Michael Pineda has always had a bit of a weak spot in his pitching profile. From his debut in 2011 until his 2017 ended with Tommy John surgery, he threw 680 innings while allowing 91 total home runs. That translated to a 1.20 HR/9, putting Pineda in the bottom 20th percentile in the league among pitchers with at least 650 innings pitched.

Despite the eye-catching rate, the home runs were a manageable issue; Pineda’s FIP in those years was a fine 3.60. More than avoiding home runs, Pineda needed the health he enjoyed between 2015-16 to be an average starter. Even setting aside the Tommy John, his time in the majors is riddled with stints on the disabled list for a variety of maladies. Now in 2019, with the health of his arm finally restored, the home run issues looms larger.

After his first nine starts of the year, Pineda is leading the majors in home run rate among qualified pitchers with a 2.49 HR/9. Following his last start, he became the first Minnesota Twins pitcher to allow at least three home runs in consecutive outings since Bartolo Colon in 2017.

This is still a small sample, and Pineda’s home run rate will probably go down as he keeps pitching. However, given his previous home run issues, the recent spike merits a closer look.

First, let’s examine his fastball. Of the 13 home runs he has allowed this year, six have been against fastballs in the middle or upper part of the zone. Pineda has always liked to throw his fastball in the zone, challenging hitters with good gas, and he has been doing exactly that this year. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox called up Michael Chavis on April 19, they were 6-13 and had no shortage of troubles. Every member of their rotation save for David Price was regularly being lit up like a pinball machine, and their no-name bullpen was shaky as well. Reigning AL MVP Mookie Betts was hardly himself offensively, and both Jackie Bradley Jr. and Steve Pearce were impossibly cold. Amidst all of that, the team’s hole at second base was just one more problem, albeit similar to last year, when even replacement-level play in the absence of the injured Dustin Pedroia did little to prevent them from winning a franchise-record 108 games as well as the World Series.

Just over one month since Chavis’ arrival, the Red Sox are now over .500 (25-22). Their pitching has come around, as has Betts, and their leading hitter in terms of both slugging percentage (.592) and wRC+ (156) is Chavis, a 23-year-old righty-swinging rookie with “a bit of a beer-keg physique” (h/t Baseball Prospectus), one who had never played second base before this season. His nine homers (in 113 PA) is tied with J.D. Martinez for second on the team behind Mitch Moreland’s 12. He homered in Boston’s wins both Sunday against the Astros and Monday against the Blue Jays. Here’s the former, in which he drove a Wade Miley cut fastball 420 feet, a towering shot over the Green Monster:

Long blasts are hardly a rarity for Chavis. Despite his late arrival, he’s tied for fourth in the majors with six homers of at least 420 feet, and he had another estimated at 419 feet. His average home run distance of 426 feet ranks seventh among players with at least 50 batted ball events (he has 68). Monday’s 389-footer off of the Blue Jays’ Edwin Jackson was just his second homer shorter than 400 feet.

Two months ago, Chavis barely registered as a player likely to make an impact on the 2019 Red Sox, in part because he had just eight games of Triple-A experience to that point along with 100 games at Double-A. Our preseason forecasts estimated he’d get just 14 big league plate appearances. Now he’s one of the players who has helped to salvage their season. So what gives? Read the rest of this entry »

It was rainy, it was short, and yet, it was the first time in 382 games that a Chicago White Sox pitcher had recorded a complete game.

On Saturday, in an effort that required just 78 pitches, Lucas Giolito became the first White Sox pitcher to throw a complete game since Chris Sale on September 16, 2016. He allowed just one run on three hits and struck out four.

The catch? Let Giolito explain it himself. As he told NBC Sports Chicago after the game, “I don’t consider it a complete game until I get nine.” Indeed, Giolito’s effort to snap a long stretch of bullpen usage was only five innings long. The game only lasted an hour and 31 minutes, if you choose to exclude the three-hour delay. A rain-soaked Chicago took care of the rest.

What’s lost in this whole story is that Giolito was solid on Saturday yet again. He’s had an up-and-down career so far, from being the Nationals’ prized pitching prospect to struggling in his first taste of the majors in 2016 to being the centerpiece in the Adam Eaton trade to posting the worst K-BB% among starters last year. But in Saturday’s start, never mind its length, Giolito lowered his ERA to 3.35. His 3.00 FIP is sterling. His 1.3 WAR in just 43 innings represents a 1.7-win improvement over his career total entering this season.

In sum, Giolito went from being league-worst to pretty, pretty good. The next step — the excellence — still comes in flashes, as it often has over his young career. Since the start of May, Giolito has posted a 1.85 ERA with 27 strikeouts to just eight walks over 24.1 innings. By WAR, he’s been the eighth-best starter this month. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets were one of the more active clubs this offseason, pulling off a big trade for Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz while signing Wilson Ramos, Jeurys Familia, and Jed Lowrie to free agent contracts. Through 46 games, the team is just 21-25, and multiple reports calling manager Mickey Callaway’s job “safe” have been issued, including a team meeting with GM Brodie Van Wagenen, which is never a good sign. The team had lost five straight games before their win last night, including a three-game sweep to the lowly Marlins despite both Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard pitching in the series. The final two games saw the team shut out offensively. There’s something wrong with the Mets, and a lot of people are at fault.

During the course of a 162-game season, there are going to be stretches where teams don’t play well. The Mets getting swept by the Marlins looks pretty bad because it just happened, but bad teams sweep good teams a fair amount during the season because three games represents less than two percent of the season. The Mets are at 21-25 — fewer wins than they would like — but keep in mind, what the Mets are doing now isn’t a massive departure from the team’s projections at the beginning of the season. This is what our playoff odds projections looked like before the season started.

Read the rest of this entry »

Things didn’t exactly go his way on Saturday, but Ryan Feierabend’s start for the Blue Jays against the White Sox — a four-inning stint that resulted in defeat — was noteworthy, not just the kind of thing you don’t see every day, but the kind of thing you don’t see every decade. Not only had Feierabend, who began throwing the knuckleball during a four-year stint in the Korea Baseball Organization, not started in the majors since September 23, 2008 (when he faced the Angels’ Vladimir Guerrero, ahem), or appeared in a major league game since July 27, 2014, but it had been nearly 19 years since a left-handed knuckleballer pitched in the majors, and more than 20 since the last one made a start.

As I noted in February, when the 33-year-old Feierabend, who found little success in parts of four major league seasons before going to Korea, signed with Toronto, the practice of throwing the knuckleball has fallen upon hard times during the pitch-tracking era:

Last year, Boston’s Steven Wright was the only pitcher (as opposed to the occasionally dabbling position player) to throw a knuckleball, but between complications stemming from left knee surgery and a 15-game suspension for violating the league’s domestic violence policy, he threw just 53.2 innings. As he’s currently serving an 80-game suspension for a PED violation — making him the first major leaguer to attain that dubious dual distinction — the pitch needs a new champion. Enter Feierabend, who by virtue of even one appearance resurrected a long-dormant line. Read the rest of this entry »

When we look back on this era of baseball in future times, exhorting children to get off our lawns, nobody shed tears of pity for the San Francisco Giants. After all, the Giants of this generation made the World Series four times and won three of them, a difficult, probability-crushing feat in a world where six division winners and four wild card teams make the playoffs. It was a team that featured most of the grandest years of one of the best players anyone will ever see — no, Dusty Baker, not Pedro Feliz — before that mantle was handed off.

After such a highlight-filled epic, the problem is what comes next? In literature, you have the ability to just end the story. King Arthur’s body sails to Avalon; Beowulf lives another 50 years; Frodo sails away. Or maybe the author doesn’t finish the books, and a TV adaptation shoves three years’ worth of material into 13 episodes. But baseball always has another sequel, another tale with new protagonists and antagonists and unfortunate Joe West cameos, and these San Francisco Giants have bungled the end of their current tale.

The Outfield Conundrum

We’ve talked a lot about Cleveland’s failures this offseason to address their outfield situation, but San Francisco’s problems are long-standing and arguably even less excusable. While one can rightly complain about the amount of chutzpah (and possibly arrogance) needed for a contending team to just let a major weakness slide going into the season because their competition is extremely weak, the Giants were under no such illusion. The NL West provided five playoff teams combined in 2017 and 2018 and the Dodgers were the NL champs in both seasons, so the “Hey, we play the Tigers and Royals a lot” excuse doesn’t hold. Not to mention that the Dodgers, while losing their partial season from Manny Machado, reasonably expected to get a full season from a returning Corey Seager, which is as good as a major free agent signing. 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 —Ryan Pressly, Trent Thornton, and Justin Verlander — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Ryan Pressly, Houston Astros

“I started throwing a curveball when I was around 14-15 years old. Steve Busby was my pitching coach growing up — the guy played in the big leagues for a long time and threw a couple of no-hitters — and he taught me his curveball. He told me I could only throw it with him during our pitching lessons. Once I got to eighth grade, or freshman year, is when I started throwing it in games.

“How my curveball works is kind of just a natural thing. My spin rate… I mean, I know why my spin rate increased. You hear all of this stuff about the Astros, but it’s not nearly the case. My spin rate increased because my velocity started increasing. I tore my lat in 2015, and when I came back my velocity kept going up. As the velocity goes up on your curveball, the spin rate is going to go up as well. I’ve also been throwing it more and more, and getting consistent with it. That’s a big reason it has gotten better. Read the rest of this entry »

Freeze baseball at the end of last year, and Josh Bell fit into an ignominious archetype. A former top prospect, he’d fallen into the power-light first base role previously occupied by the likes of James Loney and Sean Casey. The good power vibes from a homer-happy 2017 (26 dingers, .211 ISO) had faded after his slap-hitting 2018 (12 home runs and a .150 ISO). FanGraphs’ Depth Charts projections penciled him in for a .172 ISO and a wRC+ around 113 — roughly average offensive production for a first baseman.

If that projection was surprising, it was only because Bell looks the part of a slugger. At 6-foot-4 and 235 pounds, he’s an imposing presence at the plate. His minor league numbers had never showed great thump — his best showing was a credible .173 ISO with 14 homers in 2016. After that 2016 season, Eric Longenhagen graded him as having 50 game power — dead average, with the chance to improve to a 55 eventually. Bell’s frame always carried the promise of greater power numbers, but neither scouts nor projection systems thought it was a likely outcome.

That’s all well and good, but uh, have you seen Josh Bell’s 2019? He’s recorded a ludicrous .364 ISO, fifth-best in the majors. He already has 14 home runs and 14 doubles (and, perplexingly, two triples), besting last year’s home run output in only 188 plate appearances. This prodigious power, along with a .366 BABIP, has propelled him to a 185 wRC+, third-best in baseball. The power that was promised by Bell’s physical gifts has finally come in, and it’s come in all at once.

When someone puts up a line like Bell’s (an ISO that looks like a BABIP, a season-long wRC+ higher than any previous month of his career), my natural inclination as an analyst is to look for flukes. Maybe he’s hitting an unsustainable number of line drives, or 75% of his fly balls are turning into home runs. Perhaps he’s faced abysmal pitching in hitters’ parks. Surely any of those explanations is more likely than a sudden, real power spike that dwarfs his previous career. Read the rest of this entry »

It remains one of the game’s unsolved mysteries. A batter hits a pop-up near the mound and the person closest to it — a professional athlete wearing a glove — isn’t expected to catch the ball. Moreover, he’s not supposed to catch the ball. That job belongs to any one of several teammates, all of whom has traversed a greater distance. As often as not they’re climbing a slope to get under the descending baseball.

Chaos can ensue as the infielders and the catcher converge. The multiple “I’ve got its,” are drowned out by crowd noise and suddenly what should be a routine out becomes an adventure. We’ve all seen it. A bumper-car-like collision occurs and the catch is made clumsily… or not at all.

Just last week, Red Sox right-hander Rick Porcello was charged with an error when he failed to catch a pop up in front of the mound. Not because of ineptitude, but rather because he was veritably mugged by his catcher as the ball was about to arrive comfortably in his glove.

Why aren’t pitchers expected to handle simple pop-ups? They’re perfectly capable, so it makes sense that they should be catching them. Right?

“I don’t know why, and yes, they should be,’ said Seattle’s Perry Hill, whom many consider the game’s best infield instructor. “They’re on on the field of play when the ball is in play, so they should be able to make a play. It’s practiced in spring training. That little short pop-up that nobody can get to. The third baseman is playing way back. The first baseman is way back. The pitcher is the closest guy to the ball. He’ll catch that ball.”

Scott Servais sees it somewhat differently than his first base coach. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rockies’ addition of top prospect Brendan Rodgers — No. 1 in Colorado’s system, No. 28 overall — to their big-league roster completes part of a journey that seemed preordained when Rodgers was still just a high school underclassman. As is the case with lots of prominent Floridian high schoolers, Rodgers was evaluated early thanks to the endless parade of both varsity and travel baseball in Florida. Scouts were interested in Rodgers very early, as Kiley noted in his initial 2015 draft rankings.

Rodgers was a standout last summer with scouts saying he’d go in the top 50 picks as a high school junior, then he took a huge step forward this summer when his bat speed and raw power jumped at least a notch, if not two.

Those rankings, which Rodgers topped at the time, were produced after the high school summer showcase season, during which Rodgers looked fine at shortstop and continued to perform against the best pitching in the country. There were tepid evaluations of his defense and some concerns, from model-driven clubs, regarding his advanced age. But Rodgers’ offensive consistency and mix of physical talents (he had among the best raw power in the class at the time) overrode those notions.

When draft day arrived, Rodgers ranked No. 2 on the FanGraphs draft board. The Rockies drafted him No. 3 overall. Read the rest of this entry »