Bailey Falter is unique. As erstwhile FanGraphs scribe Devan Fink explained when he wrote about the 24-year-old Philadelphia Phillies left-hander last summer, Falter features a 92-mph fastball that is, for all intents and purposes, a 95-mph fastball. The effective velocity comes courtesy of extreme extension. A 6-foot-4, 195-pound native of Chino Hills, California, Falter has a delivery that puts him seven-plus feet off the mound when he releases the baseball.
Projected to be a valuable part of the Phillies bullpen this year — some evaluators feel he’ll ultimately secure a spot in the starting rotation — Falter is coming off of a rookie campaign where he logged a 5.61 ERA and a 3.79 FIP over 33.2 innings. He’s been impressive this spring; with the caveat that Grapefruit League performances need to be taken with a large grain of salt, the southpaw has been sharp, allowing just five baserunners in seven innings.
Falter discussed his delivery, and the repertoire that comes with it, following a recent game in Clearwater.
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David Laurila: You’re known primarily for your delivery, particularly the amount of extension you get. Have you always thrown that way?
Bailey Falter: “Yes. I’ve had the same delivery and extension ever since I can remember. Honestly. I had a pitching coach back home, when I was growing up, named Steve Lefebvre. He tried to tweak me up a little bit — kind of shorten me up — because I was a guy that was never going to light up a radar gun, and we thought it could possibly be due to me having such a long stride. I ended up throwing the same speed.” Read the rest of this entry »
Frankie Montas was a late scratch from his Saturday start and instead, on Sunday, threw in an early-morning sim game on Oakland’s backfields. Opposing scouts in attendance were from (in totality) Boston, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay.
Montas threw about 80 pitches, warming up and then working in eight-to-ten minute chunks against A’s big league hitters, with staff adding batters to the end of some innings and rolling others to stay within that window (which is commonplace in this setting). Then the whole group took a break for four or five minutes before Montas returned to the mound for another simulated inning. With no umpires, the A’s used the TrackMan pitch locations to call balls and strikes from their seating area behind the backstop; the unit began malfunctioning at the very end of his outing, but only for four pitches.
I have video of his entire outing below, and in addition to it being a topical scouting artifact given trade rumors around Montas, it is also a glimpse into big league minutiae in a quiet setting with just a few scouts, A’s staff, and player families around. You can often hear communication between A’s players and personnel around pitch type and velocity, but there’s no exposure of sensitive ops stuff, something I vetted while cutting this together.
Montas’ fastball ranged from 92–95 mph, but he was consistently pumping in a heavy 93–94 sinker. He was clearly coasting, as a big league vet of this stature should during a morning sim game, so the fact that this velo band is abnormally low for him — his fastball averaged 96 in 2021 and had been sitting close to that so far this spring — is fine. The pitch had big sinking action toward the bottom of the zone early during his outing and induced several ground balls, though hitters had an easier time elevating it later on. As the movement on his fastball dwindled throughout his outing, the length and movement of his upper-80s slider increased, and he found more consistent feel for locating it later in the sim game. At times he uses it like a bat-breaking cutter, at others as a finishing pitch out of the zone. Though it was his least consistent offering, many of his sliders were plus. Read the rest of this entry »
In a normal baseball offseason, all the trades would have already happened. Front offices have all season to call each other up with a million permutations of deals, and the deals they make spawn other deals, and player injuries spawn other deals, and free-agent signings lead to surpluses or needs, and… well, you get the idea. Trading flurries happen in December, and during spring training, and teams work out their rosters that way.
With a compressed offseason thanks to the lockout, the timeline has gotten all mixed up. Now, trades are happening three days before opening day. It’s madness! And speaking of:
This trade was announced last night, and I’m writing about it this morning, and so rather than write a block of text about one side’s return and then a block of text about the other, I’m going to try a slightly different framing tool: I’ll walk you through a few levels of how I’ve thought about this deal. It’s an interesting one, no doubt, as trades involving the Rays so often are. Let’s get started! Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, Shohei Ohtani returned from a string of injuries and put together a season for the ages, excelling both on the mound and at the plate en route to a unanimous American League MVP award. On the days he pitched, however, he left the Angels vulnerable, because his exits from the mound generally meant his removal from the game, costing the Angels the services of their best (active) hitter and placing the team’s relievers in the batting order. That problem is no more, as last week Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association formally announced a handful of rule changes going into effect for 2022, one of which allows a starting pitcher who also serves as his team’s designated hitter to remain in the game in the latter capacity after he’s done pitching.
That rule, and other more mundane ones, had been proposed earlier in March and tentatively agreed to later in the month. They weren’t part of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, so implementing them required a separate vote of the owners, which did not happen until last week. MLB did utilize the “Ohtani Rule” in last year’s All-Star Game; after Ohtani threw one scoreless inning as the AL starter, he stuck around to bat out of the leadoff spot a second time and then was replaced by other DHs.
In theory, the Ohtani Rule encourages other teams to develop such two-way players, but the ones who showed promise in recent years such as Ohtani’s teammate Jared Walsh and 2017 first-round picks Hunter Greene and Brendan McKay, eventually wound up on one track or the other. Thus in practice the rule is very specifically targeted at a single player — and an international superstar, at that. In baseball, the closest precedent for such a singularly oriented rule dates back to the 19th century and is linked to three-time batting champion Ross Barnes, though in that case, the change was designed to hinder his play, not aid it.
From 1871 through ’76, a batter could reach base safely on a ball that first landed in the infield and then bounced or rolled into foul territory. Barnes, a second baseman first with the National Association’s Boston Red Stockings and then the National League’s Chicago White Stockings, particularly excelled at hitting balls (not all of them bunts) that landed fair and went foul, making them nearly impossible to defend against. Via such tactics, he topped a .400 batting average four times, leading the NA in both 1872 and ’73 with marks of .430 and .431, and the NL in ’76 with a .429 mark. After the 1876 season, the NL adopted a rule defining balls that went into foul territory before passing first or third base as foul balls.
As MLB official historian John Thorn told FanGraphs, “Ross Barnes may have been the principal target of fair-foul hit change but the bunt (or ‘baby hit’) game had long been criticized as unmanly … or worse, a remnant of cricket.”
Barnes never hit higher than .272 after the adoption of the rule, though to be fair, a debilitating malaria-like chronic disease limited him to just 22 games in 1877, and 146 over the next four seasons, two of them washouts, before he retired in ’81. Notably, he lost a court case over whether the White Stockings had to pay him while he was sick.
Thorn offered the 1893 change of the pitching distance — from 50 feet at the front of the box (and 55 feet 6 inches at the back) to home plate to the now-familiar 60 feet 6 inches — as another example of a targeted rule. “It could be argued that the retreat of the pitching distance in 1893 was designed to muffle the speed of Amos Rusie and Cy Young.”
Indeed, the fastball velocities of Rusie (who had to that point led the NL in strikeouts twice and walks three times) and Young, the league leader in wins and ERA in 1892, were said to strike such fear into the hearts of batters that they insisted the league increase the distance. Peter Morris’ A Game of Inches traces the change to a more generalized aesthetic concern regarding the restoration of the equilibrium between batter and pitcher in the wake of the legalization of overhand pitching in 1884, and a distaste for the proliferation of strikeouts (does this sound familiar?). While Rusie and Young continued to flourish at the new distance, many of the game’s most accomplished hurlers to that point, such as John Clarkson, Pud Galvin, Tim Keefe, Tony Mullane, and Mickey Welch, retired just before or shortly after the distance change.
In the past decade, MLB has introduced two rules that have been closely identified with individual players, namely the “Posey Rule” that protects catchers from collisions and the “Utley Rule” that protects middle infielders from egregious takeout slides, but both of those are generalized rules, and oddly enough, they’re linked to those players from opposite directions — and, in Buster Posey’s case, perhaps the wrong player, at that. The former was adopted in 2014, three years after Posey suffered a season-ending broken leg on a collision; its advent was more directly preceded by Alex Avila’s knee injury in the 2013 ALCS, but one way or another, it protects all catchers. The latter was adopted in in 2016 after Chase Utley broke infielder Rubén Tejada’s fibula while attempting to break up a double play the previous season, and it protects all middle infielders. (Where do Avila and Tejada go to claim their royalty checks?)
Anyway, the Ohtani Rule should help the Angels by granting its namesake extra plate appearances. By my count, players batting in his stead in games from which he was removed as a pitcher — including the dud in the Bronx that I attended, where he took a first-inning exit — totaled 22 PA last year, about one per start; he also made three starts in April and May where he did not hit and the Angels used a conventional DH. At the level at which Ohtani played last year, an extra 30 to 35 PA would have worth something on the order of two runs relative to a replacement level hitter. Not nothing, but hardly season-turning (have you seen the Angels lately?), and a good way to showcase a singularly talented superstar.
The Ohtani Rule does not preclude other teams from using their pitchers as DHs, but the likelihood of, say, the Diamondbacks using Madison Bumgarner in that capacity seems vanishingly small as even they can surely offer a better hitter than one with a 44 wRC+ (21 since 2018) to bat four times a game. Incidentally, one previous candidate for two-way duty, Michael Lorenzen, is now an Angel himself, and a starting pitcher at that, though he’s lost interest in the double-duty exploits he pursued with the Reds. Lorenzen made 34 appearances in the outfield from 2018-21, starting six times (all in 2019). He owns an 84 wRC+ for his career; last year, the Halos gave over 2,000 PA to non-pitchers with lower marks, including David Fletcher, José Iglesias, Juan Lagares, Kurt Suzuki, and Albert Pujols.
The Ohtani Rule is in place for the life of the new CBA, while the other new rules to which the league and the union have agreed — the ones that weren’t part of the CBA (which you can read about here) — are applicable to 2022 only, under the health and safety protocols related to the COVID-19 pandemic. What follows is a quick rundown of those.
Roster Sizes
As in 2020, the abbreviated spring training has not allowed starting pitchers enough time to build up their pitch counts to where they would typically be at the start of the season. Thus, teams will be allowed to carry 28 players instead of 26 from Opening Day through games of May 1, with an extra player added on days in which teams play doubleheaders.
For those first few weeks, the limitation on the number of pitchers on the active roster — 13 out of 26, per a rule put in place for 2020 that has yet to be enforced — will be relaxed as well. Which, alas, means some very bloated pitching staffs. The Dodgers, who open their season against the Rockies at Coors Field, are apparently planning to use 16 of their 28 roster spots on pitchers:
Dave Roberts said the Dodgers will open the season with 16 pitchers. The Dodgers open the season in Colorado.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. The good news (?) is that they’re probably going to carry five left-handed relievers, so we can really watch Roberts dig into those matchups. The Yankees, who don’t even have the Coors Field excuse, are “leaning towards” carrying 16 pitchers into their opening series against the Red Sox as well.
May 2 can’t come soon enough.
Injured List
For the 2017 season, MLB reduced the minimum number of days for a player to be on what was then the disabled list from 15 to 10 (not including the 7-day concussion list); the next year, they renamed it the injured list. Given the general consensus that some teams were using the IL as yet another means to expand their pitching staffs, the league planned to implement a rule lengthening the minimum stays for pitchers and two-way players to 15 days in 2020, but that one fell by the wayside with the COVID-19 health and safety protocols.
Now, it will be implemented as of May 2. Until then, pitchers, position players, and two-way players can be placed on the 10-day IL, but from that point onward, only position players can use the 10-day IL. The various other ILs (COVID, 7-day concussion and 60-day) will continue to function as they did last year.
Minor League Options
The minimum number of days that a pitcher or two-way player must remain on option or outright assignment prior to being recalled or re-selected is 10 days until May 2, and 15 thereafter. This is another throwback from 2020 that’s finally going into place, designed to reduce the amount of churn in bullpens.
Additionally, those option assignments before May 2 don’t count against the seasonal limit of five, which was put in place by the new CBA.
Extra Innings
As was the case in 2020 and ’21, each extra inning will begin with a runner on second base, namely the player occupying the spot in the batting order preceding that of the inning’s leadoff hitter (unless it’s a pitcher, which is much more unlikely now with the universal DH). As of last summer — hell, as recently as early March — the Manfred Man (or zombie runner) was presumed to be a relic of the past, but according to The Athletic’s Matt Gelb and Jayson Stark, it returned as part of the league’s health and safety protocols.
This one isn’t a popular rule among fans; when I polled FanGraphs readers after the 2020 season, just 23.6% favored keeping the rule, an even lower percentage than favored retaining seven-inning games for doubleheaders (32.9%). Gelb and Stark cited a March 2021 Seton Hall Sports Poll in which just 17% of the general population approved, with 28% of sports fans and 41% of avid fans approving. Here’s the thing, though: the players like it, as pitching staffs don’t get burned out as often by epic contests and pitchers with options remaining aren’t “rewarded” for emptying the tank with another trip to the minors. Managers favor it, too, with the likes of the Yankees’ Aaron Boone, the Brewers’ Craig Counsell, and the Diamondbacks’ Torey Lovullo among those speaking up on the rule’s behalf.
Speaking of doubleheaders, if and when they’re necessary, games will be of the nine-inning variety. The seven-inning ones have been sent back to the minors, where they belong.
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Beyond those changes, a few others have been made that will persist beyond 2022, but merit mention here. The first concerns rookie qualification. As before, a player is still considered a rookie if he hasn’t exceeded 130 at-bats (not plate appearances), 50 innings, or 45 days on the active roster (time on the IL doesn’t count). Amid the abbreviated 2020 season, the powers that be decided that September (and October) days on the active roster would no longer be excluded from the 45-day count, and last year, with September rosters limited to 28 players instead of 40, that rule was retained. Now it looks as though it’s becoming permanent.
Shortly before this article was published, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that MLB will allow teams to use wearable PitchCom signaling devices during the regular season as a means of countering sign-stealing efforts and improving pace of play. Several teams have tested the devices this spring and they’ve drawn glowing reviews. We’ll have a closer look at the ramifications of that in a separate article soon.
As for the other changes you’ll see in 2022, from the universal designated hitter and the five-option limit to the expanded playoffs, those are part of the new CBA. So is the 45-day notification window for the league to implement new rules, which will likely introduce a pitch clock, larger bases, and some kind of ban on infield shifts next year. There will be ample time to yell at those clouds, I promise.
If I told you that two contending teams swapped major leaguers, you’d probably have an idea of what that looks like. Maybe a reliever and a fourth outfielder changed hands, or something like that. The Blue Jays and the White Sox didn’t do that, though; they swapped catchers, as Jeff Passan first reported:
The Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays are in agreement on a trade that will send catcher Zack Collins to the Blue Jays in exchange for catcher Reese McGuire, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN.
But even though both Reese McGuire and Zack Collins play catcher, they do so in very different ways. Amusingly, as we at FanGraphs work through our Positional Power Rankings, Collins is essentially positionless power. His home run totals in the minors and batted ball metrics in the majors tell a consistent story; if he can figure out a way to limit his strikeouts, he’ll be a fearsome hitter.
In a previous era, that might have secured him a starting catching role. But our newfound understanding of the value of receiving has exposed Collins as one of the worst defenders at the position — one who was worth a ghastly 14 runs below average in only 506 innings of catching last year. It’s not an easy skill to show with a GIF or two, and that sounds like a ton of runs to surrender in such a short time. But that matches up with the eye test, and the Blue Jays will likely use Collins mainly as a first baseman and DH. Read the rest of this entry »
If you thought the Padres were done tinkering with the starting rotation, you thought wrong. On Sunday morning, San Diego agreed to a deal with the Athletics, acquiring pitchers Sean Manaea and Aaron Holiday in exchange for pitcher Adrian Martinez and infielder Euribiel Angeles.
In a season in which teams continued to be conservative at stretching out their starting pitchers, the A’s were more aggressive with the injury-prone Manaea last year. Over the short-term, that proved to be successful, as he remained healthy and threw 179 1/3 innings, his most as a professional. The plaudits aren’t just quantity; he set career-highs all over the place, from WAR (3.3) to full-season FIP (3.66) to strikeout rate (25.7%).
How did Manaea do it? The likeliest reason is velocity. No, he didn’t suddenly become Aroldis Chapman or Brusdar Graterol, but every pitcher — with the possible exception of knuckleballers — requires some level of velocity to achieve effectiveness. In Manaea’s career there’s nearly a 100-point delta in batter slugging percentage between his sinkers going 91 mph or slower (.491) and those traveling 92 mph or faster (.397). On a player-to-player comparison, I get in the neighborhood of 40 points of SLG being the norm.
Similarly, Manaea also gets a lot more strikeouts when he’s throwing harder. More than three-quarters of his career strikeouts from sinkers come from the harder ones despite less than half of his sinkers being in the category. It’s not just chicken-and-egg; this pattern existed prior to this season. Sinkers aren’t traditionally used to punch out batters, but for Manaea, they’re an important weapon. Statcast credits him with 114 strikeouts on sinkers in 2021, the third-most of the Statcast era and the most since Chris Sale had 124 in 2015 (David Price has the crown with 125 in 2014).
It’s not even that Manaea’s sinker is a particularly nasty pitch, such as a splitter in fastball’s clothing; he actually gets less break on his than the average pitcher. It’s that his deceptive delivery and his excellent control basically function as a force multiplier to his velocity, effectively reducing the distance between the mound and home plate. Even a 30-mph fastball can strike out Juan Soto if you get to determine the sliver of time he has to make a decision. Read the rest of this entry »
While the period for extensions is usually longer, this year’s circumstances have made it a brief one, squeezed between a flurry of arbitration hearings and the upcoming baseball season. That doesn’t mean there’s been a shortage, though; according to Spotrac, the 32 extensions signed so far in 2022 marks the highest total since 40 were agreed to in 2019. While I first assumed a much lower number, it’s important to remember some were signed pre-lockout, like with Byron Buxton and José Berríos.
Anyhow, here’s one I found interesting. Having completed his rookie campaign in 2021, Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase was slated to become arbitration-eligible ahead of ‘24, followed by an entry into the open market in ‘26. But an extension has wiped those years out and possibly more. Per Joel Sherman of the New York Post, Clase is guaranteed $20 million over five years. There are two options, worth $10 million apiece, that can either cover his first two years of free agency (2027 and ’28), or be bought out for $2 million each.
Some minor details include a $2 million signing bonus and escalators that can take the options to $13 million. The main point, though, is this is a long, affordable commitment made at the genesis of a player’s career, starting at pre-arbitration and possibly ending several years later. From the Guardians’ perspective, they’ve locked up a star reliever for cheap. But from Clase’s perspective, one has to wonder if he’s leaving money on the table. The future is hazy this early in someone’s career, but when said career has been brilliant thus far, the “what could have been” takes over. Read the rest of this entry »
Having lostKenley Jansen to the Braves via free agency, the Dodgers felt that they needed a closer, and that they had an outfielder to spare. Feeling uncertain about outfield depth in the wake of Andrew Vaughn’s hip injury, the White Sox were willing to part with a pricey setup man. Fittingly, then, the two contenders teamed up on a trade on Friday, with Chicago sending Craig Kimbrel to Los Angeles in exchange for AJ Pollock.
The 33-year-old Kimbrel spent less than half a season with the White Sox after being acquired from the Cubs in a crosstown deal at last year’s trade deadline, in exchange for second baseman Nick Madrigal and righty reliever Codi Heuer. Where Kimbrel had built on a late-2020 rebound and dominated for the Cubs — posting a 0.49 ERA, converting 23 out of 25 save chances, and making his eighth All-Star team — he slotted into a setup role in front of All-Star closer Liam Hendricks with the White Sox, notching just one save and getting hit for a 5.09 ERA. At least on paper, the Sox appeared ready to utilize a similar arrangement this year, though paying Hendriks $13 million and Kimbrel $16 million made for a particularly pricey late-inning combination.
Even with the late-season hiccups, Kimbrel still finished with his best rate stats since 2017 via a 2.26 ERA, 2.43 FIP, 42.6% strikeout rate, 9.8% walk rate, and 32.8% strikeout-walk differential. Among relievers, only Josh Hader had a higher strikeout rate, and only Hendriks, Hader, and Raisel Iglesias had a better strikeout-walk differential.
The 59.2-inning workload was Kimbrel’s largest since 2018; after helping the Red Sox win the World Series in what was a comparatively lackluster season, he didn’t sign with the Cubs until June 6, 2019, after the draft pick compensation that encumbered his free agency had expired. He threw just 36 innings in 2019–20, with a 6.00 ERA and 6.29 FIP, but during the latter season, the Cubs identified a mechanical issue. “Kimbrel was getting too rotational and was flying open early,” as The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma described it in March 2021. “This led to multiple issues, all connected in various ways: his arm slot dropped, he was pulling his fastball, his velocity was dipping and he had no control of his breaking ball.” Read the rest of this entry »
Stephen Ridings strikes an imposing figure on the mound. He also misses a lot of bats. Straddling the rubber at 6-foot-8, 225 pounds, the 26-year-old right-handed reliever is coming off a season where he recorded 42 strikeouts in 29 minor-league innings, and another seven in a five-inning cup of coffee with the New York Yankees. Moreover, he allowed just 20 hits and six walks in the 34 cumulative frames.
Drafted out of Division-III Haverford College by the Chicago Cubs in 2016 — the Yankees are his third organization — Ridings comes out of the bullpen with an attack-dog mindset.
“Right now, I’m the guy that wants to blow doors off,” explained Ridings, whom New York signed in January 2021 after he was released by the Kansas City Royals. “I’m trying to strike out as many guys as humanly possible.”
The 18% swinging strike rate that Eric Longenhagen noted when writing up Ridings for our 2022 Yankees Top Prospect list — the righty is No. 21 in those rankings — comes courtesy of three-pitch mix. A heater that sits mid-to-high 90s and tops out in triple digits is his bread-and-butter, and a slider he began throwing in spring training of last year is his best secondary. A knuckle-curve rounds out his repertoire. Read the rest of this entry »
Author’s note: Jacob deGrom was scratched from his scheduled start today after feeling tightness in his throwing shoulder. He will undergo an MRI. While that potential injury makes his availability for the start of the season murky, this article is about his spring start on March 27.
When you watch Jacob deGrom, he’ll make you question what you know about the fine art of pitching. Develop a mix of killer pitches to keep batters off balance? He has five excellent pitches, but he basically only uses two of them. Change speeds? He throws his fastball in a consistent band, his slider in a consistent band, and when he does deign to drop in a changeup, it matches his slider.
None of that is the most obviously extreme thing about deGrom, though. If you’ve paid attention through a few of his starts, you know what I’m talking about: he barely uses any of the plate. Home plate is 17 inches wide, and baseballs have a radius of roughly 1.5 inches. That means that pitchers have 18.5 inches of horizontal space to play with, from catching the edge on one side of the plate to catching it on the other. Read the rest of this entry »
