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:

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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 »

Reynaldo López had a bummer of a 2019. Offense is high around the league, but a 5.38 ERA is still terrible. Pitchers don’t adjust for league offense or batted ball luck in their heads; they pretty much know the way the numbers work. Two is otherworldly, three is good, four is average, and five is “what am I doing wrong?” Honestly, it doesn’t even get that much better if you do get fancy; he had a 5.04 FIP and a 5.27 xFIP, so it’s not as though he was just getting unlucky. Those were 8% and 15% worse than league average, respectively — not great.

But wait — López was worth 2.3 WAR last year. That’s not Jacob deGrom or anything, but it’s a totally acceptable number, not at all in line with the string of fives that comprise his runs allowed statistics. Is this just a sign of how bad replacement level pitchers are? Nope! It’s a sign of a quirk in our WAR calculations and a quirk in López’s game.

When we calculate a starting pitcher’s WAR, we use FIP, with one small modification. Infield fly balls are automatic outs, and in our WAR calculations (but not in the FIP numbers we display) we count them as such by treating them as strikeouts. It’s a true enough outcome — infield fly balls pretty much always turn into outs. Grounders, line drives, and other fly balls are all soup, but a popup’s fate is known the moment it’s launched.

López gets a lot of infield fly balls. In 2019, he led the majors with 36. In 2018, another year where he managed 2.3 WAR with a 108 FIP-, he tied Max Scherzer for the major league lead with 38. Outs don’t get much easier than this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is another installment of my series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. If you missed the first piece, you’re going to want to take a peek at its four-paragraph intro for some background, then hop back here once you’ve been briefed.

Updating the East

Because our world is a roil of chaos in which people often drop the ball when the stakes are high, there have been a few roster changes in the Eastern divisions, mostly related to COVID-19’s spread or the reasonable fear of it. My initial thoughts on the AL East are linked above, while the NL East is here.

Atlanta’s positive tests during intake included Freddie Freeman, Touki Toussaint, Pete Kozma, and Will Smith, while Felix Hernandez and Nick Markakis opted out. The combination of Markakis’ opt out and Freeman’s delay (Markakis cited a discussion with Freeman as part of his reason for opting out) makes it much more likely that Yonder Alonso breaks camp with the big league club because he plays first base and hits left-handed, the latter of which the Braves’ major league roster sorely lacks. The Markakis opt out also means one of the dominoes leading to a slightly premature Cristian Pache and/or Drew Waters debut has fallen.

The bullpen is thinner without Touki and Smith but still strong because of all the talented youngsters, while Felix’s opt out makes it more likely that one of young arms, most likely Kyle Wright or Bryse Wilson, ends up in the Opening Day rotation.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s COVID situation is already so dire that it seems likely they’ll qualify for the “extenuating circumstances” clause in Section 6 of Major League Baseball’s 2020 Operations manual:

In the event that a Club experiences a significant number of COVID-19 Related IL placements at the Alternate Training Site at any one time (i.e., three or more players), and the Club chooses to substitute those players from within the Club’s organization, MLB reserves the right to allow that Club to remove those substitute players from the Club Player Pool without requiring a release.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re not familiar with Don Buford, perhaps the first thing you should know is that he was quietly very good. He averaged 4.5 WAR from 1965-1971, and in the last three of those seasons he logged a .405 OBP for Baltimore Orioles teams that captured American League pennants. A speedy switch-hitter who spent the first half of his career with the Chicago White Sox, Buford had a 117 wRC+ and 200 stolen bases from 1963-1972. He played on three 100-plus-win teams, and four more that won 90-plus. A spark plug throughout his career, he never played for a losing team.

Prior to breaking into pro ball in 1960, Buford excelled on both the diamond and the gridiron at the University of Southern California. USC’s first African-American baseball player, he followed his 10 big-league seasons with four more in Japan. Then came Stateside stints as a coach, manager, and front office executive, as well as time spent running MLB’s Urban Youth Academy in Compton, California.

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David Laurila: You played both baseball and football at USC. Where did you see your future at that time?

Don Buford: “I was leaning toward baseball, because of my size. I was 5-foot-7, 150 pounds, so I didn’t see much of a future in football. I had an offer from the Pittsburgh Steelers — they were interested in me as a kickoff and punt return guy — but I wasn’t interested. That’s the suicide squad in football.”

Laurila: What do you remember about breaking into professional baseball?

Buford: “Coming out of college, I thought I was well-prepared as far knowledge of the game, because I’d had such an outstanding coach in Rod Dedeaux. He was a legendary college coach. We won the NCAA championship in 1958.

“I had offers from the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the White Sox. The Dodgers and Yankees were offering such a minimum — a $1,000 bonus and a $400 salary — and coming out of college, I said, ‘No way; I could make that teaching school.’ That’s why I selected the White Sox. Hollis Thurston and Doc Bennett were the scouts who had followed me, and they felt I had the ability to make it.” Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals have taken seven players out of the state of Maine since the June amateur draft was instituted in 1965. None of them have reached the big leagues. Trejyn Fletcher is looking to change that. Selected 58th overall last summer out of Portland’s Deering High School, the tooled-up outfielder is No. 10 on our Cardinals Top Prospects list.

Scouting Fletcher — St. Louis’s first ever prep selection from the Pine Tree State — was unique challenge. He’d arrived on their radar in 2018 while playing in the East Coast Pro and Area Code Games showcases, but that was as an underclass invitee. Cardinals scouts were impressed by Fletcher, but with a plethora of draft-eligible players to assess, their focus was elsewhere.

That changed the following March when St. Louis learned that Fletcher had been reclassified and would be eligible for the upcoming draft. That left three months to more-intently assess a player now competing in a wholly-different environment. In charge of those efforts was Assistant GM Randy Flores, whose title includes Director of Scouting.

“As you know, the scouting format for players in the Northeast is different than it is in warmer regions,” said Flores. “In particular, the level of competition Tre was facing. That, along with the limited amount of fair weather before the draft, makes it difficult to accumulate spring at-bats that mirror evaluation periods of Southern California prospects.”

Flores and Co. embraced that challenge. Along the way, they discovered that Maine contains more than raw-but-talented athletes. The state is flush with culinary delights… and not just fresh lobster. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Kopech was awaiting what would be his only start of the spring when I talked to him in Glendale last month. Fully recovered from September 2018 Tommy John surgery, the Texas-born hurler told me it was all systems go; he was ready to climb back on the proverbial horse. Recently shorn — his once-flowing mane having been cut for charity — Kopech was simply “trying to get comfortable and find a good rhythm” as he prepared to “compete again for the first time in a while.”

The outing that ensued offered ample evidence as to why he ranks No. 2 on our White Sox Top Prospects list. Not only did the righty record a one-two-three inning, he reportedly hit triple digits on six of his 11 pitches. That’s what he does when healthy. Radar gun readings aren’t always 100% reliable, but Kopech was nevertheless clocked at 105 mph when he was 20 years old and pitching in the Red Sox system. That was five months before he was sent to Chicago as part of the Chris Sale mega-deal.

Kopech turns 24 today, and he’s once again celebrating his birthday in a holding pattern. Unlike a year ago, an arduous rehab schedule won’t be dominating his day planner for months to come. And as all Tommy John rehabbers can attest, the process is indeed arduous.

“There’s a lot of grinding,” Kopech told me. “Every day it feels like it’s great, and then it feels like it’s terrible. At first, it kind of feels like it’s not your arm. But once you get through the growing pains of trying to throw a ball with a new ligament in there, it becomes second nature again. For the most part, I treated my rehab process as a chance to get better.” Read the rest of this entry »