Nathan Eovaldi hasn’t pitched in a major league game since April 17, and he won’t until sometime after the All-Star break, but this week, before even beginning a rehab assignment, he’s been cast as a potential solution for one of the Red Sox’s biggest weaknesses: their bullpen. On Tuesday, in the aftermath of the team’s drubbing by the Yankees in the two-game London Series — during which that bullpen was torched for 21 runs and 23 hits in 12.1 innings — manager Alex Cora and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski announced plans to use Eovaldi as their closer, a job the 29-year-old righty has never held before.
Eovaldi, who is recovering from arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies in his right elbow, struggled with his command and control while making just four starts in April, getting hit to the tune of a 6.00 ERA and 7.12 FIP. That comes after last year’s strong rebound from his second Tommy John surgery, during which he threw 111 innings with a 3.81 ERA, 3.60 FIP, and 2.2 WAR. Integrating a relatively new cut fastball into his arsenal, he set career bests with a 22.2% strikeout rate and 4.4% walk rate. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out last November, his penchant for pounding the strike zone with such precision is rare among pitchers with such high velocity — and oh, can he bring it. According to Pitch Info, his average fastball velo of 97.4 was tied for third among all starters with at least 50 innings.
Eovaldi has rarely pitched out of the bullpen during his eight-year major league career, not only never notching a save in eight regular season relief appearances — four with the Dodgers as a rookie in 2011, three with the Yankees in an exile from the rotation in 2016, and one last year — but never even pitching in a save situation.
That said, he shined amid his crash course in high-leverage relief work last October, making four appearances during Boston’s championship run, two of them in save situations and one in extra innings. He threw 1.1 scoreless innings in front of Craig Kimbrel in the ALCS Game 5 clincher against the Astros, two days after making a strong six-inning start, then added scoreless innings in Games 1 and 2 of the World Series against the Dodgers, and pitched the final six innings of the 18-inning epic Game 3, taking the loss when he served up a solo homer to Max Muncy but winning the hearts of New England for his gutsy, 97-pitch effort. That was the only earned run he allowed in 9.1 relief innings; he yielded four hits and walked one while striking out seven.
Kiley McDaniel: Hello from North Carolina! Following around college Team USA and the Cubans for a few more days before I head to Cleveland for the Futures Game and our FG live event
Kiley McDaniel: the J2 edition of THE BOARD has confirmed, non VZ bonuses and the minor league version has all 35+ connected players (even if they haven’t signed yet) added to team lists
12:32
Kiley McDaniel: including Jasson Dominguez at 61 overall and 1st on the NYY list
12:33
Kiley McDaniel: lastly, we have some fun stuff planned with the high speed video and Eric has seen Greinke, deGrom and Kershaw, so here’s his article trying to figure out other guys that do stuff similarly to Kershaw using the video: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/lets-find-some-clayton-kershaws-to-scale/
If the other projectionators are anything like me, the projections going awry, afoul, or askew is always something in the back of their minds. Ideally, one should make projections, let the rubber hit the road, and then worry about what actually happened in the fall post-mortems. As much as I’d like to do that, when ZiPS makes an aggressive projection in one direction or the other, especially one that departs from the consensus of the other projection systems, I can’t help but look over my shoulder. Yesterday, I looked at pitchers for whom ZiPS missed the mark. Today, I consider the other side.
Among hitters, no projection has haunted my dreams as much as Juan Soto’s. Yes, Juan Soto was a superstar in 2018. Yes, he was just 19 when he destroyed the National League. Yes, everybody loves him as a player, not just the projection systems. However, in this case, ZiPS went out on a bit of a limb with Soto. Rather than the typical curmudgeonly regressing-toward-the-mean, ZiPS saw Soto playing even better, projecting a ninth-place finish in WAR among position players. Soto hasn’t been a disappointment, and ZiPS hasn’t been totally wrong, but the modest 23-point differential between ZiPS and reality grows larger once you consider that ZiPS missed low on the level of offense around the league.
It’s interesting to see where ZiPS differed the most from the other three projection systems used here. Do note that the “Consensus OPS” will vary slightly from what you see in the following tables, as ZiPS is not included in these consensus stats. ZiPS in 2019 tended to like a lot of the mid-20s “interesting” power prospects while simultaneously liking middling young catchers less than the other systems. That’s something that hadn’t come up in previous seasons, so I’m curious to see whether it continues and what it means. The data used by ZiPS versus that used by the other systems means it isn’t always going to be an apples-to-grenades comparison.
As with the pitchers, ZiPS is very close in accuracy to the consensus projections, but slightly behind (again, as I expect it to be). For the bias-adjusted projections, the consensus has an RMSE (root-mean-square error) of 0.1072 in OPS compared to ZiPS’ .1076. If these were the end-of-year results, we’d all be very depressed, but half-year stats are quite volatile!
Everyone liked Fernando Tatis Jr. over the long haul prior to his debut, but it was an open question whether or not everything would click in 2019. Everything has clicked in 2019. It’s easy to forget that Tatis only played a little more than half of a season in Double-A in 2018, and missed significant time due to a broken thumb. That he has succeeded does not mean it was a certainty coming into the season, so I’ll live with being wrong here. In a way, Tatis’ explosion reminds me of Hanley Ramirez’s back in the day. Not that Tatis and Hanley are or were comparable players, but the magnitude of their respective rookie explosions is similar.
What will haunt me is the Gurriel projection. The consensus was wrong on Gurriel, but if you scroll up to the first chart, ZiPS was really, really wrong on Gurriel. What makes it even more maddening is that I’m still not sure why. Gurriel’s launch angle is up and he’s hitting more barrels, but he’s also exhibiting this weird combination of swinging at fewer pitches and making even less contact than in 2018. ZiPS is coming around on Gurriel, and his rest-of-season projection now stands a stunning 73 points of OPS above his preseason projection. If we used the full-on ZiPS rather than the simpler in-season model that increase would be 94 points! The computer understands the improvement better than I do apparently.
ZiPS liked Joey Gallo more than the consensus, but still undershot Gallo’s OPS (so far) by more than 100 points. I can at least get my head around Gallo’s improvement. While a .391 BABIP is unlikely to be sustainable, there’s been a real change in his approach at the plate. In 2018, Gallo swung at 32.2% of pitches outside the strike zone; that ranked him 152nd in baseball if we use 300 plate appearances as our cutoff. In a single year, he’s cut off nearly a third of that, with his 22.5% ranking 21st-best among players with 150 plate appearances. While he’s also swinging at fewer pitches in the strike zone, the dropoff isn’t to the same degree. Even if his BABIP drops precipitously from .391, it may not drop down to previous levels. Gallo had a .250 BABIP in 2017 and a .249 BABIP in 2018, but the ZiPS model for BABIP that uses hit ball data thinks he “ought to” have put up a .301 BABIP over that period. That’s the largest deviation among hitters, suggesting that there was some hidden upside in there. ZiPS only projected a .273 BABIP — the longer a player underperforms, the more likely ZiPS is to believe reality rather than the estimate — but now thinks he’s somewhere around .300 again.
Baseball’s having a low-ball moment. Using Statcast’s strike zone, the rate at which home runs are being hit on low pitches is up 62% from 2018. 409 balls below the strike zone were hit for homers last year; this year we’re already at 347! Does this have an effect on the projections? Looking at the projections as a whole, there’s a real relationship between a hitter’s low-ball hitting ability and him beating the 2019 projections. This is something to come back to in the season’s post-mortem. The number of golf ball homers being hit would make a 1970s hitting coach cringe!
Oh, J-Ram, did you anger a sorcerer? Unless I missed something, if Ramirez’s season ends up with this OPS, it will be the least accurate projection for a batter coming off a five-WAR season in ZiPS history. Now, ZiPS only goes back to the early years of the millennium, but still, that’s not a feather in ZiPS’ cap.
Naturally, coming off a drug suspension, there are eyebrows being raised at Robinson Canó’s disappointing season in New York. It’s tempting to take the bait and worm out of a bad projection, but with nearly 15 years of drug testing, ZiPS still can’t find a pattern of group over-performance or underperformance based on the timing of a drug suspension. I think the more boring story — that a 36-year-old middle infielder is declining rapidly — is the more accurate one.
Danny Jansen fits in the category of “wrong, but in a very weird way.” ZiPS was relatively negative on Jansen coming into the season, projecting a .243/.332/.385 line, a full 61 points of OPS below what the fans estimated. Coming off a .247/.342/.432 debut and a strong performance in Triple-A, people expected more. Readers north of the border let me have it (though politely, because Canada). ZiPS turned out to be wrong, but in the opposite direction: Jansen now at .196/.278/.314 for the Jays.
Paul DeJong will represent the St. Louis Cardinals in next week’s All-Star Game. He’ll do so with solid, albeit unspectacular, offensive numbers. The 25-year-old shortstop is slashing .260/.344/.455, with 13 home runs and a 110 wRC+. Thanks in part to plus defense, he leads the Redbirds with 2.9 WAR.
Two years ago, in an interview that ran here at FanGraphs, DeJong discussed the mental side of hitting. This past weekend, the Illinois State University graduate — his degree is in biology — sat down for a far-wider-ranging conversation about his craft.
———
David Laurila: How would you describe your hitting approach?
Paul DeJong: “My general approach is to hit something hard through the middle. I’m usually looking for a fastball that I can hit gap-to-gap; not pull, not oppo, but kind of through the middle. That gives me the best chance of adjusting to different speeds and different locations. I’m able to open up, or if I’m late, I still have time to keep it fair.”
Laurila: Something I’ve been asking players about is the idea of an A-swing, and whether hitters have multiple swings.
DeJong: “Hitters absolutely have multiple swings. For instance, if you get fooled on a breaking ball, you’re kind of adjusting your body. But for me, it’s more about keeping my hands back. If you do that, you can drift forward with your body — you’ll be off balance out front — but if your hands are still back, you’re able to deliver the barrel, still put the ball in play hard.”
I’m here today to tell you about a player who has been hitting the ball tremendously hard of late. That’s nothing new — it’s a common genre of FanGraphs article. You know the deal, because I’ve written plenty of them this year already. Josh Bellis great now, Pete Alonso only hits lasers, Niko Goodrumcan apparently hit, etcetera. Inevitably, these stories catch players near a performance peak. That’s just the nature of the beast; when you look for noteworthy and exceptional performances to write about, there’s very likely some luck involved, even if the underlying statistics look good.
The ideal form of this type of article finds something that’s truly different about the player, something other than mere batted ball luck. Josh Bell’s simplified stance, for example, really is different. Even so, baseball is a game with a lot of inherent luck to it, and if you single someone out for doing tremendously well, there was probably some luck involved. Today, though, we’re going to subvert the genre. Today, let’s look at a player who is, per the trope, hitting the ball harder than ever and turning fly balls into home runs at the highest rate of his career. There’s a twist, though: Wil Myers is doing all that, but he’s also having his worst season in five years. That sounds like something worth writing about.
Myers has always had power. He’s had a 30 home run season and a 28 home run season despite playing in a home park that suppresses home runs. Despite that, 2019 is seeing the highest HR/FB% of his career. (All stats are through Tuesday’s action.) His exit velocity on line drives and fly balls is in the 97th percentile of hitters with 50 air balls this year, tied with teammate Franmil Reyes. He doesn’t fare quite as well in terms of barrels per ball hit in the air, as he’s been a bit inconsistent, but he’s still in the top 20% of baseball. There are no two ways about it; Wil Myers is hitting baseballs as hard as he ever has.
So, what have the offensive rewards of Myers’ bruising new power been? He’s batting .218/.314/.399, good for a 91 wRC+. His batting average is the lowest of his career, and his OBP and slugging percentage are higher only than his disastrous 2014 Rays campaign. That batting average is especially jarring when you consider that it’s not BABIP-driven; he’s batting .316 on balls in play, higher than his career average and significantly higher than his Depth Charts projections. High BABIP and low batting average? Strikeouts have to be the culprit here, and my goodness, Myers has struck out a lot this year — 35.6%, to be exact. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley reflect on the passing of Tyler Skaggs. Then (9:57) Ben and Sam Miller banter about whether it’s better for a team to be in a division with a few good teams or a division with one great team and a few bad teams and answer listener emails about whether baseball is a strong-link sport or a weak-link sport, whether a team could benefit by tailoring its park and its roster to a homer-averse style of play, which teams they think it would have been better for baseball for Mike Trout to have been drafted by, plus Stat Blasts about Charlie Blackmon’s home/road splits and the return of vintage Coors Field, and Trout’s chances of setting the record for the longest-ever reign by an active WAR leader.
Audio intro: Built to Spill, "So" Audio outro: Paul McCartney, "4th of July"
Last Thursday, after Edwin Díaz’s meltdown in Philadelphia — five runs allowed in 1/3 of an inning, including the game-tying and game-winning home runs — I tweeted about Díaz’s 2019 performance in comparison to his 2018 performance. I argued that Díaz wasn’t that much worse this year compared to last, citing his strikeout-to-walk numbers and his xFIP. In response, others felt that Díaz had experienced a significant drop-off, contending that an increase in hard contact allowed as well as a lower strikeout rate suggested a serious fall in performance.
This discussion is what prompted this post. My followers and I agreed on one main point: Díaz is worse this year. Where we disagreed is more complicated: Just how much worse is Díaz, and why?
First, it cannot be understated just how good Díaz was in 2018. In 73.1 innings with the Mariners, he posted a 1.96 ERA and a 1.61 FIP. His 38.2% K-BB rate was the highest among all relievers with at least 10 innings pitched, and his 3.5 WAR ranked second. Seattle sold high on Díaz, trading him (along with Robinson Cano) to the Mets in December in a seven-player deal. They received Justin Dunn and Jarred Kelenic, and while it’s far too early to declare a winner of this trade, the Mariners’ end looks quite strong so far.
This season, Díaz has been undeniably worse. As alluded to above, his strikeout rate has experienced a dip, but his K-BB rate still ranks eighth among the 174 qualified relievers through the end of June. This drop is probably not due solely to regression, but it’s still worth noting that Díaz has only fallen from the 99th to the 95th percentile in the statistic. He’s still elite in that regard. Of course, strikeouts and walks aren’t the only things that matter, but relievers have less of an opportunity (at least compared to starters) for batted ball luck to even out within one season. One bad outing, like Díaz’s against the Phillies, can influence their full season numbers pretty significantly. Díaz has allowed 17 earned runs this season (4.78 ERA). Twelve of them have come across just three outings. Read the rest of this entry »
On the heels of the record-setting free agent contract that he signed in February, Manny Machado’s career with the Padres began inauspiciously. He hit just .236/.325/.368 in March and April, and as recently as June 12 was slugging less than .400. Since then, he’s been just about the hottest hitter in baseball, and it appears that he’s turned his season around.
Off the bat, it’s worth remembering that this hasn’t been a typical season for Machado. The 26-year-old superstar agreed to terms on his 10-year, $300-million deal with the Padres on February 19, officially signed two days later, and thus got a late jump on spring training. He didn’t make his Cactus League debut until March 2, a full week into the exhibition season, and it’s fair to wonder if he was fully in shape to start the regular season. He struck out in 25% of his 120 plate appearances in March and April, a figure more than 10 points higher than last year’s 14.7%, and more than eight points above his career 16.4% mark. His 88 wRC+ for the period was the first time he left the gate with a below-average month; last year, he sizzled at a 157 wRC+ clip (.361/.448/.676) in March and April.
Machado was much better in May (.283/.365/.485, 120 wRC+), and he even cut his strikeout rate to a much more normal 16.5%. Towards the end of the month, however, he fell into a 4-for-40 slump, his worst stretch of the season. That carried into June; through the games of June 12, his line stood at .240/.329/.397 with 10 home runs and a 93 wRC+, placing him in the 25th percentile among all MLB qualifiers. Since June 13, Machado has been nearly unstoppable, batting .400/.427/.914 in 75 PA through July 1. His slugging percentage and 10 home runs in that span are both tops in the majors, while his 237 wRC+ is tops in the NL (it fell behind DJ LeMahieu’s 248 with an 0-for-2 showing in Monday’s loss to the Giants).
Through all of those ups and downs, and the aforementioned arbitrary endpoints, Machado is now batting a respectable .276/.349/.513. His 20 homers are tied for 10th in the NL, and he is on pace to surpass last year’s career-high of 37. His 124 wRC+ is tied for 25th in the league and is three points ahead of his career mark. His 2.3 WAR is tied for 20th. He spent five weeks manning shortstop in the absence of the injured Fernando Tatis Jr., where the small-sample metrics say he was slightly below average, but now back at the hot corner, he’s been above average. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I saw Dodgers lefty Clayton Kershaw in person for the first time. While he’s no longer the dominant force of nature he was at his peak — Kershaw’s fastball now sits 89-91, rather than sitting 92-94 and touching 97 as it did 2015-2017 — he’s still a very effective big league starter, on pace for a 4 WAR season, and the owner of a 3.51 xFIP across just under 100 innings pitched ahead of the All-Star break.
This is far from the first piece on this website to chronicle what makes Kershaw great as, over the last decade, he’s improved his command, and altered his pitch mix and pitching approach. What I suggest today is that part of his continued success also has to do with, simply, how he releases the baseball, and that this trait is identifiable in prospects.
It’s probably obvious to you that things beyond mere raw velocity contribute to fastball effectiveness. You can probably deduce what some of those things are through simple pattern recognition; the System Summary from this prospect list is an example of that. From having done this for a while now, there are common, visually identifiable characteristics shared by pitchers whose strikeout results outperform what we might anticipate given just their velocity, just as there are common mechanical/stuff-related attributes targeted by successful teams in the draft. (Those teams have also made mechanical and/or approach alterations to players they’ve acquired.) Spin rate, extension, vertical and horizontal approach angles, and spin direction/efficiency all play a role, too, as does command.
The more those traits serve to support vertical movement — a.k.a ‘rise’, life, carry, Z-break — the more swings and misses a fastball tends to generate. And when a fastball exhibits several of these traits, you can end up with a dominant heater despite limited velocity. Without them, I’ve been bamboozled by otherwise visually pleasing stuff. And indeed Clayton Kershaw’s fastball has some of these attributes. At 88-91, his fastball is still fine. In the mid-90s, it was utterly dominant.
The way we talk about these traits in scouting and player development is not yet entirely consistent across baseball. I was on the phone with an in-office analyst last week discussing what would eventually become this article, and we were using the same terms to describe different things, which caused us to argue for about 10 minutes before we realized we were simply miscommunicating. This video and these twoarticles provide a great foundation for understanding how pitches need to spin in order to create vertical movement. The version that has been most intuitive for me is the Rapsodo/TrackMan version, which describes spin direction by using a clock face from the pitcher’s perspective. The closer fastball tilt gets to 12:00, the more backspin it has. For the purposes of this article, I’m just looking at lefties, but you’ll be interested to know that some frequently-asked-about prospects like Zac Gallen (12:30 spin axis on the fastball), Astros RHP Jose Urquidy (91-95, up to 97, plus changeup and command, smart breaking ball usage, a 12:30 spin axis on the heater), and Ashton Goudeau (90-93, also has 12:30 spin axis, plus split/change) have some of the traits I’ve talked about.
It’s fair to watch a pitcher’s arm angle and assume that vertical arm slots create the kind of backspin we’re looking for, but we can better see the ball/hand relationship, including sub-optimal ones, using our high-speed camera, Slomie. If you didn’t read the Driveline and Laurila background articles, we’re looking for something close to pure backspin and seam uniformity. You’ll be unsurprised to see Clayton Kershaw exhibit both. At peak, he was averaging over 12 inches of Z-break on his fastball. He’s closer to 10 inches now, which is still above league average:
Spin rate is a factor here, too, and we have those for most of the minors. So based on information we have, here some lefty pitching prospects who I think also exhibit some of these Kershawian traits. I don’t anticipate any of them becoming as incredible as Kershaw, but they do possess mechanical characteristics that will enable them to get the most out of their stuff. Full scouting reports for most of these players can be found on THE BOARD.
MacKenzie Gore, San Diego Padres
Gore has all the components: the velocity, the spin axis, the seam uniformity, elite athleticism, some natural mechanical deception. He doesn’t spin his curveball as well as Kershaw, but his changeup is better. He’ll be in Sunday’s Futures Game.
Joey Wentz, Atlanta Braves
Wentz doesn’t have the quality breaking ball but his fastball plays well above it’s 88-91, and he has good changeup feel.
Ethan Small, Milwaukee Brewers
The Brewers 2019 first rounder is Kershaw’s mechanical doppelgänger. In 2019, he struck out 176 hitters in 107 innings for Mississippi State, most of them in the SEC, while sitting 88-92.
Joey Cantillo, San Diego Padres
Cantillo, a 2017 16th rounder out of a Hawaii high school, only sits about 88-92, but the life on his fastball and the quality of his secondary stuff has him missing lots of bats in the Midwest League. He hasn’t allowed more than one run in a start since April 26.
Tarik Skubal, Detroit Tigers
Skubal’s full report is on The Board. He ranks 14th in the minors in swinging strike rate.
Erik Miller, Philadelphia Phillies
He doesn’t get into his legs the way Kershaw does, and the velocity fluctuations Miller has experienced over the last year and a half is a bit concerning, but he has the pitch specifications I’ve outlined above and knows how to mix his stuff.
Burl Carraway, Dallas Baptist University
I anticipate Kiley will have high speed of Carraway in the coming days, as he’s been electric for Team USA recently, up to at least 97 with a knockout breaking ball.
Drew Dowd, Junipero Serra HS (CA) and Ross Dunn, Cottonwood HS (UT)
These were the two high schoolers at PG National whose fastballs I thought played up above their velocity for the reasons I’ve outlined above, though Dowd might be better off working with a four-seamer.
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