Before Cleveland Indians right-hander Mike Clevinger exited his second start of the season with an injury, he was throwing some of the most dominant stuff in baseball. He left his April 9 start against the Toronto Blue Jays with five innings of one-hit baseball under his belt, and over his first two starts combined, he had allowed no runs, surrendered just four walks, and struck out 22 batters in 12 innings. A strained muscle in his upper back, however, meant that the Indians would have to wait more than two months for him to return to the mound. In his first two starts back in June, he got roughed up to the tune of 12 runs allowed on eight hits, six walks, and nine strikeouts in 6.1 combined innings. Then the calendar turned to July, and Clevinger turned back into the version of himself he teased in April.

Since July 1, Clevinger has made nine starts. He has thrown 54 innings, struck out 74 batters, walked just 14, and allowed four home runs. His ERA of 2.17 in that timespan ranks 10th in the majors, but his 2.33 FIP is second, and his 2.55 xFIP is first. That kind of performance is no mere return to being healthy for the 28-year-old veteran; It’s the best he’s ever looked.

Clevinger finished his first three seasons in the big leagues with FIPs of 4.86, 3.85 and 3.52, respectively. In 72 innings this season, he’s lowered that all that way down to 2.47. That figure is weighted down by the lowest walk and home run rates of Clevinger’s career, but mostly, it’s down because his strikeout rate has skyrocketed. After entering 2019 with a career K/9 rate of around 9.5, he’s elevated that figure to over 13 to this point in the season.

That explosion in strikeouts coincides with a major step forward for Clevinger’s stuff in just the past year or so. Over the past three years, he has seen his average fastball velocity increase each season — not an easy task, considering that he didn’t break into the majors until he was 25 years old. Most pitchers lose a tick or two in velocity between their mid and late 20s, but Clevinger has gone the other direction. According to Statcast’s pitch data, from the beginning of the 2017 season until June 9, 2018, Clevinger registered an average fastball velocity of at least 94 mph in just two games, both of which were relief appearances. In starts, he tended to average 92-93 mph. Then, on June 14, his average fastball velocity spiked to 94.9 mph in a seven-inning, one-run, 10-strikeout performance against the White Sox. His average velocity was above 94 mph in three of his next five starts, and reached at least 93.9 mph in each of his final nine starts of the season. In those nine starts, his ERA was 2.03, and he struck out 63 batters in 53.1 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, and welcome to another edition of my Thursday chat. Lunch (dumplings) is on the way, my piece on Bo Bichette is in the pipeline [now live], and here’s a GIF of Kermit the Frog and Vincent Price, for no reason at all.   Ben Greenman @bengreenman Apropos of nothing. 22 Aug 2019

12:05

Jay Jaffe: I think they’d be foolish not to. For as exciting as home runs are, they’ve got a PR problem on their hands now, and the so-called steroid era taught us that MLB gets very squeamish when the sanctity of home run records is threatened. I doubt they’ll be transparent about it, but I think we’ll see some kind of attempt to return to more normal levels.

12:07

Jay Jaffe: No. Maybe if the contract was up at the end of this year, but bypassing two more years and a total of $59 million to keep it .300? Nobody cares about batting average that much.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Justin has previously written at The Hardball Times, among other outposts of the baseball internet, including The Good Phight and Baseball Prospectus. He’ll now add contributing to FanGraphs to that list. We’re excited to welcome him.

This dance only has a couple moves, and they go like this:

One partner, the coach, mutters or shouts an invitation for the other partner, the umpire, to dance with him. The umpire should not — and likely won’t — accept.

Not at first.

He must listen, certainly, and he must hear. He must register every mean or vile thing that comes out of the coach’s mouth. But he must also not hear them. Because it is not time to make his move.

Not yet.

It’s still the coach’s turn to dance. He flails his arms. He stomps his feet. And then, finally, the umpire makes two moves — the only two he’s got.

The first one can be a few things: A whisper. A head cock. Maybe a request for the coach to dance a little longer. Just one more step. Just one more word. Just so the ump can see if he’ll do it.

And if the coach obliges, the ump makes his other move.

He points up and out at the horizon, and tells the coach the dance is over. He can go off somewhere in the direction the ump just pointed. It doesn’t matter where. But he’s got to go now. Because the dance is done, even though the music’s still playing.

With all the chest-pounding, finger-pointing, eye-bulging, and hands-on-hipping we see from major league umpires, it can appear a less graceful, a less coordinated dance than it actually is. But down in the little leagues, all of the mental alertness and situational awareness umpiring requires can be, by necessity, more clearly on display. Read the rest of this entry »

After finishing up some research noting the wide gap between the quality of relief innings depending on the importance of the situation this season, it felt necessary to take a similar look at team performance. If teams were deploying less-good relievers in low leverage situations and good ones in high leverage situations, it could distort our sense of the quality of a bullpen when looking at overall numbers.

We’ll start with a pretty generic view of bullpens this year, with FIP by team:

The Cardinals have the lowest FIP of any bullpen this season, as the group as a whole has pitched very well. The Rays coming in second and first in the American League is somewhat of a surprise given their use of an opener in half their games; they are losing about 60 good relief innings and replacing them with around 180 good-but-not-as-good starting pitching-type innings. The teams fall down in a nice cascade the rest of the way, with the Baltimore Orioles providing a a very heavy base at the bottom of baseball.

But not all innings are created equal, and some of the innings pitched by bullpens are more important than others. If we separate meaningful innings (medium leverage and high leverage) from less important innings (low leverage), we can get a sense of how good a team’s bullpen is when it matters. This also could provide a better sense of which teams might be better prepared for the playoffs, given the consolidation of relief innings in October:

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 868

I welcome FanGraphs lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen back to the program. We contemplate surprisingly expensive adult hobbies before Eric details his recent amateur scouting trip through various Southern California showcases, including Area Codes and the Perfect Game All-American Classic, while I share some take aways from a weekend spent at SaberSeminar. We close with a discussion of the Arizona Fall League, and a quick draft of Fall League logos.

For prospect-related tweets, be sure to follow Eric and the FanGraphs Prospects account. And as always, you can find the guys’ latest rankings, reports, and updates on THE BOARD.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 1 hour and 3 min play time.)

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If you’re reading this article, you’re probably not dead, and if you’re not dead, you’ve heard all the fuss about soaring home run rates. I’m not here to judge your perspective on it — I think reasonable people can disagree on how they like their baseball, though I will say that I love a good strikeout and feel pretty neutral about home runs. But I think one thing everyone wonders about is who this all helps.

It’s not the pitchers, clearly. It doesn’t seem to be the big boppers — despite the stupendous home run totals, no one is threatening to hit 73 home runs any time soon. Heck, no one has approached 61 since Giancarlo Stanton’s chase in 2017, and that was a singular event rather than a wave of history-chasing sluggers. Is it the little guys? Freddy Galvis has 20 dingers on the year — that has to count for something.

There’s a lot of chicken-and-egg going on here and no real answers to the answer of who benefits the most from the livelier ball. That’s why I looked to the minor leagues to see which players were most affected by the new ball. That study was basically inconclusive, aside from showing that players with absolutely no power are barely affected.

I thought I’d take a different look at it today. It’s hard to say who has benefited the most from the new ball, but what if we could answer a different question: who would be most affected if the league surreptitiously replaced today’s baseballs with old ones overnight? Read the rest of this entry »

Because he is still only 20 years old, Juan Soto cannot legally drink in the United States. And yet, despite his recent pubescence, he’s one of baseball’s best hitters. Last week, he became just the third player in major league history to hit 50 home runs before turning 21. He’s drawn comparisons to Miguel Cabrera. He’s even already received some Hall of Fame discussion, assuming he can stay healthy over the course of what ought to be a long career.

In a piece for MLB.com from early August, Mike Petriello noted something interesting about Soto: his consistency.

There are no cold streaks, so there’s no fevered “what’s wrong with Juan Soto?” think pieces, like we’ve done with José Ramírez. There are no wild, Bryce Harper-esque up-and-downs that demand attention. There’s just steady, regular production, the kind of thing that makes Mike Trout so outstanding, and for all of that, sometimes we consider Trout to be boring.

This paragraph from Petriello’s story piqued my interest. Is there any way to examine a player’s consistency? With Soto, I attempted to do so.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Sale is apparently done for the year. Nathan Eovaldi is back in the rotation after his stint in the bullpen went badly. Mookie Betts is answering questions about his desire to test free agency. The Red Sox’s playoff odds look like the base of a Bryce Canyon formation, but right now, Rafael Devers isn’t just in the midst of a breakout season at age 22, he’s one of the hottest hitters in baseball.

Over an eight-game span against the Angels, Indians, and Orioles from August 9-18, Devers went 20-for-37 with 12 extra-base hits and 14 RBI, batting .541/.575/1.081 for a 324 wRC+. On August 13 against the Indians, he went 6-for-6, the first Red Sock to collect six hits in a game since Nomar Garciaparra on June, 21, 2003; four of those hits were doubles. He began the next night with a pair of hits off Shane Bieber, including a homer, to run his streak to eight straight. On Sunday, he had four hits, running his season total of four-hit games to four, one fewer than major league leader Charlie Blackmon. Unsurprisingly, Devers was named the AL Player of the Week on Monday.

Such is the nature of hot streaks that as soon as I started writing this, Devers went 0-for-4, and to be fair, one can find recent stretches — all of them relatively small sample sizes — where Gio Urshela or Aristides Aquino or Alex Bregman had better numbers, but the larger point is that the kid is in the midst of a great season during which he’s shown significant improvements on both sides of the ball. Devers entered Monday ranked second in the AL in slugging percentage (.596), third in batting average (.332), tied for fifth in wRC+ (147), 10th in on-base percentage (.380), and tied for 11th in homers (27th). His 5.5 WAR was tied with Bregman, trailing only teammate Xander Bogaerts (5.6) and you-know-who, Mike Trout (8.3). Read the rest of this entry »