An old friend returned to the big leagues yesterday in a relatively unexpected place. After 11 seasons in the majors, all with the Cardinals, Matt Carpenter found himself searching for a new team this winter; in the end, he only managed to snag a minor league deal with the Rangers. Now, though, he’s found himself in New York with the Yankees, signing a major league deal with them that was announced on Thursday and hitting eighth in the starting lineup for their game against the Rays that same day. Does Carpenter have a second wind, or has too much time passed since he was an effective contributor?

That Carpenter found little interest in his services this winter was hardly surprising. Some players age gracefully, but he fell off a cliff after the 2018 season, dropping from a wRC+ of 140 to 96. If that had been the extent of his collapse, he’d still have a role in the majors; he still managed to collect 1.7 WAR in 492 plate appearances in 2019, thanks to not being awful at second or third base. But after hitting .176/.313/.291 combined over 2020 and ’21, even that saving grace didn’t provide quite enough grace. What rope remained after the COVID-shortened 2020 rapidly ran out of slack the following year, and his role was reduced to the extent that only 11 of his 53 games after the All-Star break were as a starter.

It strikes me as likely that Carpenter only survived on the roster because of his long history with the franchise; infielders who can’t hit are a dime a dozen, and he didn’t have an exploitable platoon split advantage the way a steeply declining Albert Pujols did. And while much has been made of Carpenter’s struggles against the shift, and while he’s been worse throughout his career relative to a traditional infield configuration, it’s not sufficient to explain the collapse. He hit just fine overall as the approach against him shifted (no pun intended) yearly toward all-shift after 2015; by the time 2018 rolled around, when he was still a dangerous offensive player, he was almost exclusively hitting against a stacked right side of the infield. Read the rest of this entry »

“When you’re pitched away, take the ball to the opposite field.” It’s a training mantra that seemingly exists everywhere. I heard it in Little League. I hear it on major league broadcasts to this day. The data show that hitters do it, and it’s just a natural swing. I can think of few hitting sayings I believe more than this one.

Of course, just because you can hit the ball the other way doesn’t mean you have to. Over the last two years, the list of righty hitters who have pulled the ball most when they swing at away pitches (from right-handed pitchers, just to standardize the sample) probably matches your intuition:

You basically understand the kinds of hitters on here. The guys ranked sixth and seventh are similar types: Salvador Perez and Mike Zunino. It’s big boppers who try to lift and pull the ball no matter where they’re pitched, as well as guys like Marcus Semien who sell out to pull in an attempt to juice their power. If you do the most damage on the pull side and accrue most of your offensive value through power, it’s a natural approach. You think anyone’s coming to the ballpark to see Patrick Wisdom slap a well-placed cutter the other way? They want dingers!

The list of the hitters who pull the ball least often when pitched away is mostly who you’d expect, and also not who you’d expect at all. Feast your eyes on the top five:

The top four are contact-oriented hitters with elevated groundball rates… and the fifth might be the most powerful baseball player in history. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees had the third-best bullpen in baseball last year, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that had changed this year. Last season’s two best relievers, Jonathan Loáisiga and Chad Green, have combined for 0 WAR and an ERA above 5.00, and Green will miss the rest of the season due to injury. Their highest-paid reliever, Aroldis Chapman, has lost more velocity and is recording strikeouts at a below-average clip. Their big speculative offseason addition, Miguel Castro, is below replacement level.

Naturally, they have the second-best bullpen in baseball in 2022. Michael King, who I recently wrote about, is the headliner so far this year, but he’s hardly alone. Clarke Schmidt, who profiles as a starter long-term, has looked good. Wandy Peralta is a competent lefty specialist. And that brings us to King’s running mate, the other best reliever on the Yankees: Clay Holmes.

Holmes is hardly new to the majors. He toiled in obscurity with the Pirates for years, walking too many to take advantage of his grounder-inducing sinker. Then the Yankees got their hands on him, and he turned that sinker into an entire identity, filling the zone and letting the chips fall where they may. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees swept the Blue Jays in a quick two-game series in the Bronx this week on the strength of the long ball. More specifically, they sandwiched a pair of shots into Yankee Stadium’s infamous short porch in right field around a towering, no-doubt walk-off homer by Aaron Judge on Monday night, with all three homers of the three-run variety. In a year where home run and scoring rates have plummeted, the Bronx Bombers are 22-8, off to their best start since 2003 in large part because they’ve handily outhomered their opponents — an achievement that owes something to their pitchers as well as their hitters.

In Tuesday night’s game, the Yankees trailed 3-0 in the bottom of the sixth inning but put two on base with one out to bring Giancarlo Stanton to the plate against Yimi Garcia. The righty left a slider to the slugger on the outer third of the plate, and Stanton poked it to right field. Tie ballgame.

This was not a standard Stanton special. While it sped off the bat at 105.1 mph, its 33 degree launch angle gave it an estimated distance of just 335 feet, still more than enough to get out when hit into the right field corner of Yankee Stadium, where the distance is just 314 feet at the foul pole. It was Stanton’s shortest home run since at least 2015, and according to the Statcast Home Run Tracker leaderboard would not have gone out at any other major league park (though the @would_it_dong Twitter account and its Dinger Machine web page — both of which automatically pull from Statcast data — calculated that Stanton’s drive would have been out at Target Field, which is 328 feet down the right field line, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael King is really good. If you’ve been following the Yankees or the American League this season, you probably already knew that. He’s carving hitters up, to the tune of a 0.51 ERA over 17.2 innings so far. He’s striking them out (39.7% strikeout rate) and avoiding walks (4.8% walk rate). He’s doing it in long stints (six of his eight appearances have lasted two or more innings), but he’s excelled in short bursts too.

If you’ve watched King pitch lately, what he’s doing won’t be a surprise to you. His new breaking ball – a slider/curve thing he learned from Corey Kluber last year – is the star of the show. It’s a horizontally-sweeping curveball, or perhaps a slider with unique spin characteristics, or perhaps… look, maybe you should just see one:

For all the buzz around the sweeper, which the Yankees call a “whirly”, that’s not what King is doing. He’s throwing a curveball – he gets quite a bit of transverse spin on the pitch, which most sliders don’t, and uses Kluber’s curveball grip. Due to his low-slot delivery, however, “downward” break relative to his hand works out to more or less horizontal movement. Take a look at the direction of the spin he imparts on his pitches at release:

The blue lines are what we’re after – for a righty, that’s pure glove-side spin. You can think of it as sidespin. But look at his fastballs – sidespin in the other direction. How does that work? You can try it for yourself at home. Put your arm out straight sideways, then bend your elbow at 90 degrees, so that your hand is up above your head. Imagine an arrow pointing straight down from the bottom of your palm towards your forearm. If you impart spin on the ball that makes it move in the direction of that arrow – downward from the palm – it will break nearly straight downwards. Read the rest of this entry »

I have some good news about the Yankees. Their collective 120 wRC+ is tied for first among all teams in baseball, an achievement that seems like an amalgamation of skill rather than luck. Case in point: They’re leading the league in every conceivable Statcast metric, including average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and barrel rate. By hitting baseballs at blistering speeds, the Yankees are turning them into valuable extra-base hits. It’s an ideal process, especially in a season where said hits have been harder to come by.

Next, I have some not-as-good news about the Yankees. It’s something I noticed while looking into Joey Gallo. The lefty slugger recently recorded his first two homers of the season, but his overall batting line is still under water. He’s striking out over 40% of the time, and the little contact he does make hasn’t returned much. You might think this is because Gallo goes after pitches he shouldn’t à la Javier Báez, but last season, he ran one of the best out-of-zone swing rates around. The problem is that even when he’s offered an attractive pitch, he has a gruesome tendency to whiff at it. When Gallo slumps, he doesn’t do so in a manner that’s even the slightest bit flattering. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

Edward Cabrera, SP, Miami Marlins
Level & Affiliate: Single-A Jupiter Age: 24 Overall Rank: 109 FV: 50
Line: 4IP, 1H, 0R, 3BB, 7K

Notes
Cabrera was shut down in early April with a biceps issue. This came a few days after throwing three impressive spring training frames against the Nationals, during which he notched three strikeouts, including one to Nelson Cruz. His stint on the IL, though relatively brief, is the latest entry in what has been a long history of injuries since his professional career began in 2016, but he put forth a strong showing in his first start of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may already know, I’m something of an intentional walk connoisseur here at FanGraphs. When questionable ones occur, particularly in the playoffs, I like to delve into the specifics to figure out which ones are good decisions, which ones are close calls, and which ones are just plain silly.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Joe Maddon’s bases-loaded intentional walk, which was about as far on the silly end of the spectrum as you can get. Today, I’m going to cover the other notable intentional walk of the week: the Yankees giving Miguel Cabrera a free pass on Thursday. Then, as a bonus, I want to talk about Cardinals manager Oli Marmol and a clever thing he did that might escape notice if you aren’t watching closely.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees and Aaron Judge found a way to bring extra drama to Opening Day. Even with an additional 24 hours of negotiations due to the postponement of their season opener against the Red Sox, the team did not reach an agreement on a contract extension with the slugger in time to meet his self-imposed deadline. Judge, who turns 30 on April 26, had said that once the 2022 season opened, all negotiations would cease, and he maintained that stance on Friday morning amid a flurry of reports detailing the Yankees’ offer, telling the assembled media, “First pitch is at 1:08 pm.”

His status did not change, and so on Friday night Judge told The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, “At the end of the year, I’ll be a free agent. I’ll get to talk to 30 teams. The Yankees will be one of those 30.”

“I’m just disappointed because I think I’ve been vocal about — I want to be a Yankee for life, and bring a championship back to New York,” Judge told reporters after Friday’s 6-5 win. “I want to do it for the fans here. This is home for me, and not getting it done right now stings, but I’ve got a job to do on the field and I’ve got to shift my focus to that now and go play some ball.”

In a break from the way that the Yankees normally do business, general manager Brian Cashman laid out the offer to Judge “for transparency purposes” rather than rely on leaks to the media that he would have to confirm. According to Cashman, the team offered Judge seven years at $30.5 million per year, plus $17 million for this year, his final one before free agency, for a total package of $230.5 million. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite yearly preseason pieces is also my most dreaded: the breakout list. I’ve been doing this exercise since 2014, and while I’ve had the occasional triumph (hello, Christian Yelich), the low-probability nature of trying to project who will beat expectations means that for every time you look smart, you’re also bound to look dumb for some other reason.

Let’s start things off with a brief look at last year’s breakout hitter list and see how they fared.

• Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: .311/.401/.601, 166 wRC+, 6.7 WAR
• Alex Kirilloff: .251/.299/.423, 93 wRC+, 0.3 WAR
• Kyle Schwarber: .266/.374/.554, 145 wRC+, 3.1 WAR
• Gary Sánchez: .204/.307/.423, 99 wRC+, 1.5 WAR
• J.P. Crawford: .273/.338/.376, 103 wRC+, 3.1 WAR
• Nathaniel Lowe: .264/.357/.415, 115 wRC+, 1.6 WAR
• Ryan McMahon: .254/.331/.449, 95 wRC+, 2.5 WAR
• Luis Urías: .249/.345/.445, 111 wRC+, 2.7 WAR

On the plus side, nobody really embarrassed me. Alex Kirilloff came closest, but in his defense, he was playing with a wrist injury that eventually required surgery. Read the rest of this entry »