The Texas Rangers selected Texas Tech infielder Josh Jung eighth overall in last month’s amateur draft. They followed that up by taking Baylor infielder Davis Wendzel with the 41st overall pick. The Big 12 Conference co-players of the year both signed on the dotted line last week, Jung for a reported $4.4 million, Wendzel for a reported $1.6 million. Following get-ready stints at the team’s facility in Surprise, Arizona, each is expected to join short-season Spokane for the duration of the summer.

According to Rangers GM Jon Daniels, it wasn’t purely by chance that accomplished collegiate bats were his club’s top two selections.

“We didn’t make an about-face in our philosophy, but we did probably make a little more of a conscious effort to manage risk up top,” Daniels told me in mid-June. “That kind of dovetailed into where the strengths of the draft were, which in our opinion was more college than high school, and a little heavier on the position player side.”

The industry agreed with that assessment — only one prep pitcher went in the first 25 picks — but whether this was an outlier draft or not, pitchers are widely seen as riskier propositions. When I asked if that was a primary factor, Daniels delivered his answer with a wry smile. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Ottavino has had a strange 2019. Last year, he reinvented his game in a single offseason. This year, he’s mostly sticking with what worked in 2018, and the results have been pretty good. Despite pitching in homer-happy Yankee Stadium, he’s posted a 1.80 ERA (39 ERA-), and his strikeout rate is a gaudy 32.2%. He easily could have been an All-Star, even if his FIP is a less-inspiring, if still good, 3.85. His walk rate, too, has spiked — to 15.8%, near a career high. It’s too early to say whether Ottavino will back up his breakout 2018 or regress closer to his FIP by season’s end.

What it’s not too early to say, however, is that watching Ottavino pitch this year is an absolute joy. His slider, which he throws more than 40% of the time, has always been his calling card, and it’s as fun as ever, taking a great liquid arc across the plate that can make you question physics. His fastball, a hard two-seamer that he uses more like a four-seam fastball, locating it high in the zone, is a delightful offset to the slider. His cutter — well, his cutter isn’t as fun to watch as the other two pitches, but it sits in between them in velocity and movement and helps disguise everything else. What’s so great about Ottavino, though, isn’t just his raw stuff. It’s the way he uses those pitches that is so fun, and this year, he’s using them to get called strikes by the bucketload.

When you picture a 2019 slider in your mind’s eye, you might picture Ottavino’s, or maybe Patrick Corbin’s. Big break, the batter desperately trying to adjust his swing to hit something that’s falling down and away from him, and the catcher blocking a bouncing ball to record a strikeout. Ottavino still has that pitch in his arsenal, of course. Take a look at him going right after noted slider-masher Lourdes Gurriel and coming out on top:

Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatís Jr is arguably the most-exciting young player in the game. He’s certainly gotten off to a rousing start. Through his first 55 games with the San Diego Padres, the 20-year-old shortstop is slashing .327/.393/.620, with 14 home runs, a 162 wRC+, and 13 stolen bases. Twice he’s scored on a sacrifice fly that was caught by the second baseman. Defensively, his range and his arm have both elicited oohs and aahs from what is becoming an increasingly-invigorated Padres fanbase.

The conversation that follows is focused entirely on the young man’s approach to hitting. He’s learned his lessons well — primarily from his father, former big-league infielder Fernando Tatis — but at the same time, his M.O. at the plate is straightforward. Tatis likes to keep things simple, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Given the numbers he’s been putting up, why should it?

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David Laurila: Is hitting simple, or is it complicated?

Fernando Tatis: “It’s complicated if you want it to be. I think if you take it as simple as possible, you can be more consistent every day. People make it complicated when they start doing a lot of stuff — when you start doing a lot of stuff to your mind; when you think you’re doing this, you’re doing that. For me, a big thing is to remember that I’m playing baseball. I’m just a kid playing in a park. Yes, I have to make adjustments sometimes, but as simple as I can be at the plate is way better.”

Laurila: Are you basically hunting fastballs?

Tatis: “I’m always looking fastballs. I don’t want it to sound like hitting is that easy. Don’t get me wrong. Hitting is not easy. But again, as simple as I can make it is way better.”

Laurila: How do you go about recognizing breaking pitches? Is it mostly a matter of reps?

Tatis: “More reps will be better for you, but for me, recognizing breaking balls is … a big part is when you’re looking for his fastball, you forget about everything down. If you see spin up, those are the good ones to hit. The ones down are going to be hard.” Read the rest of this entry »

The past year has been a whirlwind for Liam Hendriks. A little over a year ago, he was designated for assignment by the Oakland Athletics. At that point in the 2018 season, he was sporting a 7.36 ERA with an ugly 6.43 FIP while also missing more than a month with a groin strain. No one claimed him on waivers and he was sent outright to Triple-A. He worked hard to regain his confidence while also honing his repertoire. He was recalled in September and pitched well enough as an opener to get the start in the Wild Card game against the Yankees. However, that game didn’t go to plan after an Aaron Judge two-run homer got the home team on the board early.

Even after all those setbacks, Hendriks has flourished as a critical piece in the A’s bullpen this year. He started the year in a familiar role, making a couple of opener starts and coming out of the pen as a middle reliever. But as the back-end of the Oakland bullpen began to struggle, Hendriks found his way into higher leverage situations. The climax of his year-long turnaround came when he was named to the American League All-Star team as a replacement for Charlie Morton.

Here’s how Hendriks stacks up against his fellow All-Star relievers and a few other top candidates.

Any of the other candidates listed above could have been chosen and no one would have batted an eye (ok, maybe not Ian Kennedy). But Hendriks leads the AL in WAR as well as park- and league-adjusted ERA. He’s been terrific, and the adjustments he’s made since last September are driving his newfound success. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Pete Fairbanks, Jack Flaherty, and Will Smith — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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Pete Fairbanks, Texas Rangers

“My coach — this was in summer ball when I was 14 or 15 years old — was Matt Whiteside, who I believe pitched for the Rangers back in the day. He showed me a grip and said, ‘Hey, kind of just turn your wrist; turn it on the side when you throw it.’ It’s possible that it was originally taught to me as more of a curveball, but looking back it’s always had slider characteristics to it. Regardless, that was my introduction to a breaking ball.

Pete Fairbanks’ original slider grip.

“The grip was similar to the one I have now, although it has varied over time. My slider has been good and bad. For instance, it was really cutter-y in 2017; it was very flat. It had six-to-eight inches of lift to it, which obviously isn’t what you’re looking for from a slider. You’re trying to get closer to zero. But with the tweaks I’ve made to it this year, it’s really taken off.

“I worked with one of our systems guys, Sam Niedrorf, when I was down in High-A. He was the guy who was feeding me all of my numbers on it, so I could fiddle with it to get it where it needed to be this year. We had a portable TrackMan, and I threw a couple of bullpens in front of that. Read the rest of this entry »

Dakota Hudson is somewhat of a square peg in a round hole. At a time where four-seamers at the belt are de rigueur, the 24-year-old St. Louis Cardinals right-hander likes to live near the knees. Since debuting last season, Hudson has thrown his signature sinker a full 50% of the time. And he’s done so successfully. Hudson has a 3.31 ERA over 119-and-two-thirds career innings.

He hasn’t always relied on the worm-killer responsible for his MLB-best (among qualified pitchers) 60.3% ground-ball rate. As a young pitcher at Mississippi State University, Hudson was primarily four-seamers from straight over the top, and a breaking ball he couldn’t consistently command. Then came his metamorphosis.

“Butch Thompson was my pitching coach at the time,” explained Hudson. “I was 10 or 11 appearances into my sophomore year, and had just gotten through maybe two innings. He came up to me and said, ‘Hey, are you willing to make a change?’Of course I was. So I dropped down.”

The original plan was to drop all the way down to sidearm, but Hudson couldn’t comfortably get that low. He ultimately ended up closer to three-quarters, with a sinker and a cutter/slider becoming his weapons of choice.

The process of finding the most-optimal arm slot was achieved sans a catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Lourdes Gurriel Jr. needed a reset. It was April 14, and he was hitting .175/.250/.275 over 44 plate appearances. After starting the season 2-for-27, he’d recorded hits in four straight starts, but the Toronto Blue Jays still saw enough significant problems to warrant time in the minor leagues. They sent him down to Buffalo, where he hit .276/.308/.480 with a 94 wRC+ in 31 games. It was a perfectly cromulent performance, but nothing that suggested he was a brand new man capable of wreaking havoc on big league pitching.

Then in his first game back in the majors on May 24, Gurriel hit his first homer of the season. The next day, he homered again, and the day after that, he homered again. He hit another three games later, was quiet for a week after, and then rattled off 10 homers in his next 18 games. That included back-to-back two-dinger performances last Wednesday and Friday. Since his return from the minors, no one in baseball has better numbers than Gurriel in homers (14), slugging percentage (.750), wOBA (.466), or wRC+ (199). Just three hitters have produced more WAR.

Gurriel’s hot streak is a surprise, though not because his talent has ever been in doubt. A native of Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, he was known in his young Havana Industriales career for being an athletic player with a nice glove, but he began to break out with the bat by hitting .344/.407/.560 in the 2015-16 season. That’s the kind of performance that will help put a player’s name on the map, but in Gurriel’s case, plenty of people already knew his name. His father, Lourdes Gourriel, is a former Cuban National Series MVP winner and won a gold medal with Team Cuba in the 1992 Olympics. Meanwhile, his older brother Yuli had already been a star in Cuba for the better part of a decade. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. definitely had strong baseball genes, and in November 2016, he signed a seven-year, $22-million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays, a team that has shown quite an affinity for signing players who come from prominent baseball families. Read the rest of this entry »

How would you adjust your pre-draft evaluation of a high school pitcher if you knew he couldn’t pass a physical? That is what teams needed to decide about White Sox righty Dylan Cease, who after a surgery, a year of rehab, and four years of development, will make his first big league start today.

Some version of this scenario occurs almost annually: High school pitcher throws hard during his showcase summer, becomes very famous, comes out the following spring throwing even harder, then breaks. In Cease’s case, he was 93-96 and touching 98 during showcases, then touching 100 early the following spring before he was shut down with an elbow injury that would, as teams knew ahead of the draft, eventually require surgery.

For some teams, the injury shut the door on Cease as an option entirely. He was a Vanderbilt commit whose long arm action some teams had already feared increased his risk of injury, or at least might impede his ability to develop command and a changeup, and funnel him toward a bullpen role.

But Cease also had among the 2014 draft’s best velocity and breaking ball combination. The Cubs properly assessed his signability, and after cutting an underslot deal with Kyle Schwarber for $1.5 million at pick No. 4, they suddenly had a bunch of extra bonus pool money to play with. They ended up signing three high school pitchers to overslot bonuses — Cease, Justin Steele and Carson Sands — and cutting underslot deals of varying amounts at every other pick in the first 10 rounds.

Cease signed for $1.5 million, which was the slot value of that draft’s 38th pick and is around where high school pitchers with this kind of stuff, albeit healthy ones, typically come off the board these days. It took a fortuitous intersection of several variables: Cease’s talent, the Cubs optimistic evaluation of it and his signability, the opportunity created by the underslot deal with Schwarber, and a level of comfort in taking an injured player aided by risk diversification in the other overslot high schoolers. The high school pitching crop in 2014 was wild, and a few of those players probably contributed to the current reticence to pick a similar guy very early. Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Eovaldi hasn’t pitched in a major league game since April 17, and he won’t until sometime after the All-Star break, but this week, before even beginning a rehab assignment, he’s been cast as a potential solution for one of the Red Sox’s biggest weaknesses: their bullpen. On Tuesday, in the aftermath of the team’s drubbing by the Yankees in the two-game London Series — during which that bullpen was torched for 21 runs and 23 hits in 12.1 innings — manager Alex Cora and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski announced plans to use Eovaldi as their closer, a job the 29-year-old righty has never held before.

Eovaldi, who is recovering from arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies in his right elbow, struggled with his command and control while making just four starts in April, getting hit to the tune of a 6.00 ERA and 7.12 FIP. That comes after last year’s strong rebound from his second Tommy John surgery, during which he threw 111 innings with a 3.81 ERA, 3.60 FIP, and 2.2 WAR. Integrating a relatively new cut fastball into his arsenal, he set career bests with a 22.2% strikeout rate and 4.4% walk rate. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out last November, his penchant for pounding the strike zone with such precision is rare among pitchers with such high velocity — and oh, can he bring it. According to Pitch Info, his average fastball velo of 97.4 was tied for third among all starters with at least 50 innings.

Eovaldi has rarely pitched out of the bullpen during his eight-year major league career, not only never notching a save in eight regular season relief appearances — four with the Dodgers as a rookie in 2011, three with the Yankees in an exile from the rotation in 2016, and one last year — but never even pitching in a save situation.

That said, he shined amid his crash course in high-leverage relief work last October, making four appearances during Boston’s championship run, two of them in save situations and one in extra innings. He threw 1.1 scoreless innings in front of Craig Kimbrel in the ALCS Game 5 clincher against the Astros, two days after making a strong six-inning start, then added scoreless innings in Games 1 and 2 of the World Series against the Dodgers, and pitched the final six innings of the 18-inning epic Game 3, taking the loss when he served up a solo homer to Max Muncy but winning the hearts of New England for his gutsy, 97-pitch effort. That was the only earned run he allowed in 9.1 relief innings; he yielded four hits and walked one while striking out seven.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul DeJong will represent the St. Louis Cardinals in next week’s All-Star Game. He’ll do so with solid, albeit unspectacular, offensive numbers. The 25-year-old shortstop is slashing .260/.344/.455, with 13 home runs and a 110 wRC+. Thanks in part to plus defense, he leads the Redbirds with 2.9 WAR.

Two years ago, in an interview that ran here at FanGraphs, DeJong discussed the mental side of hitting. This past weekend, the Illinois State University graduate — his degree is in biology — sat down for a far-wider-ranging conversation about his craft.

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David Laurila: How would you describe your hitting approach?

Paul DeJong: “My general approach is to hit something hard through the middle. I’m usually looking for a fastball that I can hit gap-to-gap; not pull, not oppo, but kind of through the middle. That gives me the best chance of adjusting to different speeds and different locations. I’m able to open up, or if I’m late, I still have time to keep it fair.”

Laurila: Something I’ve been asking players about is the idea of an A-swing, and whether hitters have multiple swings.

DeJong: “Hitters absolutely have multiple swings. For instance, if you get fooled on a breaking ball, you’re kind of adjusting your body. But for me, it’s more about keeping my hands back. If you do that, you can drift forward with your body — you’ll be off balance out front — but if your hands are still back, you’re able to deliver the barrel, still put the ball in play hard.”

Laurila: What about on fastballs riding high in the zone? Read the rest of this entry »