Edwin Encarnacion is 36 years old now, but age hasn’t stopped him from mashing baseballs. Among qualified American League hitters, he ranks 12th in wRC+ (139), leads the league in home runs (21), and is fourth in isolated power (.290). He’s accrued 1.7 WAR, which is pretty good at this point of the season, especially given his subpar defense. Of course, nobody is employing Encarnacion for his glove.

When Seattle acquired Encarnacion this past offseason, everybody knew he’d be traded sooner rather than later. The Mariners are in the midst of a rebuild and are reportedly “trying to trade everyone” before the July 31 deadline. Encarnacion, with his age and contract, was an obvious candidate to be moved.

It only took until the middle of June for the Mariners to find a suitor. The Yankees now employ Edwin Encarnacion.

Yankees Get:

• 1B/3B/DH Edwin Encarnacion (though it’s likely he’ll primarily be a DH)

Mariners Get:

• RHP Juan Then

Let’s touch on the Mariners’ return first before talking about the big parrot in the room. Juan Then was actually a Mariners farmhand two years ago. The Yankees acquired Then (and minor league hurler JP Sears) during the 2017-18 offseason in exchange for Nick Rumbelow.

Then is only 19 years old and he’s still in rookie ball. Prior to this season, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel ranked Then as the No. 31 prospect in New York’s system, noting that he is “advanced for his age” but has “middling stuff and physical projection.” It’s worth noting that Then seems to have developed a better fastball in the Yankees system. But again, it’s awfully hard to project a 19-year-old who hasn’t reached full-season ball. We know he’s a young arm of some promise, but the delta in his potential outcomes is very wide.

As an interesting side note, reports suggest that the Mariners chose to deal Encarnacion to the Yankees because New York was willing to absorb more money than other interested clubs. By prioritizing salary flexibility, Seattle’s move is somewhat reminiscent of how the Marlins handled the Giancarlo Stanton trade, in which the Yankees gave up significantly less player value to bring in another slugger because they were able to take on big money. It’s not ideal for rebuilding teams to prioritize monetary value over player return on transactions, but it is what it is. Money is a big part of how organizations operate, and sometimes you’re going to see deals like that. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Hicks has been Eric Nadel’s partner in the Texas Rangers radio booth since 2012. Prior to that, the Maryland native called games for the Frederick Keys (1989-1994), the El Paso Diablos (1995-2004), and the Corpus Christi Hooks (2005-2011). One month into his professional baseball broadcasting career, he learned an important lesson, courtesy of an incredulous Fat Jack.

“That first year in Frederick, we played in a Babe Ruth League park because the stadium was still being built,” Hicks told me recently. “Center field was 355 feet from home plate. As you can imagine, the stands were rudimentary; we had metal bleachers, we had a small roof. Anyway, it was April, freezing cold, and we were playing a doubleheader. There was hardly anybody there for the night portion — 100 people, if that.”

In the aftermath of a clumsy call of a boneheaded play, a voice punctured the chilly, nighttime air. Clear as a bell, it was directed at the rookie broadcaster.

“We had a runner on second base, and one of our guys laid down a bunt,” explained Hicks. “The play was made — the batter was thrown out — and when I looked up, I was expecting to see a runner at third base. He was still at second. I didn’t know what to say. When I got to that part of calling the play — the guy’s name was Scott Meadows — I said, ‘Meadows is still at second base; he didn’t go to third because…’ Then I paused and said something lame. I said, ’He didn’t have any choice.’

Cue up the choice words. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember when Chris Archer was really good at throwing baseballs? You should, because it was very recent! From 2014-17, only 12 pitchers across the majors accumulated more WAR than Archer. He was a strikeout maestro who kept his FIP consistently low with a knack for gobbling up innings and a sweet head of hair to boot, looking like an ace in pretty much every sense of the word.

Those days feel far away now, however, after a disastrous start on Tuesday brought his rough season with the Pittsburgh Pirates to a crescendo — he surrendered five home runs to Braves hitters in six innings, leading to an ugly seven-run outing. He has now allowed 16 homers in just 59.2 innings, giving him the fifth-highest HR/9 rate among all big leaguers with at least 50 innings pitched. His ERA of 5.79 is actually outperforming his 6.15 FIP. The old Archer seems long gone, but what caused him to vanish?

Typically, when a player regresses this swiftly and severely, there can be multiple issues to blame for their struggles. If you squint, you can see a few present with Archer. His four-seamer has lost two miles per hour in velocity over the past two seasons. He’s also throwing fewer strikes than he has in past years — something that is evident in his skyrocketing walk rate, up at 4.53/9 from a career average of 3.03/9 — but just 1.5% less than his career average. We can nitpick and analyze a million different data points to paint a picture of why Archer has lost his groove, but instead, let’s just talk about the issue right in front of us: His sinker has been absolutely dreadful.

I’ll admit his sinker has accounted for just 22% of his pitches this season, and that’s if you go by Baseball Savant’s pitch tracking. Our own Pitch Info data says he’s thrown it less than 15% of the time. How bad can a pitch be to be singled out as possibly the biggest cause of a player’s struggles if he throws it with less than one quarter of his pitches? In this case, extremely bad! In 2019, Archer’s sinker has resulted in a .370/.485/.815 slash line for opposing hitters. The Statcast data for the pitch is equally gruesome: .403 xBA, .761 xSLG, .522 xwOBA. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani is a fascinating player. He’s perhaps slightly less fascinating this season while he is only hitting and not pitching as well, as he did in his first campaign. Although the fact that pitching can be taken away from him for a season and he can still be a useful baseball player is still pretty incredible. On the season, Ohtani is hitting .281/.350/.512, good for a 131 wRC+ in 137 plate appearances. Last night, Ohtani added the latest interesting wrinkle to his career by hitting for the cycle.

Here’s the first plate appearance of the game, in which Ohtani hit a three-run homer.

While the triple is the most difficult part of the cycle, the home run is the most important in terms of its impact on the field. This was particularly true last night, as Ohtani’s homer put the Angels up 3-0, increasing the team’s win probability by 18% as the biggest play of the game. The next time Ohtani came up, he hit a double. Read the rest of this entry »

In August of last year, Ramón Laureano burst onto the scene with the Oakland Athletics. A mid-level prospect with the Astros, the strength of their big league outfield and the depth of their farm system pushed him out of the picture in Houston. He was traded to Oakland for a pittance in the fall of 2017 and made his major league debut on August 3. Just a week into his time in the majors, he made The Throw. You probably remember this one:

He hasn’t stopped throwing runners out with his rocket arm.

He’s made four more outfield assists since the above tweet was posted, giving him 15 across 115 career games in center field. Over the past two years, he’s second in the majors in outfield assists behind Teoscar Hernández, who has almost 400 more innings in the field than Laureano. The advanced defensive metrics back up what all those assists tell us. Since the beginning of 2018, he’s sixth in the majors in UZR’s ARM component and seventh in DRS’s rARM component. And remember, he didn’t make his major league debut until well into last season, so he’s had far fewer innings to accumulate positive marks for his throws. Read the rest of this entry »

In writing, the rule of three “suggests that a trio of events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers.” With this in mind, I present to you three interesting facts about Diamondbacks second baseman and center fielder Ketel Marte.

First, he’s married to the cousin of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and the two are so close that Marte thinks of himself as Guerrero’s older brother. Second, in 2017, he became just the eighth player in baseball history to hit two triples in a playoff game and was the first to do so from both sides of the plate. And third, he’s responsible for the second-longest home run this year, this 482-foot blast:

Hopefully you found those three facts an effective introduction to Ketel Marte. While the first two are certainly interesting tidbits, it is that third fact — the majestic home run — that is worth delving further into. Marte has hit 17 home runs in 302 plate appearances this season. Even in a homer-happy environment, that ranks tied for 15th in baseball. It also already represents a career-high, surpassing the 14-homer mark he set in 2018. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay Rays are having a tremendous year so far, better than anyone could have expected. They’re a half game out of first in the perennially difficult AL East, and that might be underselling how good they’ve been this year — their BaseRuns record is the best in baseball. How have they done it? Their pitching staff has been the best in baseball by a huge margin, posting a 3.02 ERA and a 3.34 FIP, both of which are miles better than second place. The hitting has been good, but pitching has the Rays playing like a championship contender.

That pitching staff has been a many-headed monster this year, and Yonny Chirinos has been a key part of it. He’s bounced back and forth between starting and following an opener (headlining?) over 75 innings of work, compiling a 2.88 ERA and 4.05 FIP in his second major league season. He was above average last year as well — a matching 3.51 ERA and FIP over nearly 90 innings. He sports a 21.5% strikeout rate and a sterling 4.9% walk rate. In short, Chirinos looks like a mid-rotation major league starter for the foreseeable future. What’s truly amazing about him, however, is that he’s doing that while being the most predictable pitcher in all of baseball.

If you’re behind in the count against Yonny Chirinos, it’s going to be a long day for you. His splitter, which he only learned in 2017, is lights-out. It’s been the third-most-valuable splitter in baseball this year, behind relievers Hector Neris and Kirby Yates. It generates truly video game numbers: a 45% whiff rate, 2.5 ground balls for every fly ball, and a .155 wOBA on plate appearances that end with a splitter. When Chirinos has the advantage, he’s not shy about going to the split: he throws it 43% of the time, more than twice as often as his overall rate of splitters.

No, if you want to beat Chirinos, you need to avoid the splitter. If you end up in a two-strike count, you’ll probably wave at air before heading back to the bench. Get ahead in the count, however, and things change. Chirinos has an effective fastball, a 94-mph sinker with huge horizontal break that runs in on the hands of righties. Still, it’s a fastball, not a world-destroying offspeed pitch. There’s no question which offering you’d rather face. Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, Aaron Nola was one of the best pitchers in baseball. His 3.01 FIP was very good, his 2.37 ERA was even better, and his 5.4 WAR was fourth in the National League and helped him to a third-place finish in the Cy Young voting. After four starts this season, Nola pitched like one of the worst pitchers in baseball with a 6.25 FIP, a 7.45 ERA, an ugly 13% walk rate, and a -0.2 WAR that ranked 74th out of 77 qualified pitchers. At that time, Dan Szymborksi diagnosed Nola’s issue with walks and homers and noted the following:

At least in the early going, batters seem to simply be taking a more passive approach to Nola after his breakout 2018 season, and he hasn’t adjusted. And he’s getting away from some of the things that he did successfully in 2018, such as daring to throw curves to lefties when behind in the count (he’s dropped from 39% to 20%). Batters are more patient and Nola’s been more predictable.

Since that time, Nola has essentially returned to form. He had one more bad start where he gave up two homers but encouragingly struck out nine batters against one walk. Since that start, Nola has taken the mound nine times and his FIP has been 3.30, a 76 FIP- in this run-scoring environment and very close to the 73 he’s put up over the last three years. His ERA is a very good 3.48, and though his walk rate is slightly elevated at 10%, his 26% strikeout rate is right in line with last season. In his piece, Szymborski produced a table showing the cause of Nola’s high walk rates. Batters weren’t chasing pitches they used to and they were making contact when they did. Here’s the bulk of that table, with Nola’s work through the time of Dan’s piece on April 18 and since then.

Nola isn’t quite repeating what he did a year ago, but he’s not too far off either. He’s throwing fewer pitches in the strike zone and he’s not getting as many swinging strikes, which is something of an issue, but when hitters swing at pitches outside the zone, they are whiffing like they used to. Getting a lot more first strikes is a good thing for Nola, but even better, he’s actually finishing off batters once he gets that first strike. Read the rest of this entry »

At the start of the 2019 season, the Padres went against conventional baseball wisdom. Chris Paddack, their highest-rated pitching prospect, and Fernando Tatis Jr., their best prospect, both looked ready for the big leagues. Most teams would have left them down in the minor leagues to start the year. They’d have thrown around “working on their defense” or “learning to be a pitcher, not a thrower,” but the reason would be economics. Leave a prospect down for a few weeks, and there’s an extra year of control in it for you on the other side.

The Padres, though, weren’t in the mood for games. Their two highest-paid players lobbied the owner to have Tatis on the opening day roster. Paddack didn’t need a promotional campaign: he struck out 24 batters in 15.1 innings of spring work. His changeup looked dominant. He was ready, and the Padres saw it: he started the fourth game of the season. Skipping service time games and letting your best players play was a revelation, if an obvious one. Paddack started the season with a 1.93 ERA over nine games, Tatis was the team’s best hitter, and “your best players should play” looked like a new and exciting counter to the service-time doldrums.

On Wednesday, the Padres demoted Chris Paddack to the minors. It almost doesn’t matter which level he’s headed to (High-A Lake Elsinore), because he’s unlikely to throw many innings on the farm. The Padres have been cautious with Paddack’s workload this year, only his second season back from Tommy John surgery, and there’s no reason to put stress on his arm against Cal League batters. Indeed, manager Andy Green was quick to mention workload management when describing why Paddack was being optioned:

“Rest is part of the equation. We’ve talked all year long about understanding that Chris had some limitations when it came from pitching from the first day of the season to the last day of the season. We’re cognizant of that. This is a good time to get some work done and get some rest at the same time.”

Sending Paddack to the minors looks odd at first glance. He has a 3.15 ERA and a 3.71 FIP, and he’s probably the best starter on the Padres. Why send him down? Let’s consider a few possible explanations before jumping to any conclusions.
Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Jake has previously written at Lookout Landing, and was a FanGraphs Resident in 2018. He’ll be contributing to FanGraphs a few times a week, and we’re excited to welcome him.

With “elevate and celebrate” now a totally normal part of the current baseball vernacular, it’s easy to assume that any given offensive breakout is being driven by an increase in launch angle and a corresponding surge in power. Carlos Santana isn’t exactly breaking out; he’s already a well-established and productive hitter. But after a down 2018 in Philadelphia, he’s rebounding in a big way back in Cleveland, and the most interesting thing about Santana’s resurgence is how his batted ball profile has changed.

From 2010 to 2017, Santana was a fixture in the middle of the Indians lineup, compiling a 123 wRC+ across more than 4,700 plate appearances. He’s made at least 600 plate appearances in each full season he’s played, showing a remarkable amount of consistency and durability. A strong approach at the plate has led to an excellent strikeout-to-walk ratio throughout his career, forming a solid foundation for his overall offensive contributions. But he’s always struggled with a low BABIP. He’s not the most fleet of foot and his 13.9% career pop-up rate is far too high. That has led to some streaky hitting based on the whims of the batted ball gods.

That flawed batted ball profile really betrayed him in his one year away from Cleveland. In Philadelphia, Santana posted his highest fly ball rate since his rookie year and the second-highest pop-up rate of his career. Opposing teams have often shifted against him, but that rate increased a significant amount last year. As a result, his BABIP floundered to a career-low .231, and he ended up posting the second-lowest wRC+ of his career — just 109.

Traded back to Cleveland this offseason by the Seattle Mariners, Santana has regained his hitting stroke. He’s posting career-highs across his slash line, leading to a 144 wRC+, the ninth-best mark in the American League. Just a glance at his batted ball profile reveals a completely different hitter: Read the rest of this entry »