Things didn’t look so hot for Triston Casas in the first few months of the season. From the beginning of the year through the end of May, he had a 95 wRC+ and a .195/.326/.376 slash line. He wasn’t doing enough damage in the heart of the zone and had a suboptimal launch angle distribution. That’s a fancy way of saying he wasn’t consistently making pitchers’ mistakes hurt because his batted balls were all over the place. His promising future as a masher had a bit of a cloud over it, but after an explosive July, there is good reason to be more confident in him.

Casas’ turnaround has multiple layers to it. Along with a slight mechanical tweak, he has taken on a more aggressive approach while focusing on contact towards the middle of the field. With a solid combination of power and natural lift, he is able to play with the big parts of Fenway Park. He isn’t utilizing the approach we’ve seen many lefty Red Sox hitters adopt over the years of peppering line drives and fly balls off the Green Monster. In fact, he’s 134th out of 143 qualified hitters in Oppo%. Instead, he sticks to where his bat path plays – the middle of the field. Well, that was his approach in July, anyway. Below is a table showing Casas’ horizontal and vertical batted ball profile by month this season:

He had a good June, but in terms of his batted ball profile, it didn’t look like his breakout July. In July, he stayed off the ground at an extreme rate while hitting half of his batted balls up the middle. There are only three qualified hitters in baseball with a groundball rate below 30% for the entire year: Jack Suwinski (26.1%), Nolan Gorman (27.8%), and Mookie Betts (28.0%). This isn’t in the table, but Casas’ July HR/FB ratio was 29.2%, which would put him behind only Shohei Ohtani if he were to sustain it over the full season. To see Casas hit at rates similar to elite guys like Betts and Ohtani is both good and bad. He doesn’t have the raw power or hit tool to live in outlier territory on a consistent basis, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate his success. Rather, it shows us what Casas needs to do to be a consistent power hitter. If his swing tweak and new approach enable him to more consistently hit the ball in the air, we should have greater confidence in his ability to sustain success, even as his stats become less extreme.

Before looking at the mechanical tweak, I want to focus on where and when the Red Sox first baseman has been more aggressive. The data below details his swing rates on pitches in the upper and lower third of the zone:

When the calendar flipped to June, Casas got significantly more aggressive at the top and bottom of the zone. As July rolled around, he doubled down on that aggression while adding more early count swings. There is an old school mantra that the best pitch you’ll see in an at-bat is the first one. Pitchers want to get ahead and take advantage of the hitter trying to find their timing. Still, if a pitcher lays in a cookie, the hitter should attack it. It’s always a sound approach to hunt the heart of the zone, and if you’re a struggling rookie, it makes even more sense to simplify things. When Casas implemented that strategy in July, it paid off.

He had success in the first two months of the season on 0-0 pitches in the zone, with a .424 and .681 xwOBA, respectively. In June, he ran a .026 xwOBA on these pitches across 18 total swings, though the results on those swings seem like a small sample blip; 11 of them were foul balls and three were whiffs. Something was off there, but the trend didn’t continue into July. Casas flipped the script and bumped up his swing rate by over 20 percentage points while running a .476 xwOBA. If a pitcher attacked him in the zone to start the at-bat, he put on an A swing. Now that he seems to have a better feel for his swing, he’ll have to strike the right balance of patience and aggression depending on how pitchers approach him.

Let’s look at the adjustment that helped things click mechanically. Here are a few swings from May and June before Casas made the change:

And here are a few during his stellar month:

Every hitter has a different feel for how to turn their barrel over and enter the zone. Some are more handsy, like Marcus Semien, while others aren’t handsy at all, like Casas. My use of two different angles from before his tweak is intentional. One shows his hands relative to his body on a straight angle, and the other shows how far he tucked them behind his ear. There was a good bit of movement that was triggered by his hands. But after his tweak, his barrel was almost perpendicular to the ground, with his hands working according to the movement of his entire upper body load rather than on their own. This brings me to the idea of connection. Before explaining what that means, take a look at this video posted by Alex Speier from a few days ago:

Triston Casas does not step in the bucket. He steps with a bucket. pic.twitter.com/z7TFNtM3EA

— Alex Speier (@alexspeier) August 4, 2023

This is a drill that hones the feeling of early connection between your upper body and barrel. By holding the bucket between his arms and chest throughout his swing, Casas establishes where his barrel is in space relative to his arms and torso. The result is his hands being along for the ride, rather than being the driver of the swing. In other words, his barrel placement is the result of how his upper body moves in space. While the swing in this video isn’t what it looks like in game, it helps give Casas the feel he needs to have an efficiently sequenced load and plane of rotation. You’ll notice that his hands are hardly moving during this practice swing. That ties directly to what we saw him change in July. His hands aren’t tipping until his shoulders do, and he’s not letting them guide his swing path. The result is improved barrel control stemming from better feel for where his barrel is in space. The data backs that up too. July was the first month Casas had a SweetSpot% above 37% on the season, and he blew that mark away, with 49% of his batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.

Usually, we don’t get a look into drill work like we did here. Connection drills are very common but can look confusing to the casual viewer. Luckily for us, a logical story can be told here. There is a direct line between Casas’ batted ball data and swing tweak, and the connection drill swings. I often talk about players finding their blueprint for success. A lot of the time, a particular drill can help a hitter get back in line with that blueprint. Casas now appears to have a better idea of idea of what that looks like for him, and specific cues for how he can stay there.

All this said, it doesn’t necessarily mean Casas has figured out hitting. Like most hitters, he has holes that can be exposed. As he finds success, pitchers will adjust their mix or location. Since August began, Casas has faced a career-high rate of breaking balls. He hadn’t seen more than 34% breakers in any month, but after 73 pitches this month, that rate is up to 50.7%. It’s working too – his whiff rate on that pitch group is 41.7% and he has yet to barrel a breaking ball. It’s a cat and mouse game that he will have to continuously adjust to while trying to find stability.

How Casas progresses versus his opponents’ changing approach will be crucial to our understanding of where his floor and ceiling will ultimately settle. At the very least, though, we’ve seen what the best version of Casas might look like, even if it hasn’t lasted a full season. A 122 wRC+ in your first full season ain’t too shabby.

After shipping Enrique Hernández back to Los Angeles last week, the Red Sox addressed their newfound lack of infield depth with a last-minute trade right before Tuesday’s trade deadline, acquiring Luis Urías from the Brewers for right-handed pitching prospect Bradley Blalock.

Urías only turned 26 years old in June, but he’s already had six years of big league experience under his belt. He was a highly regarded prospect with the Padres before getting dealt to the Brewers in the Trent Grisham trade ahead of the 2020 season, then broke out the next year, posting a 112 wRC+ with 23 home runs and a .249/.345/.445 slash line. That kind of production from an infielder who can capably play anywhere on the dirt seemed to solidify him as a core piece in Milwaukee’s lineup. Unfortunately, a hamstring injury suffered on the first day of the season cost him all of April and May, and once he returned from his injury, he was a shell of his former self, limping to a 60 wRC+ in 20 games in June and getting demoted to Triple-A at the end of the month. Since then, he’s posted a .250/.392/.447 slash line in 20 games for Triple-A Nashville, good for a 113 wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcelo Mayer has a promising bat and one of the highest ceilings in the minors. No. 1 on our Red Sox Top Prospects list, and no. 9 in baseball overall, the left-handed-hitting shortstop is batting in the middle of a Double-A lineup while still five months shy of his 21st birthday. Promoted to Portland from High-A Greenville in late May, the young-for-his-level infielder is slashing .249/.318/.457 with 13 home runs and a 107 wRC+ between the two stops.

His pedigree is that of a first-rounder. Taken fourth overall by Boston in 2021 out of Chula Vista, California’s Eastlake High School, he had been projected by many prognosticators to go even higher. And for good reason. As Eric Longenhagen wrote in that year’s draft recap, Mayer presented “among the best hit/power combinations in the high school class. He’s a potential perennial All-Star.”

Mayer sat down to talk hitting prior to a recent game at Portland, Maine’s Hadlock Field.

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David Laurila: How would you describe your approach at the plate?

Marcelo Mayer: “I’m really just looking for a fastball down the middle, a good pitch to hit, and adjusting to anything else from there.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers are getting at least some of the old band back together with Tuesday’s reacquisition of Enrique Hernández. The 32-year-old super-utilityman returns (along with cash considerations) via trade with the Red Sox in exchange for pitchers Nick Robertson and Justin Hagenman. Hernández, who signed a one-year, $10 million pact with Boston during the offseason, is hitting a career-worst .222/.279/.320 (60 wRC+). The Red Sox are picking up roughly $2.5 million of the deal’s remaining money to improve their return, receiving multiple polished, back-of-the-40-man arms in Hagenman and Robertson.

This season is the second consecutive year of declining offensive performance for Hernández, who has been a below-average hitter for most of the last five years. The decline is consistent across a variety of statistical categories, and there are no underlying signs that might indicate a bounce back or positive regression, but Hernández is still a capable defender at second base and (most importantly in this case) in center field. A June injury to Trayce Thompson eventually begat a deal for defensive specialist Jake Marisnick, whose recent hamstring injury again left the Dodgers thin in center. James Outman, whose hit tool has had a violent regression to the mean after a hot start, has seen the lion’s share of reps in center this year, while Jason Heyward and rookie Jonny Deluca have each played there a handful of times. All three are capable center field defenders but none of them is great, and you can make a coherent argument that Hernández is the best healthy center field defender on the Dodgers 40-man right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we turn our attention to the second base Killers. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of a team’s roster. I don’t expect every team to go out and track down an upgrade before the August 1 deadline, and I’m less concerned with the solutions – many of which have more moving parts involved than a single trade — than the problems. Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics are through Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Strider came up in a conversation I had with Max Scherzer prior to Friday night’s game at Fenway Park. We were talking about the veteran right-hander’s evolution as a pitcher — I’d first interviewed Scherzer in 2010 — and velocity and strikeout rates were predictably among the topics that popped up. Hence the mention of the 24-year-old Atlanta Braves hurler with the high-octane heater and eye-popping 39.7% strikeout rate.

“He’s got a heck of a fastball, for sure,” Scherzer said when I mentioned Strider. “And he’s still developing. One of the things Flash Gordon told me when I was a rookie coming up with the Diamondbacks is that you don’t walk into this league as an ace. His comments were, ‘Guess what? When Pedro and Roger first got in the league, they threw five innings. They were five-and-dive guys. Then they learned how to pitch; they learned how to get guys out multiple times through the order.’ It takes time to learn to be consistent at this level.

“Applying that logic — the wisdom that I heard many, many years ago — Spencer Strider is continuing to get better,” continued Scherzer. “He’s continuing to add stuff to his game while pitching great and striking out a lot of guys out in the process. As long as he stays healthy, he’s got a lot of upside with what he’s going to be able to do with the baseball.”

Strider is 23-8 with a 3.20 ERA, a 2.88 FIP, and 391 strikeouts in 250-and-two-thirds innings. He’s surrendered just 180 hits. The idea that he could become even better is a scary proposition for hitters. My staying as much elicited a strong opinion from the former Cy Young Award winner and seven-time All-Star. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor May is a Miguel Cabrera fan. Moreover, he has some favorite Miggy moments. I learned as much when I caught up to the always-engaging 33-year-old right-hander on the Sunday leading into the All-Star break.

“I got my first jersey from another player in our last series,” said May, who broke into the big leagues with the Minnesota Twins in 2014 and now plays for the Oakland Athletics. “We were in Detroit and I got a Miggy Cabrera jersey signed. I’m not a huge memorabilia guy, but he was my first, ‘Oh wow, I’m in The Show.’ It was like, ‘That’s Miguel Cabrera in the box!’ He’s one of the greatest of this generation.”

Nine years later, both players are nearing the end of the line. Cabrera, whose career has him Cooperstown-bound, is set to retire after this season. May, whose accomplishments have been far more humble, faces an uncertain near-term future. He has a 5.32 ERA in the current campaign, as well as a career-low 17.0% K rate.

May’s post-playing-days future is media-focused, and he’s already begun establishing himself in that realm. The Longview, Washington native has been an active podcaster and streamer — gaming is a noteworthy interest, Pat McAfee a notable influence — and just this past week he was part of MLBNetwork Radio’s All-Star Game coverage. His newly-signed jersey is ticketed for his home studio. As May explained, “the background has been kind of sparse, and I wanted to make sure that baseball has a spot there, along with all the nerdy stuff I’m into, whenever I’m in front of the camera.”

May has pitched in front of ballpark cameras many times, and while that includes more than two dozen appearances against the Detroit Tigers, a few of his Miggy moments likely weren’t captured. Even if they were, they went unnoticed by the vast majority of viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Grant Anderson had an especially-memorable MLB debut earlier this season. Pitching in Detroit on May 30, the 26-year-old Texas Rangers right-hander entered the game in the fifth inning and promptly fanned Zach McKinstry to strand an inherited runner at second base. He then returned to the mound in the sixth and struck out the side. In the seventh, he induced a line-out followed by a pair of punch-outs. In the eighth, yet another strikeout was followed by a Miguel Cabrera single that ended his evening. All told, the sidearming rookie had faced nine batters and fanned seven of them. He was credited with the win in Texas’s 10-6 victory.

He could have been working in a rubber plant instead. On two occasions — one of them as recently as this spring — Anderson seriously considered giving up baseball. More on that in a moment.

Five years ago, Anderson was at home in Beaumont, Texas following the draft with his father and twin brother Aidan [who now pitches in the Rangers system] when the Seattle Mariners took him in the 21st round with the 628th-overall pick. A half dozen or so calls and texts had come earlier. The Brewers, Mets, and a few other teams had reached out to say, “Hey, what do you think about this number and this round?” That none of them actually pulled the trigger wasn’t a matter of high demands. As Anderson put it, “I was coming from a small place and just wanted to play pro ball, so it didn’t really matter to me what the money was. I guess they all just found a better guy for those spots.”

Seattle and Colorado had shown the most interest prior to draft day, and had the former not drafted him, the latter presumably would have. The Rockies called to say they were planning to take him in the 21st round, only to have the Mariners do so a handful of picks in front of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

There comes a time in many a Red Sox pitching prospect’s life when he is likened to Pedro Martinez, which must be every bit as intimidating as it is flattering. His name was invoked when the Red Sox acquired six-foot-flat Dominican fireballer Rubby de la Rosa — whose grandmother nannied the Martinez boys back in Santo Domingo — in the blockbuster 2012 deal that sent Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, and Nick Punto to the Dodgers. Martinez was again floated as a lofty comp for small-framed Venezuelan right-hander Anderson Espinoza when he emerged as the team’s most promising pitching prospect in 2015 and ’16. Across the league, countless others have drawn the hopeful comparison, sometimes of the Hall of Famer’s own accord.

For 24-year-old Red Sox starter Brayan Bello, the comparisons started at least a couple of years ago. The diminutive Dominican right-hander was also overlooked for his smaller frame in his youth, and while he favors a two-seam fastball over his four-seamer — both register in the mid-90s velocity-wise — it’s the changeup that is perhaps most reminiscent of the pitcher he calls an idol. In May 2021, Peter Gammons quoted a team official noting that Bello was “up to 97 with the best changeup I ever seen, at least since Pedro.” For Bello, the comparison hasn’t exactly been unwelcome; in May of last year, upon his promotion to Triple-A, he said through a translator that he ”would eventually like to be better than him,” reflecting a kind of unabashed confidence that itself is not unlike the former Sox ace. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tough not to pick on the Cardinals these days. Last season, they won 93 games and took the NL Central title with a team that combined strong offense, exceptional defense — long a St. Louis tradition — and good pitching; it was their 15th straight season above .500 and fourth in a row reaching the postseason. This year, however, they’ve spent time as the NL’s worst team, and while they’re now merely the third-worst, at 33-46 they’re going nowhere and impressing nobody.

A big and perhaps undersold part of the Cardinals’ problem is the collapse of their vaunted defense, which has often featured five players — first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, third baseman Nolan Arenado, outfielder Tyler O’Neill, and multiposition regulars Brendan Donovan and Tommy Edman — who won Gold Gloves in either 2021 or ’22. Manager Oli Marmol has been tasked with shoehorning hot-hitting youngsters Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker into the lineup at comparatively unfamiliar positions, as both are blocked by Arenado at third base, their primary position in the minors, and between injuries and offensive issues, lately Edman has been patrolling center field instead of the middle infield. Backing a pitching staff that doesn’t miss enough bats — their 21.1% strikeout rate is the majors’ fifth-worst — it’s all collapsed into an unhappy mess.

Given that context it’s less than surprising that the Cardinals show up as one of the majors’ worst defensive teams using the methodology I rolled out on Thursday to illustrate the best. For that exercise, I sought to find a consensus from among several major defensive metrics, namely Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, and Statcast’s Runs Prevented (which I’m calling Runs Above Average because their site and ours use the abbreviation RAA) as well as our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as on our stat pages), and Statcast’s catching metrics for framing, blocking, and throwing (which I’ve combine into the abbreviation CRAA). Each of those has different methodologies, and they 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. Read the rest of this entry »