Robert Gasser is emerging as one of the most promising pitching prospects in the San Diego system. Over his last six starts with the High-A Fort Wayne TinCaps, the 23-year-old southpaw has fanned 47 batters while allowing just six earned runs in 36-and-two-third innings. On the season, Gasser has a 3.76 ERA to go with a 3.09 FIP; the latter is the third-best mark in the Midwest League.
He isn’t the same pitcher the Padres drafted 71st overall last summer out of the University of Houston. Gasser still throws from a low three-quarters slot, but his arsenal has changed, and to a certain extant, so has his attack plan. Armed with a more diverse mix that includes tweaked grips, the 6-foot-1 El Dorado, California native doesn’t believe in being bland.
David Laurila: What is your M.O. on the mound? In other words, how do you get guys out?
Robert Gasser: “Honestly, just keeping them off balance. I think that’s the most important thing for me. Throwing all of my pitches in the strike zone consistently gives me an opportunity to miss barrels while I’m changing speeds and location.” Read the rest of this entry »
There is a rule in baseball that allows managers to intentionally walk opposing batters automatically. More specifically, “following the signal of the manager’s intention, the umpire will immediately award first base to the batter.” Depending on who you ask, it’s either a minor time saver or completely pointless.
There is a generally accepted practice in baseball that intentional walks are either issued at the start of a plate appearance, after first base becomes open, or when the count begins to favor a batter. You won’t find that anywhere in the rulebook, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s a common-sense practice: the only other time you can walk a batter intentionally is after a pitch tilts the count in the pitcher’s favor, and if an intentional walk makes sense then, it probably made sense before that pitch was thrown.
Baseball conventional wisdom isn’t always correct. In the case of when to intentionally walk a batter, though, it follows straightforward logic. Allow me to make an analogy. Let’s say you and I have made a strange deal. I have 60 seconds to accomplish some task – call it untangling a knot. If I manage it, you’ll owe me $10. Before I start, I make you an offer: you can just hand me $5 now and we’ll call the whole thing off. You can trade the possibility of a $10 loss for the certainty of a $5 loss.
Let’s further say that you turn me down, and that the clock starts. For the first 10 seconds, I don’t do anything — maybe I stubbed my toe and am hopping around in pain. After those 10 seconds, I offer you the same deal: for $5, we can call the same thing off. You wouldn’t take me up on it, of course. You liked your odds enough that you didn’t opt out before, and now I’m less likely to accomplish my task.
Anyway, Tony La Russa intentionally walked José Ramírez yesterday. He did so automatically, in keeping with the rules of the game, by signaling to the umpire from the dugout. He did it in contravention of the generally accepted practices of the game, though, by issuing the walk while Ramírez was behind 0-1 in the count.
In an abstract sense, it’s pretty clear why you wouldn’t do this. The knot-untangling game is a clunky analogy but it gets the point across. There’s no reason to run the numbers: by the numbers, the walk doesn’t make sense. But abstractions don’t always tell the whole story, so let’s look at the specific circumstances around this walk and see if any of them can shed some light on what happened here.
First, the situation. Ramírez came to bat with two outs in the fifth inning. Amed Rosario, the previous batter, had doubled to make the score 4-0 and now stood on second base. Davis Martin, the White Sox starter, stayed in to face Ramírez. Pitching coach Ethan Katz came out for a discussion with Martin. After that meeting came this pitch:
From there, La Russa had seen enough: he walked Ramírez. Martin recovered to strike Franmil Reyes out, escaping the inning. It didn’t matter, in either case; the Sox only scored once all game, and Cleveland held on to win 4-1.
“…Sometimes… they get themselves out. And if they get good patience, it’s like an unintentional intentional walk. So that’s what Ethan went out to say, and the first pitch was on the plate. He fouled it off, so I said, well, put him on. I just think it’s lack of experience for Davis and understanding more about that situation. Because he’s smart enough to know to pitch off the plate and he got it on, cost him two runs. He was supposed to do it again, and after one strike, said no.”
First things first: that explains the pitching meeting. Katz was out there to tell Martin to pitch around Ramírez. Ramírez had singled in two runs in the third inning, as La Russa alluded to above. Easy peasy, right? He wanted Martin to get Ramírez to chase, Ramírez didn’t, let’s face the next batter.
Only, that description glosses over the change in count, which is the most meaningful thing that happened on that first pitch. If you’re looking to record an out, a foul ball is a pretty good place to start. José Ramírez is one of the best hitters in baseball. For his career, he’s hitting .279/.356/.507, and he’s better than that now. Even after 0-1 counts, he’s hitting .266/.307/.472 for a perfectly acceptable 106 wRC+.
But again, the question isn’t whether walking Ramírez made sense. I think I would have walked him there from the start, but I don’t believe it’s an obvious choice either way. The question, instead, is whether the information in that foul ball tilted the balance in favor of an intentional walk.
We know La Russa’s case: the pitch being on the plate proved to him that Martin couldn’t follow his instructions. He wanted pitches out of the zone, he didn’t get them, and he didn’t need to see anything more. It’s not that Ramírez made devastating contact – per Statcast, that foul ball was 63 mph off the bat, though I’m not sure how accurate foul ball exit velocity readings are – but merely the location of the pitch that made an intentional walk a good option.
I can’t tell you what the odds of Ramírez getting a hit on a ball in the strike zone were. La Russa can’t either – but from the sound of his comments, it sounds deterministic. In the third inning, when Martin left a pitch over the plate, it “cost him two runs.” Let’s see the pitch in question:
Unquestionably, two runs scored on that play. Unquestionably, Ramírez hit a single. He even hit the ball pretty hard. But is that a process failure by Martin? I’m not so sure. He threw a well-located changeup that Ramírez put on the ground into the shift. Position your second baseman three steps to the right, and that might be an out instead. Ramírez is great – but he’s hardly a guaranteed base hit every time a pitch is in the strike zone.
There’s really not much more to say than that. In La Russa’s mind, a pitch in the strike zone was unacceptable. I don’t for a second think that Martin meant to throw that changeup in the zone. Pitchers miss their targets sometimes, and Reese McGuire was setting up fairly close to the zone anyway.
I’m just an analyst on the internet. I’ve never managed a team. I won’t claim to know any of the exact numbers here, or whether Katz came out to tell Martin that any pitch in the strike zone, regardless of outcome, would lead to an intentional walk. But if I were La Russa, I wouldn’t give that order.
I’m just projecting, but it seems to me that La Russa is substituting absolutes for probabilities. You can pitch Ramírez in the zone and get an out. You can try to miss the zone and hit it. It’s not black and white – sometimes a bad process leads to a good outcome, and vice versa. That’s baseball in a nutshell: the edges are small either way, and both sides can’t win. All you can do is give yourself the best chance to succeed – pitchers have singled against Jacob deGrom, and Mike Trout has struck out against bad relievers. There are no absolutes.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding La Russa’s logic. Maybe there’s a detail left out somewhere, or something lost in translation. I don’t think so, though. Sometimes, you have to take people at their word. La Russa didn’t care about the fact that the foul ball made the count 0-1. It didn’t enter into his decision making. It wasn’t a question of whether Ramírez’s odds of getting on base changed after the combination of a pitch in the zone and a foul ball. It was just: pitch in zone, walk.
If you like La Russa’s decision making this year, this one won’t change your mind. In fact, you probably agree with him that baseball can be reduced to a binary. Pitches in the zone when you want to throw them out of the zone turn into runs, and so on and so forth.
If you haven’t liked La Russa’s decision making, on the other hand, this is just more evidence. When you deal in absolutes, you miss out on the fact that hitters do worse after 0-1 counts than overall, or that getting the other team’s best hitter to ground the ball into the shift is an overall good thing. You might also inadvertently belittle your pitcher after the game; “he’s smart enough to know” is something people say about children or pets.
If you came here to see the math behind another unlikely intentional walk, I’m sorry. There really isn’t any. You either trust that Tony La Russa knows enough that when he makes a wildly counter-intuitive decision, it’s for good reasons, or you don’t. As best as I can tell, there have never been any similar intentional walks, though our pitch-by-pitch database only goes back to 2002 and it’s entirely possible I missed some anyway. Is your faith in La Russa’s genius enough to outstrip that? That’s for you to decide on your own.
Bashing the White Sox is commonplace these days, and you can’t say the negativity hasn’t been earned. Widely expected by fans, reporters, pundits, and computer projection systems (as well as their sarcastic creators) to steamroll one of the worst divisions in baseball, the Pale Hose have struggled to consistently stay at .500, let alone stay ahead of the Twins and Guardians. Yet there are still reasons to think that the Sox, if not the team they were believed to be, can still salvage the 2022 season without divine intervention.
They’re Still Relevant in All the Projection Systems
Yes, when you look at the White Sox, you see some major, gaping holes, many of which are problems of the team’s own making, whether because of poor evaluation or inaction. Coming into the season, they were near the bottom of the league in our positional power rankings at second base and right field despite an offseason that saw a plethora of good options at those positions. They also didn’t assemble much in the way of depth in places where they had injured players or underwhelming options. Similar to my approach to mowing my backyard, they did the bare minimum.
But all of this is already baked into the cake, so to speak. The projection systems still assume that Leury García is awful and that Chicago needs another bat; the forecasts for players like Yoán Moncada, Yasmani Grandal, Eloy Jiménez, and Lance Lynn have already taken major hits. As for the team’s lack of depth, the ZiPS projected standings use a methodology that attempts to properly discount teams with underwhelming Plan Bs. Read the rest of this entry »
On June 19, the Mariners lost 4–0 to the Angels. It was their second straight shutout loss, ending an 11-game homestand where they went 2–9, dropping them to a season-low 10 games under .500, and leaving their postseason odds at a minuscule 5.3%. Since then, they’ve gone 16–3 and tied the Blue Jays for the final American League Wild Card spot after sweeping them in four games last weekend, passing five teams in the standings during this hot streak and digging themselves out of a pretty deep hole.
As you’d expect for a team playing so well, Seattle has seen contributions from all across the roster. But the pitching staff has been particularly strong, leading the majors in ERA at 2.99 since the beginning of June — a period that includes that aforementioned horrible homestand. In that same span, the starting rotation has posted a 3.06 ERA, and from June 2 to 26, it put together a 24-game streak of allowing three or fewer earned runs. The group’s collective FIP and xFIP during this period are both more than a full run above their ERA, likely indicating some amount of good fortune, but any team that rattles off 16 wins in a 19-game stretch is bound to benefit from some luck. Still, despite the gap between their results and their peripherals, many of Seattle’s starters have made beneficial adjustments to their arsenals that have fueled a lot of their recent success.
Mariners Starters, Since June 1
Player
IP
K/BB
ERA
FIP
xFIP
Robbie Ray
49.2
3.24
1.99
3.67
3.51
Logan Gilbert
47
3.64
3.45
4.05
4.04
Marco Gonzales
43.2
1.33
2.89
4.62
5.00
Chris Flexen
39.2
1.93
3.40
3.44
5.08
George Kirby
38.1
5.67
3.99
4.94
3.67
It all starts with the reigning AL Cy Young award winner, Robbie Ray. Diminished velocity led to a rough first couple of months; through his first 11 starts of the season, his ERA was sitting just under five, though his FIP and xFIP both painted a more optimistic picture. Some of that likely had to do with his propensity to allow a bunch of runs in a single bad inning in nearly all of his starts. But in his start against the Astros on June 6, he made a change to his pitch repertoire, adding a sinker — a pitch that’s now become an integral part of his arsenal:
Last year in Toronto, Ray leaned into his four-seam fastball and slider as his two primary pitches. He continued that trend in Seattle to the point where he was essentially a two-pitch pitcher during the first two months of the season. Whether it was the diminished velocity or batters simply figuring out his approach, he wasn’t nearly as effective. By introducing a sinker into his mix (and throwing his curveball a little bit more, too), he’s given opposing batters a new wrinkle to figure out. Read the rest of this entry »
From the point at which the Twins chose him with the second overall pick out of a Georgia high school a decade ago, Byron Buxton figured to make an All-Star team, or several of them. Yet not until Sunday, in the midst of his eighth major league season, did the powerful and fleet-footed center fielder officially become one. Buxton was among the reserves added to the American League team via a vote by his fellow players.
The honor is well deserved given that the 28-year-old Buxton ranks fourth among all outfielders in WAR (limiting the definition to those who have played at least 50% of their games in the pasture):
By WAR and wRC+, where his mark of 132 is in a virtual tie for 11th among the same group, Buxton is clearly having a strong season, but as his slash line shows, it’s been an uneven one. He’s hardly the first player to make an All-Star team despite carrying an on-base percentage below .300, even in the past decade; Salvador Perez did it annually from 2014-18, in seasons where his first-half OBP was as low as .259, and where his final mark as low as .274 (both 2018). Likewise with batting average when, for example, Mike Zunino had a first-half mark of .198 just last year. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Groome has experienced a lot of ups and downs since being drafted 12th overall by the Boston Red Sox out of a New Jersey high school in 2016. The now-23-year-old southpaw had Tommy John surgery in 2018, and his career mark as a professional includes an 11-22 record with a 4.50 ERA over 240 innings.
Groome’s future nonetheless remains promising. Ranked 13th on our Red Sox Top Prospects list coming into the current campaign, the 6-foot-6, 265-pound former first-rounder has a 3.52 ERA and has allowed just 58 hits (with 81 strikeouts) in 76-and-two-thirds innings with the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs. Moreover, he has a more diversified arsenal and a better feel for how to attack hitters than he’s had in previous seasons.
Groome discussed his evolution as a pitcher, and the hurdles he’s overcome along the way, earlier this summer.
———
David Laurila: When I first interviewed you in 2017, I asked where you were in terms of transitioning from a thrower to a pitcher, and your response was that you “100% know how to pitch.” Looking back, how accurate was that?
Jay Groome: “That was probably just my younger self trying to be honest. But I’ve added two more decent pitches since then, and I’m trying to throw all of them in the zone. I can fairly say now that I’m pitching a lot more than throwing.” Read the rest of this entry »
For the first time in 30 years, a pair of brothers will be in the same All-Star Game lineup. On Sunday, when the full squads were announced, catchers Willson Contreras of the Cubs and William Contreras of the Braves both made the National League team. They’ll each be in the starting lineup, as Willson won the fan vote as the NL’s starting backstop, and William, who was elected as a reserve catcher by his fellow players, has been named to replace the injured Bryce Harper as the starting designated hitter.
This is the first time since 2003 that a pair of brothers has been named to the Midsummer Classic. That year, the Reds’ Aaron Boone was a reserve for the NL while the Mariners’ Bret Boone was a reserve for the American League. The last time two brothers started the same game was in 1992, when the AL squad featured Toronto’s Roberto Alomar at second base and Cleveland’s Sandy Alomar Jr. at catcher.
By my count, a total of 18 19 sets of brothers (including one set of three brothers) has made the All-Star team at least once, with 10 sets making it in the same season at least once; both of those counts include players who were selected but did not get into the game. Five sets started in the same year at least once:
The Baltimore Orioles have been exceeding expectations this season, and an improved offense is one of the reasons why. Second from the bottom in runs scored last year, the Birds went into yesterday’s off day tied with the Chicago White Sox for seventh-most in the American League. While improved pitching and defense has arguably had a bigger impact, plating more runners has greatly benefitted the team’s fortunes.
Ryan Fuller has played a key role in the offensive uptick. A former University of Connecticut infielder who joined the Orioles organization as a minor league hitting coordinator in 2019, Fuller was promoted to big league co-hitting coach, along with Matt Borgschulte, last November.
In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series, Fuller discussed the club’s new school meets old school philosophy — and some of the notable players who embrace it — when Baltimore visited Boston earlier this season.
———
David Laurila: What is your approach — the Orioles approach — to hitting?
Ryan Fuller: “Organizationally, what we believe in starts with making great swing decisions, swinging at the right pitches in the zone, and taking pitches that aren’t in the zone. If we do that, hard contact is going to come. And if we make hard contact, OPS, scoring runs — whatever metric you want to look at — is going to heighten. Read the rest of this entry »
The Dodgers have been so good for so long that whatever numbers they put up seem to elicit a blasé response at best. Oh, their 116 wRC+ is good for third in the league? Ho-hum. It’s been that way for a while, and I wouldn’t blame you for not thinking about the Dodgers, or even refusing to. You’d like someone else to seize the throne; after all, baseball is at its best with several contending teams, not select superpowers.
But let me implore you to consider the Dodgers again. The mere fact that they’re great isn’t interesting; it’s how they’re great that is. While the pitching is playing a crucial role, I’m going to focus solely on the hitting, because that’s where this team stands out.
To lay some groundwork: Over at Baseball Savant, there’s a tool called Swing/Take runs, which shows the run value players accrue on pitches in each zone. The distinction goes beyond simple balls and strikes; down-the-middle strikes, for example, correspond to the “Heart” zone, and borderline strikes correspond to the “Shadow” zone.
We can look at these run values by team, too. Quick: what do stellar offenses do against down-the-middle pitches? Crush them, that’s what. To wit, the Yankees have accrued a league-leading 26 runs against such pitches. It makes sense; the Yankees make sense. The Dodgers, however, do not make sense:
It’s not just a quirk from this season: A vast majority of players, and thus teams, are regularly in the red when they swing against seemingly easy pitches. The Yankees are actually an outlier in that regard, and it’s part of why they’ve been successful. But the Dodgers aren’t merely missing out on down-the-middle pitches. Nay, they’re atrocious against them. On the graph, they’re in the same neighborhood as the Nationals, who own the league’s 22nd-best offense by wRC+, and the Athletics, who own the very worst. This is… strange. Read the rest of this entry »
Trades for competitive balance round picks happen a couple of times every year. Often, there are a lot of different moving parts involved, which can make it a little harder to nail down what teams think a comp pick is worth — there are so many variables associated with each player that it becomes hard to isolate the weight that the pick is carrying in the trade. Every once in a while, we get trades where one side of the deal is exclusively the comp pick, which makes it a little easier to get a feel for pick’s value. Yesterday, when the Braves acquired the 35th overall pick from the Royals for prospects Drew Waters, Andrew Hoffmann, and CJ Alexander, we had one of those instances.
The pick is the most significant aspect of this trade, but it’s value is more abstract since it not only represents a player, but also the draft flexibility it affords the Braves, as they add the bonus pool space associated with the pick (a shade over $2.2 million) to their pool. While it might seem counterintuitive for the Braves, who have a relatively thin system, to move three pieces for one, this trade feels great for them (not that it’s bad for KC). Atlanta doesn’t need Waters, who is likely carrying the most weight in the deal for the Royals. With everyone now healthy, the team has an everyday right fielder in Ronald Acuña Jr., an everyday center fielder in Michael Harris II, and a left field platoon in Eddie Rosario and Adam Duvall, while Guillermo Heredia, the Platonic ideal of a fifth outfielder, can pinch run, make the occasional start for Harris against a lefty, or serve as a late-game defensive upgrade for Duvall/Rosario/Marcell Ozuna. If injury occurs, Atlanta has other ways of moving pieces around to create a better lineup than one that would otherwise heavily feature Waters. Even if you think he’ll eventually be good (more on that in a minute), he was a superfluous in Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »
