On the strength of his monster home run and an additional RBI groundout, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. took home MVP honors from the All-Star Game at Coors Field on Tuesday night. In doing so, the 22-year-old slugger — who also nearly decapitated National League starter Max Scherzer with his hardest-hit ball of the evening — became the youngest player ever to win that award. The performance was just the latest chapter of Guerrero’s breakout, as he lives up to the high expectations set by his pedigree and his precocious development.

If for some reason you haven’t seen his highlights from Tuesday night, here’s Guerrero’s first-inning plate appearance, where his 111.1 mph rocket back through the box produced such a close call that Guerrero felt obliged to apologize to Scherzer, who remarked after the game, “I’m alive… that’s the success story… I’m just grateful I still have a blue eye and a brown eye”:

Vlad Guerrero Jr. almost takes Max Scherzer’s head off and then apologizes ? pic.twitter.com/oTv06MiY5o

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) July 14, 2021

And here’s Guerrero’s third-inning homer off Corbin Burnes:

The 468-footer was the longest All-Star Game homer of the Statcast era, surpassing Kris Bryant’s 2016 shot by a good 58 feet. With it, Guerrero became the second-youngest player to go yard in an All-Star Game, after Johnny Bench did so in 1969 at the age of 21 years and 228 days. In winning MVP honors, Guerrero, at 22 years and 119 days, surpassed Ken Griffey Jr., who was 117 days older when he won in 1992. Meanwhile, Guerrero and dad Vlad joined the Griffeys and Bobby and Barry Bonds as the only father/son combinations to homer in the All-Star Game.

With the single-game spotlight and honors behind him, Guerrero is now angling to become the youngest position player to win a regular season MVP award; he won’t surpass pitcher Vida Blue, who was 22 years and 64 days old on the final day of the 1971 season, but would surpass Bench, who was 22 years and 298 days on the final day of the ’70 season. He and his father, the AL MVP in 2004, would be the first pair to win the award. Of course, the competition for Guerrero to win is daunting given the ongoing tour de force of Shohei Ohtani. A month ago, Guerrero led the AL in all three Triple Crown categories and WAR, kindling a debate over the merits of that combination relative to Ohtani’s pitching. At that point, Dan Szymborski estimated Vladito’s chances of winning the Triple Crown at 19.1%, but the five-homer lead he held over Ohtani has become a five-homer lead for Ohtani (33-28) thanks to the Angels’ superstar’s recent flurry. Guerrero’s .332 batting average and 73 RBI both still leads the AL, as does his .439 on-base percentage, 189 wRC+, and 4.6 position player WAR, though Ohtani has taken over the combined WAR lead at 5.5, and has a slugging percentage 40 points higher than Guerrero’s .658.

Regardless of whether he’s first or second in any category, Guerrero has taken a massive leap forward from his performances in 2019 and ’20, which were solid enough for a 20- or 21-year-old, but hardly All-Star caliber. After batting .272/.339/.433 (105 wRC+) in 2019, he showed more power last year, hitting .262/.329/.462 (112 wRC+); his ISO jumped by 37 points, and his home run rate rose from 2.9% to 3.7%, a gain of about 28%.

Guerrero is showing even greater in-game power this year — his display in the 2019 Home Run Derby provided more evidence of raw power than anyone this side of Iggy and the Stooges — as you can see from the basic numbers, but before discussing that, it’s worth acknowledging his improved plate discipline. He’s cut his rate of swinging at pitches outside the strike zone from 31.6% as a rookie to 27.4% last year and then 25.3% this year; among qualifiers, he’s climbed from the 46th percentile to the 70th and now the 83rd. As a result, he’s posted the majors’ fifth-largest gain in walk rate from 2020 to ’21, jumping 5.7 percentage points to 13.9%; only Starling Marte (+7.9%,), Joey Gallo (+7.7%), Carlos Correa (5.9%), and Andrew McCutchen (+5.8%) have gained more. While Guerrero is striking out more as well (up two points to 17.6%), he’s still in the 70th percentile in that category.

The biggest difference in his performance relative to 2020, though, is how much harder he’s hitting the ball:

Guerrero’s exit velocity already ranked in the 93rd percentile last year, but he was hitting grounders about twice as often as fly balls. He still hits more grounders than flies, but his 9.8 percentage point drop in groundball rate is the majors’ fourth-largest behind Jonathan Villar (-14.0%), Kyle Schwarber (-10.6%), and Kevin Pillar (-9.9%). He’s nearly doubled his average launch angle (from 4.6 degrees to 8.4), and with it, has nearly doubled his barrel rate while increasing his already-high hard-hit rate. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Guerrero has improved in every Statcast-tracked category here — even the ones that pertain to his speed and defense, the evidence of the better conditioning and work he’s put into learning a new(ish) position — except for maximum exit velocity, where he already ranked in the 99th percentile. In case you were worried that he was stagnating, he has actually shown improvement there nonetheless, from last year’s 116.1 mph to 117.4 (for what it’s worth, he topped both with a 118.9 mph single in 2019). Fittingly, where last year’s hardest-hit ball was a lineout to second base, this year’s was a home run off the Rays’ Ryan Yarbrough, the first of the two he hit on May 24 at the team’s temporary Dunedin home:

That first one had a projected distance of 461 feet, four short of his regular season career long, set just eight days earlier off the Phillies’ Brandon Kintzler, also in Dunedin:

Guerrero’s All-Star Game homer topped that, albeit with an assist from Coors Field’s altitude (which added 32 feet, according to Weather Applied Metrics’ Ken Arneson) if not the wind (which took away 10).

On the subject of harnessing his incredible bat speed towards improving his ability to get the ball in the air, in April our own Carmen Ciardiello wrote about the possibility of Guerrero improving what he called his attack angle to better launch the ball. Using an approximation based upon the top 5% of each player’s hardest-hit batted balls, Ciardiello compared Guerrero to the other mighty sluggers with similar maximum exit velocities and estimated his attack angle at 8.71 degrees. Only Giancarlo Stanton (8.74 degrees) had one nearly as flat, while Ronald Acuña Jr. had the highest angle at 17.86 degrees, followed by Trout at 16.94. In my attempt to track this as a potential explanation for Guerrerro’s year-to-year improvement, I calculated that based upon his top 5% of hard-hit balls, his attack angle has actually dipped to an average of 6.69 degrees; five of his 13 hardest-hit balls thus far have negative launch angles, meaning that they were hit on the ground, while only four are double-digit positives, all of them homers. I’ll leave it to Ciardello for further interpretation of those results.

Looking at Guerrero’s year-to-year improvement by pitch type what quickly becomes apparent is that he’s now a serial murderer of four-seam fastballs; he’s gone from a .254 AVG, .465 SLG, and .356 wOBA against them last year to a .386 AVG, .830 SLG, and .538 wOBA. Among players with at least 100 PA ending in four-seamers, only Juan Soto has a higher average, while those other two figures are tops. Guerrero’s 18 runs above average against four-seamers is the highest of any player against any pitch, and represents a full 18-run gain relative to last year as well. His other big improvements are against sliders, where he’s gained eight runs (from +1 to +9) primarily by improving from .576 SLG to .633, and sinkers, where he’s gained six runs (from +3 to +9) primarily by improving from .485 SLG to .614.

Using 200-PA cutoffs for both last year and this one, Guerrero owns the majors’ biggest gains in both slugging percentage and wRC+. Here’s the top 15 for the former:

And here’s the latter:

I should point out that my somewhat arbitrary choice of 200 PA as a cutoff for both seasons — made in part because I wanted batting title qualifiers for 2020, but then 186 PA just looked weird — meant leaving Ohtani off the tables given that he had just 175 PA last year. His 332-point gain in slugging percentage (from .366 to .698) and 98-point gain in wRC+ (from 82 to 180) dwarf the gains of Guerrero and the rest, so if you want to imagine a version of the tables with him on top, you’re free to do so.

So long as we’re talking improvements, it’s worth noting Guerrero’s progress on the defensive side. After a rough introduction to the majors at third base in 2019 (-9.4 UZR, -3 DRS, and -19 OAA in just 824 innings), he split last season between first base (-1.8 UZR, -4 DRS, -2 OAA in 324 innings) and DH. Particularly given his weight and conditioning issues — he showed up to summer camp somewhere in the vicinity of 285 pounds — his future appeared to tilt towards the latter slot, limiting his ceiling. After apologizing to his teammates for showing up out of shape last summer, he lost 42 pounds this past winter and appears to have kept the weight off. His mobility and flexibility have improved and so have his defensive numbers, which are now within hailing distance of average (-0.5 UZR, -2 DRS, and 0 OAA in 576.2 innings).

Vladdy's split stats: Good
Vladdy's splits: Also good ? pic.twitter.com/KzX2N8YFNC

— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) April 14, 2021

Even for a player who was so heavily touted as a prospect — recall that he was the consensus number one heading into 2019 — Guerrero has come a long way in a short time, and what he’s doing at such a young age puts him alongside the likes of Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr., not to mention some of the game’s other recent prodigies:

Right now, Guerrero has the highest slugging percentage and wRC+ of any of the bunch, though preserving that distinction is no small challenge given the amount of season remaining. Our rest-of-season projections forecast him to add another 2.3 WAR, which would tie him with Seager for fifth on the list. At the rate he’s going, it would hardly be a surprise if he climbs higher.

The Angels and Braves have both suffered through largely disappointing seasons and through some serious woes in the outfield. In Los Angeles, a calf injury to Mike Trout and Justin Upton’s back issues have kept the two off the field for a significant amount of time. In Atlanta, things are even more dire. Marcell Ozuna dislocated two of his fingers back in May, but a pending domestic violence charge means he likely won’t see the field again this season. Then, on the Saturday before the All-Star break, Ronald Acuña Jr. tore the ACL in his right knee, ending his season.

Both teams are within shouting distance of a playoff spot; the Braves are four games behind the Mets in the NL East, and the Angels are five and a half back in the AL Wild Card. But to have any hope of making noise down the stretch, they needed to bring in reinforcements for their outfield depth. That’s exactly what both teams did during the break. On Wednesday, the Angels signed Adam Eaton after he was released by the White Sox on Monday. On Thursday, the Braves traded for Joc Pederson, sending prospect Bryce Ball back to the Cubs in return. Trying to replace the production of Acuña or Trout is a fool’s errand, but finding someone who’s above replacement level (even if barely in both cases) goes a long way toward filling the holes in these two lineups.

In their final game before the All-Star break, the Braves ran out two converted infielders in the corner outfield spots, playing Ehire Adrianza in right and Orlando Arcia in left. In Pederson, they’re getting a capable outfielder who can play anywhere — he has plenty of experience in center field and covered left regularly in Chicago — and who’s an offensive boost to their lineup. With Guillermo Heredia already in center, Pederson will probably shift over to right, with Atlanta likely to use a rotating cast of players in left for now.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2017, my friend Marty and I made a bet. A lot of hot young prospects were making their way to the show and Marty is a big Red Sox fan. He was convinced that Andrew Benintendi was the next big thing, while I was adamant that honor belonged to a rookie the Red Sox had traded to the White Sox who hadn’t really gotten quite as good of a look yet: Yoán Moncada. The terms of the bet were simple. I had Moncada, he had Benintendi, and the best player would be determined by whichever player put up the most WAR (FanGraphs WAR, of course) over the next three seasons. The loser owed the winner dinner at the restaurant of their choice. Benintendi’s 5.9 WAR from 2018-20 is nothing to sneeze out, but Moncada’s 9.2 takes the cake. Which reminds me, Marty still owes me dinner.

If Marty had asked me to bet on who would win the AL Central this year, I would have put my dinner money on the White Sox. Chicago’s American League team is running away with a weak division, but they aren’t doing it the way I would have predicted. The big story on the South Side of Chicago is the injuries they’ve weathered on their way to a 54-35 record. Hitting phenom Eloy Jiménez tore a pectoral muscle trying to rob a home run in spring training, and hasn’t seen a major league pitch in 2021, though he hit a home run in the first at-bat of his rehab assignment before moving to Triple-A on Tuesday. Luis Robert played all of 25 games before he tore a hip flexor. Contact stalwart Nick Madrigal had season-ending surgery after a severe hamstring tear a month ago. As the clock ticked towards the Midsummer Classic, catcher Yasmani Grandal (who was having quite a strange season at the plate) had surgery on a torn tendon in his knee. Fortunately, that injury is not expected to be season-ending. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Wisler has thrown his slider 89.2% of the time this year, the highest percentage of any pitcher in either league. He’s done so over 32-and-two-thirds innings, the last 12-and-a-third of them with the Tampa Bay Rays, who acquired the 28-year-old right-hander from the San Francisco Giants on June 11 in exchange for minor league southpaw Michael Plassmeyer. Since coming to his new club, Wisler has made a dozen appearances and allowed just one earned run.

Wisler told the story behind his signature pitch over the phone earlier this month.

———

Matt Wisler: “I’d say I learned [a slider] in high school. I’d always thrown a curveball growing up — from when I was 11 or 12 — and then around sophomore year I started throwing a slider. It was honestly more like a different variation of a curveball, though. It was just a little bit different spin.

“The slider I have now, I learned in Low-A way. My pitching coach was Willie Blair, and we were trying to get more separation between my curveball and my slider. We went through a bunch of different grips. Finally, the second time I tried his grip, it kind of clicked for me. That was in 2012. I’ve kept that one ever since, and have obviously started throwing it more and more over the last couple of years.

“My original slider was more like a slurve — it was probably high-70s, low-80s — and we were trying to find a pitch that I could get into the low- to mid-80s with a little bit different break. There are still times where it will get a little slurvy and be in the high-70s, and a little bigger and rounder. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball just wrapped up All-Star week, or better put, baseball just wrapped up Shohei Ohtani week. What more can be said? He hit six 500-foot home runs in the Home Run Derby on Monday night, then served as both the American League’s starting pitcher and leadoff hitter in the All-Star Game on Tuesday. On the mound, he threw an even 100 mph and earned the win after his one spotless inning of work.

All that put Ohtani front and center, as it should have. He is baseball’s home run leader, with 33. He’s slugged nearly .700, and among qualified hitters, his 180 wRC+ is beat only by Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s 189. He has also made 13 starts on the mound, pitching to a 3.49 ERA; his 30.7% strikeout rate ranks seventh in the AL among those with at least 50 innings. We are so lucky to have borne witness to a first half that has been uniquely and historically great.

Part of the reason Ohtani has been such a marvel this season is his sheer volume of play. When he first entered the majors in 2018, the Angels sat him on the days both before and after his pitching appearances. This season, though, things are different, as he appeared in 87 of the team’s 89 first-half games. What’s more, he has also taken at-bats in 10 of his 13 starts on the mound. The Angels said during spring training that they wanted to maximize Ohtani’s usage this season, and they certainly have. That’s just one of the many ways in which he has impressed; he’s a two-way player who’s playing just about every single day. Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Gallo didn’t win in his long-anticipated Home Run Derby debut — he didn’t even make it out of the first round or hit a single 500-foot drive at Coors Field on Monday night — but he earned his trip to Denver’s All-Star festivities nonetheless. After an injury-marred 2019 and a dismal follow-up in the pandemic-shortened season, the 27-year-old slugger is putting together his best and most complete campaign.

Gallo’s second All-Star appearance was less eventful than his first. He replaced starter Aaron Judge in the bottom of the fifth inning of Tuesday night’s game, but didn’t get to bat until the eighth, when he drew a walk against Mark Melancon in his only plate appearance. In his All-Star debut two years ago, he had entered in the sixth inning, and swatted a solo homer off Will Smith in his lone plate appearance in the seventh. That run, which at the time extended the American League’s lead to 4-1, proved to be the difference-maker in the Junior Circuit’s 4-3 win.

In between those two appearances, Gallo’s had more downs than ups, but he’s worked hard to earn his way back. Having slugged 81 homers while batting a lopsided but respectable .208/.322/.516 (113 wRC+) in 2017-18, he was in the midst of a breakout campaign when the ’19 All-Star game rolled around, hitting an eye-opening .275/.417/.643 (162 wRC+) with 20 home runs in 61 first-half games. An oblique strain that sidelined him for over three weeks in June left him 19 plate appearances shy of qualifying for the batting title, but at that point, his slugging percentage and wRC+ trailed only Mike Trout (by three points and 20 points, respectively). Alas, Gallo played just 10 games in the second half before being diagnosed with a fractured hamate in his right hand. He underwent surgery, and while he expected to be out only about four weeks, continued pain while swinging prevented him from returning at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Chosen in the ninth round of the 2018 draft, Tarik Skubal had a meteoric rise in prospect pedigree, tearing through the minor leagues in just 145 innings. He allowed just one earned run in 22.1 innings in 2018, then compiled a 2.58 ERA in high A and a 2.13 ERA in Double-A, but what caught the eye of analysts and prospect hounds alike were the strikeout and walk rates. He punched out about 40% of the batters in 2018 versus a walk rate of about 5% and posted strikeout rates of 30.3% and 48.2% in high A and Double-A, respectively, against walk rates of 5.9% and 10.6% in ’19.

Those numbers earned Skubal a place on our 2019 Tigers list before the start of that season, with Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel noting that he “dominated in pro ball after signing by throwing about 80% fastballs. He’s a ground-up rebuild who had third-round stuff at his best in college.” After he continued to dominate in 2019, Skubal climbed the 2020 version of the list, placing fourth behind three excellent prospects in their own right.

Skubal missed the entirety of the July summer camp last year but showed enough at the alternate site to earn a call-up, making his major league debut on August 18. It didn’t go to plan, though: He struck out a healthy 27.9% of batters with an 8.2% walk rate but also allowed a 72.3% fly ball rate with a 20% HR/FB ratio. That led to an ugly 2.53 HR/9 and a 5.63 ERA over 32 innings.

Unsatisfied with his 2020, Skubal made the pilgrimage to Driveline Baseball over the offseason. There, he first tried to make improvements to his existing changeup, but nixed that in favor of working on a splitter after immediately feeling comfortable with the offering used by his highly-touted teammate, Casey Mize.

Despite the new offspeed pitch, Skubal surrendered a 6.14 ERA in April despite allowing a miniscule .242 BABIP. His walk rate increased from 2020, and he was allowing even more contact in the air. And the splitter was not doing him any favors, with a pedestrian 10.2% SwStr% (the average for a left-handed pitcher’s splitter is 24.5%). He also had no control over the pitch, posting a 33.9% zone rate. Those two factors led to a .539 wOBA allowed on it.

About midway through the month, manager A.J. Hinch mentioned in a postgame press conference that Skubal would throw more breaking pitches going forward at the expense of his new splitter. That wasn’t all; he made a substantial change in terms of fastball usage after his start on the last day of April.

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is cracking down on pitch-movement-enhancing substances such as, though not limited to, Spider Tack. I asked Pittsburgh Pirates GM Ben Cherington if that was a concern for his scouting staff going into this week’s amateur draft.

“We did what I think probably every team did, which was to try to learn as much as we could about whether guys were using anything, what it was, and what adjustments they were making,” replied Cherington. “We’re not naive to think that the sticky stuff was only inside professional baseball. We did some analysis on data we have from amateur pitchers in terms of spin-rate changes over time, to see if we could glean anything from that.

“Whether or not a pitcher has used anything to get a better grip on the ball is a piece of information,” continued Cherington. “But in no way does that mean… if they had to stop using something, that they can’t adjust and still be really good. These are the most talented pitchers in the world and they have a way of adjusting and finding new ways to compete and be better. So I think that it was a small piece of information that we tried to get at, but not a major driver in any decisions.”

Following up, I asked the GM about the level of pitch-analysis data they were able to get for high school draftees, including fourth-round pick Owen Kellington out of small-town Plainfield, Vermont. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a baseball nerd like me, you’ve likely seen this graph (or a variation of it) before:

wOBA by Launch Angle

The focus should be on launch angles between 0 and 36, or better at 8-32 degrees.

Once you get below 0 or above 36, it's hard to be productive. Again, we don't care about "average" launch angle, but the frequency you can get into the "sweet spot". pic.twitter.com/7JYOPGAd4c

— Tangotiger ? (@tangotiger) October 14, 2018

Yep, it’s an illustration of how launch angle affects wOBA. And Tango’s iteration, like many others, is told through the hitter’s perspective. That makes sense – we seldom think about launch angle with respect to pitchers, since it’s trickier for them to control the contact they allow. We do know in a broad sense that there are groundball pitchers and fly ball ones, hence why metrics like xFIP and SIERA remain relevant.

But specific launch angles can also be useful in assessing pitchers. About a week ago, I shared this graph with my Twitter followers:

Here, I should clarify that what’s being measured is the year-to-year correlation of the percentage of batted balls within select launch angle ranges. What can we take away from this? It turns out that pitchers are much better at controlling the amount of extreme contact they allow. Going down the list, line drives are a capricious bunch. What we regard as standard groundballs and fly balls are a bit more manageable. When it comes to slap hits or pop-ups, though, pitchers surprisingly account for about half the variance. Go pitchers! Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, the Red Sox announced that they had extended righty reliever Matt Barnes on a two-year contract. The deal, which starts next season, will pay him a $1.75 million signing bonus along with salaries of $7.25 million in 2022 and $7.5 million in ’23. It also includes a club option for the 2024 season, valued at $8 million with a $2.25 million buyout. All told, Barnes is guaranteed $18.75 million over the term of the contract, but could earn as much as $24 million if he hits all the escalators and Boston exercises the option.

In short summary of his career, Barnes has been an effective arm since his 2014 debut. Since ’14 and through last season, Barnes was solid though not otherworldly, pitching to a 4.08 ERA, 29.9% strikeout rate, and 10.9% walk rate over 337.1 innings pitched. As with most relievers, he had his personal volatility. His best season was in 2018, when he posted a 2.71 FIP in 61.2 frames, as well as a 1.04 ERA in 10 postseason appearances en route to the Red Sox’s World Series title. On the flip side of that coin, Barnes had a comparatively tough year in 2020. He still posted good strikeout numbers but faced a bit of unluckiness with the longball, as his 1.57 HR/9 and 23.5% home run-per-fly ball rate were both career-worsts, making last season was the first time since 2015 that Barnes found himself on the wrong side of replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »