From the time he signed a one-year deal with the Royals in late January, it appeared highly likely that Aroldis Chapman’s stay in Kansas City wouldn’t be long. Either he would continue last season’s slide into irrelevance and get his walking papers once the team decided he was more trouble than he was worth, or he would pitch well enough to make himself a viable midseason trade candidate. He ended up pitching his way into the latter route; on Friday, he was dealt to the Rangers in exchange for two young players, 25-year-old lefty Cole Ragans and 17-year-old outfielder Roni Cabrera.

The 35-year-old Chapman was an All-Star as recently as 2021 with the Yankees, but his career, which had survived a 2016 suspension for violating the league’s domestic violence policy, began accelerating downhill with increasing speed in June of that season. In a nine-game span, from June 10 through July 4, he allowed 15 runs and walked nine in 5.2 innings, blowing three saves. He struggled with his release point and missed time due to elbow inflammation but more or less maintained his hold on the closer spot for the rest of the season, though he finished with a 3.99 FIP (then a career worst) and a 3.36 ERA (his worst mark since 2011). He lost the closer job for good in mid-May of last season, when he went on the injured list for Achilles tendinitis, incurred the team’s wrath by missing three weeks due to a tattoo-induced infection in his leg (one that introduced the phrase “veritable moat of pus” into the lexicon), finished with ugly career-worst numbers (4.46 ERA, 4.57 FIP, -0.2 WAR), and burned his final bridge in the Bronx by skipping a mandatory workout before the Division Series.

Particularly when coupled with his 2021 troubles and past history, that drama no doubt cooled the market for Chapman. During the winter, seven relievers netted deals with average annual values of at least $9 million, including non-closers such as Rafael Montero and Robert Suarez and post-prime closers such as David Robertson and Craig Kimbrel; more than a dozen received multiyear deals. Chapman, though, could only secure a guarantee of $3.75 million over a single season. He did get some incentives in the deal: $312,500 for reaching thresholds of 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 55 games, and another $312,500 for reaching thresholds of 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, and 40 games finished. The Rangers will be responsible for those bonuses, as well as about $1.875 million in remaining salary. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers haven’t played in the postseason since 2016 (and haven’t even finished above .500 since then), but they’ve been atop the AL West for almost the entire season and are now 49–31, with a six-game lead over both the Angels and Astros. They own the majors’ largest run differential (+160) as well as its most potent offense (5.98 runs per game), and thanks to a revamped pitching staff, they’re third in run prevention as well (3.98 per game).

An underrated part of that run prevention is the team’s defense. By my evaluation of a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages), and Statcast’s Runs Prevented (which I’ll call Runs Above Average because their site and ours use the abbreviation RAA) and catching metrics for framing, blocking, and throwing (which I’ll combine into the abbreviation CRAA) — the Rangers rate as the majors’ second-best defensive team thus far this season. The Brewers, who are in the midst of a dogfight for first place in the NL Central, are the only team ahead of them.

I’ll explain the methodology behind this conclusion below, but first a bit more about the Rangers. With Jacob deGrom sidelined after just six starts due to a UCL tear that resulted in Tommy John surgery, the team’s pitching staff has the 13th-lowest strikeout rate in the majors (22.2%), but it also has the third-lowest BABIP (.274), in large part thanks to the team’s fielders (the pitchers haven’t been especially good at preventing hard contact). Second baseman Marcus Semien is the only past Gold Glove winner of the bunch, but he’s one of five Rangers defenders with at least 5 DRS thus far, along with first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, outfielder Travis Jankowski, right fielder Adolis García, and catcher Jonah Heim. Lowe, Semien, and center fielder Leody Taveras all have at least 4 RAA, and Heim is 3.7 runs above average in FRAM and +6 in CRAA.

Not all of the metrics are as favorable for the aforementioned players, but it’s worth noting that of the 10 Rangers with the most defensive innings played at a single position, the only negative run ratings are those of shortstop Corey Seager and left fielder Robbie Grossman (both -2 RAA) and Lowe (-2.6 UZR); every other Ranger with at least 161.1 innings at a position rates as average or better. To be fair, 161.1 innings is still a small sample, and for that matter, even the 697.1 innings of Semien at second is less than ideal for a full evaluation, though we can feel better that his DRS, UZR and RAA don’t wildly contradict each other. Particularly at this stage of the season, with teams having played 78–83 games, it’s better to bear in mind the range of values reflected in an individual’s fielding metrics rather than focusing on a single one. To return to Semien: his 6 DRS and 5 RAA are contrasted by his 0.8 UZR; it’s not a matter of which one is “right” so much as it is understanding that he shows up somewhere along the spectrum from slightly above average to solidly above average.

Given all of this alphabet soup dished out in small servings, I set out to look at team defense by aggregating the aforementioned metrics, which reflect differing methodologies and produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom that owe something to what they don’t measure as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or RAAs, for example, and the catching numbers are set off in their own categories rather than included in UZR and RAA. I’ve accounted for the varying spreads, which range from 86 runs in DRS (from 42 to -44) to 25.6 runs in FRM (from 13.8 to -11.8), by using standard deviation scores (z-scores), which measure how many standard deviations each team is from the league average in each category. I don’t proclaim this to be a bulletproof methodology so much as a good point of entry into a broad topic. The Rangers, who entered Wednesday (the cutoff for all of the data below) tied with the Blue Jays for the major league lead with 42 DRS, score 1.86 in that category but “only” 1.37 in UZR and 1.13 in RAA (13.4 runs in the former, 10 in the latter, both fourth in the majors), and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien is up to his usual tricks. He’s eighth among all position players in WAR, comfortably the best on a first-place Rangers squad. For the third straight year and the fourth out of five, he’s on track to rack up four-plus WAR as one of the two best players on his team. For someone who didn’t post an above-average batting line until his seventh major league season, it’s an impressive accomplishment.

Perhaps more impressive to me: he’s doing it right under our noses, and no one seems to notice. Semien is good at everything but not in a way that adds up to a tremendous offensive line. His best skill might be durability. He’s clearly a very good player, but his particular set of skills are highlighted by the framework we grade him under. I’m interested in Semien as a player, and I’m also interested in why he’s the poster boy for both what WAR gets right and where it has limits.

Let’s start with how Semien does it. It’s fairly straightforward: he’s above average at every phase of the game. It begins with his plate discipline. To put it simply, he doesn’t make bad decisions about when to swing. In each of the past five years, he’s accomplished an impressive double: chasing fewer pitches than league average and simultaneously swinging at more in-zone pitches than league average. To state the obvious, that’s a great way to both rack up a pile of walks and avoid strikeouts. Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers, as you might have heard, are in first place. And that doesn’t even tell the whole story; the Rangers are currently on a 106-win pace, and believe it or not, they’re underperforming their Pythagorean record by four games. And they’ve done a lot of it without the best pitcher in the world.

Jacob deGrom, foremost among the numerous high-profile free agent arms Texas has invested in over recent years, has spent the past month on the IL with elbow inflammation. A slow recovery led the Rangers to move the two-time Cy Young winner to the 60-day IL on Monday. That precludes deGrom from returning to action before the end of June — which may or may not have been in the cards anyway.

But the Rangers have coped just fine without deGrom throughout May thanks in no small part to Dane Dunning, who started the year as a reliever but has matched deGrom’s results. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s officially hot start season. Now is the time when we write about players who have rocketed out of the blocks, then hope beyond hope that they don’t tumble to the track immediately after our articles get published. Today I’m looking at Jonah Heim, the Rangers’ switch-hitting catcher.

Heim has started off the 2023 season in a big way. Then again, maybe that’s not news, as Jonah Heim just has a tendency toward bigness. He’s 6-foot-4, which really should be too tall to be a catcher. Seriously, here he is (crouched!) next to Nick Madrigal just over a month ago:

I would pay good money to watch Heim pat Madrigal on the head and address him as “Scout.” Last year, the Rangers backstop accrued 2.8 WAR, which made him a top-10 catcher in baseball. It’s now May 17, and he’s already put up 1.9 WAR, ninth among all position players and second only to fellow-former-Athletic Sean Murphy among catchers. He’s slashing .313/.368/.519, up from .227/.298/.399 in 2022.

Last week, Esteban Rivera included Heim in an article about hitters who had improved after adding some movement to their swings this season. At that point, I was also interested in Heim’s breakout, but while I was watching him I got distracted by one of his very twitchy teammates. Heim’s production at the plate has improved in every single season of his career, and that trend will almost certainly continue this year. Even if his production were to fall off a cliff starting today, he’s already banked 144 plate appearances with a 144 wRC+.

When we talk about player breakouts, we look for reasons to believe that whatever changes they’ve made will stick around. We look for skills and tendencies that they haven’t demonstrated before, specifically the underlying metrics that tend to stabilize more quickly. Toward that end, I’m going to show you an extremely busy graph. Feel free to give it a quick glance and move on. Its purpose is to show you that almost nothing Heim is doing right now is completely without precedent:

Heim is at a career high or low in these metrics, but it’s worth keeping in mind that over the course of his young career, he’s already logged stretches at or near his current rate in all of them. If you’re looking for something in the numbers that says Heim is a completely new hitter, you’re likely to come up empty.

As a note, in this article I won’t spend much time separating out Heim’s approach or results from the left and right sides, because he’s only had 36 plate appearances as a righty. Almost all of the trends I’ll mention are true on both sides of the plate, but there’s just not enough going on from the right side to draw separate conclusions.

Let’s start with Heim’s approach. He’s been more aggressive at the plate, but he’s also been taking the first pitch more than ever:

If you ignore 0-0 counts, his swing rate on the pitches over the heart of the zone is four points higher than it was last year. Overall, his swing rate on pitches that Baseball Savant classifies as meatballs is up more than 10 points.

This increased aggression has lowered Heim’s contact rate just a tiny bit, so his walk rate has dropped by a tick while his strikeout rate has held steady. However, it’s worth noting that Heim’s contact rate has dropped significantly on pitches outside the zone and risen on pitches inside the zone. A couple weeks ago, I noted that Randy Arozarena was doing the exact same thing: “He’s making more contact in the zone and whiffing more when he chases. I don’t know how repeatable that is, but it’s a neat trick if you can pull it off.” The trick was not, in fact, repeatable for Arozarena. Since then his zone contact rate has crashed, and it’s now to five points beneath its 2022 level. That’s definitely something to keep an eye on for Heim, but I’ll also note that he’s seeing an elevated number of pitches on the edge of the strike zone, and that’s likely the kind of statistical noise that could be affecting these numbers.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised, if Heim’s walk and strikeout rates haven’t changed much, then his newfound success must be driven by what happens when he puts the ball in play:

Well that definitely looks much better. Although Heim has not yet touched his max exit velocity from either 2022 or 2021, he’s hitting the ball harder, and he’s also barreling it up more often. Both his wOBA and his expected wOBA are more than 100 points better than they were last year. From both sides of the plate, Heim is hitting the ball in the air more, which is good, but we’re not just talking about average launch angle. We’re also talking about launch angle tightness. Take a look at his launch angle charts:

Heim has dropped the standard deviation of his launch angle by nearly six degrees, which is a huge amount. His popup rate is down 3.6 percentage points and his groundball rate is down 7.5. See the red area on the left, where all of Heim’s hits came in 2022? In 2023, that’s pretty much the only place he’s hitting the ball. In 2022, 55% of Heim’s batted balls came off the bat between 0-45 degrees. In 2023, it’s 73%. Jonah Heim is actually building the whole plane out of the black box.

It’s not just that Heim is hitting the ball in the air. Heim was already a pull hitter, but he’s increased his pull rate to 53.3%, eighth highest in the league. If you refer back to the busy graph at the beginning, you’ll note that his pull rate really took off early last summer. However, when it came to fly balls and line drives, he pulled the ball just 20% of the time last year. This year he’s at 52%. When he does pull the ball in the air, Heim’s performance is roughly the same as it was last year (although his expected stats are improved). It’s just that he’s doing that a lot more often.

As Esteban noted in his article, Heim’s swing adjustments have helped him reach pitches lower in the zone, which would help explain why he is missing less often against breaking stuff and hitting those breaking pitches 6 mph harder than he did last year. Here’s what that looks like in a heat map. Lots more contact at the bottom of the zone, even though his swing rate down there hasn’t changed nearly as dramatically:

Here’s one thing I find really interesting. So far I’ve been grouping Heim’s air balls together, but here’s what happens when you separate out his fly balls and his line drives:

Last year, Heim’s line drives were scorched at 96.5 mph, while his fly balls were hit at 89.9 mph, right around his average EV. This year, that trend has been completely reversed.

That’s probably a good thing. First, players hit a lot more fly balls than they do line drives. Second, as long as they’re not hit softly, line drives are always valuable. Despite dropping 6 mph, Heim’s line drives have only shed 23 points of xwOBA. Fly balls are more dependent on exit velocity to make it past outfielders and over the wall, so Heim’s xwOBA on them jumped more than 200 points. For both reasons, Heim has benefitted from allocating his EV where it can have the most impact.

Between this chart and his launch angle graphs, it seems reasonable to assume that Heim’s swing is geared more toward elevation than it was in the past. Last year, when he really got hold of a ball, he was hitting it at about 18 degrees. This year, his hardest hits have come anywhere between 16 and 34. However, his soft hit rate is also the lowest it’s ever been. Maybe it’s just that he’s just adding some liners by muscling a few more pitches over the infield than he used to, pitches that he might previously have popped up or rolled over. As I said at the beginning, most of Heim’s underlying metrics show him doing things that he’s been able to do before. Being aggressive while still walking and striking out at the same rate, pulling the ball in the air with power. Only time will tell whether he can keep them going at the same time.

What’s got four thumbs and is set up for a real doozy of a pitchers’ duel in Arlington this evening? That’s right, Nathan Eovaldi and Spencer Strider. These two are second and third in baseball in pitcher WAR, and have many things in common besides: They’re both right-handed starters with big fastball velocity who are pitching well now after struggling to stay healthy at times… Okay, that’s about all they have in common.

It’s a bit early in the season for any individual game to be a must-watch, particularly an interleague matchup between two teams with basically no history apart from the Mark Teixeira trade. But if you’ve got time to kill and no strong preference about which game to scroll down to on MLB.TV, this is set to be the best pitching matchup of the night, and one of the best of the entire season so far.

Strider has become one of the most internet-popular pitchers out there for three reasons. First and most important, he’s good. Second, Strider has the vibe of a cool nerd from the early 2010s. He and a friend, inspired by their frustration with Pitchfork’s album grades, maintain a detailed Google Sheet where they rank indie rock records. Baseball Twitter is full of lapsed emo kids with too much liberal arts education for their own good (including me), and these folks love nothing so much as a ballplayer who gives the impression of having read a book once. Read the rest of this entry »

The bat waggle is by far the most popular way to stay loose at the plate. Presumably that’s because waiting for a pitch is one of the few situations when it’s socially acceptable to waggle something. Life just doesn’t offer that many opportunities to waggle. Also, it’s a two-fer. It doesn’t just keep you loose; it also keeps your bat loose. It’s all well and good if you’re body’s ready to hit, but good luck trying to catch up to a Justin Verlander fastball with a tight bat. (Fun Fact: It turns out that bats — you know, the actual winged creatures — have their own waggle.)

But even after you waggle your bat, those last couple seconds are tricky. You’re locked into your batting stance, and now you’re just waiting there at the mercy of the pitcher (and the pitch clock). You’ve got to do something to maintain attack readiness. Some players bounce the bat off their shoulder, or bounce a little bit deeper into their crouch a few times. They rock back and forth, raise and lower their hands, or grind the toe of their cleat into the dirt. Some even make sure their pelvis is loose. Like, really loose. Like, very, extremely, possibly even dangerously loose.

That’s an entirely different kind of waggle. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Rangers shocked the baseball world by signing Jacob deGrom to a five-year, $185 million contract in December, it was with the hope that the 34-year-old righty could steer clear of the type of injuries that limited him to a total of 26 starts in the 2021 and ’22 seasons. But since the opening of camps in February, it’s been a bumpy ride, and that’s carried over into the regular season. On Friday night, for the second time in three starts, deGrom took an early exit due to an arm issue; this time, he’s headed to the injured list, with a diagnosis of elbow inflammation. To call upon an oft-used metaphor: this fancy, expensive, high-performance sports car is once again in the shop.

Facing a Yankees lineup weakened by injuries — no Aaron Judge, no Giancarlo Stanton, no Josh Donaldson — on Friday night, deGrom cruised through the first three innings, retiring all nine hitters on a total of 28 pitches, striking out two and never reaching a three-ball count. He began to labor in the fourth, however. After a six-pitch groundout by DJ LeMahieu, he issued a five-pitch walk to Anthony Rizzo, then went to a full count against Gleyber Torres before getting him to fly out, and finally allowed a two-strike single to Willie Calhoun. Notably, deGrom’s last two pitches to Calhoun — a 96.6 mph fastball taken for a ball and then the 89.4 mph slider that he hit, both of which were several inches outside — were down about three miles per hour relative to their previous offerings of that type.

That sudden drop cued pitching coach Mike Maddux and the team trainer to visit the mound; Maddux soon tag-teamed with manager Bruce Bochy, who did little more than pat a dejected-looking deGrom on the shoulder and send him on his way.

After the Rangers finished off their 5–2 win, the team announced that deGrom had departed due to forearm tightness; the pitcher himself described it as “just some discomfort.” According to general manager Chris Young, an MRI taken the next day showed inflammation, but notably, he made no mention of structural damage, suggesting that whatever the team saw with regards to deGrom’s ulnar collateral ligament, flexor, and whatever else was, if not in mint condition, not a concern at this time. The Rangers elected to put him on the 15-day injured list, though Young downplayed the situation, saying, “[H]e came in today and felt OK, which was a positive, but given how important he is to us and our season, we’re going to play this very cautiously and see how he responds over the next several days to treatment. And then after seven to 10 days, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next steps are.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers have spent virtually all of the young season atop the AL West, and they solidified their position this weekend by taking two out of three games from the Astros in Houston. Though they’re off to their best start in seven years, they lost Corey Seager to a left hamstring strain last week and may not get him back for a month, threatening the momentum they’ve built.

The 28-year-old Seager came up limping while running out a fifth-inning double against the Royals last Tuesday; he grabbed at his left hamstring shortly after rounding first base, hopped his way to second in awkward fashion, and then started back to the Rangers’ dugout before the trainer could reach him. On Wednesday, general manager Chris Young told the media that an MRI revealed Seager suffered a Grade 2 strain.

This is unfortunately an all-too-familiar position for Seager — on the injured list — and an all-too-familiar injury for him as well. While a member of the Dodgers in 2019, he missed a month with a similar left hamstring strain, not to be confused with the myriad other injuries the shortstop suffered with the Dodgers, including a torn ulnar collateral ligament requiring Tommy John surgery in 2018 and a right hand fracture in ’21. After playing 157 games and winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2016 and then 145 games the next year, Seager played in a total of 307 games out of a possible 546 from ’18 to ’21, the equivalent of 91 games over a full season.

After signing a 10-year, $325 million deal in December 2021, Seager was healthy enough to play in 151 games last year, his highest total since 2016, but despite clubbing a career-high 33 homers, he slumped to a .245/.317/.455 line, setting full-season lows in all three slash stats. That was still good for a respectable 117 wRC+, five points higher than his injury-marred 2019, but it wasn’t exactly what the Rangers had in mind when they signed him. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers have made it rain in free agency for two years running. Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Jacob deGrom highlight their haul, but Andrew Heaney, Jon Gray, and Nathan Eovaldi are no slouches either. Texas shopped in bulk in the luxury aisles of free agency, and that shopping vaulted the expectations higher. The team hasn’t won 70 games since 2019 but is broadly projected, whether by playoff odds or betting lines, to end up in the 80s this year and to compete for a playoff berth.

Until late last week, the Rangers were expected to do so while attempting the team-building equivalent of playing with one hand tied behind their back. Baseball teams are required to use nine different batters, but the Rangers were short a few. Their left field plans involved Bubba Thompson, Brad Miller, Ezequiel Duran, Josh H. Smith, non-roster invitees, duct tape, and a ouija board. There’s no polite way to say this: that’s bad. But the Rangers knew it, and they acted to address their shortfall by signing Robbie Grossman to a one-year deal worth at least $2 million, and up to $5 million depending on incentives. Read the rest of this entry »