Back before the Chicago Cubs decided to go full-on Ebenezer Scrooge, they aggressively pursued top players in free agency to improve their roster. One of those players was Yu Darvish, an ace for the Rangers and Dodgers after seven years of dominating the Japan Pacific League, a feat he accomplished while still a teenager. Darvish was the best pitcher available after the 2017 season and the Cubs signed him to a six-year, $126 million contract, a sum commensurate with his abilities. And unlike his first deal in the majors, Darvish didn’t have to contend with a posting fee; when the right-hander came to the States, the Nippon Ham Fighters got nearly as much ($51.7 million) as he did ($56 million).

The initial returns were not promising. The Cubs won 95 games in 2018 before being bounced in the Wild Card game by the Colorado Rockies, while triceps and elbow issues limited Darvish to just eight games. Those were mostly ineffective games to boot, as his walk rate jumped to career highs, his ERA and FIP ballooned to near five, and he failed to complete the fifth inning in five of his starts. MRIs revealed no structural damage to his arm, but the team was careful; the triceps is important in the arm deceleration phase of a pitcher’s delivery:

Activity of the triceps muscles, as well as activity of the anconeus and wrist flexor muscles, helped the joint’s ligaments apply a compression force during this phase in order to stabilize the elbow and prevent elbow distraction.

Darvish was already a veteran of one Tommy John surgery and the Cubs were rightly conservative about rushing their ace to full-time duty. The first victory of 2019 was just staying healthy, which he achieved; Darvish only missed a single start down the stretch due to forearm pain. But the control wasn’t there in the early-going and a third of the way through the season, his ERA was at 5.40 with an extremely worrying 38 walks in 11 starts. Indeed, even late as Independence Day, Darvish’s ERA was north of five. Read the rest of this entry »

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of last night’s game between the Braves and Phillies, the visiting Phillies were holding on to a two-run lead. Dansby Swanson stood on first base with Adeiny Hechavarría on second. Freddie Freeman was facing off against new Phillies acquisition Brandon Workman. In terms of compelling endings, this is pretty close to what you hope for. One of the better hitters in the game had a chance to hit a walk-off home run to end the game, while making an out would mean victory for the other side. Freeman did get a hit, pushing a double into the gap, but the game ended when Swanson was thrown out at home trying to score the tying run. The play, already compelling given the game state, was made more interesting by two factors:

1. Andrew Knapp might have blocked the plate in violation of the rules designed to prevent collisions at home.
2. Swanson decided to try to score the tying run on the play, but made the final out instead.

Before getting to the collision rule and whether Knapp was where he shouldn’t have been, let’s first consider Swanson’s decision to attempt to score from first base. While Freeman hit the ball pretty far, it was cut off by Roman Quinn. One of the fastest runners in the game, Quinn got to the ball in the gap before left fielder Andrew McCutchen. While McCutchen’s arm strength isn’t terrible, it isn’t much more than average, while Quinn has thrown an easy 87 mph pitch from the mound, and made this throw earlier this month:

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David Fletcher is 5 feet and 9 inches tall. By the standards of professional baseball, that’s quite short. He makes up for it a bit by standing upright in the batter’s box, but no one is going to confuse him for Aaron Judge anytime soon. That makes it all the more confusing that on Friday night, he did this:

First of all, wow! Are you kidding me? That ball was nearly five feet off the ground. Halfway to home plate, it was unclear whether Fletcher was taking a swing at a major league pitch or a piñata:

If you’ve been paying attention throughout his career, Fletcher making contact with that pitch will be less surprising. He’s a singular player, a contact machine who will defend the strike zone at all costs when the count reaches two strikes. So far this year, he’s swung at 51 pitches outside the strike zone and only missed nine of them. That 87.3% out-of-zone contact rate is higher than the league contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 season couldn’t have gone much better for Stephen Strasburg, but his follow-up performance is already over. After making just two long-delayed and abbreviated starts, the 32-year-old righty has been transferred to the 60-day Injured List and is slated to undergo surgery to alleviate carpal tunnel neuritis in his right hand. He becomes the latest top-flight pitcher to land on the IL this season, and leaves the already-struggling Nationals just that much more shorthanded as they defend their title.

After averaging just 24 starts per season from 2015-18 due to a variety of ailments, Strasburg didn’t miss a single start in 2019. He struck out a career-high 251 batters in a National League-high 209 innings, received enough run support to notch an NL-high 18 wins as well, and finished with a 3.32 ERA, 3.25 FIP, and 5.7 WAR, the last of which ranked third in the NL behind Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer. He followed that stellar season with a dominant postseason performance, pitching to a 1.98 ERA with 47 strikeouts and just four walks in 36.1 innings, and won World Series MVP honors while helping the Nationals win their first championship in franchise history. After opting out of the final four years and $100 million of his contract, he signed a new seven-year, $245 million deal. It was a very good year.

Strasburg appeared to be on track to make his season debut on July 25, in the Nationals’ second game, but he was scratched from the start just hours before first pitch due to what was described as a nerve issue. He was replaced by Erick Fedde, and received an injection of cortisone. At the time, he admitted that he had been pitching through numbness in his hand for weeks. From NBC Sports’ Todd Dybas:

“Started out, probably, like the end of the first week of camp. I was waking up in the middle of the night and my hand was asleep. Kept falling asleep and I was getting these feelings, and it wasn’t really bothering me throwing. It seemed like once I tried starting to ramp up and stuff, the symptoms started to increase. It really’s something the last two [intrasquad] games was feeling it pretty regularly. Just something you try to throw through. After I got out of the last start problems, issues, just kept persisting. Saw that there was nerve impingement in my wrist. Got a cortisone shot to hopefully create more space in there to get it to calm down and get back to normal.

…”It got to the point where I didn’t have the same feeling in my hand holding the ball. It was affecting my ability to command the baseball the way I’m accustomed to. It’s something that I feel like if I take some time now to get that feeling back to normal, I can be out there much sooner than if I try to just gut it out at this point.”

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Nothing can deflate the excitement surrounding a hopeful contender like a leaky bullpen, but as is the case most years, several teams have encountered just that kind of luck in the opening weeks of the 2020 season. At various times, the relief corps of the Cubs, Reds, and Padres have all been a hurdle for those teams to overcome, rather than an asset assisting them in their playoff pursuits. As much as those units and others have struggled this season, however, no team’s group of relievers has made victories harder to achieve than that of the Phillies. Their bullpen ERA of 8.00 is the worst in baseball by more than two runs. Unsurprisingly, that has had a big impact on Philadelphia’s postseason hopes — at 10-14, the team is last in its division, and second-worst in the National League.

Instead of packing it in, however, the Phillies have dialed up some assistance from the last place team in the other league. Late Friday night, Philadelphia struck a deal to acquire right-handed relievers Brandon Workman and Heath Hembree from the Boston Red Sox in exchange for right-hander Nick Pivetta and minor league arm Connor Seabold. Boston also sent $815,000 in cash to complete the swap, assisting the Phillies in paying the $1.05 million owed to the two relievers for the rest of the season.

Of the pair heading to Philadelphia, Workman offers the most upside. A Tommy John survivor who was still spending significant time in the minors as recently as 2018, Workman broke out in 2019 with some truly elite numbers — a 1.88 ERA, 2.46 FIP, 2.1 WAR, and 13.06 K/9. When I examined him near the end of last season, I found he’d made a number of changes to his approach. He was suddenly throwing his curve nearly half of the time, and had found a way to to dramatically reduce the number of strikes he threw without suffering a noticeable drop in opponents’ swing rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Five of the first 12 picks in the 2016 draft were high school pitchers. In order, those selections were: Ian Anderson to the Braves (third overall), Riley Pint to the Rockies (fourth), Braxton Garrett to the Marlins (seventh), Matt Manning to the Tigers (ninth), and Jay Groome to the Red Sox (12th). Not surprisingly, their respective development paths have varied, injuries hindering the progress of fully half.

Chris Mears — at the time a pitching crosschecker for the Red Sox — was especially enamored with Manning.

“I liked his athleticism, his looseness, his fastball quality,” said Mears, who is now one of Boston’s two pitching coordinators, along with Shawn Haviland. “I thought he would be a longer-term development type guy — the Tigers have done a really good job; he’s made adjustments faster than I would have anticipated — but I remember him being a guy I really wanted.”

Asked why he’d viewed him as a longer-term project, Mears cited Manning’s basketball background, and “less pitching experience than many high-school draftees have at that point in their careers.” Moreover, Manning is 6’ 6” and “usually those long-lever guys take a little bit longer to get the feel of repeating their delivery.” Mears also saw a breaking ball that while having good shape and spin, wasn’t always consistent.

Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t enthralled with his potential. Mears first saw Manning at the Arizona Fall Classic, and based on that look he and Josh Labandeira, Boston’s Northern California area scout, went to see him early the following spring. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at the bottom of the standings around the league, and you’ll find some expected names. The rebuilding Pirates, Royals, Mariners and Giants all occupy a last-place spot in their respective divisions, while similar teams like the Tigers and Blue Jays are hovering near the basement and below .500. Yet tucked into that group of teams that came into the season with no hope is a franchise just two years removed from 108 wins and its fourth World Series title in the last 16 seasons: the Red Sox. And while 2020 has been a predictably dismal showing for those aforementioned clubs, Boston’s season has been one surprisingly long tumble down an endless flight of stairs. Entering Friday’s play, the Sox are a miserable 8–18 and losers of nine out of their last 11 games. They’re also firmly in last place in the American League East, staring up at the Orioles, whom they trail by 4 1/2 games.

On the one hand, that’s not where anyone predicted the Red Sox to be. They were no juggernaut in 2019 at 84–78, and losing Mookie Betts was only going to hurt. Consequently, our preseason prediction was a modest 31–29 record with a third-place finish in the division and playoff odds of 64.7% with the new expanded format. But while these weren’t the ‘27 Yankees reborn, this also wasn’t a shipwreck visible from miles away. Instead, it’s been a sudden and violent collapse that’s taken them fully out of the playoff picture. The Red Sox’s projected record for the season is now a dismal 25–35, and their resulting postseason odds are just 10.4% — lower chances than every AL team but Seattle and Detroit.

On the other hand, the Red Sox have come by their awful start honestly, thanks in large part to one of the worst pitching staffs the game has ever seen. Boston hurlers have given up the most runs in the majors (160), resulting in a run differential of -43 that’s third worst in baseball, and have a ghastly ERA of 6.01, putting them in a virtual tie with Detroit (6.03) for last place, and in the running for the worst team ERA of the modern era. Only the 1996 Tigers, who put up a 6.38 mark en route to 109 losses, and ‘99 Rockies, who posted a 6.03 figure, have done worse in the last 85 years. The Red Sox are tied for San Francisco for lowest WAR among pitching staffs (-0.6), have given up the second-most homers in the league (43, alongside the Giants), are third in walks allowed (107, tied with — you guessed it — the Giants), and rank 24th in Win Probability Added (-2.69).

It gets uglier. Owing to injuries, trades and an offseason they more or less skipped, the Red Sox have already used 11 different starters in just 26 games, and those guys have been lit up for a 6.50 ERA in 101 innings (their staff FIP is an only modestly better 6.16). Most of those pressed into service are overmatched rookies and fringe major leaguers, with the Sox cycling through cast-offs like Ryan Weber, Zack Godley, and Chris Mazza. When that hasn’t worked (which is often), Boston has been forced to go with an opener-style strategy of using its worst relievers from the get-go; consequently, the team not only is averaging a mere 3.88 innings out of its starters, but has also allowed a ridiculous 59 runs across the first, second and third innings of its games. The only constants rotation-wise are Nathan Eovaldi and Martín Pérez, and both have been mediocre at best: The former has a 4.98 ERA and seven homers allowed in 34 1/3 innings; the latter is at 4.07, which leads the team, but coupled with a strikeout rate of just 16.5% and a bloated walk rate of 13.6%. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs own the third-best record in all of baseball and have raced out to the game’s biggest division lead. The Chicago White Sox are currently third in their division, in the thick middle of the American League playoff picture as we approach the season’s halfway point. And yet, as the two of them prepare to square off at Wrigley Field this weekend, because of the way each teams’ pitching staffs are constituted, I prefer the Sox’ chances of making a deep postseason run more than I do the Cubs’. Here’s why.

Both Chicago clubs can hit (both are top five in hitter WAR) but are succeeding at preventing runs in diametrically opposed fashion. The Cubs starters have been great. They have the lowest BB/9 in baseball at 1.80, they’re fourth in starter ERA, second in FIP (3.24 and 3.25, respectively), third in innings pitched, third in WAR (including two of the top 10 individual WAR-producing starters, Kyle Hendricks and Yu Darvish), and they’re keeping the ball in the park, allowing fewer homers than any other rotation in baseball except for the Reds and Cardinals, who haven’t played as many games due to clubhouse viral infections.

But of the 10 teams that currently have playoff odds above 80%, the Cubs bullpen is the worst. Cubs relievers have the eighth-worst ERA in baseball, the fifth-highest walks per nine, and they’ve given up more homers (13) than the starters (12) in 50 fewer innings of work. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a big week for the Seager family. For the first time in the careers of 26-year-old Corey Seager, who debuted in the majors with the Dodgers in 2015, and his 32-year-old brother Kyle, who debuted with the Mariners in 2011, the pair crossed paths in a regular season game. What’s more, they put themselves in the history books by becoming the first pair of brothers to homer in the same game for opposing teams since 2001, and just the ninth to do so in MLB history. Both brothers are off to strong starts this year after solid but unexceptional 2019 seasons.

Bad timing accounts for the fact that the brothers had never played a regular season game against each other until this week. Their respective teams played an interleague series in Los Angeles in April 2015, but Corey, the Dodgers’ first-round pick three years earlier, had just begun his second stint at Double-A Tulsa. When the Dodgers visited Safeco Field in August 2018, he was on the injured list, having not only undergone Tommy John surgery on May 4 of that year but also arthroscopic surgery on his left hip labrum on August 7.

MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick described the brothers’ first regular-season meeting as bittersweet, because the coronavirus pandemic prevented parents Jeff and Jody from making the trip from North Carolina to join them either at Dodger Stadium, where they played on Monday and Tuesday, or Safeco Field, where they played Wednesday and Thursday. The dueling homers occurred in the series opener on Monday, with Corey clubbing a towering 425-foot shot off Justin Dunn with two on in the third inning; dig the looks on the pair’s faces as little brother rounds the bases:

As you can see, an inning later, Kyle countered with a 405-foot solo homer off Ross Stripling, the second of three that the Dodgers righty would serve up in that frame as the Mariners overcome a 6-2 lead. Even so, the Dodgers came back to win the wild slugfest, 11-9. Read the rest of this entry »

It is uncommon for a player who has only pitched in relief to land within sniffing distance of a preseason top-100 prospect list. In his 2020 rankings, Eric Longenhagen identified a total of 43 pitchers, 42 of which have spent most if not all of their minor league careers as starters. Typically, just the threat that a pitcher could need to transition to the bullpen in the majors necessitates a substantial drop in his stock. Dodgers right-hander Brusdar Graterol, for example, dropped nearly 50 spots on Longenhagen’s list in the span of a year, partially due to the increased likelihood his big league career would be spent as a reliever.

All of which is to say that Cleveland’s James Karinchak is an anomaly. He was No. 115 on Longenhagen’s prospect list before the season started, two spots behind Graterol. Where he differs from Graterol — as well as others like Rays right-hander Shane Baz, who was ranked one spot behind Karinchak — is that there hasn’t been any real effort to have him start in some time. He appeared in 82 minor league games from 2017-19 and started just six, all of which came back in his first professional season. There is little precedent for someone inspiring such promise as a full-time reliever in the minors. Fittingly, there is also little precedent for the numbers Karinchak posted in his minor league career.

Karinchak made the Cleveland prospect list only in the “Other Prospects of Note” section before the 2019 season. At the time he was coming off a season in which he’d thrown 48.2 innings across three levels of the minors and allowed just nine runs while striking out 81 and walking 36. An injured hamstring delayed his first appearance last year, but when he finally got back on the mound, his numbers were something you couldn’t expect to replicate in a video game. Read the rest of this entry »