With his trade to Boston on Thursday night, Steve Pearce has completed a personal odyssey. By joining the Red Sox, Pearce has now been employed by all five clubs in the American League East. The last leg in his tour of the division moves him from a club with little chance of making the postseason — a Blue Jays team that is beginning to think about next year (or, really, 2020) — to one that figures to be competing with the Yankees into September for a division title.

The Red Sox acquire Pearce for a specific reason: to help against left-handed pitching. The Red Sox have been below average (97 wRC+) against lefties this season, ranking 14th in baseball and eighth in the American League.

Pearce, meanwhile, has always hit lefties well. He owns a career slash line of .264/.346/.494 and 127 wRC+ against left-handers, and this season he has a .306/.358/.531 slash and a 143 wRC+ in 53 plate appearances against lefties. He has played first, left, and right field for the Blue Jays, so he gives the Red Sox options for getting his bat into the lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen running slightly later than usual due to travel for the FanGraphs meetup in Denver this weekend. Read previous installments here.

Clay Holmes, RHP, Pittsburgh Pirates (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 25   Org Rank: 27  FV: 40
Line: 7.1 IP, 5 H, 0 BB, 8 K, 1 R

Notes
Holmes has had mediocre command throughout his career and has generally projected to a bullpen role where he’d theoretically be a mid-90s sinker/slider guy. In the past month, he has thrown 66% of his pitches for strikes and has been locating his slider to the back foot of left-handed hitters effectively. He looks more like a backend starter than a reliever right now, but it’s a four-start run juxtaposed against more than a half decade of fringe control.

Alexander Montero, RHP, Boston Red Sox (Profile)
Level: Short-Season   Age: 20   Org Rank: NR  FV: 35+
Line: 5 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 7 K, 1 R

Notes
Montero’s presence and early success is a welcome sight for one of the worst systems in baseball. He’s a relatively projectable 20-year-old with a three-pitch mix led by a fastball that’s up to 95 mph and a diving split changeup. Montero signed late for an amateur IFA last summer, inking a deal just weeks before he turned 20. He pitched in the DSL last year and was skipped directly to the New York-Penn League this summer after finishing extended.

Brandon Wagner, 1B, New York Yankees (Profile)
Level: A+  Age: 22   Org Rank: NR  FV: 35
Line: 3-for-5, 2B, HR

Notes
Wagner has had an odd developmental path. He was a chubby high school first baseman from New Jersey who spent two years at a Texas JUCO and became a 6th rounder as he improved his conditioning. He has displayed a career-long ability to discern balls from strikes and is a .365 OBP hitter over four pro seasons. During that time, Wagner has moved his batted-ball profile like a glacier from 50% ground balls down to 40% and has now begun to hit for significant in-game power. Six-foot first basemen with average, pull-only power are still long shots, but if Wagner keeps performing if/when he’s promoted to Double-A, he’ll at least force re-evaluation the way Mike Ford did.

Jackson Kowar, RHP, University of Florida (draft rights controlled by Kansas City)
Level: CWS Age: 21   Org Rank: NR  FV: 45
Line: 6.2 IP, 5 H, 2 BB, 13 K, 0 R

Notes
Kowar was dominant in his College World Series start against Texas yesterday, reaching back for 95-97 toward the end of his start and was flashing a 70 changeup. He also threw 121 pitches.

Jacob Amaya, SS, Los Angeles Dodgers (Profile)
Level: Short-Season  Age: 19   Org Rank: HM  FV: 35
Line: 1-for-1, 4 BB

Notes
Amaya’s tools have a utility vibe because his frame limits his power projection to something around average or just below it, but he’s an average athlete with defensive hands befitting a middle infielder and advanced bat-to-ball skills. If he grows into a 6 bat, which is unlikely but possible, it won’t matter that he doesn’t hit for a lot of game power.

Notes from the Field

I’m just going to drop a bunch of D-backs notes from yesterday’s AZL action. Alek Thomas went 0-for-3 but ground out tough at-bats and spoiled several good pitches while he did it. He also made two impressive defensive plays, one which might have robbed a homer and another in the left-center gap that robbed extra bases. Jake McCarthy looks fine physically (of note since he was hurt for most of his junior year at UVA) and took a tough left-on-left breaking ball the other way for a single in his first pro at-bat. Twenty-year-old righty Luis Frias was up to 96 mph, rehabbing Brian Ellington was up to 97. Finally, lefty reclamation project Henry Owens (Allen Webster, Owens, and Clay Buchholz have all been D-backs for some amount of time during the last year, which isn’t surprising if you know the roots of this current front office) K’d 5 in 2.1 innings with some help from the umpire. He was 87-90 with an above-average changeup, an average breaking ball, and arm slot closer to what he had as a prospect with Boston after he was side-arming last fall.

On April 18, I wrote an article titled “How Mookie Betts Has Been Baseball’s Best Hitter.” It was true — through to that point, Betts was first among all players in wRC+. Doesn’t get much more meaningful than wRC+. Betts opened the season on an absolute tear.

The way this usually goes, we write about a white-hot player, and then the player begins to regress. This is just an unavoidable fact of how writing works; we notice when players are doing something extreme, but extreme performances are unsustainable. Sure enough, since April 18, Betts no longer ranks first among all players in wRC+. He’s ranked second among all players in wRC+, only slightly behind teammate J.D. Martinez. In one way, Betts has cooled off. In another way, he’s done nothing of the sort.

Through roughly two months, Betts has been a better overall player than anyone else. I wrote in April about how he’s been able to lift so many balls to the pull side. That’s kept up — Betts knows he’s best as a pull hitter, and he’s getting more balls in the air. Yet there’s also something else going on. There’s been one other situational change, that’s paying off in a staggering way. I still have trouble believing the numbers, and I’ve already conducted all the research.

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Daniel Mengden has bested the Red Sox twice this season. On April 22nd, the Oakland A’s right-hander was credited with a win after allowing the visiting Boston squad a lone run over 6.1 innings. This past Tuesday, he got another W while giving up a pair of runs, one of them unearned, over six equally effective innings at Fenway Park. In the combined outings, Mengden fanned eight, walked none, and surrendered just three extra-base bits, only one of which left the yard.

On Wednesday, I asked the mustachioed 25-year-old about his attack plan versus four of the Boston batters he’s faced. Here is what he had to say.

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Mengden on Mitch Moreland and Andrew Benintendi: “Mitch Moreland and Andrew Benintendi… when I faced [the Red Sox] in Oakland, I had a changeup-heavy game against them. My changeup was working really well that day. Moreland got me twice yesterday, once on a changeup. He also got me on a 1-2 curveball that I should have bounced. I left it up and he flipped it down the [right field] line. He’s one of those guys who I feel sits offspeed, and you have to be tricky with some of those guys.

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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 eighth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Sean Manaea, Blake Treinen, and Steven Wright — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Sean Manaea (Athletics) on His Changeup

“My college roommate, Tyler Pazik, showed me his changeup before the last start of my sophomore year [at Indiana State]. Three days later I took it to our regional game against Austin Peay and threw it pretty well. It was one of those things where I could just pick it up and throw it, and not have to think about it. Then I took it to the Cape and had a good summer there. Then I took it to my junior year.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rick Porcello was really good in 2016 when he won the Cy Young award. He had a very strong 3.40 FIP, an even better 3.15 ERA, and was worth 5.1 WAR. The race was close that year, with Porcello narrowly edging out Justin Verlander. Corey Kluber, Chris Sale, and even Zach Britton all also had decent arguments for the award. Any one of the starters could have won, but Porcello got the nod in what was presumably his career year.

It’s early, but so far Porcello is putting those presumptions to the test. Through four games, Porcello has 23 strikeouts against just one walk with a fantastic 1.74 FIP and 1.40 ERA. He’s never pitched quite this well before.

Even during his 2016 campaign, Porcello never put together a stretch as good as the one of which he’s in the midst. The graph below shows rolling four-game stretches since Porcello came to Boston.

We are currently at the low mark for both ERA and FIP during Porcello’s tenure in Boston. As to why Porcello is on such a great run, we can start with the lack of home runs. Since joining the Red Sox, Porcello has never produced a four-game stretch without allowing a homer until now. He had a couple per year back in his extreme pitch-to-contact ground-balling days in Detroit, where the park suppressed homers, but he had no such streaks during his first three seasons with the Red Sox. Some of that can be chalked up to good fortune, of course: he is obviously going to give up a dinger at some point this season. In addition to keeping the ball in the yard, though, there’s also that 23:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

So what’s the difference? Is there even one?

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It took a no-hitter — a 108-pitch, 10-strikeout gem by the A’s Sean Manaea — to stop the Red Sox in their tracks, snapping their eight-game winning streak and dealing them just their third loss of the year in their 20th game. Though they lost to the A’s again on Sunday, they’ve spent time in some rarefied air in recent days.

When the Sox beat the A’s on Friday night to climb to 17-2, they became the first team in 31 years to reach that early-season pinnacle, and just the sixth since 1901, when the American League began play:

Two of those five teams went on to win the World Series. The 1955 Dodgers, managed by Hall of Famer Walter Alston and led by Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider (and also featuring a 19-year-old bonus baby named Sandy Koufax), started the year 10-0 and ran their record to 22-2 before taking their third loss. By that point, they were nine games ahead of the National League pack; they would win by 13.5 games, then claim their long-awaited first championship by beating the Yankees in a seven-game World Series.

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As I was researching a Mookie Betts article yesterday, I kept coming across various suggestions that Betts was thriving because of a more swing-happy mindset. Maybe that’s true on some level, but Betts isn’t actually swinging more. He continues to run one of the lowest swing rates in either league. The key for Betts has been pulling the ball in the air. He’s hunted pitches to drive, and he’s driven them as he wanted. There are few better pull hitters in the game.

That being said, while Betts hasn’t turned into anything particularly aggressive, he has given a little push to his in-zone swing rate. He’s cut down on his out-of-zone swing rate. There’s no benefit from swinging at would-be balls. And as for the rest of the Red Sox around him — this has become a different-feeling lineup. The Red Sox, as a team, have changed their approach, bringing to an end a long era of patience.

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It’s not entirely clear anything was wrong with Mookie Betts in 2017. Yes, he finished with a wRC+ of just 108, after the previous season’s 137, but those numbers can occasionally mislead. Consider the Statcast-based expected wOBA, available to query at Baseball Savant. Betts, in 2015, had an expected wOBA of .335. In 2016, it was .336. In 2017, it was .341. I wouldn’t necessarily call that conclusive, but it’s evidence that Betts was just hurt by a little bit of bad luck. He remained a perfectly good hitter all the while.

In 2018, Betts has an expected wOBA of .602. He leads all qualified hitters in wRC+. Tuesday night, in a game started by Shohei Ohtani, Betts went deep three times. Betts won’t keep this up, because no one could keep this up, but it’s worth it to look under the hood. Betts’ scorching start has been a consequence of his hitting to his strengths.

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