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 —Jace Fry, Mitch Keller, and Josh Taylor — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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Jace Fry, Chicago White Sox

“I started throwing a slider when I was about 14, but it was a different grip, and a different kind of pitch. It was more of a big, sweeping slider. After my second Tommy John surgery, I stopped throwing that one and started throwing the slider I have now. J.R. Perdew taught it to me. This would have been in 2016. I gained a little more velocity, and get sharper action.

“Going back to the beginning, I started throwing a curveball when I was 10, and that one I’ve been throwing my whole career. The slider was added once I got into high school. Growing up, there were a lot of good coaches in my area [Beaverton, Oregon]. My pitching coach was Jim Coffman, who is an area scout for Oakland. I went to him for four or five years, and he’s the one who taught me how to spin the ball correctly, and how to be on time. Read the rest of this entry »

Some change is coming to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Over the last month, the team has fired long-time manager Clint Hurdle and President Frank Coonelly, and today the news came out that GM Neal Huntington is out of a job as well. Owner Bob Nutting is still the one making the calls in Pittsburgh, but the team has hired a new President, with former Pittsburgh Penguins hockey executive Travis Williams taking over the business side of the operation in hopes of duplicating his success with the city’s hockey team. As for Huntington, his departure signals a major change in operations for the Pirates. But a change in operations doesn’t necessarily mean a change in direction, and some skepticism regarding the latter is warranted given the last few decades of Pirates baseball.

Every franchise experiences inflection points, where the team charts a new course in an attempt to move forward. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2018; a year later, they fired Dave Dombrowski and brought in Chaim Bloom to help sustain his predecessor’s success while avoiding the failings that precipitated Dombrowski’s departure from Detroit. After sustained failure, the Cubs hired Theo Epstein and the Astros brought in Jeff Luhnow. Both were enlisted to tear down and then rebuild their respective franchises in the hopes of striking out on a new path and contending for the playoffs and championships. It’s not entirely clear that this is what’s happening in Pittsburgh. The club missed its opportunity to capitalize on its three-year playoff run from 2013 to ’15, and faces a future that doesn’t look too different from most of its past. Read the rest of this entry »

“Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.” – Tom Lehrer

Coming off of three consecutive NL East titles from 1990 to ’92, the Pirates lost Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds in back-to-back offseasons and quickly descended into the divisional basement. Unlike Chuck Cunningham in Happy Days, the Pirates didn’t just take the stairs and disappear forever. Vanishing from history would probably have been more merciful than what actually happened; the Pirates became the justified butt of baseball jokes. Run by Cam Bonifay and Dave Littlefield for the 15 years that followed, Pittsburgh filled out the entire Bingo Card of Incompetence. They drafted poorly, and gave bizarre contracts to players like Pat Meares and Kevin Young, who couldn’t even be called tertiary talent, and appeared to be on a mad quest to trade any developed star for as little as possible.

Unlike many organizations, which have one single, horrific move worth mocking, it’s difficult to decide which situation was the most embarrassing for the Pirates. Was it the time they signed Meares to a one-year contract after he was non-tendered, then gave him a four-year deal after a week of a .508 OPS? Was it trading Aramis Ramirez and not getting a single real prospect in return? Was it picking up Matt Morris and his contract for no particular reason? Or was it paying Derek Bell $4.5 million to live on his boat? I’d be hard-pressed to choose when the Pirates were the most de-pantsed.

Overcoming 15 years of haplessness was the challenge set to Frank Coonelly and Neal Huntington when they took over the Pirates’ day-to-day operations in September 2007. They cleaned the Augean stables, remaking the organization from top-to-bottom and turning it into one that looked like its more modern contemporaries. They brought in analysts, integrated contemporary sabermetric approaches, and found a pitching coach in Ray Searage who could help them turn straw into gold. And for a while, it worked. Blowing through the .500 threshold, the Pirates won 94, 88, and 98 games, making three consecutive postseasons for only the second team in the team’s history. Read the rest of this entry »

Two spring trainings ago I was at the Padres complex in Peoria, Arizona, chatting with Dave Cameron. The longtime FanGraphs frontman had recently joined the NL West club as an analyst, and he had a suggestion. “You should talk to Rowan Wick,” Cameron said of the non-roster invitee whom San Diego had claimed off waivers the previous month. “He’s a good story.”

Indeed he was. Wick entered pro ball as a catcher in 2012, converted to the mound in 2015, and possessed what was later described to me as “one of the shortest, quickest arms I’ve ever seen.” He’d had yet to throw a pitch in the big leagues.

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Wick before departing Arizona, but I remembered Cameron’s suggestion when I returned to the Cactus League this past spring. The right-hander — now with eight-and-a-third MLB innings on his resume — was in camp with the Cubs, a long shot to make the team. A full year after having the bug put in my ear, I wrote about the 26-year-old hurler from North Vancouver, British Columbia.

He proceeded to outperform all expectations. The bulk of his big-league action coming since mid-June, Wick logged a 2.43 ERA and a 2.82 FIP in 31 games out of the Chicago bullpen. Those weren’t even his most-impressive numbers. Opposing hitters slashed a paltry .183/.295/.233 against his overpowering arsenal — one which included a retooled secondary offering.

Wick pointed to just that when asked to explain his breakout campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

While eight teams remain in the postseason, seven who missed out are busy searching for their next skipper. On Thursday, the Mets’ Mickey Callaway joined the ranks of the unemployed, getting the axe after just two seasons at the helm. He’s the fourth manager fired since late September with at least a year remaining on his contract, after the Padres’ Andy Green, the Pirates’ Clint Hurdle, and the Angels’ Brad Ausmus. Meanwhile, two former World Series winners, the Giants’ Bruce Bochy and the Royals’ Ned Yost, have retired, and a third ex-champion, Joe Maddon, parted ways with the Cubs after his contract expired. At this writing, the fate of the Phillies’ Gabe Kapler still hangs in the balance.

What follows here is a roundup of each vacancy, including a list of reported candidates that may not be comprehensive, since all of this is attempting to hit several moving targets. I’ve attempted to distinguish them from those whose candidacies are merely speculative. The teams are listed in order of 2019 records.

Mets (86-76)

What happened: Callaway was hired by general manager Sandy Alderson, who took a leave of absence in mid-2018 due to a recurrence of cancer and decided not to return to the job. Former agent Brodie Van Wagenen was hired last November, and he made a series of splashy moves, many of which ultimately set the Mets back (particularly the trade of two former first-round picks for Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz). The holdover manager did not mesh with an increasingly analytically inclined front office — at one point, Callaway boasted, “I bet 85% of our decisions go against the analytics,” a statement that stood out given his often glaring in-game mistakes, many centered around a bullpen that ranked among the league’s worst. Read the rest of this entry »

If the batting title race is the one you’re paying attention to in the National League over the next couple of weeks, you’re probably cheating yourself. The NL Central division race and wild card races are both still compelling, and Anthony Rendon has turned the MVP conversation into a legitimate three-man competition, emerging as a worthy challenger to Cody Bellinger while Christian Yelich’s season has prematurely ended. Additionally, the idea of crowning someone “batting champion” for finishing first in just one offensive category is a little bit silly. But if you are zeroing in on this sort of thing in September, chances are you’ve gotten a glimpse of something the average baseball fan very likely hasn’t: that Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Kevin Newman has absolutely caught fire over this final stretch.

Newman, a 25-year-old rookie, has spent the last three weeks doing nothing but terrorize opponents. In his last 90 plate appearances, he’s hitting .420/.478/.654 with six doubles, two triples, and three homers. His 196 wRC+ in that time trails only Eugenio Suarez, Rendon, and Ketel Marte in the National League, and it’s brought his season batting line up to .317/.363/.451 and his season WAR to 2.4. He’s now sixth in the NL in batting average, 15 points behind league-leader Rendon. Is that gap surmountable with just 11 games left to play in the Pirates’ season? Almost certainly not. But it’s still gives us a good excuse to talk about Newman’s quietly productive year.

Newman made his MLB debut in 2018 but did not produce encouraging results. He hit .209/.247/.231 over 97 plate appearances, good (?) for a wRC+ of just 28. Over the last offseason, Eric and Kiley ranked him just the 13th-best prospect in the Pirates system — partially because of his age (he ranked as highly as fifth just two years before), partially because of his lackluster debut, and partially because he just wasn’t seen as having that high of a ceiling. He had good contact rates and was serviceable in the field, but he had no power to speak of and didn’t have any other outstanding tools to make up for that. Read the rest of this entry »

Hitting a baseball comes naturally to Riley Greene. That’s not to say the fifth-overall pick in this year’s draft doesn’t work on his craft — he does— but at the same time he likes to keep any tinkering to a minimum. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Prior to the Detroit Tigers’ calling his name on June 3, Greene had been labeled “the best pure hitter in the prep class” by Baseball America.

He hit the road running in pro ball. Greene scorched the Gulf Coast League to the tune of a 1.039 OPS in nine games, quickly earning a promotion to short-season Connecticut. While not nearly as prolific against New York-Penn League pitching — a .766 OPS in 24 games — he did show enough to get moved up to low-A West Michigan in early August. Playing against much-older competition in the Midwest League, Greene slashed .219/.278/.344 in 118 plate appearances.

When I talked to the 18-year-old Oviedo, Florida native in mid-August, he made it clear that his swing is already well-established.

“My dad has been doing baseball and softball lessons for 24 or 25 years, and he taught me to hit,” said Greene. “Growing up, most of my coaches never touched my swing. It was just my dad. He’s a simple A-to-B guy, not much movement, and that’s how I try to be.”

Greene told me his front foot is his timing mechanism, and that his setup at the plate has remained essentially the same. He “might be an inch taller with his body,” but that’s a matter of feel and comfort, not because of a calculated adjustment. He’ll maybe spread out at times, but “only by a centimeter or two.” Read the rest of this entry »

September call-ups, both high-profile and totally innocuous, have been trickling in over the transaction wire for the last several days. As always, there are some that will have real impact on the playoff race, some that are interesting for the purposes of player evaluation, such your usual spare lefty reliever and catcher (by far the most common types of September additions), and some teams with no new names at all. Below I’ve compiled notes on every player brought up by National League teams since the start of the month, no matter how inconsequential, and I slip some rehabbers and August 31st acquisitions in here, too. It’s a primer for you to get (re)acquainted with players who might impact the playoff race or seasons to come.

Contenders’ Reinforcements

Atlanta Braves — INF Johan Camargo, RHP Chad Sobotka, RHP Jeremy Walker, LHP A.J. Minter, RHP Bryse Wilson

Camargo didn’t hit with the big club at all this year, not even in late July or all of August when he was handed pretty regular at-bats filling in for an injured Dansby Swanson. But he hit .483 over the few weeks he was down in Gwinnett after Swanson returned and Camargo was optioned. He’ll be a versatile, switch-hitting bench piece for the stretch run, and he projects as that sort of premium bench player long-term.

Sobotka and Walker were optioned to make room for the multiple relievers Atlanta acquired at the deadline. Sobotka, who sits 94-98 with life and has a plus, 2900-rpm slider, posted a 16-to-2 strikeout to walk ratio at Triple-A since being sent down. You may see him pitching big innings this month. Walker has been throwing 25-pitch, 2-inning outings with three days of rest in between. He may be on mop-up or long relief duty. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Arizona Fall League rosters were (mostly) announced today, and we’ve created a tab on THE BOARD where you can see all the prospects headed for extra reps in the desert. These are not comprehensive Fall League rosters — you can find those on the AFL team pages — but a compilation of names of players who are already on team pages on THE BOARD. The default view of the page has players hard-ranked through the 40+ FV tier. The 40s and below are then ordered by position, with pitchers in each tier listed from most likely to least likely to start. In the 40 FV tier, everyone south of Alex Lange is already a reliever.

Many participating players, especially pitchers, have yet to be announced. As applicable prospects are added to rosters in the coming weeks, I’ll add them to the Fall League tab and tweet an update from the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account. Additionally, this tab will be live throughout the Fall League and subject to changes (new tool grades, updated scouting reports, new video, etc.) that will be relevant for this offseason’s team prospect lists. We plan on shutting down player/list updates around the time minor league playoffs are complete (which is very soon) until we begin to publish 2020 team-by-team prospect lists, but the Fall League tab will be an exception. If a player currently on the list looks appreciably different to me in the AFL, I’ll update their scouting record on that tab, and I may add players I think we’re light on as I see them. Again, updates will be posted on the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account, and I’ll also compile those changes in a weekly rundown similar to those we ran on Fridays during the summer.

Anything you’d want to know about individual players in this year’s crop of Fall Leaguers can probably be found over on THE BOARD right now. Below are some roster highlights as well as my thoughts on who might fill out the roster ranks.

Glendale Desert Dogs
The White Sox have an unannounced outfield spot on the roster that I think may eventually be used on OF Micker Adolfo, who played rehab games in Arizona late in the summer. He’s on his way back from multiple elbow surgeries. Rehabbing double Achilles rupturee Jake Burger is age-appropriate for the Fall League, but GM Rick Hahn mentioned in July that Burger might go to instructs instead. Sox instructs runs from September 21 to October 5, so perhaps he’ll be a mid-AFL add if that goes well and they want to get him more at-bats, even just as a DH. Non-BOARD prospects to watch on this roster include Reds righties Diomar Lopez (potential reliever, up to 95) and Jordan Johnson, who briefly looked like a No. 4 or 5 starter type during his tenure with San Francisco, but has been hurt a lot since, as have Brewers lefties Nathan Kirby (Thoracic Outlet Syndrome) and Quintin Torres-Costa (Tommy John). Dodgers righty Marshall Kasowski has long posted strong strikeout rates, but the eyeball scouts think he’s on the 40-man fringe. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
Read the rest of this entry »