This is Esteban’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Esteban is a baseball fanatic. While his Yankees fandom may be a disappointment to some, it’s the reason he became obsessed with the game we all love. His perspective is heavily influenced by his time as a player, but his passion lies in linking mechanics with data. Esteban’s previous work can be found at Pinstripe Alley. He’s New York born and raised and will probably let you know once or twice more.

Over the last few weeks, Bo Bichette has been the catalyst for the Toronto Blue Jays as they have battled for the top American League Wild Card spot. If you exclude Aaron Judge’s historic bashing of baseballs, no one else in the month of September has hit like Bichette, who has outpaced everybody except the Yankee outfielder to the tune of a 229 wRC+. Not too shabby!

Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus did a great job covering Bichette’s breakout through a statistical lens. The main point of focus from Orr was Bichette’s willingness and ability to spray the opposite field gap. Bichette got away from that for most of this season, but his mechanical adjustments have got him back to being the best version of himself and embracing the opposite field laser.

His style of hitting is unique. Depending on your preferred flavor of hitting, you may have mixed feelings about his swing and the movement he generates in it. But whatever your preference, there is no denying his performance. Those movements, which make him appear as if he is swinging as hard as he can, are exactly how he can produce so much power despite being slightly undersized compared to the average major leaguer.

For Bichette, it’s all about how he uses his lower half to interact with the ground. At his size, it takes efficient movement up and down the kinetic chain to produce power on a variety of pitches and in a variety of locations. He doesn’t have the natural strength for a low effort swing that still produces bat speeds north of 75 mph. His stance, load, and entry to and through the hitting zone need to be consistent. That will be the focus here: how Bichette has cleaned up the interaction between the ground and the balance in his lower half and hips to create more plate coverage in his bat path. Let’s start with a comparison. The first swing here is from mid-July, while the second is from late August. I prefer to start with normal-speed video to see if it’s possible to read the swing at the same speed as the players on the field, mainly the pitcher and the catcher:

The thing that immediately stands out to me is that Bichette is staying too far over his back half. As he makes contact, pay attention to the direction of his reciprocal movement after hitting the ball. (By reciprocal movement, I mean the response his body makes to rotating and making contact.) While it’s very subtle, you can see his torso face the sky as he finishes his swing, especially in the first GIF. This takes away space in his bat path to hit the bottom of the ball with force at different depths (front to back of the plate) of the strike zone.

Picture the barrel entering the back of the strike zone with a slight loft, but instead of keeping that loft as it moves to the front of the plate, it begins to move vertically to the top of the zone. This cuts off the barrel from moving in front of the plate at an ideal vertical bat angle, thus taking a key part of the hitting zone (in front of the plate) away from Bichette. That’s why you see choppy groundballs rather than line drives. The second swing above is slightly improved. That tracks, as it came much closer to his breakout in September where he fully perfected the scissor kick and lower half balance. Let’s look at three swings during said breakout that best portray the adjustment:

Much, much better. His swing and setup against Shane McClanahan’s running fastball prove he understands he needs to keep his hips closed as long as possible to stay on this pitch. Rotational athletes need to keep their center of mass in a position where they avoid getting pushy in their rotation; pushy rotators will do what Bichette did earlier this summer. They get stuck in their posterior and push out of their lower half with their back foot/leg, leading to their shoulder and chest facing the sky too soon in the swing. Think about it like this. Baseball players, both hitters and pitchers, want to stay in between their back foot and front foot throughout their rotation. If you get pushy, your head (center of mass) will drift forward and disrupt your swing path. Bichette has done a phenomenal job of improving his rotational direction. How exactly has he done this? That’s where the slow motion video comes into play. To the tape!

Please turn your attention to Bo’s back foot. In the first clip from July, where he hit a grounder through the hole, you can see his back foot move straight back towards the umpire as he rotates. This is what folks call squishing the bug. In the second clip, that back foot is almost completely hidden throughout the rotation by the front leg. The movement of the back leg towards the left side of the batter’s box is known as a scissor kick. Leading up to contact, Bichette is transferring energy in a different direction than he did in July to keep his center of mass where it needs to be. The scissor kick stores the energy in his hips and makes his rotation move up through his spine, as opposed to squishing the bug, where a hitter digs a hole in the ground, creating more spin in the leg (less efficient). This is no longer a pushy swing:

I bet you had to watch this a few times to believe it really happened. By the looks of it, Bichette is fooled and doesn’t have a chance to barrel up this pitch. But instead of drifting forward upon being fooled by the pitch’s spin, he maintains his hip hinge and creates a bigger stretch in his upper half. That is special movement. This angle gives you a better idea of how he did it:

Even as Bichette’s hips clearly commit to swinging, he is able to keep his upper half waiting to unload. As his front leg nears full extension, it stores potential energy and allows him to have a delayed trigger. I must remind you that this pitch was low and away off the plate. Bichette is one of those special hitters who pulls slow, outside pitches for home runs.

The scissor kick is the main movement that puts him in a position to pull a pitch in this location. Think about it like this. If you set up in the batter’s box to hit and align your feet parallel to the opposite diagonal line on the plate instead of the vertical straight lines, it’s as if you’ve changed where center field is. As a hitter scissor kicks, that’s exactly what happens. Their hips are in a better position to pull outside pitches, because it’s more like hitting a pitch straight up the middle, based on the direction the hitter’s hips are facing. It’s not an easy movement by any means, since you still need to be able to pull inside pitches in this position. That’s exactly why you mostly see it from the elite class of hitters who can cover a large portion of the plate.

Almost every legitimate hot streak or breakout can be described through video storytelling. Subtle changes in movement patterns can pay huge dividends for players, just like they have for Bo Bichette. He was an above-average hitter all season, but by cleaning up his lower half, he has climbed back to near the top of the shortstop WAR leaderboard and is on his way to another five-win season.

Trevor Rogers was a revelation in 2021. He went from having a forgettable first major league season in 2020 to being a near-ace in short order, piling up strikeouts galore en route to a 2.64 ERA with the peripherals to match over 25 starts. You can’t throw a stick in Miami without hitting a pitcher who’s a potential difference-maker, but even against that backdrop, Rogers looked like one of the team’s brightest young stars.

This season hasn’t gone according to plan, to say the least. Rogers has been slowed by injury, hitting the IL thanks to back spasms and later a lat strain that shut him down for the year with the Marlins out of contention. But even when he wasn’t hurt, he struggled across the board. He struck out fewer batters, walked more, gave up 150% more home runs than in his 2021 campaign in fewer innings, and generally looked like a fish out of water.

If you’re painting with a broad brush, the story here is easy to understand. Rogers was better than expected in 2021, so our expectations got too high, and then he went back to his pre-breakout form. If you look closely, though, that’s not what happened at all. Rogers changed a ton about his game. Some of that change was good, some was bad, and I’m quite curious to see what sticks when he returns next year. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, on your way to your local coffee shop or the train station, you probably passed two guys writhing around on the sidewalk, one screaming “Aaron Judge!” while trying to wrap up his counterpart in a figure-four leg lock; the other, attempting valiantly to squirm out of his predicament and refusing to tap out, shouting “Shohei Ohtani!”

Such is the nature of this year’s AL MVP discourse, the most spirited awards debate since the halcyon days of Mike Trout vs. Miguel Cabrera a decade ago. And that’s appropriate — these are two of the most recognizable names in the sport, both accomplishing things we only see once every few decades, and both doing it in major markets. (I’m framing it this way on purpose in order to provoke a second argument: Is Anaheim really part of the Greater Los Angeles area, or is it something else?)

But they name three MVP finalists, not two, which leaves us a little less than two months from a hilarious television moment: Judge and Ohtani, on MLB Network, awaiting the results of this contentious election while the host runs down the credentials of some joker with no shot at all of taking home the hardware.

So who should that joker be? Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries are always unwelcome, but the pumpkin spice season is perhaps the most unfortunate time of year to lose a player to one. A surprise malady at this point in the season can shut a player out of some, if not all, of the postseason, and with no ability to make trades and playoff eligibility freezing at the beginning of September, it’s especially challenging to fill holes on the big league roster. This weekend featured some particularly bad injury news for playoff teams, as a number of players who can’t be easily replaced saw their postseason outlook take a turn for the worse.

Let’s take stock of what these injuries might mean come October, beginning with the Tampa Bay Rays, who got the worst bit of news. Shane Baz needs Tommy John surgery, and since we’re so late in the season, 2023 is off the table for his return as well. Until this setback, Baz’s recovery from his most recent elbow problem seemed to be going well, and the team had held out hope that they’d be able to get him up to speed enough to at least pitch in relief. With Baz out, the Rays will have to rely more on Tyler Glasnow, who is expected to be activated on Wednesday in his return from a Tommy John surgery of his own.

The bad news in Tampa didn’t stop with Baz. Brandon Lowe’s back problems have ended his 2022 season early. While (hopefully) not as significant as Baz’s injury, Lowe has struggled with back pain for most of the season and recently had a cortisone injection. As with Baz, the hope had been to get him back on the roster in time for the playoffs. Even with his struggles this year, which were due in large part to the aforementioned injury, ZiPS still thinks Lowe’s bat has the most upside of nearly anyone on the team, and the Rays will take a small but significant hit in the postseason projections in his absence. Without Baz and Lowe, ZiPS thinks of the Rays as a .547 team rather than a .553 one, with their solid depth keeping things from being far worse. The full version of ZiPS projects Lowe’s primary replacement, Jonathan Aranda, at a 105 wRC+ for the rest of the season, a significant bump from his 90 wRC+ projection before the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody can accuse the Mariners of skimping on frontline pitching in an effort to end their epic playoff drought. After signing Robbie Ray to a five-year, $115 million deal last winter, they traded a quartet of prospects for Luis Castillo on July 30. Already this was no mere rental, as the 29-year-old righty still has another season under control before free agency. Or rather had another season under control, because on Saturday, the Mariners announced they had agreed to terms with Castillo on a five-year, $108 million extension.

With the ink on the new deal barely dry, Castillo threw five solid innings against the Royals on Sunday, but faltered in the sixth and was charged with the first three runs of what turned out to be a gruesome 11-run rally that three other relievers tried in vain to contain. The Mariners, who led 11-2 before the onslaught, lost 13-12, dropping them to 3-7 on a 10-game road trip from hell, during which they lost series to the Angels, A’s, and Royals, and sent both Eugenio Suárez and Julio Rodríguez — their two most valuable players by WAR — to the injured list, the former with a fractured right middle finger, the latter with a lower back strain. Sunday’s loss dropped the Mariners to 83-69 overall, but fortunately for them, both the Rays (84-69) and Orioles (79-73) lost on Sunday as well, leaving Seattle four games ahead of Baltimore for the final American League Wild Card slot, and half a game behind Tampa Bay for the second slot.

The outing was the third rough one out of the last four for Castillo, who gave up six runs (three earned) to the White Sox on September 7, and four runs in 4.2 innings to the A’s on September 20. Even so, he’s pitched to a 3.34 ERA and 3.12 FIP in 59.1 innings over 10 starts since the trade, and a 3.06 ERA and 3.17 FIP in 144.1 innings overall. He didn’t make his season debut until May 9 due to a bout of shoulder soreness that sidelined him in the abbreviated spring, but among all pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 76 ERA- is 21st in the majors and his 78 FIP- is 12th; regardless of innings, his 3.4 WAR is in a virtual tie for 23rd among all starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Snell had to have seen 2022 as an opportunity for a bounce-back. After infamously being pulled by Rays manager Kevin Cash with a one-run lead in the sixth inning of a decisive Game 6 of the 2020 World Series, the lefty was dealt to the Padres in a blockbuster that December. He struggled to find his groove in San Diego in 2021, battling through an inconsistent season for a disappointing Padres team and finishing with a 4.20 ERA, a 3.82 FIP, and a 3.74 xFIP. He must have been eager to put his middling Padres debut behind him when he prepared for his first start of 2022 on April 10, but he was scratched during his pregame bullpen session, hitting the injured list and making way for then-Padres prospect (and current Washington National) MacKenzie Gore to make his major league debut.

No, the comeback would have to wait. Snell would have to endure rehab starts in Fort Wayne, Indiana, then Lake Elsinore, California, and then El Paso, Texas before rejoining the team on May 18 in Philadelphia. He would have to suffer eight team losses in his first eight starts, during which he posted a 5.13 ERA, 3.71 FIP, and 4.04 xFIP and finished the sixth inning just twice. And in his final start before the All-Star Break on July 14 in Colorado, Snell walked six and allowed five runs over 3.2 innings. He walked his final three batters of the first half, forcing in two runs.

But you wouldn’t have known any of that last Wednesday night, when Snell took a no-hitter into the seventh inning at Petco Park against the Cardinals, one of the league’s most potent offenses, finishing the night with a career-high-tying 13 strikeouts over 7.0 scoreless innings. The performance was the crown jewel of a second half during which Snell has pitched himself back into the conversation as one of the league’s most dominant lefties – and one of San Diego’s October X factors. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in June, Ben Clemens noticed that Braves reliever A.J. Minter had taken a big developmental step, specifically by cutting his walk rate basically in half from 2021. Through some statistical trial-and-error, Ben discovered that Minter had revamped his approach after falling behind in the count, pitching in and around the zone almost exclusively in two- and three-ball counts:

“All he did was make one adjustment — before he ever got to a 3–0 or 3–1 count, he’d dial in and throw something competitive — and presto, walks were gone overnight.”

Three and a half months later, Minter’s walk rate has bumped up a little, but only to 5.2%. That’s still a fraction of his previous career low, 8.5%, and even more impressive given his 34.9% strikeout rate. There are other pieces to what makes a good reliever, like preventing home runs (Minter has allowed only four in 65 innings this year) and limiting hard contact, but based just on those strikeout and walk rates, one would assume that Minter has been one of the best relievers in baseball this season. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the 1950s, Hall of Fame slugger Ralph Kiner famously said that “singles hitters drive Fords and home run hitters drive Cadillacs.” Michael Massey’s grandmother may or may not have been familiar with the quote, but she did her best to send the 24-year-old Kansas City Royals rookie down the right road. I learned as much when I asked Massey about his first big-league blast, which came on August 18 against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field.

“What I thought of when I hit it was my nana,” said Massey, who grew up in the Chicago area and went on to play his college ball at the University of Illinois. “She passed away toward the end of last season — she was 93 — and growing up she’d always give me a hundred bucks for every home run I hit. She loved it when I hit home runs, and did that for every league I played in.”

Massey has never tallied up his earnings from over the years, although he does acknowledge that the benevolence was bountiful. Along with his homers in youth leagues, high school, and college, he left the yard 21 times in High-A last year.

His grandmother — his mother’s mother — escaped Illinois winters by vacationing in Florida, and eventually became a snowbird. That the Sunshine State became her “favorite place in the world” made Massey’s first MLB home run even more special. And the memories include much more than money. The family matriarch regularly played whiffle ball with him when he was growing up, and she wasn’t just a fan of her grandson. She loved baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball teams are like most entities operating with finite resources: If you want to know what they value, look where those resources get spent. The Toronto Blue Jays clearly value starting pitching. They spent $80 million over four years on Hyun Jin Ryu, two top prospects plus a seven-year, $131 million extension on José Berríos, $110 million over five years on Kevin Gausman, and $36 million over three years on Yusei Kikuchi.

Gausman has been as good as advertised this year, but behind him, the Blue Jays’ most important pitcher hasn’t been one of their big-money acquisitions, but Alek Manoah, a 24-year-old on a pre-arbitration contract. And he’s not even the 6-foot-6 Floridian most people expected to become Toronto’s homegrown frontline starter. In 2017, the Blue Jays spent a first-round pick on Nate Pearson, he of the 102 mph fastball and slider that touched 95. Pearson tickled the top 10 of the global prospect rankings in 2020, while Manoah — despite being a first-rounder himself — worked in relative obscurity.

Pearson’s career has stalled, thanks to an array of setbacks that would be at home in the Book of Job, ranging from a sports hernia to mononucleosis. And into that niche has stepped Manoah, who possesses less eye-popping stuff but the finesse and durability of which frontline starters are made.

Manoah is in the top 15 among qualified starters in innings, ERA, strikeouts, and WAR, but his pitching approach belies his youth. He throws reasonably hard — though an average fastball velocity of 93.9 mph is nothing to write home about in this day and age — but this year his ERA has gone down by eight tenths of a run while his strikeout rate has fallen by five percentage points. That’s because he’s allowing less hard contact than any other qualified starter in the game.

The key to Manoah’s success is the combination of his four-seamer and his sinker, two pitches that resemble each other closely in velocity and flight path until diverging wildly in late break. That combination doesn’t always result in a swing and miss, but it’s exceptionally hard for a hitter to square up, making it the baseball equivalent of putting your palm on your little brother’s forehead and straightening your arm so he can’t hit you back.

“I think the biggest thing I like to do is watch hitters’ approaches, watch their swing path, watch the way they swing, the way they take pitches, and see certain pitches they’re looking for,” Manoah said. “For me that will dictate whether I’m going sinker or four-seam or how I want to set it up.”

Of course, Manoah didn’t invent this strategy; numerous pitchers have used it to great effect, even during the height of the four-seamer-heavy, swing-and-miss tulip fever that gripped baseball at the end of the past decade. In fact, several of those pitchers have worked for Toronto in recent years, specifically Ryu and Berríos, whom Baseball Savant lists as one of the most similar pitchers in the league to Manoah in terms of velocity and movement.

Manoah’s taken the opportunity to learn as much as he can from his older teammates.

“[Ryu’s] pitch design might not be the same, but the way he gets into his legs and his mechanics and his rhythm are very similar to mine,” Manoah said. “For Berríos, it’s really the way he sets up his sinker and his changeup. For me, I wasn’t really much of a changeup guy, but I’ve been able to watch him, and he’s not worried about certain movements — as long as he’s tunneling it off the sinker, he can use them together.” He also mentioned Ray, Gausman, and David Phelps as players he’d picked up lessons from during his time in the majors.

Manoah has had to be a quick learner, because as much as it seems like he just burst onto the scene as a rookie last year, his rise is even more meteoric than you’d think. Despite his physical gifts, he was undrafted out of high school, and in three years at West Virginia, he spent only one as a full-time starter. After being drafted 11th overall in 2019, he spent all of 2020 pitching at Toronto’s alternate site.

“I feel like we had a pretty good simulated season,” he said of the alternate site camp. “Still training, still long tossing, still facing live hitters. There was a sense of motivation because it was that time when people were going to know who was working and who wasn’t. I didn’t have to focus on the results because there were no results. Being able to work on my changeup, my body, my work ethic, and routine without having to worry about results — I think it allowed me to enjoy that process and be ready for spring training.”

So Manoah went into the big league rotation in May of 2021 after just nine minor league appearances ever, at any level, and just two seasons of more than 80 total innings. And he was immediately one of Toronto’s best pitchers, striking out more than a batter an inning and posting a 3.22 ERA in 111 2/3 innings over 20 starts.

“I think every step of my journey has been preparing me for this,” Manoah said.

Now, despite his youth, Manoah is one of the most essential players on a team that’s a near-lock to make the postseason. He made his first All-Star team in July, and his inning while mic’d up made him one of the game’s breakout stars. When a Montreal radio host made insensitive comments about Alejandro Kirk last week, it was Manoah who jumped to defend his catcher. He’s a veteran, in every respect but age.

And now, one of the big questions facing Toronto interim manager John Schneider is how hard to ride Manoah down the stretch. On the one hand, home-field advantage in the first round could be huge for Toronto, but on the other, the young righty is now some 54 innings past his previous career high with two weeks, plus the postseason, left on the calendar. Manoah is currently 16 1/3 innings from 200, a milestone he views as important because reaching it is evidence of a good work ethic, but he’s happy to pitch or sit if asked.

“I literally told them I don’t want to be the one to make that decision,” he said with a chuckle. He’s simply pleased to be pitching so well that the Blue Jays are scheduling their playoff rotation with him in mind.

“Last year, I got moved because we wanted to set up Robbie Ray and our horses,” he said. “I remember telling myself I want to be one of the guys they’re setting up for big games. Now that we’re there, it’s pretty cool.”

This is Davy’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Davy is a writer and musician who lives in Brooklyn. He has previously written for Baseball Prospectus, where he contributed to the Too Far From Town series about the contraction of the minors. He bakes fancy cakes and plays guitar for The Subway Ghosts, a punk rock band whose other members are also baseball writers. Davy grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, and his earliest ballpark memory is of boos raining down on Glenn Davis at Memorial Stadium.

Carlos Correa picked a great time to turn things around. The 28-year-old is widely expected to opt out of his three-year contract with the Twins this winter, and he’s primed to hit the free agent market on an absolute tear. Correa is slashing .377/.438/.663 in September, good for a 216 wRC+. That’s the sixth-best mark in all of baseball and second among shortstops, behind only the red hot Bo Bichette.

Like Bichette, Correa faced a rough time earlier in the season. Where did things go wrong for the future former Twin? It’s time for some fun with 15-day rolling averages! Read the rest of this entry »