The New York Yankees are incredible. They control first place in a strong American League East division by seven games; our playoff odds project them as having an 88.3% chance of winning the division, with 16.2% odds to win the World Series. This, despite an astonishing volume of injuries suffered by key players over the first half of the season, a series of events that thrust bench bats and backups who once seemed somewhat redundant into the spotlight. DJ LeMahieu, for example, didn’t have a clear starting spot when the team signed him to a 2-year, $24 million contract over the offseason. But a week away from the All-Star break, he’s been the Yankees’ best player, and it isn’t particularly close.

At 3.6 WAR, LeMahieu is a full win better than the next-most valuable player on the roster. He leads his team in batting runs above average (20.8) and defensive runs above average (3.5). He is second in wRC+ (145) and wOBA (.389). He’s the AL’s leader in batting average (.345). The Yankees are an outstanding offensive team, ranking fourth in team wRC+ and hitting the fifth-most homers in baseball, despite the long absences of sluggers like Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Miguel Andujar, Aaron Hicks, and Didi Gregorius. Yet, it is LeMahieu — he of the 94 career wRC+ and 61 total homers over nine seasons — who has served as the linchpin of the New York lineup.

LeMahieu has been popular around these parts for a while now. In early 2018, Travis Sawchik caught up with him to discuss his shift away from being an extreme opposite field hitter, and over this past offseason, Jeff Sullivan discussed his potential were he ever to unlock more power. This seems like a good time to check back in with LeMahieu, though, because he has spent the past few weeks setting the baseball world ablaze. Since going 3-for-5 against the Blue Jays on June 5, LeMahieu has hit .424/.467/.717, with six homers, eight walks, and 27 RBIs in 22 games. His production in that span gives him an absurd 213 wRC+ and 2.0 WAR, both of which lead the majors.

It’s been a long time since LeMahieu was this hot:

That previous spike came in August 2016, when LeMahieu rattled off a similarly torrid stretch. In 22 games from August 2-28, he hit .447/.544/.647 with four homers, 17 walks and just seven strikeouts. That happened to be his best year in the majors, as he finished with a .391 wOBA and 4.4 WAR as a member of the Colorado Rockies and won the NL batting title. Before that season, LeMahieu had always been a below average hitter; in the two seasons that followed, he was one again. Now, he’s back to being a revelation, and continues to show an ability to adapt.

One of the knocks against LeMahieu during his free agency was his predictably uncomfortable home/road splits. During his tenure with the Rockies, he recorded an OPS of .834 and a wRC+ of 96 at Coors Field, but had his OPS fall to .681 when he played on the road, with his wRC+ taking a corresponding dip to 84. That makes a good bit of sense. Because his low number of fly balls limits his power potential, LeMahieu’s offensive production relies upon him having a high BABIP, the way he did in 2016 when he hit .388 on balls in play. Coors’ spacious outfield will serve players like that well — between 2012 and 2018, three of the top four home BABIPs in baseball belonged to Rockies hitters, with LeMahieu ranking at the top of that list at .374. Away from Coors Field, his BABIP was .310. Skepticism over how valuable he could be when calling a different ballpark home was reasonable. This year, however, LeMahieu has done all he can to put that criticism to rest. At Yankee Stadium, he’s hitting a robust .335/.402/.555 with a BABIP of .357 and a wRC+ of 152 a tOPS+ of 108. His road numbers look pretty good too: .350/.375/.497, with a .385 BABIP and a 136 wRC+.

The matter of LeMahieu’s home/road splits wasn’t the only one he needed to address as a Yankee. He also needed to prove he could hit something other than a fastball. In 2018, LeMahieu was a solid fastball hitter, posting a wOBA of .356. That came honestly enough — from 2015 to 2018, only one hitter in baseball, Ben Revere, saw a higher percentage of fastballs than LeMahieu (65.8%). He struggled, however, against breaking and offspeed pitches, with wOBAs of .254 and .275 against them, respectively.

This year, opposing pitchers have begun to change the way they approach LeMahieu. Just 56% of the pitches he’s seen in 2019 have been fastballs, down 11% from a peak rate of 67% in 2017. Slider and cutter usage against him has gone up a combined 6.5% from just one year ago, and he’s seen about 2% more changeups and splitters. Added together, that’s a notable change, and in response to seeing a more balanced repertoire, LeMahieu has made himself into a more balanced hitter:

One of the keys to LeMahieu’s great 2016 season was his ability to get positive results out of just about any pitch thrown his way. With his resurgence in 2019, it’s no surprise he’s seeing similar results. LeMahieu has been one of the 10 best hitters in baseball against both the slider and the curve this year, after struggling with each of those pitches in the past. At the same time, he continues to hit fastballs well. In 2016, LeMahieu recorded a .412 wOBA against the fastball. In 2019, that number is .394. As you might imagine, striking this kind of balance isn’t easy. Across all of baseball, just two hitters have posted at least a wFB of 4.0, a wSL a 4.0, a wCB of 4.0, and a wCH of 3.0: LeMahieu, and former Rockies teammate Charlie Blackmon.

It’s easy to evaluate a recent free agent signee in the midst of an unsustainable hot streak and say a bunch of teams missed out on him. But LeMahieu makes the impulse difficult to resist. Just two teams have gotten at least LeMahieu’s 3.4 WAR out of their second basemen, and no team has gotten more value out of a position player free agent who signed this offseason:

With the return of Hicks and Judge, as well as their trade for Edwin Encarnacion, the Yankees are closer to full strength than they’ve been in a long time. But they still have a long way to go. Stanton and Cameron Maybin are likely out until at least August, while Andujar won’t return until 2020. Injuries persist on the pitching side. A deep postseason run remains very likely, but it will continue to require constant adjusting and refining for the team to reach its potential. Perhaps that makes LeMahieu the perfect player for the Yankees.

Luke Jackson has blown six saves this season, tied for the major league lead. His struggles as the Braves closer have given rise to a play on the chorus from OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson”: Back in mid-May, after blowing two save opportunities in a row, fans on the Atlanta airwaves and Twitter started singing “I’m sorry Luke Jackson (oooh).” His problems — and the singing — only got worse in early June after he allowed runs in five of his first seven appearances in the month. But if you look at Jackson’s peripherals outside of their game context, the next line in OutKast’s song becomes a lot more appropriate: “I am for real.”

A first-round draft pick by the Texas Rangers in 2010, Jackson never really lived up to his pedigree with his original organization. By 2015, he had transitioned to the bullpen full-time, though he did make his major league debut that year. He was traded to the Braves in an unheralded, change-of-scenery move in December 2016 for Brady Feigl (no, the other one) and Tyrell Jenkins. He was just as unremarkable in Atlanta, getting designated for assignment three separate times, each time going unclaimed on waivers. He made the Opening Day roster this year as a fall back option after injuries decimated the team’s bullpen during spring training.

In his first appearance of the season, he gave up a grand slam to Rhys Hoskins. Luckily it was a low-leverage situation since the Braves were already three runs behind. With Arodys Vizcaino injured and A.J. Minter and Dan Winkler ineffective, Jackson found himself thrust into high-leverage situations by mid-April. But despite the aforementioned struggles, he’s been the best reliever in the Braves bullpen this year. If you compare what he’s doing this year to what he was doing before, he looks like a completely different pitcher:

Read the rest of this entry »

On November 14, 2018, Blake Snell won the AL Cy Young award. It was a close vote, but no one could say Snell didn’t deserve at least to be in the discussion. He compiled a 1.89 ERA, best in the AL, and his peripherals (2.95 FIP, an outrageous 31.6% strikeout rate) weren’t far behind. He was, simply put, one of the best starters in baseball — unfair, as future Rays employee Jeff Sullivan put it. Just more than seven months later, on June 29, 2019, Blake Snell’s ERA was on the wrong side of 5. By RA9-based WAR, he was barely above replacement level in 2019. A strong start yesterday moved his ERA down to a still-inflated 4.87, but it’s worth asking: is something wrong with Blake Snell?

Now, as my RotoGraphs colleague Al Melchior recently put it: nothing is wrong with Blake Snell. Still, it seems like it might merit investigating. Guys with stuff like Snell’s aren’t supposed to even be capable of putting up near-5 ERA’s this far into the season. Al focused on Snell’s strike-throwing, and that’s always a make-or-break issue for a guy with such dynamite stuff, but Snell’s walk numbers, while high, aren’t crippling. He’s actually walking fewer batters than last year, and his K-BB% is a career high. No, Snell’s 2019 has been alarming because of his inconsistency, and that’s worth looking into.

In 2018, Snell made only four starts in which he didn’t last at least five innings. One was his first start back from injury, which hardly counts. This year has been an entirely different story. Snell’s start on June 25, when he survived only 3.1 innings against the Twins, was his sixth outing of 2019 to see him not finish the fifth inning. There’s always batted-ball luck involved in short outings, but still, Snell’s 2019 feels extreme. Did he change something in 2019 that’s leading to more abbreviated outings?

It’s worth saying again that Blake Snell is incredible. All four of his pitches are weapons. His four-seam fastball is the fastest thrown by any left-handed starter, and it generates whiffs on more than a quarter of batters’ swings against it. Its rise and fade are near-unmatched; only Justin Verlander gets more total movement on his four-seam. Snell’s curveball, which he’s throwing 27% of the time this year, is awe-inspiring. Batters whiff on 55% of their swings against it, the second-best mark for any starter who has thrown 100 curveballs this year. His changeup? It generates the fourth-most whiffs per swing, 44%. He rarely throws his slider (7.6% of the time so far this year), but you guessed it: no starter’s slider gets more whiffs per swing than Snell’s. Read the rest of this entry »

Our Playoff Odds page has a nice little feature that lets you display, for any two dates, the difference between a team’s playoff odds on Date A and its odds on Date B. Around the end of each calendar month, I like to use that feature to check in on which teams most improved their odds over the month that was and which lost ground. It’s a long season, and it’s easy to miss things. Here are the largest changes in playoff odds from June 1 to June 30:

There’s a story there. Let me start it by saying that 17 of 30 big-league teams saw no change at all to their playoff odds in June, or saw a change of less than 2%. Another five saw a change greater than 2%, but less than 10%. Of the eight teams whose playoff odds swung by more than 10% in June, fully half — the four teams at the top of the table — came from the same division: the National League East. To some extent, that kind of clustering is to be expected — when one team rises, another in its division must fall — but the relative quiet of every other division gives us an opportunity to reflect for a moment on what happened in the NL East in June, and what lies ahead in July. Read the rest of this entry »

Brendan McKay continued his fantastic season this past Saturday. Making his big-league debut with the Tampa Bay Rays, the 23-year-old left-hander retired 18 of the 20 Texas Rangers batters he faced. And his work on the farm had been every bit as dominating. In 66.2 innings between Double-A Montgomery and Triple-A Durham, McKay compiled a 1.22 ERA and allowed just 38 hits.

And then there’s the offensive side of the equation. As you know, McKay can swing the bat. Aspiring to be the major’s next Shohei Ohtani — sans the Tommy John surgery — the former Golden Spikes winner as a two-way player at the University of Louisville was 11 for his last 33, with three home runs, at the time of his call-up.

What is his approach on each side of the ball, and does he truly expect to be able to play both ways at baseball’s highest level? I addressed those questions with the 2017 first-round pick a few days before he arrived in The Show.

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Laurila: Nuts and bolts first question: What is your approach on the mound?

McKay: “I’m a pitcher who likes to get ahead — just like every other pitcher — and force the action, rather than letting the hitter have any control over the at-bat. That’s basically it.”

Laurila: Are you looking to induce contact, or are you out there trying to miss bats? Read the rest of this entry »

A number of years ago, Boston sports-TV anchor Bob Lobel used to say of former Red Sox players excelling for other teams, “Why can’t we get players like that?” Similar words are currently being uttered in Detroit, in regard to James McCann. In his first season with the Chicago White Sox, the 29-year-old catcher is slashing a robust .320/.378/.519, and he’s already gone deep nine times.

McCann wasn’t nearly that good with the stick in his four-plus years with the Tigers. When he signed with the ChiSox in December — a bargain-basement one-year deal for $2.5M, no less — he was a .240/.288/.366 career hitter. How did he suddenly morph into an offensive force?

“Honestly, the biggest thing for me this year is that I’m trying to be the best James McCann,” is how the Tigers castoff explained it prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “I’m staying within myself and not trying to do too much. I’m taking my base hits the other way — I’m taking my singles — and not trying to hit the impossible six-run homer.”

The breaking-out backstop trained with Rangers infielder Logan Forsythe over the offseason — both live just south of Nashville — and as McCann pointed out, each has played with some great hitters over the course of their careers. Not that attempting to emulate one’s more-talented peers is always the best idea. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, the Cubs ended months of waiting by signing Craig Kimbrel to be their closer. Due to the lack of a spring training, Kimbrel was sent down to the minors for a bit to make sure he could still pitch. In Triple-A Iowa, Kimbrel made four appearances and pitched 3.2 innings. He struck out four of the 14 batters he faced, walked just one and gave up a lone run on a solo homer. The Cubs, satisfied that he was well enough to face major league hitting, called Kimbrel up yesterday.

After the Braves jumped out to a 6-1 lead, it didn’t look like Kimbrel’s services would be needed. But the Cubs stormed back with eight runs across innings four through six and the new Cubs’ closer was asked to come on for the save in the ninth inning, protecting a 9-7 lead. The first batter to the plate was catcher Brian McCann. After taking a 98 mph fastball at the bottom of the zone for strike one, McCann fouled off three more fastballs. Then Kimbrel tried to drop in his curve:

McCann was obviously displeased, but the pitch might have been even closer to the strike zone than the box on the television suggested, as it did look to catch the corner. Kimbrel threw seven curves among his 20 pitches. As for the movement on the pitch, it was in line his numbers from last season, though its drop yesterday and last season wasn’t quite as big as it had been in the years prior. Read the rest of this entry »

News broke last night that Rays’ prospect Brendan McKay will make his debut on Saturday; Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times had the initial report. The reasons for Tampa calling up McKay, who was ranked 14th overall this spring by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel before moving up to 11th on THE BOARD in the post-draft update this month, are threefold. First, the Rays need a pitcher Saturday. As Topkin noted in his piece, Ryan Yarbrough pitched three innings in last night’s 18-inning win over the Twins, and he won’t be able to take the bulk of the innings tomorrow as originally planned. Second, the Rays are in what should be an incredibly close race for the playoffs and need every competitive advantage they can get. And third, tying into the second, McKay is a very talented pitcher who gives the Rays the best shot at winning.

Before getting to McKay’s talents, let’s first examine the competitive landscape in the American League. Much has been made of the parity in the National League, with nearly every teams having some shot at the playoffs halfway through the season. The top-heavy nature of the American League has made for a bunch of haves and have-nots, with only a handful of teams having a realistic shot at the playoffs. Looking at the playoff odds, the Rays are one of those teams:

Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Belt isn’t having a particularly good year. For once, I don’t just mean that his counting numbers are unimpressive; he’s long been a player whose production has outstripped his reputation, as light-slugging first basemen tend to be, and playing in San Francisco’s extreme scoring environment hasn’t helped. From 2012 to 2018, he produced 3.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances, All-Star-level production, despite never really hitting for power or average.

This year, his defense has dragged him down near replacement level (note to the Giants: Belt really shouldn’t play the outfield), but his hitting isn’t up to his usual standards either (a 107 wRC+ that equals last year for his worst full-season rate). Even as Belt’s production wanes, though, he’s actually getting more fun to watch. Why? Well, you never know when he’s going to drop down a bunt, regardless of situation, and bunting for a hit is among the most fun plays in baseball.

When you picture the ideal player to shift against, Brandon Belt is almost a perfect match. He’s left-handed, pulls a ton of his groundballs, and isn’t fast enough that a second baseman in shallow right field might not have time to throw him out on a grounder. When shifting exploded in frequency from 2014 to 2016, Belt was the kind of player who gave teams a reason to do it. In 2015, 54% of the balls he put in play were against a shift, up from 14% in 2013. By 2016, that number climbed to 78%, and it’s bounced around 80% ever since.

At first, Belt had no clear counter. By the end of 2016, he’d bunted only five times in his major league career, going 2-4 with a sacrifice. Teams shifted on him with impunity, and Belt lashed grounders into the shift. His groundball rate decreased, but that’s not a way to punish shifting; it’s merely a way to ignore it. He tried bunting more in 2017, but it was only middlingly effective — he finished 3-6 on the year, and two of those singles were bang-bang plays; he easily could have been 1-6. “Bunt against the shift” is a great idea in theory, but Brandon Belt wasn’t doing it well enough in practice.

Bunting skill isn’t fixed, though, and Belt proved it. His bunts in 2018 were crisper, better-executed, and better-aimed. Take a look at this surgical strike against the Padres:

Freddy Galvis’s kick-stop drives the point home: there’s no reason to bother fielding that ball. For the season, Belt went 4-6 on bunts, and none of the singles even drew a throw. That .667 on-base percentage will do, even if he did embarrass himself in a Bay Area tilt:

Hey, they can’t all be perfect. That’s no different than a grounder into the shift, even if it probably feels worse.

Remember all the way back in the previous paragraph where I said they can’t all be perfect? Well, I lied. Brandon Belt is perfect on bunts this year, and he’s getting increasingly audacious. He’ll bunt in situations where a runner is valuable, sure. Leading off an inning against a decent reliever in a close game? That’s a great time to get a runner on first, and the shift is just asking for it. He doesn’t even hesitate:

That’s too obvious, though. Brandon Belt isn’t about bunting only in situations where a runner on first is most important. He’s in it for the love of the bunt. 1-1 count with two outs and a one-run lead? Sure, Belt will bunt on you:

Are runners on first valuable with two outs? Not at all! Still, Belt’s feeling it. Put away your run expectancy tables and feel the magic. Sometimes you just have to bunt.

How about against an Orioles righty in Camden Yards, a situation where Belt is probably as likely to hit a home run in a single plate appearance as he’ll ever be? Oh yeah, absolutely:

Keep your home runs; Belt will take his not-even-guaranteed base and be happy with it. The Giants hit three long balls in this game. Brandon Crawford, he of the .141 career ISO and 8.7% home run per fly ball rate, hit two home runs. Lefties batting against Oriole righties are in the best possible situation to succeed. Gabriel Ynoa has a 6.45 FIP and 6.75 ERA this year, for crying out loud! Belt doesn’t care, though. He’s bunting.

If you think those last two bunts are questionable, his latest one takes the cake. With the bases empty, a bunt single and a walk are exactly the same. Honestly, a bunt single and a walk are the same almost all the time, but especially with the bases empty. 3-0 count, pitch that might well be called a ball? Bunts away!

Bunts on 3-0 are rare, because they’re ridiculous. 3-0 counts often end in walks, without the hassle of having to connect on a bunt and reach base safely. When Matt Carpenter did it last year, I looked into it and found that he was only the third player to get a fair bunt down with a 3-0 count and the bases empty in the last 10 years. Well, that statistic is now outdated, because Brandon Belt is the fourth.

Think about what bunting on 3-0 entails. A 3-0 count is the best place a hitter could ever find himself. After 3-0 counts this year, major league hitters as a whole walk 60.6% of the time. They get on base 72.8% of the time. On the rare occasion where they don’t walk, they often hit home runs — 5% of non-walk at-bats that hit 3-0 end in a dinger. Literally every offensive stat is improved; batters have posted a .233 ISO (against .180 ISO overall), a .322 BABIP (.296 overall), and a .309 batting average. Brandon Belt doesn’t care. He just wants to bunt.

At this point, I think we can say that Brandon Belt is drunk with bunt power. In a twist, though, that isn’t really new. When Cody Bellinger bunted on 3-0 in 2017, Jeff Sullivan investigated and found a 3-0 bunt attempt from Belt that went foul in May 2017. Brandon Belt wasn’t even a good bunter in 2017! That bunt rolled foul, and it might be good that it did; the Dodgers weren’t particularly over-shifted. He just felt like bunting.

Hittable righties, favorable counts, spots where a runner on first isn’t all that valuable? That’s all irrelevant. Brandon Belt sees an opening, and he attacks. It’s not going to stop teams from shifting against him — he’s grounded into a shift 41 times this year, which means the shift is saving more in grounders than it gives back in bunt singles. Still, if you’re playing against Belt, maybe keep your third baseman close to home until the count gets to two strikes. Honestly, maybe leave him there with two strikes, too. Belt hasn’t attempted a bunt with two strikes yet in his career, but at the rate he’s turning bizarre situations into bunt singles, it’s only a matter of time.

The MLB All-Star Game is just two weeks away, and the Baltimore Orioles have been campaigning hard for Trey Mancini to appear on the American League roster. This is understandable — at 22-58, the Orioles have given fans little to cheer for this year, and Mancini is rather unambiguously the best player on the club. Teammate Chris Davis has been vocal in his support for Mancini, and the organization went so far as to put together a full-fledged (if tongue-in-cheek) campaign video for him.

Baltimore’s enthusiasm surrounding Mancini’s All-Star candidacy helps draw attention to what has been a fantastic bounce-back season for the 27-year-old. He owns a .303/.362/.557 line and a 139 wRC+, good for 24th-best in the majors. His 7.9% walk rate and 19.5% strikeout rate are both career bests, and his xSLG, xBA, and xwOBA figures each put him in the 87th percentile of all major leaguers or better.

That set of numbers contrasts sharply with where we found Mancini in 2018. He smacked 24 homers for a second year in a row, but that was the lone bright spot in an otherwise underwhelming offensive season. He hit just .242/.299/.416, posting a 93 wRC+ and 0.29 BB/K figure. Because Mancini was a nightmare in the field — his -17.2 defensive runs above average were the fifth-worst in baseball — he finished the season as a sub-replacement level player. In most other organizations, he likely would have lost his starting job, but on the talent-bereft Orioles, he’s gotten a second chance. How has he made the most of it? Read the rest of this entry »