In a season that has already produced two no-hitters (as well as two that would have counted as such before Major League Baseball tightened its definition of the feat), this week produced two near-misses on consecutive nights. On Tuesday night in St. Louis, the Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas came within one strike of no-hitting the Pirates, and on Wednesday night in Los Angeles, the Dodgers’ Tyler Anderson fell two outs short of no-hitting the Angels. It’s fair to say that we’ve never seen anything quite like this.

Had either Mikolas or Anderson pulled off the feat, they would have joined Tylor Megill and four Mets relievers, who combined to no-hit the Phillies on April 29, and the Angels’ Reid Detmers, who no-hit the Rays on May 10. In the first of several coincidences that run through this tale, Detmers was actually Anderson’s opposite number on Wednesday, though he exited in the fourth inning after being roughed up for four runs. The Pirates, as it turns out, were already held hitless in a game on May 15 by the Reds’ Hunter Greene and Art Warren, but because they scored the game’s only run and didn’t need to bat in the ninth given that they were at home, the effort did not count as a no-hitter based on a 1991 ruling by MLB’s Committee for Statistical Accuracy.

(In the other non-no-hitter this year, six Rays pitchers held the Red Sox hitless for nine innings on April 23, but a seventh pitcher allowed a hit in the 10th inning.)

The 33-year-old Mikolas started the nightcap of a day-night doubleheader against a team that owns the NL’s weakest offense (3.42 runs per game) and its second-lowest batting average (.220). He only got as far as the second inning before allowing his first baserunner; with one out, he hit Canaan Smith-Njigba in the left foot with a slider, then erased him when Diego Castillo grounded into a 5-4-3 double play. Mikolas need another double play in the third after leadoff hitter Hoy Park reached on an error, as third baseman Brendan Donovan, who fielded his grounder, pulled Paul Goldschmidt off first base with a high throw. Yu Chang followed by working a seven-pitch walk before Michael Perez grounded into the needed 4-6-3 double play and Tucupita Marcano struck out, one of six punchouts on the night for Mikolas.

That 20-pitch third inning was the St. Louis righty’s most labor-intensive of the night. By comparison, Mikolas needed only 10 pitches in the fourth, which began with another error by the Cardinals’ defense; this time, Bryan Reynolds‘ fly ball glanced off the glove of left fielder Juan Yepez. He took second on the error, then came around to score after groundouts by Jack Suwinski and Daniel Vogelbach.

By that point, the Cardinals had already plated seven runs, and Suwinski’s grounder began a string of 17 consecutive batters retired that carried Mikolas to within one out of completing the no-hitter. He passed the 100-pitch mark while facing Castillo, who led off the eighth inning by battling for eight pitches before striking out. By the end of the frame, Mikolas had matched his MLB career high of 115 pitches, set on May 29 in a 5.2-inning grind against the Brewers (Lord knows how high he went during his three years in Japan).

Mikolas needed just two pitches to dispatch Perez on a grounder to start the ninth, and six more to get Marcano to fly to right. Facing Cal Mitchell for the final out, he fell behind 2–0, then got a called strike on a fastball and a swinging strike on a down-and-in curve. Mitchell fouled off another fastball, then hit a deep fly ball to center field. Gold Glove winner Harrison Bader leaped in pursuit of the ball but just missed as it went over his head and bounced off of the warning track and over the wall for a ground rule double. Mikolas exited to a hearty ovation from Busch Stadium’s 33,977 fans, leaving Packy Naughton to record the final out. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Montgomery hasn’t had the easiest of careers. While he established a name for himself with a solid rookie campaign in 2017, extended battles with injuries kept him off the mound in subsequent years. An underwhelming return in 2020 (5.11 ERA) raised questions about his future with the Yankees. But the much better peripherals (3.87 FIP, 3.65 xFIP) signaled a return to form, and the following year, Montgomery put together somewhat of a second breakout season, anchoring a rotation that was considerably more volatile than it is now.

Last year, Montgomery made an adjustment I thought was interesting but never got to write about, drastically raising his four-seam fastball usage in September, which had its pros and cons. On one hand, this newfound reliance on the hard stuff granted Montgomery the highest monthly strikeout rate of his career, as hitters found themselves whiffing at elevated fastballs. On the other hand, it led to a barrage of hard contact; the shape of Montgomery’s fastball isn’t great to begin with, and the corresponding decrease in sinker usage didn’t help, either.

Considering Montgomery’s excellent command, though, I believed he could make this new approach work in the long-term. So naturally, the development we’ve seen this season is… a near-abandonment of the four-seamer! His last five starts all featured a four-seam fastball usage under 10%; against the Tigers on June 5, Pitch Info thought he didn’t throw a single one. But Montgomery isn’t just tinkering with his pitch mix. Check out this side-by-side view of his typical arm slot in 2021 (left) versus 2022 (right):

It’s subtle, but you can see that Montgomery is throwing slightly less over-the-top than before. The Hawk-Eye readings bear this out: he’s lowered his average vertical release point from 6.70 feet to 6.47. What good is a different angle for? My theory is that it’s helped Montgomery exchange vertical movement for horizontal. His sinker is getting more drop and arm-side run than ever before, which is the sort of trade-off stuff models absolutely love (and opposing batters hate). It’s come at the cost of a worse four-seamer, but realistically, improving two diametrically opposed fastballs is a tall order. Montgomery made a choice to stick with one, and so far, it’s worked wonders.

Originally, this article had a much bigger focus on Montgomery. But looking around the league, I couldn’t help but notice several other pitchers who’ve placed a recent emphasis on their sinkers. There are the obvious names, like Clay Holmes and his triple-digit, bowling-ball sinkers, or basically the entire Giants rotation sans Carlos Rodón. Lesser-known examples (to the average fan, at least) include Mitch Keller, who, as noted by Michael Ajeto, switched to a sinker-slider combo after a disappointing start to his season. Oh, and did you know Robbie Ray reintroduced his long-dormant sinker? Wild. Maybe he reckons it’ll help curb the home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and we’re once again hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features Oakland Athletics right-hander Paul Blackburn on his curveball, a revamped pitch playing a key role in what has been a career-best season.

On track to represent Oakland in next month’s All-Star game, Blackburn has won six of eight decisions — this for the team with baseball’s worst record — while logging a 2.26 ERA and a 3.09 FIP over 13 starts comprising 71-and-two-thirds innings. He’s thrown his curveball, a pitch he no longer grips in atypical fashion, 18.5% of the time.

———

Paul Blackburn: “I started throwing a curveball right around my sophomore year of high school. I learned it from watching Barry Zito. I grew up in Northern California — I’m a Northern California guy — so I saw a lot of Barry Zito and his big curveball. Read the rest of this entry »

Eli Morgan is one of the best-kept secrets in baseball. He’s not a high-leverage reliever for a marquee team. He’s not even the best or most famous reliever on his own team. Heck, he was a middling five-and-dive starter in the majors just last year. But none of that matters anymore, because now he has a cheat code:

That changeup is absolutely ludicrous. It looks like no other pitch in baseball. It’s slow, much slower than the rest of Morgan’s arsenal. Every other one of his pitches is in the vicinity of league average, while his changeup is the slowest in baseball. That makes for huge separation from his fastball; if the two started on the same trajectory, the changeup would fall 30 more inches than the fastball on its way to home plate. That’s nearly half an Altuve. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the defending World Series Champion Atlanta Braves. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second 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.

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

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

On Wednesday, the Astros easily handled the Rangers. They won, 9–2, with Luis Garcia’s strong start backed by a typically robust offensive performance. The Astros are very good. The Rangers are significantly worse. There are baseball games like this every day, multiple of them even. But this game stands alone, for one singular feat.

Er, well, dual feat. In the second inning, Garcia was simply too much for the Rangers. He faced Nathaniel Lowe, Ezequiel Duran, and Brad Miller, and wasted no time in setting them down:

LUIS GARCIA IS IMMACULATE. pic.twitter.com/9YwSW06uIp

— Houston Astros (@astros) June 15, 2022

That was the 107th immaculate inning — nine pitches, three strikeouts — in baseball history. It wasn’t the most recent one for long, however. In the seventh, Phil Maton came on in relief of Garcia and got right down to business. He faced Nathaniel Lowe, Ezequiel Duran, and Brad Miller, and wasted no time in setting them down:

SAME GAME. SAME BATTERS.

PHIL MATON IS IMMACULATE. pic.twitter.com/xg53FGAJ02

— Houston Astros (@astros) June 15, 2022

Hey, that was really convenient! I got to use the exact same sentence again, because Maton exactly repeated Garcia’s feat; he tore through the three Rangers in only nine pitches for the 108th immaculate inning in history. It was, as you’d expect, the first time the same team has accomplished the feat twice in one game, as well as the first time it’s happened twice on the same day, to give you an idea of how out of the ordinary this was.

You didn’t need FanGraphs to tell you that was remarkable, though. Everyone else already has. Instead, I thought I’d take a look at perfect strikeouts — three pitches, one strikeout, no beating around the bush — and see whether this game still stands out if we remove the “innings” part of immaculate innings.

Garcia had those three perfect strikeouts in the second inning, but he actually managed another one in the game. It was, in fact, the next batter he faced: Leody Taveras went down on consecutive pitches before Marcus Semien took a first-pitch ball to end Garcia’s streak. Four three-pitch strikeouts in a game sounds quite impressive, but it’s not even the most in a game this year. Zach Eflin reeled off six perfect strikeouts in his start on May 22. Six other players have notched five such strikeouts in a game, including Garcia himself on April 22.

Extending our lens backwards in time to 2007, the earliest year in the pitch-by-pitch database I used, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Max Scherzer holds the single-game record. On May 11, 2016, he tied a far more visible record with 20 strikeouts in a nine-inning game. He also struck out nine batters on exactly three pitches. Scherzer might just have a knack for this; he also notched two separate games with seven three-pitch strikeouts (May 26, 2017 and September 20, 2018).

There have been 11 games since 2007 where a pitcher recorded seven or more three-pitch strikeouts. No one else has more than one. Scherzer, it turns out, is the master of the efficient strikeout. Other good pitchers have approached those heights, but only rarely. Here are those 11 games:

That’s neat, but focusing on that fact highlights only Garcia, and not particularly well at that. If we’re focusing on team perfect strikeouts, the Astros mustered seven; Garcia’s four and Maton’s three were the only ones of the game. That’s part of a three-way tie for most in a single game this year. The Rays notched seven on April 14, and the Astros did it again on April 24. If you’ll recall from above, that’s the game where Garcia had five perfect strikeouts. He’s the standard-bearer for the feat this year.

Zoom out, and things get Rays-y. On August 17, 2019, they struck out ten batters on three pitches apiece, the only team (!) to eclipse Scherzer’s nine-strikeout effort. Houston pitchers certainly looked dominant yesterday, but they needed an entire extra immaculate inning to match the standard Tampa set.

Are you less interested in the specific game and more interested in Garcia’s three-pitch-strikeout prowess? He has 17 of them on the year, which certainly sounds impressive, but only places him in a tie for seventh among pitchers in 2022. Shane McClanahan is first, with a whopping 23. Nestor Cortes, of all people, has 18. Scherzer has 15, and he hasn’t pitched in a month. Garcia is certainly one of the best pitchers in baseball when it comes to going right after the batter and setting them down, but he’s not the best in the business.

Did I succeed in exhausting everyone’s interest in three-pitch strikeouts? Who knows! I find them quite interesting, but then, I find a lot of things about baseball quite interesting. I found yesterday’s Astros feat amazing, but giving it a little more context just makes Scherzer’s feats stand out even more. The three-pitch strikeout is the ultimate expression of pitcher dominance — no waste, just three straight strikes, next please — and it stands to reason that the marquee strikeout pitcher of our generation is also the marquee three-pitch-strikeout pitcher of our generation.

This is a wonderful era of baseball in which to be a fan of shortstops. From Francisco Lindor to Carlos Correa to Corey Seager to Xander Bogaerts, there are so many top-tier players at the position. Contrast that with the 1960s and ’70s, an era from which only one shortstop actually got into the Hall of Fame in Luis Aparicio (Ernie Banks never played another game at short after 1961). A merely “good” shortstop can get overlooked in such an atmosphere.

Dansby Swanson certainly wasn’t overlooked during his days as an amateur. The No. 1 pick in the 2015 draft, he was ranked as the best draft-eligible player that year by a number of highly respected analysts and scouts, including our own Kiley McDaniel. Also lending to the hype was the fact that, just six months after being drafted by Arizona, he was the key player in the notorious trade that sent him, Ender Inciarte, and Aaron Blair to Atlanta in exchange for Shelby Miller.

If scouts were over-exuberant about Swanson’s development, so was ZiPS, which pegged him as the fifth-best prospect in baseball before the 2016 season, behind Seager, Byron Buxton, J.P. Crawford, and Orlando Arcia (oof). But Swanson didn’t develop into the superstar that many predicted. Over his first three seasons, he hit .243/.314/.369 for a 75 wRC+ and 2.2 WAR — hardly the worst player in baseball, but a far cry from the phenoms we’ve been blessed with, such as Fernando Tatis Jr. and Mike Trout. While Swanson hadn’t quite been named a bust, there were certainly whispers of disappointment.

If Swanson’s early career didn’t exactly go gangbusters, he steadily improved with the Braves. He had his first two-WAR season in 2019, earned his first MVP vote in ’20, and recorded his first three-WAR season in ’21. Since the start of 2019, he has ranked 10th among shortstops in WAR, sandwiched between Seager and Javier Báez. But in Atlanta’s pecking order in recent years, it’s (rightfully) been Ronald Acuña Jr., Freddie Freeman, and Ozzie Albies that have drawn the most attention among Braves hitters, with Swanson seemingly relegated to being one of the ohyeahhimtoos in public regard.

He’s been more than that this year, particularly of late. There are a lot of players responsible for Atlanta’s current 14-game win streak, and Swanson’s been a key piece of that puzzle, hitting .379/.455/.586 line with 1.1 WAR. But even when you back up and look at the entire season, it’s not the returning Acuña Jr. leading the team in WAR, nor Albies, the big acquisition Matt Olson, Austin Riley, or one of the pitchers; it’s Swanson. Read the rest of this entry »

A Tiger hit a home run on Monday night. Normally, that wouldn’t qualify as news, and in this case it didn’t even lead to a victory, but Willi Castro’s leadoff homer off of Lance Lynn — on the White Sox starter’s first pitch of the season — was Detroit’s first home run since June 2, and just its second in 11 games this month; in the two games since, they haven’t hit another. At this point, just about any time the Tigers score seems noteworthy given that they’re averaging a major league-low 2.71 runs per game, putting themselves in the company of some of the worst teams in recent history. That’s hardly the only thing that’s gone wrong for a team that’s barreling towards its sixth straight sub-.500 campaign.

After winning 77 games last year under new manager A.J. Hinch, their highest total since 2016, the Tigers made a big splash before the lockout by signing righty Eduardo Rodriguez and shortstop Javier Báez to pricey, long-term deals, with the righty getting five years and $77 million and the shortstop six years and $140 million, the team’s largest commitments since the 2015-16 offseason. Along with the Rangers, Mets, and Phillies, they were one of just four teams to commit at least $75 million in total salary to two players. Once the lockout ended, the team added lefty reliever Andrew Chafin (two years, $13 million) and righty Michael Pineda (one year, $5 million) as well and, three days before Opening Day, traded for outfielder Austin Meadows. According to RosterResource, the team’s payroll increased by $47 million over last year, from $88 million to $135 million. Our preseason projection for 77 wins and 12.1% Playoff Odds didn’t indicate a forthcoming powerhouse, but between those moves and the decision to open the season with 2020 first overall pick Spencer Torkelson at first base, the team at least showed a laudable commitment towards improvement. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Youkilis could swing the bat. In 10 big league seasons, the player immortalized in book and movie form as “The Greek God of Walks” logged a .281/.382/.478 slash line and a 127 wRC+. At his peak, he was one of the best hitters in the American League. From 2008-10, Youkilis averaged 25 home runs annually while putting up a .308 batting average and a 150 wRC+. Over that three-year stretch with the Boston Red Sox, he walked 197 times and stroked 429 base hits.

In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series, Youkilis — now a part-time analyst on Red Sox TV broadcasts — discussed the art and science of what he did best: squaring up baseballs.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with the nickname you got early in your career. Looking back, what do you think of it?

Kevin Youkilis: “It was interesting more than anything. It’s not something I equated to. I saw myself as a hitter, and the walks just a byproduct of not getting good pitches. Part of the game is that you walk if you don’t get pitches to hit.

“At the beginning, it was a lot of… it was kind of crazy. There were all these media-driven things coming my way. That was the hardest part. I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ It was all fixated on walking, versus the other things I did well.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the bottom of the 10th inning of last night’s Guardians/Rockies game, Charlie Blackmon made a bad read. No, not this one:

That wasn’t the greatest baserunning decision ever – if Andrés Giménez had snared that ball, Blackmon would have been stuck at second – but you can at least understand his hesitation. The ball was still in the air nearly the whole way there, a double play would be disastrous, and hey, if it gets through Giménez, a runner on third with no one out almost always scores, right?

Right? Wrong:

This was a series of tough decisions that went awry, and since I love bad baserunning, I had to break it down.

Let’s start with the first step. I can’t tell whether the Rockies had the contact play on, forcing Blackmon to head home with the crack of the bat and re-evaluate based on the ball’s path. He was hardly blazing headlong down the line at first contact:

Read the rest of this entry »