Around this time last year, Ken Giles fell prey to the right hook… of Ken Giles.

On May 1, while with the Astros, Giles came into a scoreless game against the Yankees. After an Aaron Judge single, Didi Gregorius double, Giancarlo Stanton strikeout, Gary Sanchez homer, and an Aaron Hicks single, Giles exited the game, which, by this point, was no longer scoreless. The Yankees had mounted a four-run lead, and Giles had only recorded a single out. One might say that, as Giles left the field, he was not happy.

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Fine, I’ll say it: The Baltimore Orioles aren’t fun to watch. The team just lost its 38th game and is on pace for a 113-loss season. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing fun about them. John Means can be fun. A lot of the fun comes from the fact that he’s not someone you would have expected to lead a starting rotation in ERA and WAR coming into the year, but he is (albeit tied with Andrew Cashner at 0.6).

Prior to the start of the 2019 season, Means only had one major league appearance and five seasons of minor league ball to his name (while spending almost two seasons in Double-A). An 11th-round pick in 2014 out of the University of West Virginia, Means was never considered to be a top prospect. He went unmentioned in our Orioles top prospects list coming into this season, for instance. Because there weren’t meany extensive reports on Means available on the internet, I asked Luke Siler of Orioles Hangout for his assessment of the left-hander as a minor leaguer.

Before the improvements, Means was that typical Triple-A depth player who performed well enough to keep fans intrigued but not well enough to merit an MLB role. The profile was a fastball topping at 92, but sitting more 89~91 mph, a loopy below average curveball, a fringe average slider and an average changeup with average command… nothing was exciting but he mixes pitches well and can land them all for strikes.

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Robert Stephenson looked done. After a rocky 2017 (4.68 ERA, 13.8% walk rate), he pitched poorly enough in 2018 spring training that the Reds sent him down to Triple-A Louisville. A vote of no confidence from the Reds, of all teams, is a bad sign for a pitcher. In 2016, the Reds finished 30th in pitching WAR; in 2017, they finished 29th. As Stephenson toiled in Louisville, Reds pitching wasn’t setting the world on fire — the 2018 team finished 26th in WAR, allowing more home runs than every team in baseball other than the Orioles.

When Stephenson returned to the majors at the tail end of 2018, things looked grim. In four appearances, he compiled a 9.26 ERA with more walks than strikeouts. His control, always a limiting factor, looked like it might be his undoing — even in a serviceable Triple-A season, he’d walked 12.2% of the batters he’d faced. As 2018 came to a close, the Robert Stephenson story seemed nearly written. Stuff-first pitching prospect can’t harness his command and never makes good on his promise? Seen that one before. As 2018 was Stephenson’s last option year, he started 2019 in the majors, but time very much felt short.

To understand why Stephenson’s middling major league career was something more than just a journeyman starter’s struggles, you have to look back to his prospect pedigree. In 2015, Kiley McDaniel rated him as the top Reds prospect. In 2016, Stephenson slipped all the way to second. At each turn, though, he showed every tool imaginable. His fastball touched the upper 90s. His curveball was drool-inducing. His changeup wasn’t quite there yet, but you could dream on it. He scuffled in a September call-up in 2016, but for the most part, he looked the part of a future impact arm.

If that was the whole arc of Stephenson’s career, it would be just another cautionary tale about toolsy high school pitching prospects. Sometimes all the stuff in the world isn’t enough, you could tell yourself. Player evaluation is hard! But fortunately for the narrative, that’s not where the story ends. The Reds had to find a place for Stephenson on their 2019 roster, so they turned to the bullpen. Control-challenged starters, after all, are often just relievers waiting to be discovered. What has Stephenson done with the opportunity? Here are the top five relievers this year when it comes to getting swings and misses.

Swinging strike rates this high mostly just look like random numbers, but stop and think for a minute about what this means. A quarter of the pitches Josh Hader throws result in swinging strikes. Not a quarter of the swings — a quarter of the pitches. Stephenson isn’t far behind with his 21.6% rate, and that’s almost as wild. If Stephenson throws five pitches, one is getting a swing and a miss. Hader is a game-breaking curiosity, a mythical bullpen beast who strikes out half the batters he faces and swings playoff series. Robert Stephenson had a 5.47 career ERA coming into this season, and there he is in second place.

Sometimes, relievers are easy to spot. Take a two-pitch pitcher who needs a little velocity boost. Give them an offseason to work on throwing with maximum effort. There you have it, a reliever in a can. So did Stephenson add three ticks to his fastball and start maxing out that wipeout curveball scouts loved so much? Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Stephenson has added a pinch of velocity this year, but he’s not a completely remade pitcher or anything. In 2017 and 2018, his four-seam averaged 93.1 mph in starting appearances. In 2019, he’s dialed it up to 94.2 mph. Maybe he hasn’t gotten a huge velocity boost from relieving, but it’s still something.

When it comes to a secondary pitch, though, Stephenson has made a change. In his 2016 debut, he threw a fastball two thirds of the time, mixing in changeups and curveballs in roughly equal measure. In 2017, he threw a slider for the first time. The pitch was more of a power curve than anything else, thrown with a curveball grip and wrist action closer to a fastball, and it immediately became Stephenson’s best pitch. Batters whiffed at nearly half of the sliders they swung at; not too shabby for a pitch he’d never thrown before.

By 2018, Bob Steve had made the slider his go-to pitch, and analysts noticed. Though he didn’t record many major league innings in 2018, he threw 40% sliders when he did. Of the 99 sliders he threw, 18 drew swinging strikes, a 40% whiff-per-swing rate that beat anything he’d ever done with his curveball. The fastball/slider combination still didn’t produce great results that season, but the bare bones of an impact reliever were there; a decent-velocity fastball, wipeout secondary stuff, a willingness to throw a ton of secondary pitches.

That fastball, however, it’s fair to say wasn’t ready for prime time. By FanGraphs’ linear-weight pitch values, his fastball has been 38 runs below average in his career. It’s hardly better using Pitch Info classifications, at 34 runs below average. These linear-weight pitch values take balls in play, strikes, and balls into account, but the problem with Stephenson’s fastball is pretty straightforward — when batters swing at it, they destroy it. This isn’t a one-year thing, a small sample artifact, or anything benign like that. Every year he’s been in the majors, his results and expected results on contact have been objectively awful.

As you can see, the fastball has been quite poor, even in 2019. Given how much his fastball has been shelled, though, Stephenson’s 2019 is even more impressive. He has a 3.96 ERA and a 2.56 FIP despite a fastball that essentially turns every batter into Cody Bellinger. How has he pulled off that trick? Well, he stopped throwing fastballs, that’s how. Take a look at the qualified relievers who have thrown the most sliders this year.

Want to limit the damage done on fastballs and leverage your excellent slider? Sometimes the solution is pleasingly straightforward — throw as few fastballs as possible, and replace them one-for-one with your best pitch. This play only works in relief, as you can’t exactly throw 60% sliders as a starter, but his slider is so good that even when batters know it’s coming, they can’t hit hit.

Stephenson’s slider is gorgeous when he throws it out of the zone. Jung Ho Kang surely has sliders on the brain here, but still bends the knee.

Keston Hiura manages to get the bat on the ball, but only barely, and the result is the same.

These are the kinds of sliders that end at-bats, and Stephenson is adept at hunting strikeouts with the pitch. He’s getting whiffs on 56% of swings against his slider, a frankly mind-boggling number. But as well as the slider plays as an out pitch, that’s not the only thing Stephenson uses it for.

When Stephenson first developed his slider in 2017, he used it in the way most pitchers use sliders. It came out late in counts as a hammer, a pitch that looked like a fastball early before falling off the table late. While he dabbled with it early in counts, it was largely a pitch to be used while ahead. This year, that dalliance with early-count sliders has become a full-blown romance. Stephenson is throwing sliders to open at-bats 62% of the time in 2019. If the count gets to 1-0, he still goes to his slider 43% of the time. 2-0? Still 42% sliders. On 2-1 counts, Stephenson throws 70% sliders. He’s using the pitch in every situation, whether it’s a traditional slider count or not.

This adjustment is a stroke of genius for someone who can’t afford to let batters tee off on his fastball. As a batter facing Stephenson, you desperately want to avoid a two-strike count, because a two-strike count against Stephenson’s slider is a sure way to end up in a Pitching Ninja GIF. Best, then, to swing at an early fastball. It’s the pitch you want to hit, after all. The next step in that game theoretical confrontation is for Stephenson to throw sliders in fastball counts, and either throw enough for called strikes or be deceptive enough that batters can’t just leave the bat on their shoulders.

Amazingly enough for a pitcher who came into 2019 with a 13.6% career walk rate, Stephenson has pretty good slider command. He’s locating 45% of his first-pitch sliders in the zone, enough that hitters can’t wait him out. His overall slider zone rate of 46% is comfortably better than average (43% for the big leagues as a whole). When he does miss the zone, he’s missing close — he already has nine swinging strikes on out-of-zone sliders to start at-bats this year, the most of any reliever and only three behind slider factory Patrick Corbin for most in the majors.

Though he throws the slider in the strike zone less often than his fastball, the slider has proven to be more effective at managing counts. For his career, he’s located 52% of his fastballs in the zone to open at-bats, a slim lead over the slider. The pitch generates almost no out-of-zone swings, though, which undoes the edge he gets from having more pitches in the zone, and that’s before we even get to what happens when batters do swing. When batters swing at fastballs, they might hit them, and with Stephenson’s fastball, you don’t want that. Take a look at Stephenson’s first pitch outcomes, both in his career prior to 2019 and in 2019.

Those balls in play are mostly fastballs, and letting batters put first-pitch fastballs into play isn’t where you want to be when your fastball is as flat as Stephenson’s. Emphasizing the slider has moved all three results the way you’d like to see them move, and even if it’s a small sample size, it’s encouraging to see such promising first-pitch numbers. The league as a whole has a .364 wOBA after a 1-0 count and a .267 wOBA after 0-1. Those 13% of plate appearances that Stephenson has moved from the 1-0 or in play bucket to the 0-1 bucket are like facing Brandon Drury instead of Ronald Acuña 13% of the time — that’ll do nicely.

Maybe you’re a skeptic. Maybe you think that anything can happen in 25 innings, that the dead can walk and a minor leaguer can look like an effective reliever, if only briefly. Maybe you’d prefer to point to Stephenson’s 3.96 ERA and say that even if this is a new skill level, a high-3 ERA reliever hardly merits a deep dive. I don’t see that, though. I see a celebrated prospect who was legitimately not good enough to stick in the major leagues by doing what he’d done his whole life. I see that celebrated prospect making up a new pitch on the fly, throwing that pitch 60% of the time, and excelling in the major leagues with it. Robert Stephenson was a cautionary tale, and now he’s an impact reliever with a hellacious put-away pitch he can throw in any count. In what has so far been a frustrating Reds season, it’s great to see a former prospect make good.

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Heading into spring training ahead of the 2018 season, there was a fair bit of optimism regarding Jorge Polanco despite a so-so 2017 campaign. He earned a starting job in 2017, but some early season struggles spiraled after a death in the family. He lost his starting position and heading into August, his 47 wRC+ was the worst in baseball among those players with at least 300 plate appearances. Polanco basically salvaged his season over those final two months by putting up a .317/.377/.553 slash line with 10 homers and a 145 wRC+ in 234 plate appearances. At 24 years old, he looked like he was building on his solid prospect status as part of a young Twins core expected to contend. An 80-game suspension for PEDs announced in spring 2018 robbed Polanco of the first half of games and the latter half of the season was rather uneventful, with a decent 110 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR. Through two months of the 2019 season, Polanco has been the best player on the team with the best record in baseball.

Jorge Polanco is hitting a robust .335/.405/.583 with a 160 wRC+ and a 2.6 WAR. That ranks eighth in all of baseball and is already half a win better than his preseason projections. After that decent half-season in 2018, it’s fair to call this season’s performance a big surprise, though it wouldn’t be fair to say he’s never done this before. Below you’ll find Polanco’s 50-game rolling wRC+ since the the 2016 season when he first got a real shot at playing time:

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Here is our latest mock draft, compiled using industry chatter from team personnel and player reps, our own in-person scouting, and educated guesses informed by how we believe individual teams have operated recently. For more information on the players mentioned below, head over to The BOARD, which we’ll continue to flood with player info in the coming days, as well as our first two mocks. New Jersey prep RHP Jack Leiter (Vanderbilt commit, son of Al Leiter) is the only player who definitely belongs in the top 78 picks on talent that isn’t in this projection, as he’s the most likely top talent to go to college based on his $4+ million asking price.

We’ll do two more mock before Day 1 of the draft kicks off — one on Monday morning, and a bare bones list of names shortly before the draft begins that evening. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Rays’ four-man outfield against Cavan Biggio and the gradual ascendance of four-man outfields across the league, Sam’s belated thoughts on the Mets and baseball in Avengers: Endgame, a few underappreciated aspects of the late Bill Buckner’s career, and the record number of MLB debuts this decade by sons of former big leaguers (including the return of star-caliber sons), then discuss the origins and sustainability of the Minnesota Twins’ best-in-baseball start to the season, what makes the Twins an entertaining team, Cleveland’s comparatively disastrous first two months, and more.

Audio intro: Garcia Peoples, "Four Walls"
Audio outro: Weezer, "Trampoline"

Link to picture of four-man outfield against Biggio
Link to article about Biggio’s swing change
Link to four-man-outfield instances per season
Link to Ben on the history of four-man outfields
Link to Buckner on the Fielding Runs leaderboard
Link to Buckner on the Defensive WAR leaderboard
Link to examples of the Mets in post-apocalyptic movies
Link to Travis on MLB fathers and sons
Link to Stubbs interview episode
Link to Foley’s book-signing event
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Fred Merkle, Fred Snodgrass, and Mickey Owen had it easy by comparison. In a time before television and the internet, they didn’t have to endure the endless replay of their infamous gaffes, the worst moments of their professional careers re-stoking the enmity of championship-starved fans at the press of a button. Bill Buckner, who died on Monday at the age of 69, wasn’t so lucky in that regard. While the man spent parts of 22 seasons in the majors, finished with a .300 batting average or better seven times, won a batting title, made an All-Star team, started for two pennant winners, and racked up a career total of 2,715 hits, all of that was overshadowed by the Mookie Wilson ground ball that trickled through his legs in the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The clip (find it yourself) lives on eternally, the indelible image of his miscue accompanied by the excited voice of Vin Scully in one of his most memorable calls — a thrilling moment, unless you happened to be on the wrong end of it.

Though he was just one of several players who played prominent roles in Boston’s series loss, Buckner received countless boos and even death threats for his role in prolonging the Red Sox’s decades-long championship drought. Thankfully, both he and the Red Sox faithful eventually achieved some closure and catharsis regarding the matter. After a career spent grinding through countless ankle surgeries, injuries that required him to begin treatments five hours before game time — “Billy is the only guy in the game with cauliflowered feet,” quipped the Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray in 1987 — he never lost the respect of the baseball world, and he accepted his spot in history with dignity and a measure of defiance.

According to his family, Buckner died after a battle with Lewy Body Dementia, a neurodegenerative disease that shares similarities with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Born in Vallejo, California on December 14, 1949, Buckner took to baseball so quickly as a youth that his mother falsified his birth certificate so that he could begin playing Little League a year early. At Napa High School, in addition to excelling as a lefty-swinging first baseman, he earned all-state as well as Coaches All America honors as a wide receiver. The Dodgers chose him in the second round in 1968 as part of the greatest draft haul the game has seen. In the four phases of the draft as it existed at the time, the team selected six players — Buckner, Doyle Alexander, and Tom Paciorek in the regular June draft; Davey Lopes in the January secondary phase, and Steve Garvey and Ron Cey in the June secondary phase — who would make a total of 23 All-Star teams, and signed 11 players who would combine for 235.6 WAR (Baseball-Reference’s version) at the major league level. (All of those are records according to MLB.com’s Jim Callis.) Read the rest of this entry »

The first experience I had with Will Smith was watching several people engaged in conversation about what song he should use as his walk-up music. Will’s expression implied that this was not the first time he’d heard such suggestions, but to his credit, he did settle on a few expected classics. After all, Bel Air is only about 20 miles from Chavez Ravine.

The second experience I had with Will Smith was witnessing him throwing the ball down to second base. Quick footwork and an ultra-quick release caused some wide-eyed double-takes aimed at stopwatches in the dugout at Lindquist Field in Ogden, Utah. Times ranged as low as 1.73 and few were higher than the upper-1.8’s. Smith’s athleticism and throwing ability behind the plate was immediately evident to the excited player development staff on hand.

In his first two years at his hometown University of Louisville, Smith hit a total of 15 extra-base hits in 300 plate appearances, showing good bat-to-ball skills but otherwise not a ton of offensive impact. His brief stint in the Cape Cod League after his sophomore season showed much of the same – he was a good athlete who looked like he should be able to provide value behind the plate (a position that was not familiar to Smith upon entering college, as he played the infield in high school), but not packing much punch with the bat.

Louisville’s 2016 team was loaded with draft prospects, and Smith’s performance put him in the same conversations as teammates Corey Ray, Zack Burdi, Drew Harrington, and Kyle Funkhouser. He matched his extra-base hit total from the previous two years combined in almost 100 fewer plate appearances while walking more than he struck out. His defensive prowess behind the plate was on full display as well, as he excelled while catching an impressive pitching staff that included the aforementioned Harrington and Funkhouser as starters, Burdi as a reliever, and then-sophomore Brendan McKay in the rotation.

Like many organizations, the Dodgers were enamored with Smith’s athleticism, high probability of staying behind the plate, and contact skills. The newly developing power pushed Smith’s ceiling even higher and he steadily crept his way up the draft board as the season went along and the power kept coming. The Dodgers had three first-round picks that year and used the first, the 20th overall pick, on Wisconsin high school shortstop Gavin Lux. With the second, the 32nd pick, the organization stayed within the skillset of up-the-middle players with good contact skills and selected Smith. Read the rest of this entry »