pace. But they have gotten some legitimate performances from hitters that they simply have not had in previous seasons. Luis Arraez hasn’t stopped hitting since he got to Miami, and Jorge Soler is amidst yet another bounce back and clubbing homers all over the park. As a team desperate for offense, it’s been great to have those two hitting so well — and luckily, they aren’t the only two hitting. Bryan De La Cruz and Jesús Sánchez have been key to the Marlins’ success as well.

Both De La Cruz and Sánchez came to the team from fantastic player development organizations in Houston and Tampa Bay, respectively. De La Cruz is in his age-26 season, and Sánchez is in his age-25 season. Both are still under 1,000 career plate appearances and have been rather slow burns developmentally after struggling at different stages in their respective careers. And both have always shown interesting skills that suggested there was still some developmental meat left on the bone, as Eric Longenhagen would say. The flashes of success between 2021 and ’22 were interesting, but now each of them are legit contributors who have cemented their positions in the middle of Miami’s lineup and long-term plans. Read the rest of this entry »

When I last checked in on Nick Castellanos, he was not in a good place. Though he was playing in a World Series with the Phillies, the team with which he signed a five-year, $100 million contract after the lockout ended in March, his season had been a disappointment, and aside from the occasional big hit here and highlight-reel catch there — the latter class of which had seemed particularly unlikely given his defensive metrics — his postseason had been bleak as well, right down to his making the final out in Games 5 and 6 of the World Series as the Phillies fell to the Astros. Fortunately, after turning the page on 2022, Castellanos has reemerged as one of the Phillies’ most productive hitters.

When the Phillies signed Castellanos, he was coming off the best season of his career, having made his first All-Star team while setting across-the-board career highs with a .309/.362/.576 line, 34 homers, a 139 wRC+, and 3.6 WAR. He had opted out following the second year of a four-year, $64 million deal with the Reds, but despite notable interest from multiple teams including the Padres and Marlins, he didn’t secure a deal before the lockout began in early December. Once he did finally agree to terms with the Phillies, eight days after the lockout ended, he felt as though he had to rush into the season, adjusting to a new team, new city, new fanbase, and new media… and with a new child on the way. Soon, Bryce Harper’s elbow injury forced Castellanos to play right field on a regular basis instead of DHing a significant amount of the time as initially planned.

Things did not go well. Castellanos matched his career-worst 94 wRC+ via a .263/.305/.389 line, set career lows with a 5.2% walk rate and 6.6% barrel rate, and homered just 13 times. He was dreadful afield (-10 RAA, -8 DRS, -7.3 UZR) as well, and while his -0.8 WAR didn’t make him the majors’ least valuable position player, none of the 31 others with WARs that low or lower — including future Hall of Famers Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto — had just set sail on a $100 million contract. Adding further insult, in the postseason, Castellanos hit .185/.232/.246 in 69 plate appearances. Not even a few memorable diving catches could offset that. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that Andy Warhol didn’t actually say “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”? I was shocked to learn the truth. Apparently, two museum employees invented the quote when they were working on a Warhol exhibit. That makes the saying more interesting to me, actually: two anonymous people creating the work of someone famous for the democratization of art is enjoyable. But I digress: the point of bringing that quote up is that Nick Anderson is well into his second fifteen minutes of fame, and I’m pretty sure that this, too, is something Warhol would approve of.

It’s hard to imagine a better pitcher getting a worse contract than the one Anderson signed this offseason. He was one of the best relievers in baseball, period, from his 2019 debut until tearing his UCL in 2021. Heck, he was top 15 in reliever WAR from 2019 to ’21, and he basically didn’t play in one of those years. Sub-3 ERA, sub-3 FIP, the fourth-highest strikeout rate in baseball (39.6%) — Anderson was an elite closer, and the Rays used him accordingly. The Braves are paying him only $875,000 this year. That’s some kind of bargain.

As Esteban Rivera detailed last November, there were reasons to doubt that Anderson would come back strong. He looked diminished in his last few appearances before hitting the IL; his biggest weapon, a fastball with excellent carry that left batters flummoxed, lost its usual carry. Vertical approach angle is all the rage in pitch design these days, and that’s the case because it neutralizes the biggest weapon hitters have: power on contact. You can’t hit a home run if you can’t hit the ball, and flat-angled four-seam fastballs are great at doing just that. Read the rest of this entry »

I was contemplating Kyle Schwarber recently, as one does, and was amused by the notion that a player could post a batting average in the .170s and still be a valuable hitter overall. We’ve known that batting average isn’t everything since… well, I was going to say the nascent moments of the sabermetric revolution in the late 20th century, but it’s been way longer than that.

There’s a thread in popular history that casts the latter-day Brooklyn Dodgers as a team of romantic literary figures. Between the righteousness of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, the tragic brevity of the careers of Pete Reiser and later Roy Campanella, and the juxtaposition with the shiny, all-conquering Yankees, there’s a sense that the Dodgers succeeded through some combination of moral rectitude and poetic necessity.

In truth, they won because they drew an absolute crapload of walks. In 1947, Reese and Eddie Stanky both drew over 100 walks, and the Dodgers drew 30% more walks than the NL average. The 2002 A’s beat the AL average by 16%, so the team that made walking cool looks like a bunch of hackers next to the 1947 Dodgers.

If Branch Rickey knew the limitations of batting average, what took the rest of us so long? Read the rest of this entry »

Games are shorter this season due to the pitch clock, which means that starting pitchers are usually throwing an outing’s worth of offerings in less time than they typically did in previous years. Whereas a quality start of seven innings and 100 pitches might have taken two hours and 15 minutes in the past — this before a call to the bullpen — it can take as little as an hour and 45 minutes in 2023. Those times will obviously vary, with the effectiveness of the opposing pitcher playing a major role, but the fact remains that such an outing now regularly takes place within a more condensed time frame.

How different is this for starting pitchers? Moreover, is throwing that number of innings and pitches in a narrower time frame harder, or is it actually easier? I’ve asked those questions to several pitchers since the start of the season, with their answers sometimes extending to other aspects of the new pitch clock. Here is what they’ve had to say.

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Shane Bieber, Cleveland Guardians: “Good question. To give you a real response on the impact… we’ll probably see at the end of the year after a great big body of work. Right? The number of quality starts, or whatever you want to call them. But for me, personally, I’m not finding much of a difference. I work pretty quick, especially without runners on. Last year, I think I was the second fastest without runners on base. Maybe the first. Wade Miley works extremely fast, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate to admit it, but I’m a bit of a grump these days. Specifically, I’m a grump about position players pitching. Every time Jay Jaffe chronicles the spread of the tactic, I get annoyed right alongside him. When some disinterested backup infielder lobs the ball in at 40 mph, I cringe. I was a fan of the rules that limited when teams can send hitters to the mound; in fact, I remember being disappointed that the rules weren’t more stringent when they first came out.

With that said, I have to take it all back now. I’m in on position players pitching – as long as we’re specifically talking about Brandon Crawford. He took the mound to close out a 13-3 Giants victory yesterday and did so in a way that position players simply don’t anymore: He tried as hard as he could.

There have already been multiple excellent breakdowns of how Crawford had always wanted to pitch and how he got the opportunity. I can’t match that kind of coverage – but I can take a different angle. He looked borderline acceptable out there, something you can’t often say of hitters taking the mound. How acceptable? Let’s do a pitch breakdown. Read the rest of this entry »