Lyon Richardson remains raw with a ton of potential. Ranked sixth on our Cincinnati Reds Top Prospects list, the 21-year-old right-hander has a 5.13 ERA in seven starts for High-A Dayton, but he also has a pair of a high-octane heaters, a plus changeup, and a hard curveball that gets side-to-side movement. What he lacks more than anything is experience on the mound. Primarily a position player as a Florida prep, Richardson didn’t become a starter until his senior year at Jensen Beach High School. It was then that he began turning heads. Enamored with his athleticism and explosive velocity, the Reds selected him with the 47th-overall pick of the 2018 draft.

Richardson discussed his arsenal, and the learning curve that goes along with it, late last week.

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David Laurila: Describe yourself as a pitcher.

Lyon Richardson: “I haven’t been pitching for very long. I just try to learn as much as I can, and be as aggressive as I can. At this point, I don’t really have the ability to give in, if that makes any sense. So really, I just try to be as aggressive as possible and push the hitter.”

Laurila: Would you say you’re more of a “stuff guy” right now?

Richardson: “For the most part, in the history of me pitching, I’m a thrower. Historically, I’m a position player, so all I really knew was to throw hard. I’m trying to be more of a stuff guy, but it’s in production. It’s definitely a production.”

Laurila: By and large, you’re trying to be a stuff guy and learning to “pitch” at the same time?

Richardson: “Correct. So, my velocity is definitely up — especially over the past year — and being able to control the pitches with that velocity is definitely a big thing. In 2019, I think my average fastball was 89 to 92 [mph] — something like that. Out of high school, I was anywhere from 95 to 98. This year, it’s back up to right around high school range. I was up to 98 in spring training, and I’ve been up to 97 a bunch so far this season.” Read the rest of this entry »

I like the Marlins pitching staff. There’s a certain charm to a rotation that mostly consists of farm-grown talent, and it’s a powerhouse, too. Sandy Alcantara and Trevor Rogers have become two of the league’s more reliable starters by virtue of their electric stuff, with room for further growth. The bullpen is home to a diverse group of relievers whose idiosyncrasies are so irresistible that we’ve written about a member of Miami’s relief corps not once, but twice – and it’s not even the offseason! Collectively, the Marlins ‘pen has accrued 2.7 WAR, good for fourth-best in the majors.

Rarely is there one reason for success like this. In all likelihood, the Marlins have excelled at pitching because they just happen to roster good pitchers. With teams increasingly tailoring plans to the needs of individual pitchers, team-wide dogmas and philosophies are harder to find. So what follows isn’t an explanation. Rather, it’s a series of observations I find noteworthy. Up first, here’s a graph showing each team’s average vertical break on its four-seam fastball (abbreviated as “fastball” from here on):

Though the gap between first and last is only a couple of inches of movement, we can still glean certain teams’ preferences. For example, teams like the Dodgers, White Sox, and Yankees have a predilection for fastballs that generate ample ride. You know the drill – throw them up in the zone and chances are hitters will swing and miss. It’s a tried and true approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom is on another planet right now. You don’t need me to tell you this, but it’s fun to just marvel at his stats. Through 10 starts, deGrom has a 0.56 ERA, a 46% strikeout rate, and a 4% walk rate. He’s produced 3.7 WAR, which is nearly a half-win better than the next-best pitcher, Corbin Burnes, who has “merely” put up 3.3.

deGrom is quite possibly in the midst of one of the best pitching seasons in baseball history, particularly on a per-inning basis. Pedro Martinez’s 1999 campaign currently holds the single-season pitching WAR record at 11.6, and though deGrom almost certainly won’t hit that mark, he’d blow it away if he pitched the same number of innings at his current rate. Give deGrom Martinez’s 213.1 innings, and at this pace, he’d put up 12.3 WAR. Say what you will about injuries and starting pitching workloads in this era, but that’s just a primer on the level of dominance deGrom has reached so far in 2021.

So if you’re a hitter stepping in against deGrom, how in the world do you get a hit off this guy? Batters are slashing just .121/.152/.220 against him, good for a .163 wOBA allowed. That’s the best mark among the 294 pitchers with at least 100 batters faced this season, and deGrom has more than doubled that threshold (223 TBF). If you’re hitting against deGrom, you’re lucky if you just put the ball in play, let alone get on base.

Is there an alternative strategy that works here? deGrom is raking up all of these strikeouts — without allowing virtually any walks — while boasting the seventh-lowest Zone% in baseball. Hitters are flailing against pitches that aren’t even strikes anyway: 60.5% of the time, deGrom is throwing the hitter a ball. If you’re in a two-strike count, he’ll throw you a ball 64.5% of the time, putting him in the 91st percentile in O-Zone%. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 Cubs won the NL Central, but they did it in a fairly unusual way, getting minimal contributions from Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, and Javier Báez. In 151 combined games, their trio of stars combined for a mere 1.6 WAR, mostly coming from Rizzo (1.0); back when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, Bryant alone racked up nearly eight wins. Last season, players like Ian Happ and Willson Contreras were the ones who propelled the team to October baseball, not the old core.

With Báez, Bryant, and Rizzo all set to enter free agency this offseason, the Cubs, as in many a heist movie, hoped to bring back the old crew for one last big score in 2021. But unlike many good yarns about high-stakes thievery, the Cubs largely ignored the supporting cast. The studio had cut the budget, an obvious necessity what with the Cubs playing in a tiny, small-market city, boasting merely the fourth-best attendance in baseball in 2019, and the reality that no owner in baseball history has ever made money. Yu Darvish was off to film a high-budget action movie in San Diego; the only primary member of the 2019 rotation still on the roster in ’21 is Kyle Hendricks.

Without much in the way of new blood, they needed their old core to shine one last time. And luckily for the Cubs, this is largely what has happened. In a similar number of games as the 2020 season, our troika of protagonists has combined for 4.8 WAR, tripling their contribution from the prior season. With the addition of Nolan Arenado, the Cardinals got most of the preseason NL Central ink but the Cubs have been more impressive at the box office. Read the rest of this entry »

No one thought that the Arizona Diamondbacks were going to contend for their division this year. It’s been nearly a decade since any team other than the Dodgers took that title; the buzz factor, the splashy acquisitions, newly belonged to the Padres; and it didn’t take too long before the Giants proved themselves formidable contenders, too. The Rockies were, as expected, back in the rearview mirror, another star bitterly departed, their GM resigned, reports of organizational dysfunction hovering around them. What, then, of the Diamondbacks? To linger — to play spoiler, maybe. To continue onward, even if only because they have to. “#RattleOn” — that’s their hashtag. One imagines the heat, a bone-deep drought, a sound — low to the ground and strange — carrying out into the unfurling darkness until you can hear it no longer. The sound is a warning, or an object of childish entertainment, or a sigh whose meaning remains frustratingly unclear. It persists even after it’s gone.

Last week, the Diamondbacks lost seven games in a row. Six of those games were on the road. The Diamondbacks have, in fact, lost 19 consecutive road games. The record for most consecutive road losses is 22 — a mark achieved once by the Philadelphia Athletics in 1943, and later by none other than the New York Mets in 1963. No team has ever lost exactly 21 road games in a row — an entirely different Philadelphia Athletics team lost 20 straight in 1916. And there, the next name down the list: the 2021 Arizona Diamondbacks, winners of just under a third of the games they’ve played.

The Diamondbacks lost in Oakland. Ketel Marte crashed into the Coliseum, making an incredible catch — and then the ball disappeared from his glove when his back was turned. The final score was 4-0, anyway. They were unable to scratch a run across against Sean Manaea, just as they’d only managed two in seven innings off Chris Bassitt the day before. Before that, they lost in Milwaukee — a tie carried into the eighth lost and never recovered; mostly, deficits whose heights couldn’t be scaled, no matter how slight. They were swept in LA by the Dodgers; in Denver, by the lowly Rockies; in Queens by the Mets and in Miami by the Marlins. Their last road win was on April 25. They swept the doubleheader in Atlanta, 5-0 and 7-0. They were, at that point, exactly .500. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani produced another tour de force on Friday night against the Diamondbacks, throwing five strong innings and collecting a pair of doubles — lighting up Statcast along the way — and even making a defensive cameo in the Angels’ 6–5 win, though he departed before the matter was settled in extra innings. None of what the 26-year-old phenom did on Friday was anything we haven’t seen from him before, but that’s part of the point. He’s making this double duty stuff seem routine, combining pitching and hitting responsibilities in a way that hasn’t been pulled off in over a century, performing at a very high level in both roles with specific elements that are elite, and positioning himself as a legitimate MVP candidate.

Othani was facing a downtrodden club that had lost 21 of their previous 23 games, but the Diamondbacks were at least playing at Chase Field rather than threatening to extend their 19-game road losing streak. On the mound, he allowed just two runs over five innings, striking out eight. Both runs came in a messy fifth inning that included hitting Tim Locastro with a pitch, back-to-back balks (the second of which scored Josh Rojas), and a wild pitch on which Eduardo Escobar struck out but reached first safely as Ketel Marte scored from third. Surprisingly, nobody had that particular combination on their Bad Inning Bingo cards.

Shohei Ohtani did not agree with this balk call pic.twitter.com/fRmOS0La5K

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) June 12, 2021

That inning aside, Ohtani was impressive, generating 14 whiffs, just one shy of his season high (which he’s reached three times); seven of those were via his four-seamer and another five with his splitter. The latter has a claim as the most unhittable pitch in baseball. Among offerings that have concluded at least 50 plate appearances, Ohtani’s splitter has held batters to the majors’ lowest wOBA:

Meanwhile, Ohtani’s splitter has also produced the majors’ highest whiffs per swing rate:

I’ve included Ohtani’s majors-leading putaway percentage on the offering (per two-strike pitch ending with a strikeout) and his second-ranked strikeout percentage (per plate appearance ending with the pitch). Glasnow’s curveball is the only pitch that has a higher rate in the latter category.

As for Ohtani’s fastball, which averaged 95.2 mph on Friday — and 95.5 for the season, 1.2 mph lower than his 2018 rookie campaign — he threw one to Asdrúbal Cabrera in the third inning that was clocked at 99.6 mph. That’s his fastest since a 98.8 mph heater on May 5; he hasn’t topped 100.0 since April 4, but both of those round up to 100 if you’re counting that way. Velocity aside, the most distinctive thing about his heater — which batters have hit for a .270 AVG, .444 SLG, and .400 wOBA — is his 30.2% PutAway%, which ranks eighth in the majors.

In 47.1 innings (4.1 shy of his rookie total), Ohtani has posted a 2.85 ERA, 3.41 FIP, and 3.61 xERA. Those numbers won’t thrust him into the AL Cy Young race, particularly give his workload constraints; he’s on pace to throw 118 innings after two years of almost nothing. Still, they’re significantly better than average — his ERA- is 69, his FIP- is 82 — and they testify to a convincing recovery after so much time lost to blisters, a UCL sprain that resulted in Tommy John surgery, and a flexor pronator sprain that shut him down after two brutal appearances last year.

Among AL pitchers with at least 40 innings, Ohtani’s 34% strikeout rate ranks fifth and his 0.76 homers per nine 11th. While his 14% walk rate is the league’s second-highest, he’s gotten the situation under control; after walking 19 batters in his first four starts (18.2 IP), he’s walked just nine over his last five (28.2 IP), with just one start with more than two. On a per-plate appearance basis, his walk rate has dropped from 22.6% over those first four starts to 7.6% over the last five. That’ll do.

As for Ohtani’s hitting, he went 2-for-4 with a pair of doubles. The first one, off Merrill Kelly, came in the third inning after he fouled an 0–2 cutter off his right knee, producing a scary moment (think Christian Yelich suffering a season-ending kneecap fracture in 2019). Uncomfortable but undaunted, Ohtani arose and, four pitches later, ripped a sinker into the right-center field gap, driving in Justin Upton; the drive’s 114.9-mph exit velocity was the game’s highest.

Moments later, Ohtani came around to score on an Anthony Rendon single. That hit was sandwiched around a pair of groundouts, but in the seventh inning, after moving from the mound to right field, he doubled off Taylor Clarke to send Upton to third, who later scored on a wild pitch to break a 4–4 tie, though Ohtani was stranded at third. He departed the game after the inning, with Taylor Ward moving from center to right and Juan Lagares taking over in center.

This was the third time this season that Ohtani has moved from the mound to the outfield in the same game, and the first in a contest the Angels won; they lost 5–1 to Houston on May 11 despite his season-high seven-inning, one-run effort, and 3–2 to Cleveland on May 19, when he pitched just 4.2 innings and allowed two runs. He’s played the outfield on two other occasions — once after shifting from designated hitter, once after pinch-hitting — and while he’s yet to record a putout or assist in 6.1 total innings in the pasture, he’s now gone 2-for-4 in those extra plate appearances.

Including his pinch-hitting appearances on Saturday and Sunday, Ohtani is hitting .269/.353/.608 and ranks second in the AL in slugging percentage and homers (17) behind only Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (.688 SLG, 21 HR). Ohtani’s 159 wRC+, meanwhile, is third behind Guerrero (204) and Matt Olson (169). Again, it’s a convincing turnaround given last year’s dismal .190/.291/.366 (82 wRC+) line. The offseason work he did to strengthen his lower body and rebuild his swing is paying off; he’s absolutely crushing the ball. Through Saturday, his 23.8% barrel rate leads the majors; his .418 xwOBA places him in the 97th percentile; and his 55.2% barrel rate and 93.5 mph average exit velocity are both in the 96th percentile. All of those are career highs, and his 34 barrels are just three short of his career high, set in 2018, albeit on 72 fewer batted ball events (143 to 225).

Owning the major’s top barrel rate as well as its most unhittable pitch (or one of them, at least) is incredibly cool, but one of Ohtani’s most impressive stats is perhaps his most basic one: He’s played in 60 of the team’s 65 games, starting 55 times and pinch-hitting in five. He’s made his two-way play routine to an extent that he wasn’t allowed to do in 2018, when the Angels generally kept him out of the lineup both the day before and the day after his starts and didn’t let him hit on the days he pitched, lest they lose the DH upon his departure. Even given the caveat that he’s not playing the field, this is a huge deal — the closest analogue we’ve seen to Babe Ruth’s 1918 and ’19 seasons. In ’18, Ruth, still a member of the Red Sox, made 19 starts plus one relief appearance, totaling 166.1 innings, and added another 57 starts in the outfield (including 11 in center!) and 13 at first base, plus five pinch-hitting appearances. His 11 homers and .555 slugging percentage led the AL and his 2.22 ERA ranked ninth, and his 6.7 combined WAR ranked second in the majors. In ’19, Ruth made 15 starts plus two relief appearances, tossing 133.1 innings, and 106 starts in the outfield plus another five at first base, as well as one pinch-hitting appearance. He set a single-season home run record that year with 29 and ran away with the major league leads in OBP (.456), SLG (657) and combined WAR (9.8).

While I’m not suggesting that Ohtani is revolutionizing the game the way Ruth did, his 2.1 WAR as a hitter (tied for ninth in the league entering Sunday) and 1.1 WAR as a pitcher combined rank second only to Guerrero’s 3.9, and it projects to 8.0 WAR over the course of the season, about halfway between Ruth’s 1918 and ’19 seasons. With Vladito currently leading all three Triple Crown categories (he has 55 RBI and a .344 batting average to go with his 21 homers), this could be a very interesting MVP race, and any fears that it will boil down to a repeat of the 2012 AL battle between Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout, with its old school/new school fault lines, ought to be at least somewhat assuaged by Guerrero’s high WAR.

Then again, these days one can’t get much more old school than invoking the Bambino himself. That Ohtani’s performance is inviting that comparison is a wonder to behold.

Joe Smith has quietly been a good pitcher for a long time. Now 37 years old and playing for his sixth team, the Houston Astros reliever has a 3.06 ERA over 14 big-league seasons. Moreover, his 804 appearances are the most of any active hurler — and that’s not even the eye-catching part. Smith recently moved ahead of Walter Johnson into 49th place on the all-time list, with another legend in his sights. Next up is Nolan Ryan, who logged 807 career outings.

I asked Smith about his ascent in the pitching-appearances category. Could he have imagined this when he debuted with the New York Mets in 2007?

“When I first got called up, I was just trying to figure out what the heck pitching in the big leagues was, “said Smith, who’d been drafted out of Wright State University the previous year. “That offseason, I wrote out some goals and things I needed to get better at, and I was able to accomplish them. At that point I felt like I could do it for a long time. But there’s so much luck in this game. Your health, right? Pedro Martinez was on the team, and everybody would wish him good luck. He’d be, ‘No, wish me good health. If I’m healthy, I’ll be good.’ That really resonated with me. Being able to answer the call is what it’s about, especially when you’re a reliever. You want to be able to post as many days as you can.”

Right now he’s on the shelf. Smith went on the 10-day IL earlier this week, his return date uncertain. The sidearmer told me that everything is structurally sound, yet his forearm had been “grabbing” him (Astros manager Dusty Baker has reportedly referred to it as “elbow soreness”). Read the rest of this entry »

This past offseason, the Toronto Blue Jays spent a ton of money to upgrade their lineup, bringing in George Springer and Marcus Semien for a combined total of $168 million. Of course, $150 million of that total is owed to Springer over the next six seasons; Semien signed a one-year deal after finding the market for his services to be rather slow and cold. Two months into the season, it’s been Semien who has been the more valuable acquisition for the Jays, however. Springer has been sidelined for all but four games with a nagging quad issue that has yet to be resolved. Meanwhile, Semien leads all qualified second basemen with 2.6 WAR, a mark that places him seventh overall among all qualified batters.

For Semien, his success this year has been a huge payoff on the risk he took by signing that one-year offer. After a breakout 2019, he struggled to maintain that new level of production the year after. With real questions about his true talent level at the plate lingering over him, he decided to take a one-year offer to rebuild his value in 2021.

As Mike Petriello recently notes, the offensive downturn Semien suffered through in 2020 may be a bit misleading. Through the first 14 games of the 2020 season, he posted a 45 wRC+, but because of the truncated season, those 14 games represented around a quarter of the total games played last year, giving them an outsized effect on his overall line. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Tuesday’s slate of games provided us with a cluster of enjoyable home runs. Among them were Shohei Ohtani’s longest career home run (an estimated 470-foot blast); Ke’Bryan Hayes inadvertently missing first base and having his third bomb of the year overturned; and a fly ball off the bat of Carlos Correa that just (and I mean just) cleared the Green Monster.

Correa’s home run, the shortest of the season so far, was struck at a launch angle of 49 degrees and traveled an estimated 310 feet; it’s one of only four (over-the-fence) home runs hit since 2015 with a launch angle that high or higher. There have been several homers hit 310 feet or less, but the lion’s share of them have been the inside-the-park variety. Here’s the list of impressively short out-of-the-park home runs:

Read the rest of this entry »

In our preseason positional power rankings of the league’s third basemen, the Braves came in at No. 25, projecting for just 1.4 WAR at the position, with Jason Martinez writing not only about Austin Riley’s potential contributions, but also possible production from Jake Lamb. Roughly two-and-a-half months later, the picture looks entirely different: Lamb never took an at-bat in Atlanta (though he’s playing well for the White Sox), while Riley has put together a very solid offensive season. In 59 games and 231 plate appearances through June 9, he’s slashing .300/.381/.515 with 11 home runs and a 142 wRC+ and has accumulated nearly as much WAR by himself (1.3) as the team’s total positional projection. As a result, the Braves have gotten some of the best value in the majors at third base relative to those projections. (The Rangers mess with the table a touch, since they were projected for and have achieved negative value so far, but I digress.)

Read the rest of this entry »