On Sunday afternoon, I was working on a piece about why the trade market doesn’t heat up until July, and per habit, I chose a game to have on in the background while I work. I usually flip between them, focusing on where the action is based on the score and runners on base, but with the day just starting, I began with Oakland at New York. The A’s had Sean Manaea on the mound, which made me think about his 2013 spring, and a wasted trip to Normal, Illinois.

It’s easy to forget that Manaea entered that spring as a candidate for the top pick in the draft. He was a six-foot-five, physical left-hander who entered Indiana State with a mid-80s fastball but suddenly was up to 98 mph in the Cape Cod League two years later. There, he was universally seen as the best prospect during the 2012 season, putting up a 1.22 ERA with 85 strikeouts in 51.2 innings and allowing just 21 hits and seven walks.

Manaea was living up to expectations early that spring, but things took a turn for the worse on March 15 in a game at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. Manaea couldn’t find a comfortable landing spot for his front foot and irritated his right hip. The injury would affect him for the remainder of the season; he missed starts and at times was scratched at the last moment. When he did pitch, he performed quite well, but the stuff was also down, and considerably so at times. Figuring out where he would (and more importantly should) go in the draft was becoming the biggest challenge of the tear.

The Missouri Valley Conference Tournament was set to begin on Tuesday, April 20 at Duffy Bass Field in Normal, Illinois, on the campus of Illinois State University. Indiana State would take on Creighton in the first game, with first pitch at 10:00 AM and Manaea scheduled to pitch. It was quite possibly the last chance to see him before making a multi-million dollar decision on the player, and I was asked to attend.

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In no world is Juan Soto is having a bad year. Through games played on Saturday, he has more walks than strikeouts, a 128 wRC+, and a .272/.404/.426 triple slash in 240 plate appearances. He’s been worth 1.6 WAR in 58 games, thanks at least in part due to improved defense; ZiPS projects him to add another 3.5 wins the rest of the way, which would result in a career-high 5.1 WAR. Even at his current pace of 4.5 WAR, Soto would end the season as one of the more valuable players in baseball.

By his standards, however, Soto is actually having a bit of a down year. That 128 wRC+ I mentioned? That is just above his worst mark in any 58-game stretch (127) of his entire career. It still represents great production in a vacuum, and the fact that his worst wRC+ still is 127 is just another way to underscore his greatness. But at the same time, it still leaves us with a lot of questions, none more important than this: Why has Soto seen such a notable decrease in performance?

The answer might seem somewhat simple: He’s hitting far too many groundballs. Soto currently has a 55.3% groundball rate, seventh-highest in the majors. The fact that he’s still posting a 128 wRC+ in spite of that is borderline absurd; of the 30 qualified hitters with at least a 48% groundball rate, he has the highest wRC+, a testament to his phenomenal plate discipline and frequency of hard contact.

As a result of all of these grounders, Soto is embarking on Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s 2020 journey. But while Vlad Jr. is currently elevating and celebrating this year, Soto is grounding and outing. Bad attempt at a rhyme aside, his groundballs mostly turn into outs. The ones that aren’t outs? They are singles, and they the reason why he has experienced a personal power outage. In his last 50 games, he has a .137 ISO, another career low for a sample that large.

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Imagine for a moment that the sabermetric movement never took hold in baseball. Hitters would still be valued based on batting average and RBI; pitchers would be measured on their win total and ERA. In this context, John Gant would be considered among the more effective pitchers on the Cardinals’ staff and in all of MLB. His 4–5 record is not impressive, but his 3.50 ERA ranks second on the team and 45th among all starters who have thrown 50 innings — firmly in the territory of a solid No. 2 starter.

A fan who looks beyond ERA, though, knows Gant has not been a good pitcher in 2021. He has struck out only 16.5% of the batters he has faced, a rate about 33% below average, and walked 15.8% of the batters he has faced, close to double the league average. To put that in context, Gant’s walk rate is second worst among all starting pitchers who threw at least 50 innings since 2018; Tyler Chatwood walked 19.6% of batters in 96 innings that season. His K-BB% is third worst, after Chatwood in ’18 and Bryan Mitchell in that same year. The degree of his struggles with his control is almost unparalleled:

Gant’s FIP stands at 5.01, 1.51 runs worse than his ERA. Incorporate batted ball data, and the picture gets worse; his SIERA is 5.97. All in all, he has been worth just 0.1 WAR in 61 innings.

I would imagine most, if not all, the readers of this website assume that Gant is bound to regress, probably to the point where he will not be in the Cardinals’ rotation either at some point this season or next. To say he is walking a fine line would be an understatement. But I am not going to get into why Gant will most likely struggle the rest of the way. Instead, I want to dig into why he has struggled.

First, take a look at Gant’s arsenal:

Gant has a broad array of offerings. Based on my research into pitcher repertoires and their reliance on two pitches, he is among the leaders in number of pitch types thrown and among the laggards in use of his top two pitches. He throws his two most used pitches, the sinker and changeup, 60.1% of the time. He also throws a slider, four-seamer, curveball, and cutter, all of which he uses enough that the batter at least has to think about the prospect of seeing any of them.

The diversity of pitches may not be doing him any favors, though. The league as a whole throws the ball in the zone 49.1% of the time, and batters swing a shade above 47% of the time. Gant’s zone rate is a little below the rest of the league at 46.6%, but he only induces swings on 42.3% of all pitches. Let me break it down by count:

Gant generally avoids the zone more than the rest of the league in most counts, with the largest deviations coming in hitters’ counts. He grooves pitches into the zone on 3–0 more than league average, but he lags by a noticeable amount in two-ball counts. His control struggles stand out most on 3–1 counts, though. Those are a bit different than 3–0 counts; batters swing so infrequently on 3–0 that you can be confident in throwing a pitch in the strike zone without major repercussions. In 3–1 counts, though, hitters become much more aggressive, hunting for a pitch they can hurt. For whatever reason, whether it is lack of control or lack of confidence in his stuff, Gant finds the zone a whopping 15% less than league average in those situations. Hitters have taken notice, swinging at only 37% of his offerings compared to 54.5% for all other pitchers. Batters also seem to have figured out that getting deep into counts against Gant is especially beneficial given his penchant for walks; they are only swinging at 35% of his 1–0 pitches (42.2% is average), 27.6% of his 2–0 pitches (versus 41.9% league-wide), and 49.3% of his 2–1 pitches (against the 58% average). Clearly the book is out on Gant and his passive approach.

Only one of Gant’s offerings, meanwhile, exceeds the league-average zone rate of 49.1%:

His sinker, the most used pitch in his arsenal, is the lone one he can consistently throw for strikes; the changeup, his second favorite pitch, only finds the zone 32.8% of the time. That is a large percentage of total pitches that hitters know will not be competitive.

Though Gant does not throw his curveball very often (8% of the time), his usage of the pitch is notable for one particular reason.

Gant throws the curveball on almost 20% of his first pitches in a plate appearance. Group that together with the changeup, and more than 30% of his first pitches are non-competitive. Focus on the counts where he struggles to find the strike zone (1–0, 2–0, 2–1, and 3–1) and on his pitch usage in them. Now look at how often he throws each pitch in the zone in those counts:

He has yet to throw a curveball in the strike zone after starting a plate appearance out with a ball. The changeup’s zone rate on 1–0 counts is only 41%. In 2–2 counts, most of his repertoire finds the zone at a rate 25% worse than league average. For 3–1 counts, the situations where he struggles the most, his two favorite pitches, the sinker and changeup, are thrown in the zone just 38.1% and 14.3% of the time, respectively; the rest of the league fills up the zone 60% of the time! His avoidance of the strike zone and subsequent lack of swings are astounding.

Add all of this up and you can understand why Gant is struggling to strike hitters out and keep them off the bases:

Gant is walking batters nearly four times more often than the league average on plate appearances that reach 0–2 counts and almost three times more often on plate appearances that are 0–1 and 1–2. While not as drastic, the same trend persists across all counts except 3–0, where he is more likely to pitch in the zone. Correspondingly, he is failing to put batters away when he reaches advantageous counts because hitters feel comfortable leaving the bat on their shoulders.

What does this mean for Gant going forward? Unless he makes drastic changes to how he attacks the opposition, he will continue to give out free passes and fail to put batters away via strikeouts, leading to traffic on the base paths and balls in play — the perfect recipe for opposing teams to put up crooked numbers. Is there a fix? He could start with throwing the ball in the strike zone more often, but if it were that simple, he would be doing it already. Maybe he lacks confidence in his stuff and fears what will happen if he lives in the strike zone at even a league-average rate. Or maybe he just does not have the control to be a starting pitcher.

The latter explanation would put the fault more on the club than Gant. If he is not capable of turning over a lineup effectively due to a lack of control, the impetus is on the Cardinals to make an adjustment. Without Jack Flaherty for an extended stretch and Miles Mikolas for all but four innings, as well as injuries to Kwang Hyun Kim and the struggles of Carlos Martinez to find his velocity, St. Louis has had a hard time piecing together a viable rotation. The only consistent options have been Adam Wainwright and Kim when healthy, with the talented yet raw Johan Oviedo brought up from Memphis as a reinforcement. If the club hopes to make a playoff push, Gant either needs to improve substantially in the very near future, or St. Louis needs to turn to other options, whether it be from the farm or via trade.

Braxton Roxby was an unpolished gem when the Cincinnati Reds signed him as a non-drafted free agent last summer. A 6-foot-3, 235-pound right-hander, Roxby possessed projectable stuff, but his resume was anything but shiny. In three collegiate seasons with the Division-II Pittsburgh-Johnstown Mountain Cats, he logged a 7.31 ERA. Moreover, that number was 9.68 in his junior year.

Then came Kyle Boddy and the Reds pitching-development machine.

In what is shaping up as one of the best underdog stories in recent memory, Roxby has been shoving in his first professional season. Pitching in a relief role for the High-A Dayton Dragons, the 22-year-old hurler has surrendered just four hits and one run in 16 innings. He’s punched out 28 batters.

How he ended up signing with Cincinnati is a story in itself. Roxby talked to 20-plus teams after being bypassed in last year’s truncated draft, and the tenors of the conversations were largely the same… with one notable exception.

“The Reds were the only team to take it a step above,” said Roxby, who majored in Civil Engineering at Pittsburgh Johnstown. “They had me on a Zoom meeting — [Director of Pitching] Kyle Boddy and [Assistant Pitching Coach] Eric Jagers were both on there — and they had video breaking down my mechanics, as well as the analytics of my pitches and how I can use them better. That made it hard not to choose them.” Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Gomber came to the Rockies by way of the Nolan Arenado trade back in January, but of the five players acquired by Colorado, he faced the most immediate pressure as the lone newcomer expected to contribute to the big league club right away. That may feel like a bit of misfortune for a 27-year-old pitcher simply trying to find a foothold on a big league roster after bouncing between Triple A and the bigs between 2018 and ‘20 while with the Cardinals. Being traded for a franchise cornerstone wasn’t his only bit of rotten luck; he now has to make half of his starts in Coors Field, a place that is far and away the worst pitcher’s park in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Few major leaguers can claim as exciting a debut week as Akil Baddoo had. On the first pitch he saw in the majors, he launched a 372 foot home run to the opposite field. The next day, he blasted a grand slam in the ninth inning of a blowout loss. The good vibes continued in his third major league game. After entering the game as a pinch runner in the eighth inning, Baddoo knocked in the game-winning run in the bottom of the 10th.

I often wonder what happens to rookies like Baddoo who make such a big splash in their debuts. How do they handle the inevitable failures they encounter in the big leagues? Baddoo’s first couple of steps in the majors were fantastic, but it’s the third, fourth, and fifth steps that so often trip up players trying to establish themselves at the highest level.

The tough reality of playing in the majors quickly brought Baddoo back down to earth. He launched another pair of home runs in back-to-back games a week after his extra-inning heroics, but soon began to struggle to handle big league pitching. Those struggles shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, Baddoo had played just 29 games above Single-A during his short minor league career. Tommy John surgery wiped out most of his 2019 season in High-A and the pandemic prevented him from getting on the field in any professional capacity last year. Nonetheless, the Tigers selected him from the Minnesota Twins in the Rule 5 draft based on his toolset and potential alone.

But as you might expect for any 22-year-old with just over 1,000 professional plate appearances under his belt, Baddoo soon found himself flailing against the best the sport has to offer. On May 18, he reached 100 plate appearances on the season. On that date, his season slash line sat at .222/.287/.478 with an ugly strikeout rate touching nearly 40%. After the first two weeks of the season, when he slugged seven extra base hits in nine games, he collected just 10 total hits across the next 23 games, only five of which went for extra bases.

Baddoo has always shown an excellent understanding of the strike zone. His minor league walk rate was 13.7%, and in his only other full season as a professional (2018), he walked 14.3% of the time in Single-A. While that keen batting eye resulted in plenty of walks, it didn’t necessarily prevent him from developing significant holes in his swing. His minor league strikeout rate was 22.7% but much of that overall rate is pulled down by his excellent showing in rookie ball in 2017. During the last two seasons of his minor league career, his strikeout rate rose — to 24.0% in 2018 and 29.8% in ’19.

Making the adjustment to major league pitching is a tough task for any prospect, and most are making the transition from Triple-A with far more experience under their belts. Baddoo made the jump from High-A, with more than a year and a half between professional appearances complicating matters even further. These struggles were expected, but the true measure of his resilience is how Baddoo has adjusted. Over the 20 games and 58 plate appearances since May 18, Baddoo has compiled a .333/.448/.521 slash line and his strikeout rate has fallen to just 20.7%.

Here’s how he described how he approached his adjustments to Chris McCosky of The Detroit News:

“Really, it’s just having a game plan and sticking to what got you here. It’s just about staying mentally strong throughout the whole process. There’s been a lot of ups and downs, but I just took what the coaches and the veteran players were giving me and I made my own routine, my own plan on how to attack the game of baseball.”

Here’s a look at his 10-game rolling strikeout and walk rates this season:

After about a month of exposure to major league pitching, Baddoo made some significant changes to his approach that resulted in a dramatic decrease in his strikeout rate and an increase in his walk rate.

If we use May 18 as a breakpoint in his season, giving us 100 plate appearances in the first period and just under 60 in the second, we see some significant improvements in all of Baddoo’s plate discipline metrics.

He’s cut his chase rate and improved his contact rate, thereby reducing his rate of swinging strikes. His contact rate is still something to worry about; even in its improved state, it sits below league average. That was a big concern while he was a prospect in the Twins organization. A bit of swing-and-miss will always be a part of his game, but if he’s making enough solid contact and getting on base often enough, he might be able to mitigate that part of his offensive profile.

The walks have certainly come as the season has progressed but the results on contact have been a bit more mixed.

Even though Baddoo’s overall offensive contributions have been far more valuable over his last 60 plate appearances, the quality of contact he’s made has been decidedly worse. His hard hit rate has fallen precipitously though his expected wOBA on contact has stayed steady. Instead of making solid contact and driving the ball, he’s been thriving on weakly hit flares and groundballs finding holes. During his surge over the last month, his BABIP has been .429 despite all of the weaker contact.

We’re working with a total sample of just 159 plate appearances and trying to glean some evidence of improvement over the last 60 PAs. It’s not much to work with and it may amount to nothing at all. Opponents will inevitably adjust their approach and Baddoo will face a new challenge when they do. But it is encouraging to see some of the tools he featured as a prospect materialize in the majors after they were largely absent during the first month of the season.

The Tigers have also diligently protected him on the strong side of an outfield platoon. He’s compiled all of 27 plate appearances against left-handed pitching so far and has been completely neutralized. That was the profile scouts had envisioned for him as a prospect, and Detroit’s outfield is in a state where they have little to loose to see if Baddoo can reach or exceed that ceiling.

The changes Baddoo has made to his approach bring his excellent pitch discernment to bear and have paid dividends, but he’s far from a finished product. He needs to find a way to reincorporate that penchant for solid contact he displayed during the first two weeks of his major league career. His confidence and drive were big reasons why the Tigers felt comfortable taking such a raw player in the Rule 5 draft. He’s learning on the fly how to overcome failure without the option to return to the minor leagues to work on things in a low pressure environment. That kind of resiliency isn’t easy to maintain, but Baddoo hasn’t let the big stage get to him yet.

“Once I stop smiling, we’ve got a problem,” he said to McCosky. “When I’m smiling, we’re good to go.”

All-Star Game voting kicked off a few weeks ago (if you haven’t filled out a ballot, you can do so here), with the first round of totals announced earlier this week. There are a few players running away with their position, but most are up for grabs. Among those looking for more votes: Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Rangers shortstop, who’s unhappy with the results so far.

https://twitter.com/Isiahkf11/status/1404490572069588993

Kiner-Falefa has a case for taking the trip to Colorado, as he currently ranks fourth in both FanGraphs WAR (2.0) and bWAR (2.8) among shortstops in the AL, yet he did not crack the top 10 in the first vote update. Still, All-Star roster spot or no, this has been a wildly successful season for him, particularly in light of the defensive move he had to make.

Originally drafted as a shortstop, Kiner-Falefa played multiple infield positions as he worked his way through the minor leagues and also tried his hand at catching before going from third base to shortstop this season. As noted by Andrew Simon of MLB.com and our Jake Mailhot during the offseason, he’s now become the first player in the modern era to play at least 50 games at catcher, third base, and shortstop throughout his career.

It’s not only his versatility that is noteworthy. The reigning 2020 AL Gold Glove winner at third base, Kiner-Falefa’s skills haven’t diminished with his shift to shortstop; his defensive component of WAR (based on UZR) is the highest at that position in the AL. The table below shows a breakdown of FanGraphs’ measures of the primary components of WAR individually (hitting, fielding, and base running):

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In 2020, the San Diego Padres finally had their breakout season, going 37-23 in the pandemic-shortened sprint, good enough for the third-best record in baseball. A lot of players were responsible for getting them to where they ended up, but one of the best bits of news for the team was that Eric Hosmer was one of them. After signing a long-term contract prior to the 2018 season, Hosmer hit .259/.316/.412 in his first two seasons with the Friars, for a wRC+ of 93 and -0.5 combined WAR that placed him near the bottom of the ranks of baseball’s first baseman. But in 2020, with the highest average launch angle and lowest grounder percentage of his career, he hit .287/.333/.517, giving some hope that would turn things around.

If the first three months of 2021 are any indication, those hopes have mostly evaporated, ninth inning, game-tying home runs aside. Hosmer’s still hitting the ball very hard, but he’s largely back to his old, pre-2020 habits, hitting an inordinate number of pitches straight into the dirt, knocking out more ants than opposing pitchers. Since 2015, Statcast has kept track of what they call the “Sweet Spot” or pitches hit with a launch angle between eight and 32 degrees. Only twice has Hosmer been over 30%: in 2020 and his equally excellent 2017 season. For 2021, that mark has dropped to his lowest number yet, 22.3%. As a result, even with a better average exit velocity than last year, he’s missing 150 points of slugging percentage:

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Spencer Strider is a pitching nerd. He’s also a promising prospect putting up stellar numbers in his first professional season. Drafted in the fourth round last year out of Clemson University, the 22-year-old right-hander has a sparkling 1.50 ERA in six starts split between Low-A Augusta and High-A Rome. Moreover, he’s overpowering hitters to the tune of 14 hits allowed and 44 strikeouts in 24 innings.

Strider — No. 22 on our Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list — nerded out about his repertoire, and the evolution of his approach, prior to last night’s game.

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David Laurila: Tell me about yourself as a pitcher. How do you get guys out?

Spencer Strider: “I believe in attacking the zone and putting the game in the hitters’ hands. Whether you’re throwing 50 [mph] and can’t throw a strike, or you’re throwing 101 and spotting up like Jacob deGrom, the hitters have to deal with whatever you give them. The statistics show that’s going to work in your favor the vast majority of the time.

“I’ve also come to learn a lot about my fastball. At the end of college we were able to get more more data and metrics on it, and I understood the concept of vertical break, how spin is helpful, and everything else that’s part of the vernacular now. I’ve focused on pitching to the top half of the zone, where it’s most difficult to hit a good rising fastball. Most of my attention over the last few months has been working on a breaking ball that complements that fastball use, something with more vertical depth at a high velocity.”

Laurila: For years, pitchers tended to tell me that they pitch to contact. Now it’s more common for them to say they’re trying to miss bats. Where do you stand?

Strider: “I’m definitely trying to miss bats. That’s the best outcome. I want to give myself the best chance of being successful, and if a guy swings-and-misses, I can’t be hurt by that. If I can pitch in a way that guarantees me more swings-and-misses, that helps remove the possibility of bad outcomes. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like this season, umpires are under more scrutiny than ever before. Part of that might be because we’ve grown tired of the inconsistency that comes with human umpires, while another part could be access to more information, such as data on individual umpires’ accuracies.

On the sabermetric side, research on umpire performance has yielded mixed results. In April, our Ben Clemens examined whether the strike zone had changed and found no difference compared to previous seasons (though he noted that might not be very satisfying to frustrated fans). Recently, over at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur concluded that the issue wasn’t the rate of wrong calls, but rather their magnitude. In other words, umpires are messing up in high-leverage situations. But is this because of umpires succumbing to pressure? Or just variance? The “why” component still eludes us.

In the midst of all the umpire-related hoopla, though, it seems like we’ve overlooked the importance of pitch framing. Until robot umpires come along, the art of presenting would-be balls as strikes (and making sure strikes don’t turn into balls) will remain relevant. This season’s umpires have been inconsistent, sure, but it’s undeniable that a certain amount of agency belongs to skillful catchers. Read the rest of this entry »