Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pointing out that the strike zone graphic used by TBS is not representative of the actual strike zone used in MLB, and is giving fans the wrong impression of the quality of the home plate umpiring in the playoffs. After nearly every NL game, we’ve seen a cascade of calls roasting that night’s umpire for making a bunch of bad calls, but in most cases, PITCHF/x has confirmed that the umpires are calling the same pitches they always call.

Today, though, I’m not going to defend last night’s umpire. Ted Barrett worked the plate for the Cubs/Mets game, and his zone was atrocious.

Those two called strikes off the plate to left-handed batters — one against Lucas Duda, one against Curtis Granderson — are bananas. That down and away pitch that Pedro Strop threw to Kelly Johnson is almost never called a strike either.

But Mets pitchers got their own share of nutty calls as well, especially at the bottom of the zone. Anthony Rizzo, Kyle Schwarber, and Chris Denorfia all had strikes called on them on pitches so far down that they shouldn’t have been reasonably expected to swing. And Kyle Hendricks took a pitch from deGrom at the very edge of even the shifted right-handed zone, because apparently a pitcher hitting against another team’s ace also needs a huge strike zone to contend with.

Barrett’s zone went both ways, and he wasn’t favoring one team or another, but last night’s strike zone was worth complaining about. This wasn’t just TBS misleading viewers with a poorly drawn graphic. Ted Barrett’s strike zone last night really was enormous.

Walking around Wrigley Field before tonight’s game had a different feel to it. The everything-is-possible electricity that permeated last week’s NLDS showdown against St. Louis was gone. There was energy in the air, but it was a nervous energy. Cubs fans seemed apprehensive, if not a little bit scared.

You couldn’t blame them. Not only was their team down two-games-to-none, the losses came with Jon Lester and Jake Arrieta on the mound. The bats were turned stone cold by Mets’ pitchers at frosty Citi Field, and now they were up against Jacob deGrom, the best of a talented New York staff.

They cheered to mask their fear. Prior to the first pitch, a “Let’s Go Cubbies” chant drowned out the introduction of the New York starters. Solo homers by Kyle Schwarber and Jorge Soler proceeded to raise the roof. The annulment of a Mets run – courtesy of a ball-in-the-ivy ground-rule – elicited one of the loudest sighs of relief you’ll ever hear.

Beyond that, the noise appeared almost obligatory in nature. It was cheering for the sake of cheering. Base runners were at a premium for the home team all night, while the visitors had no shortage of traffic. Sloppiness also marred the effort. Chicago didn’t play a clean game, with a Trevor Cahill wild pitch the most egregious of the mistakes. It brought in a run, and the Cubs – despite their best efforts – weren’t scoring many of their own.

The atmosphere was subdued by the later innings. Smatterings of applause greeted the final outs of the top of the ninth inning, but nothing more. It was uncomfortably quiet in the bottom half. The Mets won 5-2, but it felt like 10-2.

Drizzle is falling as fans file out of the ballpark. It’s only fitting, because while a glimmer of hope remains, their fears are coming to fruition. The Cubs are on the brink of elimination.

Because Homer provides little in the way of psychological commentary and also because Achilles isn’t a real person, it’s hard to know precisely how the latter feels during Book XXI of the Iliad while avenging the death of Patroclus by filling the River Scamander with so many Trojan dead that the river itself is compelled to assume human form and reprimand the hero, as follows:

“Achilles… My fair waters are now filled with corpses, nor can I find any channel by which I may pour myself into the sea for I am choked with dead, and yet you go on mercilessly slaying. I am in despair… trouble me no further.”

As I say, it’s difficult to understand precisely what sort of redemptive pleasure Achilles experiences during that episode — but also less difficult, now, for those of us who have witnessed Jose Bautista (first) homering and (then) hurling his bat into whatever lays beyond the eternal mise en scene.

Footage robbed without shame from Gregor Chisholm of the Internet.

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Here’s a weird thing about Marcus Stroman’s slider: it has more drop than his curveball. We still call it his slider because it goes four miles per hour faster than his curve, but the curve has slowly tilted sideways. Or, to say it better, Stroman’s other pitches have tilted downwards and the curve has stayed about the same.

Check out Stroman’s release points. For every pitch other than the curve and the sinker, Stroman is an inch or two more over the top this year.

In related news, all of Stroman’s pitches — other than the curve — are dropping more this year.

Marcus Stroman Vertical Movement by Year

Year	Fourseam	Sinker	Change	Slider	Curve	Cutter
2013	9.1	0.0	6.4	-0.7	-3.9	4.3
2014	9.2	3.3	3.9	-1.4	-2.3	4.9
2015	8.6	1.8	3.6	-2.0	-1.1	4.0

SOURCE: BrooksBaseball.net

Movement = PFx_z, or vertical ‘drop’ in inches

Could this just be mucking with classification systems? Maybe. The two pitches are only three mph apart. Let’s look at the movement on both of his breaking balls in one place and see if they’ve moved from last year to this year, then. Use the filter to change years.

Yup. The slider drops more than the curve, and the curve is more horizontal this year. He’s also using the slider more this year, and the curve less. But the whiff and ground-ball rates on the curve are better than they are for the slider.

Going more over the top has increased the ground-ball rate on all but his slider, and that may be why he’s pitching today. Not going over the top as much on the curve has made that pitch more of a frisbee than a round-house curveball.

Maybe he’s still getting his feet under him, and things will change again in the future. But for now, Marcus Stroman may be the only pitcher in baseball that has a slider that drops more than his curveball. PITCHf/x classifies his pitches a little differently, but we can forgive that system. He’s got a strange mix.

There’s no reason, really, for FanGraphs.com to publish the footage one finds here of the improbably majestic home run authored earlier tonight by Kyle Schwarber during his club’s postseason victory over St. Louis — no reason, that is, because all relevant sports-media outlets have already examined the home run and its attendant majesty. And yet, what one finds here is that same footage, reproduced once again for the public and unaccompanied by anything in the way of particularly insightful analysis.

“Pourquoi?” a Frenchman might ask in French. And “Pourquoi pas?” a second Frenchman might reply. Because the French are contrary by nature, is probably why. But also because, yes, there’s little incentive not to have done it.

The overriding theme of this year’s NLDS is age and the passage of time. That calendar dynamic is two-fold, and it pertains solely to the team advancing to the NLCS. The Chicago Cubs are a talented kiddie corps. The Chicago Cubs haven’t won the World Series since 1908.

If baseball’s lovable losers (or, to some, not-so-lovable losers) extend their goat-exorcizing quest even further, overkill is inevitable. You’re excused if you think we’ve reached that point already. Far more electronic ink has been spilled on the Cubs than on the team that finished with the best record in either league. St. Louis is good again. St. Louis is back in the postseason. Ho-hum.

It’s not fair, really. But it is understandable. Fresh faces that teem with talent is a good storyline, and truth be told, 107 years is a long time.

Jason Hammel started for the home team, and predictably it wasn’t pretty. The journeyman right-hander had a 5.37 ERA over his last 13 outings, and according to catcher Miguel Montero, “in the second half, he kind of started elevating his fastball a little bit more; obviously you don’t want him to do that.”

The wind – as it was last night when eight balls left the yard – was blowing out. Read the rest of this entry »

What I like about this little InstaGraphs section is that it allows for plays to be highlighted even if they don’t turn out all that important. Given what the Cubs pulled off Monday, it would be weird to dedicate a whole front-page post to a home run hit by Jason Heyward. Not a lot of people even clearly remember a home run being hit by Jason Heyward. The Cubs did well to smother the memory of that dinger with all the dingers of their own. On InstaGraphs, though, I don’t have to care what matters. An InstaGraphs post is almost like a footnote. Let’s you and I watch a footnote.

The Cardinals made it a game again when Heyward went out and clobbered an outside breaking ball. Though the Cubs wouldn’t relinquish the rest of their lead, it did at least make for some nervous moments. And you’ll notice it wasn’t a bad pitch. It wasn’t even a strike. Jake Arrieta threw Heyward a 1-and-1 ball, and Heyward took it the other way for a homer. Arrieta had previously allowed one home run over the span of 412 plate appearances. A run like that is made all the more remarkable when you realize sometimes home runs can just be the result of simple bad luck.

According to PITCHf/x, the home-run pitch was 15 inches away from the middle of home plate, meaning it was more than six inches off the outer edge. That makes it the third-most outside pitch hit for a home run by a lefty in 2015. Heyward is topped only by Chris Davis and Freddie Freeman, and you can see screenshots below:

The thing that stands out here — Davis was pretty far up in the box. Freeman was pretty far up in the box. Heyward was more in the middle, so he had to reach out that much more, accomplishing something close to full extension. While Davis and Freeman hit pitches that were more outside, by a little bit, Heyward’s might’ve been the most outside, relative to his body. I don’t know. It was far away, is the point.

He also hit a line drive, instead of a classic dinger. According to the ESPN Home Run Tracker, under ordinary conditions, Heyward’s home run would’ve left precisely one major-league ballpark. Arrieta has now allowed 11 home runs in 2015 — three of them had just enough juice to leave one stadium. Home runs can come out of nowhere. Even when you, the pitcher, have done nothing to deserve them. Sometimes good pitches get hit out. Sometimes pitches that are just plain well out of the zone get hit out. The most amazing thing about Arrieta is that this hasn’t happened more. Maybe now it’s going to. Baseball is stupid like that. Baseball always wants to prove that it’s smarter than you.

That’s a review of what Jason Heyward did. It mattered for some minutes. No one’ll remember it a week or two from now. Yesterday, it was outnumbered by other extraordinary things. Further extraordinary things will take place in the weeks ahead. So many little things are remarkable, and baseball just ties them all together and advances from one to the next almost without ever stopping. And you thought baseball needed to move faster.

The sun was still out when the first pitch was thrown in today’s Cubs-Cardinals Game 3. That’s as it should be. Wrigley Field is all about day baseball, and with a five o’clock start, the skies didn’t begin to darken until the fourth inning.

Right from the get-go, the crowd was sonorous, and without need of “Get loud!” prompting from the video board. A fervent fan base with 100-plus years of woe in their collective conscience doesn’t require help. (Not that kind, anyway.) And kudos to Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts for recognizing it. As the Chicago Tribune’s Paul Sullivan pointed out, Ricketts has decreed that no such artificial nonsense will besmirch the NL’s oldest venue.

Wrigley roared as one when Kyle Schwarber homered in the second. Two innings later, Starlin Castro equaled the rookie’s feat and the fans roared again. When Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo went back-to-back in the fifth, it was downright deafening. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Braves made an announcement, and I happen to be part of it.

Wednesday will be my last day as Lead Prospect Analyst here at FanGraphs, as I’ve accepted the position of Assistant Director of Baseball Operations with the Atlanta Braves. The staff has been great to work for, particularly the guys who decided to take a chance on me: David Appelman and Dave Cameron. They gave me all the resources I asked for and all the support I could imagine for my sometimes odd-sounding ideas.

I think we accomplished something special in setting at least a new template for covering scouting and player development, if not a new standard. My 2016, 2017 and 2018 draft rankings will come out tomorrow, and I have one more project that will be rolling out soon. I was only able to finish about half of what I had set out to accomplish here, so I’m disappointed that I left some of my ambition on the table, but the opportunity I was given for a new challenge was too great to pass up.

In my new job, I’ll be working with arguably the best group of scouts in baseball and coming aboard under new GM John Coppolella. I’ve known Coppy for a while, dating back to when he was my boss with the Yankees for my first baseball operations job, in 2005, while I was still in college. I’m all in on his vision for running a front office and also building an organization, with his fingerprints already all over the organization. John Schuerholz and John Hart are legends and they have arguably the most impressive resumes in the game; I’m thrilled to work for them. It also seemed like the office could use a guy not named John.

I’ll be brief explaining my role, as I’ll be there to learn and contribute behind men with more experience than me. In short, I’ll be doing many of the same things I did for FanGraphs: contributing to the draft and international signings, scouting the minor leagues and doing what I can to improve the big league product, all of these from both a scouting and analytics perspective. I am grateful for everything the FanGraphs family has done for me and to you guys for reading and participating in the process. I look forward to this new challenge and will do everything I can to ensure that it includes multiple World Series titles.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and for all the feedback — positive and negative — that you’ve offered me over my time here. Keep reading FanGraphs, and start watching the Braves; I’m looking forward to what both organizations do going forward.