The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and once again we’re hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features a pair of Pittsburgh Pirates on their quality curveballs; Chris Stratton is one of the club’s back-end relievers, and prospect Mike Burrows is rated by Baseball America as having the best breaker in the system.

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Michael Burrows, Pittsburgh Pirates

“My dad said I couldn’t even try to throw a curveball until I had hair under my armpits; that was the saying for him. But yeah, I really started as soon as I could, maybe at 13 or 14, and then just developed feel for it. As I got older — as I continued to progress — I had to change the shape of it, because as hitters got better I couldn’t have a curveball that was popping out. So it’s really been an evolution of a curveball that was in the low-to-mid 70s and has creeped up into the low 80s. It’s sharper now.

“I would say it [improved the most] over COVID, and then as I got into the 2021 season. That spring training, I really started working on building intent and throwing it harder. Metrically, when you look at a curveball that’s over 80 mph, it’s significantly harder to hit — hitters’ numbers go down — and I think that was the biggest turning point for me. Throwing it harder, there’s not a huge decrease in break, but a better shape to where it tunnels my fastball better.

“[Prior to 2020], I didn’t have Rapsodo, TrackMan, or anything like that. Right before COVID hit, about a month until that spring training, I went out and got a Rapsodo. I started diving into the metrics of pitches — why some are better than others, what spin direction was going to do for me. That’s when I really started developing my curveball. I was also throwing with a guy from the Dodgers, Nolan Long — he’s since signed with Athletics — and they have endless amounts of information over there. Another thing I did was take the Rapsodo course, so I could better understand all of the numbers.

“In terms of adjustments, it wasn’t really mechanics; it was more so thinking about that last five percent, rather than the entire motion. It’s about keeping my body under control, and then in that explosion, when I’m really throwing the baseball, is when the effort happens. It’s like a karate-chop motion, where your hand is staying neutral through the throw. It’s that last bit, where the hand is coming through and it rolls over top.

“The curveball was always there for me. It’s not like it had bad spin or anything like that. Everything was there. All I needed was to find a better shape that was going to tunnel my fastball. I still want that 12–6; I still want that vertical break to it. Again, I want to be able to tunnel it, not have it pop out.” Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Gammons didn’t invent the Sunday notes column, but few would dispute that he perfected it. The 77-year-old sportswriter-turned-TV-analyst did so at The Boston Globe, where he began a career that has seen him become the world’s most-influential baseball columnist. To say that Gammons has been an influence on the column you are currently reading would be an understatement.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Gammons for years, yet had never asked him about the genesis of his own Sunday column. Chatting with him at Fenway Park earlier this week, I decided to change that.

“I loved the notion of the notes column, and how Dick Young used it,” Gammons said of the late New York-based sportswriter. “I always thought there should be one for every sport. Bob Ryan and I talked about it when we were both interns, in 1968. I’ve always loved the minor leagues, and in 1970 — 1969 was my first full year with the Globe —I asked, ‘Can I write a notes column on the minor leagues?’ The Globe people said fine. This was for the Sunday paper.”

Gammons recalled writing about Bob Montgomery, who came up through the Boston system before catching for them for 10 big-league seasons. (Later a TV analyst on Red Sox games, Montgomery has the distinction of being the last player for any team to come to the plate without a batting helmet.)

In typical Gammons fashion, the other player he mentioned having covered in his nascent notes days was equal parts obscure and interesting. Calling him “a minor league legend as a hitter,” and citing his .300 big-league batting average, Gammons name-checked Chris Coletta. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may already know, I’m something of an intentional walk connoisseur here at FanGraphs. When questionable ones occur, particularly in the playoffs, I like to delve into the specifics to figure out which ones are good decisions, which ones are close calls, and which ones are just plain silly.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Joe Maddon’s bases-loaded intentional walk, which was about as far on the silly end of the spectrum as you can get. Today, I’m going to cover the other notable intentional walk of the week: the Yankees giving Miguel Cabrera a free pass on Thursday. Then, as a bonus, I want to talk about Cardinals manager Oli Marmol and a clever thing he did that might escape notice if you aren’t watching closely.
Read the rest of this entry »

By his own definition, Max Scherzer had a shot at a no-hitter. In the nightcap of Tuesday’s doubleheader against the Giants at Citi Field, in his first home start since signing with the Mets, he held San Francisco hitless for 5.2 innings before Darin Ruf lined a single to left field, ending the 37-year-old righty’s quest for his third career no-no. “My rule of thumb is when you get one time through the order, you got something going. You get two times through the order, you got a shot,” said Scherzer afterwards. He had turned the lineup over for the second time earlier in that inning; Ruf was the 21st batter he faced.

Scherzer wasn’t the only pitcher to make a run at a no-hitter this week. In the span of just over 24 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, five starters made it through at least five innings without yielding a hit. Just hours after Scherzer’s effort, the Braves’ Max Fried retired the first 15 hitters he faced at Dodger Stadium before Hanser Alberto lined a single to right field. The next day, the Brewers’ Brandon Woodruff, the Dodgers’ Tony Gonsolin, and the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani all found the holes in opponents’ bats. While none of them made it as far as the nail-biting time in the eighth or ninth innings, the conditions appear primed for the 2022 season to pick up where last year — a season that featured a record nine no-hitters — left off.

Through the first two weeks of the season, starters have taken no-hitters into the sixth inning 10 times:

Even before the controversy involving Kershaw — who became just the second pitcher pulled from a perfect game in the seventh inning or later — and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, Padres manager Bob Melvin pulled starters with no-hitters in progress in back-to-back games. What’s more, they were his first two regular-season contests with his new team! Like Roberts, Melvin made his moves in light of the fact that his starters hadn’t fully built up their pitch counts after shorter-than-normal spring trainings, and like Kershaw, both Darvish and Manaea publicly supported their manager’s decision. Read the rest of this entry »

When the 2022 season opened to fanfare and excitement, one of the main talking points was the record-setting arrival of top prospects. After countless rebuilds, a global pandemic, and a prolonged lockout, fans deserved to watch budding superstars duke it out in games that matter. Some of them, like Seiya Suzuki and Jeremy Peña, have been thriving right out of the gate; both rank among the top ten in batter WAR as of Thursday’s games. Others like Spencer Torkelson might have fallen a bit off the radar but have still been successful per wRC+ or batted ball metrics.

Much to our annoyance, though, there’s always a flip side we’d like to ignore. Enter Julio Rodríguez, whose triple slash of .136/.208/.159 is terrible not just amongst fellow rookies, but also all of major league baseball. This isn’t to say we should be concerned; Rodríguez remains one of the most talented rookies around, and in the grand scheme of things, 12 games and counting mean next to nothing. Don’t smash that emergency glass just yet!

But in his opportunities to prove himself, Rodríguez hasn’t been offered fair terms. One of the most fundamental and effective traits a hitter can possess is plate discipline, which is partly the ability to ignore unfavorable pitches. It’s something Rodríguez has demonstrated several times in a limited number of plate appearances, with confidence to boot, but that bravado hasn’t quite translated into results:

This is a chart showing all eight (!) called third strikes outside the zone against Rodríguez, a league-leading total. The plotted strike zone is adjusted for his height, by the way, so there’s no ambiguity here. It gets even worse when you actually look at some of these pitches, which the umpires gift-wrapped for pitchers who made objective mistakes. For example, here’s a Sonny Gray sinker that is rarely, if ever, called a strike, especially in a two-strike situation:

Uh-huh. Sure, that’s totally a decision befitting a stadium named Target Field.

You could maybe argue that Rodríguez, whose two-strike swing rate of 40.3% is the third-lowest among all hitters, needs to up his aggression. The cost of taking a third strike is high, so the math tells us that a batter ought to hack away instead. But Suzuki has a similar two-strike swing rate (42.7%), and he’s yet to be punished for his passivity. Whatever flaws Rodríguez might have right now as a hitter don’t excuse the fact that very few calls have went his way. This is a clear problem, one that has Mariners fans understandably angsty. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 971

On this week’s show, we welcome a club’s president of baseball operations to talk about his team’s inner workings before we react to the exciting first few weeks of the season.

• At the top of the program, David Laurila welcomes Derek Falvey, president of baseball operations for the Minnesota Twins. Falvey gives us insight into the José Berríos trade, how much autonomy they give manager Rocco Baldelli, and whether it is easier or harder to trade with general managers you count as friends (such as former podcast guest Ross Atkins). We also hear about players like Simeon Woods Richardson, Jhoan Duran, Joe Smith, and Dylan Bundy, as well as the team hiring Kevin Goldstein away from FanGraphs. [2:46]
• In the second half, Ben Clemens and Jason Martinez get together to chat about the young baseball season. The pair discuss the recent Luke Voit/Tommy Pham drama, and talk about the sometimes-double-edged sword of playing with a chip on your shoulder. The duo also discuss some disappointing clubs (the D-backs) and some pleasant surprises (the Rockies), as well as the game’s overall lack of offense. Finally, Ben is cautiously intrigued by the Baltimore Orioles’ pitching strategy and its early dividends, highlighted by Keegan Akin. [25:36]

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Shohei Ohtani was up to some Tungsten Arm O’Doyle antics last night. He batted twice before throwing his first pitch of the game, something no one had accomplished in the recorded history of baseball. He bunted for a hit in the sixth inning while throwing a perfect game, almost assuredly the first time any pitcher has done that. That’s par for the course for Ohtani.

If you spend too long thinking about his record-breaking unicorn status, though, you might miss this fact: Ohtani has never looked better on the mound. Last year, he was a hitter first and a pitcher second; his 3.18 ERA over 130 innings was certainly impressive, but it wasn’t the equal of his .257/.372/.592 batting line and 46 home runs. This year, he’s off to a slower start with the bat — not a poor start, to be sure, but not the equal of last season. On the mound, though, he’s looking better and better. If 2021 was the year of Ohtani (hitter-first), 2022 might be the year of Ohtani (pitcher-first), with last night’s brush with perfection signaling his arrival. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Olson isn’t the only recent recipient of a contract extension who’s off to a ridiculously hot start. The Guardians’ José Ramírez is putting up even more eye-opening numbers than Olson, and he added to those with a grand slam and an RBI double against the White Sox during a Wednesday doubleheader, driving his season total to 20 — in 11 games!

I generally don’t care about RBI totals much, particularly since I’m more than a decade removed from my days of playing fantasy baseball. You might not care much about them, either, having grown to appreciate the modern-day cornucopia of statistics that do a better job of measuring batter skill. But hey, we’re just two weeks into the season, and with none of the stats under discussion having stabilized, it’s a good time just to appreciate extremes of performance while connecting them to more solid truths. Ramírez’s incredible hot streak provides us a good opportunity to appreciate the player before us (and I promise you, I won’t spend the entire piece rambling about ribbies).

And so here we are. In Wednesday’s opener, the Guardians piled 10 runs on White Sox starter Dallas Keuchel, one in the first and then nine in the second, during which the Chicago lefty failed to retire any of the 11 batters he faced. A pair of errors by shortstop Tim Anderson didn’t help, and neither did manager Tony La Russa’s apparent desire to avoid going to his bullpen so early. Ramírez, the sixth batter of the inning, unloaded on a center-cut cutter that turned a 3–0 game into a 7–0 one:

Man, that ball got outta here in a hurry, which will happen when you hit one with an exit velocity of 111.6 mph. It was Ramírez’s fourth homer of the season, and his second grand slam; he hit his first one off the Reds’ Daniel Duarte in the ninth inning of an April 12 game, that while batting left-handed:

Beyond the slam, Ramírez didn’t get another hit in the first game, an 11–1 rout. He went 1-for-3 with an RBI double and a walk in the nightcap, a 2–1 win by Cleveland. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Ryan’s name is well-known to FanGraphs readers, particularly those who are into pitching analytics. As Jake Mailhot wrote when profiling him back in January, the 25-year-old Minnesota Twins right-hander succeeds in part because of an extreme vertical approach angle. Thrown from an atypical arm slot, Ryan’s four-seamer — despite averaging a modest 92 mph — is especially effective up in the zone. As Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote last month, “Throughout his time in the minors, Ryan’s strikeout rate has left many scratching their heads.”

His ability to miss bats has thus far translated to the big leagues. Since debuting with the Twins last September, the former Tampa Bay Rays prospect — Ryan came to Minnesota as part of last July’s Nelson Cruz deal — has allowed just 23 hits, with 41 strikeouts, in 36-and-two-thirds big league innings.

Ryan — No. 6 on our 2022 Minnesota Twins Top Prospects list — discussed his approach angle, and the repertoire that goes with it, prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: The majority of FanGraphs readers are familiar with your pitching profile. That said, how would you describe it?

Joe Ryan: “I’m not sure. I don’t think about it too big-picture, or try to analyze myself in that way. Simplistically, I’m a strike-thrower that fills up the zone, tries to hit my spots, and pitches to my strengths. I’m also always trying to develop new pitches and make everything else better, and more consistent. I’m not trying to overhaul, but rather I tinker a lot. Maybe not a lot, but I am always wanting a little more.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Freeland and the Rockies were set for a tense arbitration session. He had asked for $7.8 million; they countered with $6.425 million. That was the fourth-largest gap between team and player across all of baseball. But good news for people who don’t like contentious negotiations: That’s all in the past, because both parties agreed to a five-year extension that supersedes the arbitration dispute and should keep Freeland in Denver for the foreseeable future.

The deal, which buys out three seasons of free agency, has all kinds of bells and whistles. At its core, it’s a five-year, $64.5 million contract, which will pay him $7 million, $10.5 million, $15 million, $16 million, and $16 million for the next five years. If Freeland pitches 170 innings in ‘26, he’ll trigger a player option for the 2027 season, which would pay him $17 million. But wait, there’s more! If Freeland finishes in the top five in Cy Young voting in either 2022 or ’23, he can opt out after ’24; if he’s showing Cy Young form, he’d presumably do so.

This deal is somehow the largest contract the Rockies have given to a pitcher since Darryl Kile and simultaneously not one of the top five deals signed by starting pitchers since the end of last season. As befits a deal that is simultaneously large and small, I’m of two minds about it. Read the rest of this entry »