Dylan Cease has a simple calling card: a four-seam fastball that he throws in the upper 90s. Every prospect evaluation of Cease centered on the heater, a bludgeon he would use, the theory went, to leave hitters with no good choices. He backed it up with a curveball and a developing changeup, but those were the backup dancers; the fastball was the star everyone came to see. There were questions about whether he’d be able to make the whole package work, but if it did, the heater would be the reason why.

Nine starts into his sophomore season, however, things haven’t gone according to plan. Cease’s 15.4% strikeout rate is the fourth-lowest among qualified starters, ahead of only Mike Fiers, Antonio Senzatela, and teammate Dallas Keuchel. The White Sox probably hoped Keuchel would help mentor their pitching staff, but uh… not like this. On the other hand, Cease is running a 3.33 ERA, better than team ace Lucas Giolito. Huh?

In an even stranger development, Cease’s fastball appears to be the culprit behind his poor strikeout rate. Though it hasn’t lost any velocity — his 393 four-seamers this year have averaged 97.4 mph — the pitch simply hasn’t missed any bats. Here are the 12 pitchers with the lowest whiff-per-swing rates on their four-seamers, as well as their average velocity:

That’s not a list of bad pitchers. It is, however, disconcerting to see a fastball-first power pitcher sharing space on a list of contact-heavy fastballs with literally Zack Greinke. Cease has an absolute cannon, but he isn’t missing any bats with it. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants have 23 wins on the season. One week ago today they won for the 20th time, with the decision going to Caleb Baragar. It was the rookie left-hander’s second W in two days, and his fifth on the year to go with one loss. This isn’t 1972 Steve Carlton we’re talking about either. Baragar is a reliever who has pitched all of 17-and-two-thirds big-league innings.

Has a pitcher ever recorded six decisions — moreover five wins — in so few innings to begin a career? I wasn’t able to find an answer in time for this column — a call to the Elias Sports Bureau went for naught — but there is a pretty decent chance that Baragar holds a unique distinction.

The 27-year-old Jenison, Michigan native is taking his newfound habit of gobbling up Ws with a grain of salt.

“It’s a stat — ‘winning pitcher’ — that doesn’t always tell the whole story,” said Baragar, who has received some good-natured ribbing from Giants starters. “It’s not something where I’m walking around saying, ‘Hey, I have five wins in the big leagues.’ For me, they’re important because the team won, and this is a shortened season where every game matters. It’s by no means a personal stat that I’m holding my hat on.”

The first of his wins came in his big-league debut on August 25. Notably, it came against the best team in baseball. Having no fans in the stands worked to his advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Grieve had a relatively nondescript playing career. From 1970-1979, the now-72-year-old former outfielder logged 474 hits, 65 of which left the yard, and a 100 wRC+. Those numbers came primarily with the Texas Rangers, who had drafted Grieve out of the University of Michigan while the franchise was still located in Washington DC.

Grieve is a product of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and while he grew up rooting for the New York Yankees, one of his biggest thrills came in his home state’s most-famous sports venue. The date was May 5, 1974, and the event itself was proceeded by a certain amount of trepidation.

“Billy Martin was the manager at the time,” explained Grieve, who is now a TV analyst for the Rangers. “Jim Fregosi and I had been playing against left-handed pitchers, and Mike Hargrove and Jim Spencer had been playing against right-handed pitchers. Anyway, the people of Pittsfield had called the Red Sox and were somehow able to set up ‘Tom Grieve Day’ at Fenway Park between games of a Sunday doubleheader. Usually when there’s a day for someone at a ballpark, it’s for a Hall of Fame player, so I can remember going to Boston knowing that it was going to happen, and being a little bit embarrassed.”

Not to mention wary of what his manager might think. Not only was Grieve a 26-year-old platoon player, Martin had donned pinstripes for much of his own playing career. Moreover, Martin was notoriously as combative as they come. Read the rest of this entry »

Two decades before Matt Foster was born, Dr. John had a hit single with “Right Place, Wrong Time.” Later covered by the Dave Matthews Band, as well as B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt, the song is true to its title. Funk-fused in sound, “Right Place, Wrong Time” is essentially an ode to misfortune.

Foster has had the opposite experience since debuting with the Chicago White Sox on August 1. Seventeen innings into his big-league career, the 25-year-right-hander has a won-lost record of 4-0. By and large, Foster has been in the right place at the right time.

Which isn’t to say he hasn’t pitched well. The Valley, Alabama native has allowed just eight hits and three runs in his 17 frames, and he’s fanned 21 batters along the way. Making those numbers even more impressive is the fact that Foster is a former 20th-round draft pick who came into the 2020 campaign with limited expectations. Despite a solid 2019 season in Triple-A, he garnered a mere honorable mention on our 2020 White Sox Top Prospects list.

Foster’s first big-league appearance came against the Kansas City Royals, and his initial emotions might be best described as falsely placid.

“When I got on the mound, I was like, ‘I’m really not that nervous,’ said Foster. “Then [Jorge] Soler got the first hit off me, and I was still kind of, ‘Well, OK.’ But then I threw an 0-0 slider to Salvador Perez and he almost took it yard. Then I was like, ‘OK, I’m nervous. This is real.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Winning a batting title on its own doesn’t quite win you the household name status that it once did. Ask the casual fan the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the name Tim Anderson, and there’s a good chance it’s the time he pimped the living daylights out of a homer off Brad Keller in 2019 and was subsequently plunked for it. Only after a repeat visit to his highlight reel and another exhausting discussion about baseball’s unwritten rules would they get around to saying he was last season’s American League batting champion, with his .335 average leading all major league hitters.

For a guy who previously held a career batting average of .258, that was a surprising development, but it wasn’t as though he’d suddenly turned into an MVP candidate. Anderson virtually never walked, and hit for only average power, meaning a near-.400 BABIP could still only get him to a 3.5 WAR season. That’s nothing to sneeze at — it put him in the 78th percentile of all batters who made at least 300 plate appearances last season. But there was good reason to believe that was probably his ceiling.

That brings us to another surprising development — Anderson has gotten even better. He’s once again in the batting title discussion, with a .333 average that trails only that of Cleveland’s Franmil Reyes (.336) in the American League. But he’s also running an on-base percentage of .372 and a whopping .579 slugging percentage, helping him to 1.5 WAR that ranks 19th in baseball. Of the 18 players ahead of Anderson, Paul Goldschmidt and Anthony Rendon are the only ones not to have logged at least seven more games than him. Read the rest of this entry »

By the third inning of Lucas Giolito’s start last night, a pattern emerged. The Pirates would attack him with lefties — they started seven left-handed batters — and Giolito would counter with his changeup. Cole Tucker, for example, faced three straight changeups after falling behind in the count 0-1. He managed to take the first one, but the second and third proved irresistible, and he fruitlessly waved at strike three:

By itself, there’s nothing remarkable about that sequence. Of course righties go to their changeup to combat opposite-handed pitchers — it’s only natural. Giolito has a good changeup, too. Why not use it? But these changeups were indicative of a larger trend, one that you could hardly avoid seeing last night as Giolito rampaged through the Pirates’s lineup on his way to a no-hitter: Giolito’s changeup is his best weapon, and he’s learning to trust it.

If you take a look at our Pitch Values, this is hardly a surprise. Giolito’s changeup is his most valuable on a per-pitch basis. The only year of his career it hasn’t produced better-than-average results was his 2016 cup of coffee in Washington; aside from that, it’s been a trusty companion, even when he wasn’t the pitcher he is today.

This year, however, he’s leaning into the pitch like never before. He threw 78 pitches to left-handed batters last night, and 36 were changeups. That 46.2% changeup rate was the third-highest he’s thrown in a single start. Four of his top five changeup rate starts have come this year:

In fact, he’s increased his usage of the pitch every year of his career:

Last night, that changeup usage paid off. He drew 13 swinging strikes on the pitch, a career high. He threw high fades, like this pitch to Tucker that ended the eighth:

He worked it below the zone, far too tempting for Jarrod Dyson to hold back:

Even when he left one in the zone, the deception, speed change, and movement were too much for Gregory Polanco:

Those three locations — really two locations, because the pitch to Polanco was probably the same rough idea as the one to Tucker — were the plan behind all of his changeups last night. Up and away, below the zone, or misses that drifted over the plate:

While the changeup served to finish lefties off, it also helped set up Giolito’s fastball, and vice versa. Miss a changeup away, as JT Riddle did here:

And you might still be thinking soft-and-away on this hard-and-in fastball:

That was a perfectly-located fastball for the situation. On 1-2, there’s no need to stay in the zone, and the downside isn’t hard contact but simply a ball or potentially a foul. Maybe a batter can make contact with that pitch, but it would take a superhuman effort to drive it to the outfield, much less over the fence.

Better fastball location has been a key to Giolito’s improvement, and he’s taken another step forward in it this year. In 2019, he made significant strides by simply throwing more strikes. He threw his fastball in the zone 57.3% of the time, a career high and four points higher than the overall league average. That aggressive approach put him ahead in counts and kept the pressure on hitters, but it came with a downside: he left 9.1% of his fastballs middle-middle (the league average was 8.2%), and as you might imagine, those pitches got hit hard.

This year, he’s dialed his zone-hunting back; he throws strikes at a roughly average rate. That’s come with a huge benefit; he’s cut his middle-middle percentage by two points, now 7.1%. That doesn’t mean he never misses, but there are fewer opportunities for hitters to take big hacks at centrally located pitches. Batting isn’t easy; you can get a good pitch to hit and still end up like Bryan Reynolds here:

Leave a pitch there often enough and the batter is sure to win eventually. But Giolito gave the Pirates only three such cookies last night. Fail to cash in on those, and you’re looking at a steady diet of unhittable changeups and painted fastballs. It’s simply a numbers game, though the numbers won’t always work out as well as they did against the Pirates. Dropping from 9% to 7% is roughly one fastball per game the opposing team doesn’t get to take a cut at, and in the long run, that adds up.

In fact, that’s my main takeaway from last night. No one has ever been a good enough pitcher that you should expect a no-hitter in a given start. Baseball simply doesn’t work that way. Last night, however, Giolito gave himself a phenomenally good chance to hold the Pirates hitless. He started early; he got behind in the count 1-0 only seven times and got ahead 0-1 17 times.

From there, he mostly gave the Pirates only bad choices. They couldn’t help but comply; they came up empty on 41% of their swings against his fastball, and that’s the easy one to hit. They whiffed on 56.5% of their swings against his changeup, and 72.7% of their swings against his slider when he deigned to throw it. He drew 30 swinging strikes last night, the highest total and percentage of swinging strikes for any starter this year. They’re a bad hitting team, one of the worst in baseball, but he also never gave them much of a chance.

That’s not to say the start was flawless. Thirteen strikeouts in a complete game means at least 14 balls in play, 14 chances for something to fall through. That’s a simple truth of pitching: you can’t avoid rolling the dice on a few balls in play, no matter how dominant you are.

One of the sticking points about sabermetric analysis of baseball is the role of luck in the game. The argument in favor of it is pretty clear: results follow a normal distribution in many cases, and the worst team beats the best team some amount of the time. No one would argue that baseball is deterministic. Thinking of the sport as a series of coin flips, though, robs it of some inherent drama. Is a no-hitter as impressive if it’s not a triumph of pitching but rather a string of 50/50 decisions coming up in Giolito’s favor?

I think people misunderstand what sabermetricians mean by luck. I certainly don’t think of it the way I see it popularly described. Sure, batted balls are inherently a roll of the dice. Microscopic differences in initial contact can be the difference between a liner in the gap and a screamer directly at a fielder:

Think of it this way, however. Have you ever woken up in the morning and felt an extra spring in your step? Ever thrown a ball around and thought “Wow, my arm is accurate today”? Of course you have, because it’s a natural part of the human condition. Do you have any agency over when it happens? Some, perhaps — you’re less likely to wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after a night of partying — but for the most part, it’s simply a feeling you get in the morning at random, waking up on the right side of the bed, so to speak.

Lucas Giolito woke up on the right side of the bed yesterday. The Pirates hitters didn’t. Play that game, in those exact conditions with those players at that exact moment, 100 times, and you wouldn’t get 100 no-hitters. You would, however, get sheer dominance. Giolito wasn’t simply “getting lucky” when he blew fastballs by hapless batters, or went fishing with his changeup and hooked batters 13 times. He was in the zone, executing all three pitches and rarely missing location, he and James McCann divining hitters’ thinking and twisting them into pretzels.

Call it luck if you’d like. It’s clearly not an average day for Giolito. Were he to pitch like this every time out, he’d be the best pitcher in baseball. But in the moment, I think it’s unfair to say he was simply “getting lucky.” On his best days, Giolito is capable of such a display. Those best days don’t happen frequently, of course. They happen far less often than his average days, and the average days are important, because seasons are built on average days.

For me, though, it’s a reminder of why it’s such a joy to watch a great pitcher. In the long run, randomness will prevail. Giolito will have some good starts and some bad starts, and the sum of his efforts will go down into statistical record. The average of those starts is what you can expect to see from him in a random game. But it’s not what you’ll actually get from him on a given night. Any start you watch could be the one where he’s feeling it, where he “deserves” the kind of performance we just saw, and there’s simply no way of knowing if you’ll witness it until you watch.

Last night was a fluke, in a mathematical sense — most of the time, Giolito isn’t that good. And yet, it was no fluke. If he could replicate his true talent level from last night, not all his high and low points but simply his form at that exact moment, he’d break baseball. It won’t last. Next time out, he might be great again or might be average, and there’s no way to know until it happens. That’s the joy of a great pitching performance. It might not be likely, but when it happens, it feels almost inevitable — give or take an assist from Adam Engel.

The Chicago Cubs own the third-best record in all of baseball and have raced out to the game’s biggest division lead. The Chicago White Sox are currently third in their division, in the thick middle of the American League playoff picture as we approach the season’s halfway point. And yet, as the two of them prepare to square off at Wrigley Field this weekend, because of the way each teams’ pitching staffs are constituted, I prefer the Sox’ chances of making a deep postseason run more than I do the Cubs’. Here’s why.

Both Chicago clubs can hit (both are top five in hitter WAR) but are succeeding at preventing runs in diametrically opposed fashion. The Cubs starters have been great. They have the lowest BB/9 in baseball at 1.80, they’re fourth in starter ERA, second in FIP (3.24 and 3.25, respectively), third in innings pitched, third in WAR (including two of the top 10 individual WAR-producing starters, Kyle Hendricks and Yu Darvish), and they’re keeping the ball in the park, allowing fewer homers than any other rotation in baseball except for the Reds and Cardinals, who haven’t played as many games due to clubhouse viral infections.

But of the 10 teams that currently have playoff odds above 80%, the Cubs bullpen is the worst. Cubs relievers have the eighth-worst ERA in baseball, the fifth-highest walks per nine, and they’ve given up more homers (13) than the starters (12) in 50 fewer innings of work. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into 2019, opinions differed about how much of Luis Robert’s potential would manifest in games. Those opinions got considerably more uniform after a breakout season that saw Robert tap into his power. One of the top prospects heading into 2020 (he ranked seventh overall on our Top 100), Robert has helped a surging White Sox club filled with young talent get a good jump on the season. His .354/.415/.542 batting line has been good for a 177 wRC+, and he’s checking off every box on his scouting report for better or worse.

While defensive metrics don’t hold a lot of water this early in the year, the scouting reports on Robert are great. Eric Longenhagen has said Robert is a “plus-plus runner, and his instincts in center field are terrific.” Here’s a seemingly easy play Robert made early in the season:

The ball left the bat at more than 100 mph. Unless balls like that are hit right at a fielder, they’re usually a hit. Instead, Robert covered over 50 feet in under three seconds (the GIF above is 2.8 seconds long). Statcast tracks each batted ball’s hang time and the distance a player has to travel to get it. This is what Robert’s profile looks like:

The only balls Robert didn’t catch either hit the wall, or came with a 0% probability of making the play. Robert has been as advertised in the field. The same is true as a baserunner. Robert’s 29.4 feet per second sprint speed is near the top of the league, and he has four steals in five tries, finally getting caught last night. He also has three infield singles. Here’s one of those singles, where a slight hesitation on a routine ground ball allowed Robert to make it to first in under four seconds, essentially a Byron Buxton-level time:

Read the rest of this entry »

Don Cooper’s playing career wasn’t anyhing to write home about. The longtime Chicago White Sox pitching coach made 44 appearances, and threw 85-and-a-third innings, for the Twins, Blue Jays, and Yankees from 1981-1985. His won-lost record was an undistinguished 1-6, his ERA an untenable 5.27. The bulk of his time was spent down on the farm.

He did have a good Uncle Charlie.

“Coop had one of the best curveballs I ever saw,” said Showalter, who was Cooper’s teammate for a pair of Double-A seasons. “He had one of those curveballs you could hear coming out of the hand. We used to call it ‘the bowel locker’ — it would lock your bowels up. He’d sit in the dugout between outings, and all he’d do is flip a ball; he was always trying to get the right spin on it. You could hear it snap. Man, could he spin a curveball. Holy [crap]. It was tight.”

Showalter chose not to compare Cooper’s curveball to that of any particular pitchers, but he did throw out some names when I asked who else stood out for the quality of his hook.

“Scott Sanderson had a great curveball,” said Showalter. “Dwight Gooden had a great curveball; you could hear that one coming. Jimmy Key had a great curveball, although his was bigger. Mike Mussina used to invent pitches. One common thing about all those pitchers is that they had a great hand. If you said that to a scout, he’d know exactly what you were talking about. Mariano Rivera had a great hand. He could manipulate the ball. David Cone had a great hand. Curt Schilling. Kevin Millwood is another. He could do things with a baseball; his hands were huge.” Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re watching a baseball game, there are few things as nerve-wracking as seeing your favorite team’s pitcher consistently fall behind hitters. You know intuitively that the better the count is for the hitter, the better chance there is he’ll see a pitch he can slug. Broadcasters often love to talk about first-pitch strikes and their importance in both “setting the tone” of an at-bat and keeping pitch counts low. These are all valid notions — in 2019, the league-wide wOBA when the pitcher was behind in the count was .432. When the pitcher was ahead or the count was even, that mark was .269. That’s about the same difference as there was between Mike Trout and Orlando Arcia, the worst qualified hitter of last season.

Nearly everyone who threw at least 1,500 pitches in 2019 performed worse when behind in the count, with the exception of Tigers starter Jordan Zimmermann, who was just bad regardless of the situation. But just because someone falls behind in the count doesn’t mean he’s a lost cause. Even when at a disadvantage, some pitchers hold their own just fine. Here were the 10 best pitchers when throwing from behind last season.

By and large, that’s a list of good pitchers. However, there is an outlier here in Gio González. Not because he isn’t a good pitcher, mind you. The veteran lefty, who signed with the White Sox over the winter, held a 3.50 ERA (79 ERA-) and 4.04 FIP (90 FIP-) over 87.1 innings with Milwaukee last season. He doesn’t stand out because of a lack of skill level. He stands out because of how often he’s behind compared to the other pitchers on this list. Read the rest of this entry »