The end of Wednesday’s A’s-Twins game was, fittingly for an up-and-down Oakland team, absolutely wild. After the A’s tied the game in the bottom of the ninth, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli pulled Josh Donaldson, who was set to be the runner on second base in the 10th, in favor of rookie infielder Travis Blankenhorn. That speed upgrade proved inconsequential when Byron Buxton hit a towering home run to score Blankenhorn, but Baldelli’s move ultimately proved unintentionally costly.

In the bottom of the inning, Twins closer Alex Colomé got two quick outs, then walked the next two batters to load the bases. A weakly-hit ground ball to second should have ended things, but Blankenhorn, now at the keystone after pinch-running, bobbled it to allow one run to score and bring the A’s within one. Ramón Laureano followed that up with a hard-hit grounder to third, where Luis Arraez had taken over for Donaldson after playing the previous nine innings at second. He fielded the ball cleanly but overthrew first base for a game-ending two-run error. The A’s won without collecting a single hit in the inning.

It’s not unfair to chalk that win up to luck. But winning 11 games in a row takes a lot more than luck, and that’s just what the A’s have done — an especially impressive feat, considering the team’s historically horrendous start. Losers of six straight to open the year, they’re now tied with the Mariners for first in the AL West. How exactly have the A’s been able to turn their season around in such dramatic fashion?

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The NL West is a two-team division these days, but that wasn’t always so certain. In 2019, the Diamondbacks burst onto the scene as a potential playoff team — not the equal of the Dodgers, but a thorn in their side nonetheless. The Snakes didn’t boast the same top end as their Hollywood rivals, unless you had a wildly optimistic opinion of Ketel Marte, but they did have depth, personified by Carson Kelly, the highlight of their return for trading Paul Goldschmidt.

That 2019 season showed Kelly’s promise. In 365 plate appearances of platoon work, he compiled 1.8 WAR, combining competent work behind the plate with a 107 wRC+. That batting line was buoyed by a 13.2% walk rate and a juicy .232 ISO, neither of which seemed particularly convincing, but his central skills — good plate discipline, the ability to draw a walk, enough power to be respectable — all pointed to continued offensive competence.

The 2020 season wasn’t so kind. A .221/.265/.385 line was good for a 70 wRC+, and those flashes of light from the previous year — his walk rate and power on contact — both dipped. It was only 129 plate appearances, and it came with a .250 BABIP, so it was hardly a season he couldn’t recover from, but his swoon mirrored Arizona’s: 25–35, last in the NL West. After the Padres went nuclear this offseason and with the Giants continuing to hit on interesting players, it was easy to move on from the Diamondbacks and their bushelful of interesting but flawed players, Kelly included.

Secretly, though, Kelly’s 2020 was actually encouraging. Not the top-line numbers, mind you; those were terrible, like we talked about above. But consider: Kelly’s ISO (extra bases per at bat, if you’re unused to seeing that; it’s a measure of power) dropped from .232 to .164, and he totally deserved that. His barrel rate halved, his hard-hit rate declined precipitously, and he traded line drives and fly balls for grounders. Bad power central!
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This recent tweet from Daren Willman caught my eye:

#Rangers Kohei Arihara threw 7! different pitches in the first inning. pic.twitter.com/X86J6NpvFH

— Daren Willman (@darenw) April 20, 2021

Partially it was because I was already intrigued by Kohei Arihara, but the pure absurdity of this fact stands out, too. He threw seven different kinds of pitches in his most recent start against the Angels. Seven! In one inning! The only other player to accomplish this feat in 2020 was Arihara’s countryman Yu Darvish, who coincidently did so in seven different innings last season. Since 2008 (the first season with public PITCHf/x data), there have been 909 instances of a pitcher throwing at least seven different pitch types in a single inning. When you think about how many innings of regular season baseball have been played since 2008, you can appreciate how rare this type of occurrence is.

If you are not familiar with Arihara yet, let me fill you in. The right-hander came over from NPB after playing six years for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. He was posted going into his age-28 season and signed a two-year deal with the Rangers for a total of $7.44 million, $1.24 million of which was the posting fee awarded to his now-former club. At the time of signing, this seemed to be a very good deal for Texas. Arihara lacks the explosive fastball and mind-bending breaking pitches frontline starters in MLB today; his strikeout rate his final season in Japan was 19.4%. But his repertoire was deep. Eric Longenhagen wrote up a scouting report back in December outlining his pitch mix and fastball velocity, comparing him to other high-profile players from NPB. Eric concluded that Arihara profiled as a back-of-the-rotation type, placing a 40 FV on him. Getting a guy who can fill the back of a rotation for about $3.7 million per year (when accounting for the posting fee) seems like a solid deal to me. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres stockpiled starting pitching and mapped out their season, they probably didn’t count on Ryan Weathers playing the stopper. Yet in a rotation with a former Cy Young winner, a four-time All-Star, and the author of the season’s first no-hitter, it was the 21-year-old southpaw — the majors’ youngest starting pitcher — who helped the Pad Squad turn the page on a 2-7 slide, a three-game losing streak, and some sobering injury news with 5.2 innings of one-hit shutout ball against the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine on Thursday night, part of a 3-2 win.

Making just the second start of his career, and matched up against Walker Buehler for the second time in six days, Weathers kept the Dodgers off balance with an effectively wild four-seam fastball/slider combo, mixing in the occasional sinker and changeup. While his low-spin four-seamer averaged a comparatively modest 93.7 mph and topped out at 95.9 mph, its exceptional horizontal movement helped him rack up 15 called strikes and four whiffs for a 41% CSW on that pitch, and an overall 33% CSW for the night.

Weathers threw 39 pitches in the first two innings, walking leadoff hitter Mookie Betts and plunking Max Muncy to start the second, but striking out Corey Seager, Sheldon Neuse, and Luke Raley along the way. The lone hit he gave up a sharp single to Buehler to start the third inning, but he got his pitch count in order by using just eight pitches to retire Betts, Seager, and Turner to begin his second time through the order, kicking off a run of 11 straight Dodgers he retired before departing in the sixth with a 2-0 lead. Read the rest of this entry »

The quality of Dustin May’s raw stuff is undeniable. He throws his sinker with the highest average velocity of any starter in the majors and it’s ridiculous tailing action makes it one of the most GIF-able pitches in baseball. During each of his starts, Twitter is flooded with GIFs like this one.

Dustin May, Filthy Two Seamers.

Get out of my head, Joe Davis! (but, yeah, you're right ?) ? pic.twitter.com/gw5ZV2bxGk

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 15, 2021

It’s not just May’s sinker that stands out. His entire arsenal is composed of pitches with elite characteristics. Here’s a look at May’s repertoire and each pitch’s percentile ranks when compared with their respective pitch types:

May’s velocity on each of his pitches obviously stands out; he’s among the league leaders in average velocity on all four of his pitches. On three of his offerings, he has elite movement in one direction or the other. It’s a truly impressive arsenal without peer in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two hitters I would like to introduce. The first, Player A, has been described in terms of the classic trio of statistics: average, on-base percentage, and slugging. The second, Player B, has been described in terms of modern metrics like Exit Velocity and Barrel rate. Take a look at their numbers and try to see who’s better:

Player A: .081/.205/.162

Player B: 95.4 mph Exit Velocity, 63.6% Hard-Hit rate, 27.3% Barrel rate

Not much of a competition, right? Without additional context, you probably chose Player B in a heartbeat. Player A’s appalling triple-slash makes him a DFA candidate. Player B, on the other hand, looks like a hitting genius! Those numbers and rates would place him well above the 95th percentile of all major leaguers. The twist, of course, is that these two hitters are in fact the same person: Matt Carpenter, veteran infielder for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Traditional and modern metrics do disagree at times, but the disparity between them is seldom this wide. Through 18 games, Carpenter’s efforts to clobber the ball have not translated into actual results, much to the chagrin of Cardinals fans. There’s having a stretch of bad luck, then there’s hitting below .100. Is there something else we’re missing? Read the rest of this entry »

There are two things that jump out to me about Freddy Peralta’s start to the 2021 season. The first is that the man once known as Fastball Freddy is throwing said fastball at a career-low rate. The second is that he’s added some new moves into his windup that may be increasing his deception. Amidst all that change are some underlying command issues that suggest he still has things to work on.

Let’s start with his windup, which I’ve become absolutely fixated on. It’s not at all the windup I remembered him having, and I’m mesmerized by it.

Like an alarm clock going from a restful existence into a blaring beep that jiggles itself off the nightstand, Peralta has added some chaos to his delivery. What once was a fairly normal over-the-head windup and cross-body release has gotten more complicated. The leg kicks up higher, his feet are more caffeinated, and he starts in a more hunched position as if to make his over-the-head motion easier to attain. His new windup is nearly a half a second faster from start to release. And did I mention his feet? His feet!

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Ross Stripling was featured here at FanGraphs last week, with the article focusing on Clayton Kershaw. Stripling shared how his former Los Angeles Dodgers teammate influenced his own career, as well as some of the things that make Kershaw elite. The Hall-of-Fame-bound southpaw’s innate ability to manipulate a baseball was part of that conversation, which took place prior to the start of the season.

Not included in that earlier piece was what Stripling — now a member of the Toronto Blue Jays — told me about how he manipulates one of his own pitches. The 31-year-old right-hander’s signature offering is a classic 12-6 curveball, which is among baseball’s best when he’s on top of his game. Here, in Q&A format, is that part of our multi-subject exchange.

———

David Laurila: You have a pretty good curveball yourself. How would you describe it?

Ross Stripling: “It’s a spiked curveball, and I don’t waver on the grip. I’ve never actually learned if it’s considered a knuckle curve or not, but I put my knuckle on the ball. Most people will put just their fingertip on the ball and call that a spiked curveball. I curl my finger, and put my whole top knuckle on the baseball. I also grip it as hard as I can. From there, I just rip it. Read the rest of this entry »

If you pulled up the AL Central standings today, you’d find that the team currently sitting at the top isn’t the favored Chicago White Sox or the Minnesota Twins, but the Kansas City Royals. While 90% of the season remains, it’s hard to object to the notion that it’s better to be in the lead at this point rather than the basement. It’s still reasonable to believe that the two preseason favorites are better teams than the Royals overall, but that doesn’t mean the season can’t end with Kansas City in possession of a golden ticket to the AL Division Series.

Long-time readers will know that I’ve never thought the Royals were particularly well run, at least not since Ewing Kauffman, the team’s owner from the 1969 expansion, passed away in 1993. During Kauffman’s tenure, Kansas City was arguably the most successful team created in the expansion era, ranking eighth in winning percentage (.517). By 1993, only two other expansion-era teams were even at .500: the Blue Jays at .511 and Houston at .501. At the organization’s peak, from 1975 to 1989, only the Red Sox and Yankees won more games, and at one point, the Royals went to the playoffs in seven of 10 seasons.

Since 1993, the organization has generally been unsuccessful. In about a quarter-century, the Royals have only had four winning seasons. While they bagged a World Series title in 2015, they only made the playoffs twice, despite playing in what was arguably baseball’s weakest division. Under Kauffman’s successor, team CEO, and eventually full owner David Glass, the team fared much worse. In 1993, Kansas City had a $40 million payroll, the fourth-highest in baseball. By the post-strike 1995 season, they ranked 21st. There they stayed, usually in the bottom third of the league and frequently in the bottom five. Since Dayton Moore’s first full season as the general manager in 2007, Kansas City has ranked 28th in wins and 22nd in payroll:

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With apologies to Jacob deGrom, no pitcher in baseball is as hot as Corbin Burnes right now. Through four starts, the Brewers’ 26-year-old righty has allowed just one run and eight hits, and has yet to walk a single batter in 24.1 innings, that while striking out an eye-opening 40 hitters. His outings have quickly become appointment viewing — not too shabby for a pitcher with just 17 big league starts under his belt — and he’s already carved himself a small niche in the record books.

Burnes didn’t exactly come from nowhere — he was a Top 100 Prospect here and elsewhere three years ago — but his setbacks have made his rise to dominance all the more dramatic. Between pitching in a small market and thriving under pandemic conditions, he’s flown a bit beneath the radar until now, though a guy carrying a 0.37 ERA and 0.68 FIP can do that for only so long. The short version of his tale is that the 2016 fourth-round pick out of St. Mary’s College made a solid debut out of the Brewers’ bullpen in ’18, but his attempt to get a foothold in the rotation went disastrously the following year, as he was pummeled for 21 runs in 17.2 innings over four March and April turns. In between detours to Triple-A and the Injured List, he made 28 more appearances out of the bullpen but was lit for an 8.82 ERA and 6.09 FIP in 49 total innings.

Last year, however, he ditched a too-straight four-seam fastball that in 2019 had averaged 95.2 mph but had been lit for a .425 batting average and .823 slugging percentage, a malady Ben Clemens detailed during his examination of Burnes’ expanding repertoire as part of our Thursday Burnesday package. In its place, Burnes opted for a sinker/cutter combination that was utterly filthy, with the former averaging 96.0 mph and the latter 93.1. Both had elite spin rates, a common thread across Burnes’ arsenal. Via The Ringer’s Michael Baumann, “Out of 209 pitchers with enough playing time to qualify for the Baseball Savant leaderboard last year, Burnes had the third-fastest-spinning slider and cutter… the second-fastest-spinning sinker, and the eighth-fastest-spinning curveball.” Read the rest of this entry »