Whatever else you might say about Jerry Dipoto, he’s demonstrated an indomitable desire to engage in trades. Big trades, little trades, all sorts of trades. And with injuries and Robinson Canó’s suspension forcing Dee Gordon to move back to the infield (before going on the disabled list himself), and with an extra $11 million of loose change suddenly freed up by Canó’s absence, it seemed likely that Dipoto would ride again, provided he could find a willing partner.

This afternoon, Dipoto found his man, or men rather. Per Marc Topkin.

#Rays have traded Span and Colome to #Mariners

— Marc Topkin (@TBTimes_Rays) May 25, 2018

#Rays get back Andrew Moore and Tommy Romero from #Mariners

— Marc Topkin (@TBTimes_Rays) May 25, 2018

The Mariners will also receive $4.75 million in cash considerations, so not all the Canó money is spent. The deal makes all the sense in the world for the Mariners. Denard Span and his heretofore 114 wRC+ will provide additional depth in a suddenly thin outfield, with Dipoto indicating that the initial plan is for Span to spend his time in left field, while Guillermo Heredia and Mitch Haniger roam center and right, respectively. Ben Gamel will remain in the mix for the left-field spot. Span also gives the team additional options in center should Heredia falter against right-handed pitching.

Alex Colomé, meanwhile, reinforces a bullpen that, outside of closer Edwin Diaz, has been shaky at times. James Pazos and Nick Vincent have pitched their way to a respectable FIPs, but offseason signing Juan Nicasio’s velocity has declined slightly, as has his effectiveness. According to Pitch Info, his average fastball has climbed back closer to 95 mph rather than the 91 mph Mariners fans were seeing in spring, but he’s still lost a tick, which may help to explain the increase in his home-run rate. Colomé’s season got off to its own rough start, marred by inexact command that lead to an 11.7% walk rate, but May has gone considerably better, with his FIP dropping to 1.35. He represents an additional option in late innings and beyond making the ball more likely to get to Diaz, should also allow the Mariners to rest Diaz a bit more.

Tampa’s side is bit stranger. For a team with the Rays’ pitching strategy, it seems odd to trade a good closer, an oddity that isn’t lessened by the acquisition of Wilmer Font. The Rays do get Andrew Moore and prospect Tommy Romero, which isn’t nothing. As with any set of young arms, there’s always the risk that they’ll bloom into something Seattle regrets giving up. Moore pitched big-league innings with middling results last year, and started the season in Double-A, but he’s still thought to have back of the rotation potential. That isn’t useless, but it also isn’t likely to help the Mariners win right now. And as Jerry and this trade show, winning right now is what Seattle is interested in.

Necessity is said to be the primary motivator behind innovation. And no franchise is faced with a more difficult environment in which to compete, is confronted by a greater need for innovation, than the Tampa Bay Rays.

In possession of either the worst or second-worst stadium situation in the majors, with small-market revenues, the Rays also share a division with coastal elites like the Yankees (+76) and Red Sox (+75), who rank second and third in the majors in run differential, respectively, behind only the Astros (+98).

Because of this, the Rays have been more willing to experiment than just about every other club over the last 15 years. They brought defensive shifts to the American League, signed Evan Longoria to a club-friendly deal six days after he debuted in the majors, and have limited starting pitchers to two trips through the order more aggressively than any other club. This spring, they planned to employ a four-man rotation.

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The Cleveland Indians were looking into the future when they selected Will Benson 14th overall in the 2016 draft. The powerfully-built Atlanta, Georgia product was a week shy of his 18th birthday, and his left-handed stroke — lethal against prep competition — was going to require polish if he hoped to reach his sky-high ceiling. Two years later, that process is well underway.

“You really wouldn’t,” Benson responded when I asked if now-versus-then film footage would show the same setup and swing. “In high school, you’d see a very athletic kid just competing and somehow getting it done. What you’d see now is more efficient movement — that’s a big thing I’ve worked on — and I’m maintaining better posture throughout my swing. Mechanically, making sure I’m getting behind the baseball is huge for me.”

Hitting the ball long distances isn’t a problem for the young outfielder. His power potential is a primary reason he went in the first round, and 545 plate appearances into his professional career — keep in mind he’s still a teenager — Benson has gone yard 23 times. The youngest position player on the roster of the Lake County Captains, he currently co-leads the low-A Midwest League with seven round trippers.

While Benson’s swing is conducive to clearing fences, his mindset is that of a well-rounded hitter. While he’s embraced launch-angle concepts, his focus is on simply squaring up the baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the bell tolled for the 2018 season of the Diamondbacks’ Taijuan Walker. The week before that, it tolled for the Padres’ Dinelson Lamet, and before him, the Angels’ JC Ramirez and the A’s A.J. Puk. If it feels like March and April are particularly full of Tommy John surgery casualties, that’s because they are, at least when it comes to recent history. In early March, just after Rays righty Jose De Leon discovered that he had torn his ulnar collateral ligament, I noted some recent trends regarding everyone’s favorite (?) reconstructive elbow procedure, including the extent to which those early-season injuries are rather predictive of the season-long trend. With April now in the books, and with my nose still in Jon Roegele’s Tommy John Surgery Database, the situation is worth a closer look.

Via the data I published in the De Leon piece, just under 28% of all Tommy John surgeries done on major- or minor-league pitchers (not position players) from 2014-17 took place in March or April, with the figure varying only from 24.8 % to 30.0% in that span. Even expanding the scope to include February as well, which doesn’t increase the total number of surgeries by much but does capture significant ones such as that of Alex Reyes last year — gut punches that run counter to the optimism that reigns when pitchers and catchers report — the range is narrow, with 27.5% to 33.0% of pitcher surgeries taking place in that span.

After my piece was published, a reader pointed out that The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh took an in-depth look at the phenomenon, but intuitively, it’s not hard to understand. Not only do pitchers’ activity levels ramp up dramatically once spring training begins, as they move from lighter offseason throwing programs to facing major-league hitters and therefore place far more stress on their arms, but many pitchers are finally forced to reckon with injuries that did not heal over the winter.

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 the fifth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Danny Duffy, David Price, and Sergio Romo — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Danny Duffy (Royals) on His Changeup

“My changeup used to be a two-seam circle. It was a really good pitch in the minor leagues because of the difference in velocity — I could get away with lack of movement — but, up here, it was starting to get ineffective.

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Daniel Robertson has been scorching the horsehide. With 84 plate appearances under his belt — just enough to qualify for our leaderboards — the 24-year-old Tampa Bay Rays infielder ranks fourth from the top in both wOBA (.451) and wRC+ (189). His slash line heading into the Month of May is a stand-up-and-take-notice .333/.476/.561.

He credits an adjustment for his fast start. Rightly unsatisfied with his rookie-season output — Robertson logged a .634 OPS in part-time duty — he spent the winter revamping his stroke under the tutelage of a pair of hitting gurus. No longer satisfied with a “pretty generic swing,” he’s now embracing launch angle (a term he uses cautiously) and adopting a rhythm-conscious mindset that allows him to transfer his energy through the baseball.

Robertson talked about his new mechanics and approach when the Rays visited Fenway Park over the weekend.

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Robertson on making the adjustment: “I got knocked for what I did offensively last year. I feel that I impressed with what I did defensively, but for my whole career I’ve always been a hitter. I think I’m starting to show that again this year, thanks in part to things I worked on in the offseason. I’m putting myself in a better position to hit and that’s translating into me seeing the ball a lot better, as well as doing damage rather than having a defensive swing and just slapping it around.

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On the same night that top prospect Ronald Acuña made his made his major-league debut, a former Brave had his own memorable moment. In Wednesday night’s Rays-Orioles game at Camden Yards, in the bottom of the sixth inning, 33-year-old Rays lefty Jonny Venters made his first major-league appearance since October 5, 2012. He faced just one hitter, Chris Davis, and needed just four pitches to retire him on a routine grounder to shortstop, but in doing so he became the rare pitcher to return to the majors after a third Tommy John surgery.

Exactly how rare is in dispute, which I’ll examine in greater depth below, but first, let’s appreciate the man and his moment. A 30th-round draft-and-follow pick in 2003 out of a Florida high school, Venters was such an obscure prospect that his name was misspelled “Benters” on some draft lists according to John Sickels. He began his professional career in 2004, but by the end of 2005, when he was 20, he had already gone under the knife of Dr. James Andrews for his first Tommy John surgery. That cost him all of the 2006 season. Working primarily as a starter, he reached Double-A in late 2008 and Triple-A in 2009. Though he didn’t make the Braves the following spring, he was soon called up and debuted against the Rockies on April 17, 2010 with three shutout innings.

Able to Bring It with rare velocity for a southpaw (95.1 mph average according to Pitch Info), Venters proved effective against righties as well as lefties and quickly gained the trust of manager Bobby Cox; by June, he was working in high-leverage duty. In 79 appearances as a rookie, he threw 83 innings and struck out 93, finishing with an ERA of 1.93, a FIP of 2.69, and 1.5 WAR. The next year, he made an NL-high 85 appearances and turned in similarly strong numbers in 88 innings, making the All-Star team along the way. The heavy usage was a bit much for his elbow to take, however. By mid-2012, a season during which he made a comparatively meager 66 appearances, he was briefly sidelined by elbow impingement. He began the 2013 season on the disabled list due to lingering elbow pain and soon received a platelet-rich plasma injection to promote healing. On May 16, he underwent his second TJ surgery, also by Dr. Andrews. To that point, he owned a 2.23 ERA, 3.00 FIP, and 26.6% K rate in 229.2 major-league innings.

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Jonny Venters was in the news this week after becoming the first pitcher to appear in a big-league game after undergoing three Tommy John surgeries. The 33-year-old veteran worked one-third-of-an-inning for the Tampa Bay Rays after having last pitched for the Atlanta Braves in the 2012 postseason. It’s a great story, worthy of the attention it’s garnered (and will continue to garner; colleague Jay Jaffe will have more on Venters in the coming days).

On Friday, I approached Venters to discuss a tangentially-related subject: the worm-killing sinker that made him an effective setup man before his elbow became stubbornly uncooperative. Since the stat began being tabulated, no pitcher with at least 125 career innings under his belt has had a higher ground-ball rate than the 68.4% mark put up by the come-backing left-hander.

Venters transitioned to a sinker-ball pitcher in 2009 when he was a starter with the Double-A Mississippi Braves. He’d been primarily a four-seam guy, but the organization asked him to put that pitch in his back pocket and begin prioritizing his two-seam. Helped initially by the tutelage of pitching coach Marty Reed, it eventually became his go-to.

Success wasn’t instantaneous. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Kiermaier has come a long way since I first talked to him in the spring of 2014. At the time, his big-league experience consisted of two games — two very important games — as a defensive replacement with the Tampa Bay Rays. Already considered elite with the glove, he was seen as the club’s centerfielder of the future — assuming he could hold his own with the bat.

A little over a year later, in May 2015, I followed up with the uber-athletic former 31st-round draft pick. As he was coming off a rookie season where he’d slashed a better-than-many-expected .263/.315/.450, the resulting Q&A was titled “Kevin Kiermaier on Turning a Corner”.

The years that have followed have been a combination of prosperous and unkind. The now-28-year-old Kiermaier accumulated 11.3 WAR between 2015-2017, in large part because his defense has been nothing short of exemplary. Despite multiple trips to the disabled list, he led MLB with 89 Defensive Runs Saved over that three-year stretch. At the plate, he slashed a credible .262/.320/.426, with a dozen home runs annually.

Staying on the field has obviously been a major issue. Kiermaier has missed chunks of time with hand and hip fractures, and earlier this month he went on the shelf with a torn ligament in his right thumb. Prior to the most-recent injury, I sat down with Kiermaier to discuss his career thus far, with the main focus being his continued development on the offensive side of the ball. Read the rest of this entry »

Trey Mancini did some tinkering prior to the start of the season. Hoping to “limit a bit of pre-swing movement,” he decided to lower his leg kick. The Baltimore Orioles outfielder hit that way throughout the offseason, and he continued the experiment in spring training.

Then, about a week and a half before opening day, he returned to doing what feels natural.

“I am who I am,” Mancini told me last weekend. “The leg kick is just something that works for me — there’s a comfortability factor involved — so once I realized what I was trying didn’t feel totally right, I went back to my old one.”

Mancini felt that the lower kick disrupted his timing. Read the rest of this entry »