Please note, this posting contains two positions.

Position: Biomechanist, Performance Science

Summary:
The Detroit Tigers are currently seeking a full-time Biomechanist in the Performance Science Department. This role will assist with the delivery of performance science solutions within Baseball Operations. The biomechanist will be responsible for translating biomechanical data into applied, actionable outcomes to be used by staffs to optimize performance. This role will work closely Baseball Analytics, Player Development, Strength and Conditioning, and Sports Medicine. Read the rest of this entry »

Any team down 1-0 in a five-game series has problems. That’s where the Boston Red Sox find themselves after losing Game 1 of their American League Division Series tilt against the Tampa Bay Rays 5-0 in St. Petersburg on Thursday night. But before this series began, the Red Sox already had plenty of issues, and while Alex Cora did his best to mitigate them with some unexpected decisions concerning his pitching staff, he was left helpless thanks to a moribund Boston offense.

Problem No. 1: The Red Sox are all but forced to lean on left-handed starters against a team that crushes them

The Red Sox had to use Nathan Eovaldi just to get to this point. Unfortunately, the understandable decision to have their right-handed ace start the AL Wild Card game means that Tampa will likely face a left-handed starter in at least three games should the ALDS go the full five. That’s a problem when squaring off against the Rays, whose offense finished second in the AL only to the Houston Astros in terms of runs scored and features one of the most dangerous lineups in baseball against southpaws. Here’s Tampa’s Game 1 lineup, with their 2021 performance against lefties:

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Coming into the American League Division Series, the Chicago White Sox faced a tough task: controlling the tireless Houston Astros offense, which paced the majors in scoring. They’re a nightmarish matchup; high on-base hitters up top, power in the middle, and enough firepower that Carlos Correa (134 wRC+) bats sixth and Kyle Tucker (147 wRC+) seventh.

Chicago’s plan? Fastballs. That’s less by design and more because Lance Lynn, their Game 1 starter, throws more of them than anyone else in baseball. Is that a smart plan against the Astros? No, it is not — they were the third-best fastball-hitting team in baseball this year by run value. On the other hand, they were also the third-best team against breaking pitches and the second-best against offspeed offerings, so it’s not as though there were easy choices. But fastballs? In this economy? It felt like it might be a long afternoon.

For an inning, Lynn managed it. He mixed four-seamers and cutters, keeping Houston hitters off-balance. His cutter could almost be called a slider, and it’s key to keeping opponents uneasy; it’s the only pitch he throws with glove-side movement. He set the side down in order — but even then, Alex Bregman smashed a line drive directly at Leury García for the third out. The cutters weren’t doing enough to keep Astros hitters from sitting on other fastballs.
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Bobby Bradley is both a power hitter and a work-in-progress. Swinging from the left side, the 25-year-old Cleveland first baseman swatted 16 home runs this year in 279 plate appearances, but he also fanned 99 times. At 35.5%, his K-rate was fourth-highest among major league batters with at least 250 PAs. But again, Bradley hits for power. Despite an uninspiring .208/.294/.445 slash line, his 99 wRC+ was a mere tick below average. With further maturation and improved contact skills, Bradley could very well emerge as a force in the middle of the soon-to-be-Guardians lineup.

Bradley talked hitting when Cleveland visited Fenway Park in early September.

———

David Laurila: Do you view hitting as more of a science, or as more of an art?

Bobby Bradley: “More of an art. Personally, I don’t look at it from the scientific side; I don’t get into all the data and all that. It’s more something that I take pride in, and I try to take care of my swing. So I’d say that it’s a work of art to me. I obviously haven’t perfected it, but at the same time, it’s like my masterpiece.”

Laurila: Do you have the same swing now that you did as a younger player?

Bradley: “It’s pretty close. For instance, it’s not entirely different from when I got drafted [in 2014]. There are maybe a couple of things, like where I put my hands. I also have a little bit bigger leg-kick now. But overall, it’s pretty close to where I was in high school.”

Laurila: When did the bigger leg-kick come about? Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox summarily dispensed with the New York Yankees in their winner-takes-all Wild Card matchup on Tuesday night, with Nathan Eovaldi cruisin’ and Gerrit Cole the subject of a bruisin’. Boston now faces the Tampa Bay Rays in a five-game American League Division Series matchup that represents just the third time the teams have ever squared off in the playoffs.

One of the interesting things about this matchup from a projections standpoint is that it features two of the teams with the largest gap between their FanGraphs Projected Standings and the ZiPS-concocted ones. Indeed, if it weren’t for the St. Louis Cardinals, these two squads would have the biggest separation in the two systems’ respective preseason outlooks, with the FanGraphs Projected Standings preferring the Red Sox and ZiPS leaning toward Tampa Bay:

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Both the Astros and White Sox dominated their respective divisions in 2021. For Houston, this was the team’s fourth division title in five years; for Chicago, its first since 2008. With the Rays having run away with the AL’s best record, these two clubs have been in each other’s sights for a while now. Both teams are filled with offensive stars, hard-throwing pitchers, and deep rosters; on paper, this looks like an even matchup.

The Astros are vying for their fifth consecutive trip to the American League Championship Series, which they’ve won twice, first in 2017 and again in ’19. They backed into the expanded playoffs last year as the only AL team with a record below .500 but came alive in the playoffs and nearly completed an 0–3 series comeback against Tampa before falling in Game 7. As for the White Sox, they’ve now made the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time in their franchise history — appearances that are the culmination of a long rebuilding cycle that began more than half a decade ago. And this series will be a rematch of the 2005 World Series, Chicago’s last title and back when Houston was still a National League club.

For the third time in the last five years, the Astros led the majors in wRC+ and also finished first in runs scored, batting average, on-base percentage, and strikeout rate. That last statistic is perhaps most important to their playoff success. As previous research has shown, high-contact teams do well against high-velocity pitchers, which every postseason team has in spades. A team’s regular-season strikeout rate also tends to correlate well with postseason success, as Eno Sarris found over at The Athletic. That tracks with the foundation of the Astros’ success over the last half-decade.

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A few hours before Tuesday’s Red Sox-Yankees Wild Card tilt, the Colorado Rockies announced that they had agreed to two new contracts, getting baseball’s offseason started just a little bit early. First, the club and right-handed starter Antonio Senzatela came to terms on a five-year contract extension, one that guarantees him $50.5 million and includes a $14 million club option for 2027. The team also agreed to bring back first baseman C.J. Cron on a two-year, $14.5 million deal.

Though both contracts were announced on the same day, they accomplish different goals. Senzatela, for one, was not a free agent until after the 2023 season; the new contract buys out his two remaining arbitration years at $7.25 million apiece, while valuing the three free agent seasons that would have come after at $12 million each. Cron’s contract, on the other hand, can be considered an extension in name only (since players are under contract until five days following the World Series), as he was set to hit the open market in just a few weeks. Interestingly — though it’s almost certainly just a coincidence — Cron’s contract will also pay him exactly $7.25 million in each of the next two seasons.

Also notably, the two deals represent the first moves made by the team’s new permanent general manager, Bill Schmidt, who officially shed the interim title on Saturday. He had been serving in the role since May 3, following Jeff Bridich’s late-April resignation. Prior to assuming the interim role, Schmidt had led the Rockies’ scouting department, a position he had held since 1999. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you subscribe to the notion that styles make fights? I’m not 100% sure what that means — I’ve never been a boxing fan. But styles make for entertaining baseball games, and the Cardinals and Dodgers set out to prove that during Wednesday night’s National League Wild Card game.

The Dodgers brought the heavy artillery: a coterie of MVP winners, Silver Sluggers, and All-Stars who led the NL in scoring. Their splendor was slightly diminished by Max Muncy’s absence, but the offense still felt like a battering ram. Their starter? None other than Max Scherzer, the modern avatar of power pitching, all glowering stares and challenge fastballs.

The Cardinals? They’ve got star hitters, too, but nothing like the Dodgers’ onslaught. They thrived this year both by smacking home runs — Tyler O’Neill and Paul Goldschmidt are large and powerful — and by playing the best defense in the majors. Their pitcher of choice Wednesday? Crafty old Adam Wainwright, who rarely tops 90 mph on the radar gun but makes up for it with a time-bending curveball and pinpoint command. Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Eovaldi had it all working. Through his first five innings of work, he had a spectacular game brewing: seven strikeouts, two hits, no walks, and no runs. The Red Sox were already ahead 3–0. Everything was coming up Boston.

After a strikeout to begin the sixth inning, Eovaldi faced the top of the Yankees’ order. Suddenly, things got tough. Anthony Rizzo clobbered a home run. Aaron Judge followed with an infield single, narrowly beating out a throw from Xander Bogaerts. Suddenly, the tying run was at the plate — and it was freaking Giancarlo Stanton, who had already doinked a ball off of the Green Monster earlier in the night.

Ten years ago, that would be the introduction to an article about one of two things: either Eovaldi’s heroic stand where he faced down his doom and retired Stanton and Joey Gallo, or the Yankees’ dramatic comeback from a 3-0 deficit. But last night, Alex Cora went to the bullpen.

It wasn’t a pitch count issue, to say the least. Eovaldi had thrown only 71 pitches, carving through the New York lineup with great speed. It wasn’t a handedness issue; Cora went with a righty to replace him. It wasn’t even a homer-proneness issue, a handy thing to keep an eye on when the tying run stands at the plate: Eovaldi induces more grounders than does Ryan Brasier, the pitcher who replaced him, and has allowed fewer home runs per inning pitched, both in 2021 and his career.
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When the Yankees signed Gerrit Cole to a nine-year, $324 million deal in December 2019, they envisioned him contending for Cy Young awards and pitching do-or-die games in October. They likely didn’t imagine those would be Wild Card games, however, nor did they foresee the ace right-hander taking an early exit before things really got out of hand, but that’s just what happened on Tuesday night in Fenway Park. On the heels of a strong but uneven season that may yet garner him a Cy Young award, Cole fizzled, surrendering a pair of homers and retiring just six of the 12 Red Sox he faced before departing with a 3-0 deficit. The Yankees’ offense was kept at bay by opposite number Nathan Eovaldi and the four relievers that followed, and the Red Sox advanced with a 6-2 victory.

Cole pitched about as well as any American League starter this year, posting the highest strikeout rate (33.5%) and strikeout-to-walk differential (27.8%) among ERA qualifiers, and finishing second in both flavors of WAR, trailing only Eovaldi in FanGraphs’ version, 5.6 to 5.3, and the Blue Jays’ Robby Ray in Baseball Reference’s version, 6.7 to 5.6. His 2.92 FIP ranked second behind Eovaldi’s 2.79, while his 3.23 ERA placed third behind Ray’s 2.84 and Lance McCullers‘ 3.16. Cole also had the lowest xERA of any AL qualifier (3.15).

Even so, the 31-year-old righty entered Tuesday night with at least some cause for concern. He left his September 7 start after 3.2 innings due to tightness in his left hamstring, and while he was solid enough in his return a week later — five innings, seven strikeouts, and one run on 108 pitches against the Orioles — he was cuffed for five homers and 15 runs in 17.2 innings over his final three starts. One of those was actually solid enough; he threw five shutout innings against the Red Sox in Fenway Park on September 24 as the Yankees built a 7-0 lead, then allowed a three-run homer to Rafael Devers in his final inning of work.

The late-season funk was deep enough to generate questions about which version of Cole would show up on Tuesday night, but unfortunately for the Yankees, the question was settled early. Kyle Schwarber sent a 103-mph rocket to center field on Cole’s fifth pitch, a 98.2-mph four-seam fastball that was more or less in the middle of the plate. Brett Gardner caught it for an out, but the missed location and the quality of contact didn’t bode well for the pitcher. After getting Enrique Hernández to pop out, Cole avoided the strike zone altogether against Devers, and walked him on six pitches. He then fell behind Xander Bogaerts, 2-1, before leaving a changeup in the middle of the zone; the slugging shortstop hammered the ball 427 feet to dead center for a two-run homer:

Per Baseball Savant, it was just the third time in his career that Cole served up a home run to a right-handed hitter on a changeup, and the first time in over four years. His first two came while pitching for the Pirates, first on May 5, 2014 against the Nationals’ Ian Desmond, and then on September 17, 2017 against the Reds’ Eugenio Suárez.

Pitch choice and location aside, it was an all-too-familiar spot for Cole to wind up in. During the first inning of his starts this year, batters hit .265/.317/.521 for a .354 wOBA against him, accounting for seven of the 24 homers he served up. His ERA in the first inning was 4.80, compared to 2.91 in all other frames. Tuesday was a bad time to hold form in that regard.

In the second inning, Cole had to work around a one-out double by Kevin Plawecki, who hit a 105-mph rocket off the center field wall on a 98.5 mph fastball that again caught too much of the zone. Cole recovered to strike out both Bobby Dalbec and Christian Arroyo, the former looking at a 3-2 slider that was actually off the outside corner, and the latter swinging at high cheese. To start the third, he got ahead of Schwarber 0-2, but after missing way outside with a changeup, he came back with a 97.4 mph four-seamer above the zone. The Boston slugger went and got the cheese, schwarbing it to right field at a 110.3-mph clip for a solo homer.

After a soft infield hit to the third base side by Hernández, and then a six-pitch walk to Devers, Cole’s night was done; manager Aaron Boone pulled the plug before the Yankees’ inconsistent offense, which managed just six runs during the team’s final three games of the regular season as it squandered home-field advantage for this game, had to dig out of a bigger hole. Clay Holmes extricated the Yankees from the jam with a strikeout of Bogaerts and a double play ball off the bat of Alex Verdugo. The Yankees made a game of it, trimming the lead to 3-1 in the sixth, but a bad send by third base coach Phil Nevin and a great throw by Bogaerts left Aaron Judge hung out to dry at home plate on the second of Giancarlo Stanton’s two long singles off the Green Monster. The Red Sox never let them get any closer.

It wasn’t that Cole lacked his typical velocity; his 97.8 mph average four-seamer was a whisker ahead of his season average. His 18% swinging strike rate and 34% CSW rate were both above his season averages as well. Yet his command was lacking; he threw far too many noncompetitive pitches, particularly fastballs:

Worse, when Cole got to two strikes, he couldn’t close the deal:

Hitters had a .405 OPS vs. Cole when the #Yankees ace got to 2 strikes during the season. Cole got to 2 strikes 8 times vs. the #RedSox. They had a 1.667 OPS. 2-for-6 with a HR, 2b, 2 BBs. #Yankees #RedSox

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) October 6, 2021

Ouch. Three of the four batted balls of 100 mph or higher that he allowed came with two strikes.

Afterwards, Cole refused to blame his hamstring or his bout of COVID-19 for his late-season woes, telling reporters, “At the end of the season, we are all going through and wearing whatever we’ve had to overcome to get to this point. You know, the other team is dealing with the same kind of situation.” He noted that it wasn’t so much that his fastball command was unreliable, as he generated three popups with it; that Schwarber had to expand his zone to reach the homer; and that his changeup got hit hard. “When it’s all said and done, there wasn’t one pitch that was good enough because we didn’t get the job done,” he said.

Asked whether he could put his finger on what happened over the last month, Cole didn’t offer a blanket explanation, saying “Evaluate each game individually… It just wasn’t the same answer every time.”

In terms of batters faced, Cole’s start was the sixth-shortest in Wild Card game history:

Four of those six starts involved the Yankees, who have made too much a habit of traveling this route into October by playing in four of the last six AL Wild Card games. Two of the above starts came in the same game in 2017; after the Twins chased Severino, the Yankees chased Santana and rallied to win while the bullpen held Minnesota to a single run over 8.2 innings.

That list is no place to be, and a start like Cole’s will be a tough one to live down given that it occurred within one of the game’s most heated rivalries, and against the backdrop of the Yankees’ relative lack of postseason success in recent years. They’ve exited before the ALCS in seven of the past nine seasons, and haven’t won the World Series since 2009, an eternity by the franchise’s standards.

Cole’s start will be cited as evidence of his fall from grace after a strong first two months to 2021, though the reality is a bit more complicated. Undoubtedly, his season was a clear step down from 2019, when he delivered a 2.50 ERA, 2.64 FIP, 39.9% strikeout rate, and 7.5 WAR for an Astros team that came within one win of a championship. But judged by everything except his 2.84 ERA, Cole’s 2021 season was a step up from last year’s shortened campaign; driven by a home run rate that ballooned to 1.73 per nine between seasons of 1.2 per nine on either side, his FIP rose to 3.89 in 2020 while his strikeout rate dipped to 32.6%, still good for third in the AL.

Cole’s 2021 season had two obvious points of inflection that conveniently segment his body of work into thirds, more or less: the crackdown on pitchers’ use of foreign substances, which was first reported on June 3, though enforcement didn’t begin until a few weeks later, and the pitcher’s positive test for COVID-19, a breakthrough infection that was reported on August 3 and that sidelined him for over two weeks.

Here’s how his season looks by the basics:

One could argue that the hamstring issue marked another point of inflection, but I’m not sure how useful breaking the last part into segments of four and five starts — the first of which featured a lights-out 0.73 ERA and 1.02 FIP between his return from illness and his early exit — is in the grand scheme.

All of Cole’s numbers declined after the specter of sticky stuff enforcement reared its head, but as you can see, his ERA was half a run worse than his peripherals suggested, owing something to a lousy defense that ranked 27th in the majors in DRS (-63) and 25th in OAA runs prevented (-13); by the latter, Cole’s -3 runs placed him in just the 16th percentile among all pitchers.

Getting back to the leaderboard comparisons, Cole’s 31.5% strikeout rate and 24.6% strikeout-walk differential form June 3 onward both would have ranked third in the AL, his 3.66 FIP seventh, 16 percent better than league average, his 2.2 WAR tied for eighth. Relative rankings of that order would have registered as something of a disappointment had they been maintained over the course of a season, as the Yankees aren’t paying Cole to be merely a top-10 AL pitcher — and the team would have finished outside the playoff picture.

And now, a closer look at his Statcast numbers:

There’s no getting around the fact that Cole’s four-seam fastball spin rate dropped conspicuously after news of the crackdown emerged; his spin-to-velocity ratio (SVR) dropped from 26.3 to 24.4 in that same span. Even before the league began enforcing the ban on foreign substances via the umpire checks, he made headlines first for his awkward answer when asked directly whether he used Spider Tack on June 8, and then for his complaints about the difficulty of gripping the ball on June 16. Cole, who serves on the executive subcommittee of the Players Association and has spoken up about various labor matters such as service time manipulation and competitive balance, was hardly alone in discussing grip issues, or in calling for the league to incorporate player input into the new rules; among frontline hurlers, the likes of Tyler Glasnow, Max Scherzer, and (ugh) Trevor Bauer spoke up as well.

Among pitchers with at least 150 four-seam fastballs thrown before June 3 and 300 after that date, Cole had the 16th-largest spin rate drop, putting him in the 89th percentile of that group:

Cole’s drop in four-seam spin rate from June 3 onward was about 2.5 times the major league average of 68 rpm (from 2,319 rpm to 2,251). Similarly, his drop in SVR was about 2.6 times the major league average of 0.7 (from 24.7 to 24.0). Cole isn’t the only awards candidate on that leaderboard, as the names of Buehler and Ohtani stand out. As you can see, the changes affected pitchers with more fastball spin than Cole (who ranks in the 91st percentile in that category) and with much less. In terms of SVR — a category in which Cole placed in the 82nd percentile among qualifiers during the first part of the season — his drop was the 10th largest (93rd percentile).

Results-wise, the numbers in the table prior to that one show that Cole’s velocity actually increased beyond the first leg of his season, and his spin rate rebounded somewhat. Both his average exit velocity and hard-hit rate fell relative to that first leg, though his barrel rate did rise substantially. What’s more, where his actual batting average and slugging percentage were higher than his expected numbers during the first leg, they were lower during the other two legs save for a slightly higher batting average than expected in the third leg. Taken as a whole, his gaps between actual and expected stats were very small and right in line with his career norms, suggesting that at least some of the fluctuations had less to do with any particular changes than to sample size and randomness:

Crackdown-wise, this is not meant to be an indictment of Cole given the number of pitchers who were apparently using foreign substances, or who experienced spin drop-offs from the first third of the season to the remainder, whether with regards to their fastballs or other pitches. He had points in his season following the ban where he pitched brilliantly, and he was hardly facing a cupcake schedule; by Baseball Reference’s RA9Opp calculations, which measure the park-adjusted scoring rates of the teams a pitcher faces in the service of that version of WAR, his opponents’ 4.96 runs per game was the highest among AL ERA qualifiers.

Still the performance numbers are what they are, and taken together with the disappointing end to Cole’s season, we — and he and the Yankees, more to the point — are left with more questions than answers as to what happened, both on Tuesday night and in the bigger picture, and where his performance goes from here. Like Clayton Kershaw, the only pitcher with four losses in potential elimination games (Cole is tied for second with three alongside eight other pitchers including CC Sabathia, Max Scherzer, and Hall of Famers Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson), he may have to endure the weight of the can’t-win-the-big-one tag until he wins one.

In a league where the last five Cy Young winners either didn’t pitch enough innings or were entirely out of the league, and where no one pitcher dominated enough categories to make a clear-cut case, Cole may yet bring home the award that eluded him in 2019, when teammate Justin Verlander narrowly beat him out. Such hardware could be cold comfort in the aftermath of the Yankees’ elimination. He’s hardly alone in terms of blame for the team’s precarious entry to the playoffs or its swift exit, but of all the players in pinstripes, Cole’s upcoming winter might feel the longest.