A’s third baseman Matt Chapman has had a pretty brutal start to his season. In 96 plate appearances through games played on April 27, he’s slashing just .152/.281/.329 and has struck out more than 34% of the time. His wRC+, meanwhile, is 45 points below his career-average into this year.

Chapman also finds himself atop a leaderboard that would, upon first glance, seemingly lead to success at the plate. Year-over-year, no hitter has increased his Center% — or percentage of batted balls hit up the middle — more than he has, with a rate that has gone up by more than 1.75 times.

Strikeouts aside, you would think that Chapman should at least be getting some decent batted ball results. More than 52% of his batted balls so far this year have gone up the middle, leading all hitters. Amazingly, though, he has hit the most groundballs up the middle this season without a hit, at 12. That’s right: On twelve different occasions this season when Chapman has hit a ball back towards the middle, it’s gone for an out.

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It would be inaccurate to say that the Yankees suddenly have a catching controversy, but only because the situation has been building for years, and already came to something of a head last fall. While Gary Sánchez burst onto the scene a few years ago as one of the game’s top backstops, he has struggled mightily in three years out of the past four, to the point that he started just two of the team’s seven postseason games last October and was nearly non-tendered last December. Amid his latest slump and the team’s ongoing funk, Yankees manager Aaron Boone said on Tuesday that going forward, Sánchez and longtime understudy Kyle Higashioka will share the starting job.

“Kind of we’ll just go day by day,” Boone told reporters. “They’re obviously both going to play a lot. But it will be a day by day thing that I’ll try to communicate as best I can.”

“[Higashioka has] just earned more playing time. Simple as that… His improvements the last couple of years on both sides of the ball have been strong. I think the way he’s played here on the onset of the season has earned him some more opportunities.”

The move has as much to do with ascendance of the 31-year-old Higashioka — a seventh-round 2008 pick who’s spent parts of five seasons at Triple-A Scranton-Wilkes/Barre plus the past season-and-change as the top backup — as it does the ongoing descent of the 28-year-old Sánchez, a two-time All-Star. After a miserable 2020 campaign in which he hit an unfathomable .147/.253/.365 (68 wRC+) with 10 homers and -0.1 WAR, Sánchez showed signs of a bounce back during spring training, and homered in each of the Yankees’ first two games of the regular season against the Blue Jays. He hasn’t homered since, however, and has gone just 6-for-48 with a lone double and seven walks since en route to a .182/.308/.309 (85 wRC+) line, that while his defense has again regressed. He’s hardly the only reason that the Yankees have stumbled to an 11-13 start — they were 9-13 before rolling into Camden Yards for their usual pillaging and plundering — but with Higashioka outplaying him on both sides of the ball as so many of their other hitters have slumped, the time is right for the Yankees to try this. Read the rest of this entry »

Eduardo Rodriguez has been one of the vital cogs for the resurgent Red Sox. Sure, Boston’s league-leading wRC+ is the main impetus for the club’s success. But both the starting rotation and the bullpen have been in the top third of the league and Rodriguez has been one of the larger actors of the former’s placement among the league-leaders. Rodriguez has accumulated 0.4 WAR in just four starts and 23 innings of work. He sports a 3.52 ERA and 3.34 FIP despite allowing a gaudy 17.4% HR/FB. The main driver of his results? Not only is he striking out a shade more than 29% of opposing hitters (after posting marks of 24.8% and 26.4% the previous two seasons), his walk rate sits at a sparkling 2.2%. This start is already extremely impressive. But in the context of what he endured in the very recent past, I would say it’s extraordinary.

For those unfamiliar, Rodriguez missed the entire 2020 campaign. It wasn’t due to an elbow injury or shoulder soreness or forearm tightness. Rodriguez suffered myocarditis; a heart condition connected to contracting COVID-19. Speaking to Joon Lee of ESPN, Rodriguez said he could not throw pitches without feeling significant fatigue brought on by the effects of his condition. He was unable to train for three months. This meant that not only did he miss last season but he was behind the proverbial eight ball when it came to preparing for the 2021 season.

Getting back on the mound was an amazing accomplishment alone. Having one of the most dominant starts to the season among all starting pitchers is one of the most surprising developments of the young season. Rodriguez has not just picked up where he left off. He has adjusted his pitch mix and fundamentally changed the method by which he attacks hitters.

His fastball velocity is down a half a tick, despite the league average increasing by half a tick.

But that hasn’t proven to be a problem. As I alluded to, he has made major tweaks to his arsenal in 2021. In his first three major league seasons, Rodriguez leveraged his plus fastball velocity by throwing the pitch about 60% of the time. As the velocity diminished, he began to rely on the pitch less in 2018-19. Now the four-seamer is his second-most used pitch:

Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another week of college baseball, minor league spring training, and big league action. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Kevin’s Notes

John Baker, RHP, Ball State: 9 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 8K

When I saw John Baker’s line from Friday’s game against North Illinois, my first reaction was, “Wait a second, that John Baker?” It feels like he’s been part of the Redbirds’ weekend rotation since the Clinton administration, but in reality he’s a fifth-year senior with 60 games and over 300 innings on his college resume. He’s always been good, earning All-Conference awards and a couple of pre-season All-American mentions while compiling a 3.17 career ERA and more than 10 strikeouts per nine innings. In 2019, he was a 29th round pick of the Marlins; he was overshadowed on that year’s Ball State team by eventual Arizona first-round pick Drey Jameson, who was taken 34th overall. Read the rest of this entry »

Like the rest of us, Aaron Sanchez’s 2020 caught him by surprise. A couple of weeks after a September 2019 anterior capsule surgery on his right shoulder — no easy thing to return from as a pitcher — he was optimistic when speaking with reporters, telling them, “I will pitch next year.” But he was non-tendered by the Houston Astros, and as the winter months came and went, he remained unsigned. Then the pandemic wiped out nearly four months of the 2020 season, and by the time baseball returned, teams weren’t in the mood to pay up for the remaining free agents. It wasn’t until February 21 of this year, 552 days after his most recent pitching appearance, that a team finally signed Sanchez to its big league roster.

That team was the San Francisco Giants, for whom Sanchez made his fifth start on Tuesday and threw 4.2 innings of two-run, one-hit baseball that included five walks and six strikeouts. The lack of certainty surrounding both his health and effectiveness entering the 2021 season seemed destined to make Sanchez an odd fit for the team that took a shot on him, but in San Francisco, his kind is actually right at home. The Giants’ rotation is filled with pitchers who have some kind of major injury in their recent history. In many cases, the return from those injuries hasn’t been graceful; some of those pitchers have found themselves moving to the bullpen in an effort to reclaim some of their value. Many were free agents last winter, with no guarantee they’d be given a starter’s job with their next team. Somehow, the Giants built a rotation out of these guys. And a month into the season, that rotation might be the best in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like only yesterday that the Yankees snatched Mike Tauchman from the Rockies for a pittance and unleashed him on the AL East. In 2019, Tauchman was electric; his .277/.361/.504 slash line buoyed the Yankees in a season where they desperately needed it. Injuries (and 100 PA in the minors) kept him from playing a full year, but even in only 296 plate appearances, he managed 2.6 WAR, sixth among Yankees batters.

That performance didn’t carry over into 2020. Despite the team’s intermittent injury problems, the Yankees used him as a fourth outfielder and defensive replacement. He didn’t hit a single home run, a concise summary of what went wrong: his power disappeared overnight. By the start of this year, he was barely playing and out of minor league options, which makes last night’s development unsurprising: the Yankees traded him to San Francisco in exchange for Wandy Peralta and a player to be named later, as Jack Curry first reported.

Tauchman had lost his spot in the Yankees’ outfield, and it’s not hard to see why. Aaron Judge and Aaron Hicks are playing everyday, which left one outfield spot for three outfielders: Tauchman, Clint Frazier, and Brett Gardner. Tauchman and Gardner fulfill similar roles, and the team was giving Gardner the majority of the playing time while carrying no backup shortstop. Frazier is the only outfielder with options, but he’s playing far more than Tauchman, which meant Tauchman was the odd man out — the team needed to trade him to avoid exposing him to waivers. Read the rest of this entry »

There probably aren’t many times in his life when Franmil Reyes has snuck up on someone. Listed at 6-foot-5 and 265 pounds, Reyes looks like he could stiff arm a Ford F-150. There’s nothing inconspicuous about him. However, despite being fourth in average exit velocity since he was called up in 2018 – rubbing elbows with the Aaron Judge-s, Nelson Cruz-s, and Joey Gallo-s of the world – Reyes’ name is rarely mentioned when discussing the game’s prodigious power hitters. Part of this may be because he’s played in Cleveland and a pre-Fernando Tatis Jr. San Diego. Part of it may be because, despite the jumbo exit velocity, he’s tied for 21st in home runs over that span. You can hit the ball as hard as you want, but if 46.6% of them are on the ground like Reyes’ have been, people will lose interest as quickly as those blistering grounders become outs.

Exit velocity will catch the eye of dedicated, hardcore fans painstakingly poring over data. But massive home runs will always be the quickest way to draw the eyes of casual fans. Ideally (as Reyes did twice on Tuesday night) you can hit a ball over 110 mph while also sending it halfway to a neighboring county. Reyes may not have to worry about sneaking up on people anymore, both because he’s finally getting the results that his exit velocities would suggest, and because he’s literally being very loud. You’ll know he’s around because you’ll know the sound of his bat.

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Karl Kauffmann is flying under the radar. Drafted 77th overall by Colorado out of the University of Michigan in 2019, the 23-year-old right-hander is ranked an anything-but-eye-catching No. 23 on our Rockies Top Prospects list. Recent opportunities to impress have been scant. Thanks to the pandemic, Kauffmann’s last game-action came two summers ago when he helped lead the Wolverines to the finals of the College World Series.

But he may not be under the radar much longer. Kauffmann has big plans for the forthcoming season, and they include a new pitch. With Corbin Burnes in mind, the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan native spent the winter months working on a cutter. Kauffman discussed its development, as well as the rest of his repertoire and what he’s learned from Chris Fetter, prior to the start of minor-league spring training.

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David Laurila: Your prospect profile at FanGraphs describes you as “a one-seam sinker/changeup righty with a pretty firm, inconsistent mid-80s slider.” How accurate is that?

Karl Kauffmann: “I think it paints part of the picture. There’s more to the story, stuff-wise — what I was trying to accomplish at Michigan, and how the stuff plays into that. I left high school a four-seam, 12-6, big-breaker, hard-fastball type of pitcher. I didn’t pitch much my freshman year, then went out to the Cape Cod League. That was in 2017. The coach there — I was with Scott Pickler for two years, with [Yarmouth-Dennis] — told me I’d never pitch if I didn’t learn a sinker/slider. That summer, I basically taught myself, working with some of the coaches, how to throw that one-seam. It was a way to get easy groundballs, and I picked it up pretty quickly.”

Laurila: Chris Fetter was your pitching coach at Michigan. What was his role in you making that change? Read the rest of this entry »

This is Owen’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Owen is a recent college graduate who is passionate about all things baseball, data, and baseball data. As a native of Northern California, he has been a firsthand witness to historic baseball events such as Sean Doolittle, hitting prospect; Aaron Judge, football player; and Cliff Pennington. Among other things, he hopes to provide insight into machine learning and advanced analytics.

Aaron Judge has always been a fascinating case study; anyone with such an extreme profile helps to build our understanding of both what is possible and what is relevant to our understanding of which players are good. We know that even in the face of a high strikeout rate and below-average contact rates, Judge is an elite player, due in no small part to his 99th percentile power; he owns a career wRC+ of 151 despite having a 31% strikeout rate. But for many, there is a nagging sense of “what if.” What kind of hitter could he be if his plate discipline were better?

Those “what ifs” are the result of the improvement we saw Judge make after a 2017 swing change. We’re now years removed from that campaign. Judge’s 1,000-plus plate appearances since then make it likely that his plate discipline skills are what they are at this point. He was a model of consistency from 2017-19: an O-Swing% in the range of 24.6% to 25.9%, a Swing% that ranged from 40.3% to 42.7%, a CSW% that ranged from 28.6% to 31.5%, and a Contact% that ranged from 65.1% to 67.6%. Our coarse understanding of hitters’ plate discipline skills is that they’re largely immutable. After all, if they were more malleable, we’d probably see a lot more players cut their strikeout rates and boost their walk rates. Sometimes a change in how much a hitter is swinging outside the zone will stick out, but it’s often accompanied by a shift in how much they’re swinging overall, suggesting a change in their approach rather than a leap forward in their underlying ball and strike recognition. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the season, the Milwaukee Brewers were a popular pick to win the NL Central, with half of the writers here at FanGraphs expecting them to emerge victorious. The strength of the team is its pitching, with a rotation spearheaded by Brandon Woodruff and Corbin Burnes as well as an excellent bullpen anchored by Josh Hader and 2020 NL Rookie of the Year Devin Williams. But there was a good deal of uncertainty about where the offense would come from and how much run support the strong pitching would receive. The shortened season saw Lorenzo Cain opt out and underwhelming performances from perennial MVP candidate Christian Yelich and infielder Keston Hiura. ZiPS (along with many other models) projected bounce-back campaigns for both Yelich and Hiura. These two sluggers’ ability to produce is critical to the Brewers’ success this season.

Yelich has not gotten off to a great start and has already missed 12 games due to back issues, which he’s dealt with previously in his career. But it’s Hiura that I want to put the spotlight on. In his rookie season, Hiura took the National League by storm, slashing .303/.368/.570 while hitting 19 home runs; he was second on the team to Yelich with 140 wRC+. Hiura entered the 2020 season expected to hold down the keystone and contribute as a key power bat in the lineup. Yet as was the case for so many hitters in the pandemic-shortened season, Hiura took a step backwards from his prior year’s performance. He managed a disappointing but still respectable 87 wRC+ and 13 home runs, but he struck out more. He walked less. His hard hit rate plummeted from 47.1% to 39.6%.

Nearly a month into the 2021 season, Hiura’s offensive performance has fallen short of even last season’s paltry marks. Through last weekend’s action, he is slashing .145/.264/.242 with a wOBA of .240 and 50 wRC+. One area that is a complete disaster for Hiura is his contact rate. To truly capture the magnitude of his issues, one must look beyond his strikeout rate (34.7%, which is really bad) to Z-Contact%, which is the percentage of balls a hitter makes contact with when he swings at pitches in the strike zone. So far in the early going, Hiura has the worst Z-Contact% in baseball, lagging behind Javier Báez by about 2.5%. Recently, Brewers hitting instructor Andy Haines mentioned Hiura’s timing is off but that he’s “getting closer every day.” While his coaches may express some optimism, any progress has yet to find its way onto the field. Here’s a sample of some swings and misses against the Cubs’ Kyle Ryan. Read the rest of this entry »