A World Series champion in 2013, Koji Uehara has called it quits.
Photo by Keith Allison.

On May 20, Koji Uehara announced his retirement from professional baseball. The news was significant for several reasons. First, it was announced during the season. Uehara admitted that he “already decided that I would quit this year, and in my mind I felt three months would be make or break.” He also cited that his fastball just doesn’t have enough to compete in NPB anymore and remarked that him being in the organization would reduce chances for other youngsters. It sounds like, all-around, Uehara has resigned to his fate of being a very old man by baseball standards. It’s sad to hear, but that’s just reality.

Second, it simply feels like an end of an era. The man pitched professionally since 1999. Sure, most major league fans weren’t familiar with him until he signed with the Baltimore Orioles in 2009, but even then, he was 33 years old. Personally, I became familiar with Uehara from his dominance in Japan and his exceptional 2006 World Baseball Classic performance (which is never to be forgotten by Korean baseball junkies like myself).

To understand Uehara’s career, it’s essential to look at his time in Japan. His interest in going to the big leagues goes all the way back to his amateur days. As an ace of the Osaka University of Health and Sports Sciences, Uehara was courted by the then-Anaheim Angels. It was said that the Angels prepared an amount of 300 million yen (just below $3 million in current currency rate) for the righty. Uehara was intrigued by it, but the Yomiuri Giants, who had coveted him for a long time, managed to convince him to stay in Japan, selecting him in the 1998 NPB Draft. Among the notable names selected in the event were other future big leaguers Kosuke Fukudome, Kyuji Fujikawa, and Daisuke Matsuzaka.

In 1999, his first professional season, Uehara set NPB ablaze with ridiculous numbers. As a 23-year old fresh out of college, the righty went 20-4 with a 2.09 ERA and 179 strikeouts versus 24 walks in 197.2 innings. He also threw a whopping 12 complete games (!) in 25 starts. He had the most wins and strikeouts and the best winning percentage and ERA, making him the quadruple-crown winner among all pitchers. He, of course, won the 1999 NPB Rookie of the Year, a Golden Glove, Sawamura Award (the NPB’s equivalent of the Cy Young Award), was named to the Best Nine, etc. Basically, Uehara had an entrance of the ages. Here’s a peek at his dominance from that season:

As a starting pitcher, he didn’t reach the same kind of brilliance he showed as a rookie, but he was still great. In 2002 for instance, he won another Sawamura Award by going 17-5 with a 2.60 ERA and 182 strikeouts versus 23 walks in 204 innings. He also garnered some stateside attention in fall 2002. In the first game of the MLB-NPB exhibition series, Uehara struck out reigning NL MVP Barry Bonds thrice. His pitching prowess also impressed former AL MVP Jason Giambi. “He had a great forkball,” he said. “He threw it hard enough that you couldn’t sit on it, and he made quality pitches all night.” Read the rest of this entry »

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What does ZiPS have for Yordan Alvarez’s translation?

Is Alvarez for real?

Do the Astros need to call up Alvarez right now?

Scattered within my weekly chat questions about cat and chili, there were quite a few questions revolving on Yordan Alvarez, who has spent the first two months of the 2019 season traumatizing minor league pitchers. So naturally, instead of answering the questions, I greedily saved the Alvarez talk for an article on the subject.

Prior to this season, Alvarez was ranked seventh in Houston’s farm system by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel on the strength of his raw power potential. Ranking seventh on the Astros says more about the team’s organizational strength than any negative about Alvarez; he’s not someone who would appear in a Fringe Five column. While with a lot of minor league outfielders, you try to see if they can stick in center as long as possible, this was never a realistic option for Alvarez, who is cut from the massive slugger template.

But if you thought he was a one-dimensional type of hitter, a Pedro Cerrano type, you’d be wrong. While it’s not believed that he’ll maintain high batting averages in the majors, I think he might hang onto better averages than many think. For one, he has an efficient, easy swing and is willing to use the entire field, making him less likely to be subject to shift abuse than some other sluggers in the majors. Just to illustrate, here’s Alvarez’s spray chart in the minors in 2019 compared to Max Kepler, a more pull-heavy left-handed hitter.

Alvarez has kept his swinging strike rate under 10% in the high minors, and in the early going, he has cut off about a quarter of his 2018 strikeout rate. His walk rate has also edged higher; Alvarez is a hitter who eats what he hunts. ZiPS uses play-by-play data to estimate a version of xBABIP that I refer to as zBABIP (you don’t win the Kewpie doll for guessing what the z stands for). Alvarez won’t keep the .424 BABIP that’s currently driving his .400 batting average in the minors, of course, but the hit data suggests he may keep quite a lot of it. Read the rest of this entry »

The list of players who have struck out 15 batters without allowing a walk in a shutout is a small one. So small that I can list them here in chronological order: Van Mungo, Luis Tiant, Dwight Gooden, Roger Clemens (twice), Kerry Wood, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez (twice), Erik Bedard, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Vince Velasquez, Jon Gray, and Shane Bieber. The Cleveland right-hander became the first pitcher since 2016 to accomplish the feat when he struck out 15 Orioles over the weekend. Perhaps the effort comes with a caveat because it was Baltimore, although the club’s 24% strikeout rate is middle of the pack and there are five teams with a wRC+ lower than the 83 currently sported by the Orioles. Bieber surprised with a strong performance last season and he looks even better this year thanks to some changes he’s made to miss more bats.

Bieber came into the league as a command artist. He doesn’t have a great fastball, but he locates it well and has a very good slider. This is what Eric Longenhagen had to say about Bieber heading into last year:

Bieber works away from righties, using his fastball and slider in sequence very effectively. He locates his slider in a spot that is equal parts enticing and unhittable, and this trait runs through a lot of the pitchers who exceed scouting expectations and make a big-league impact with just solid stuff. It’s an above-average pitch on its own but garnered an elite swinging-strike rate last year. The stuff, alone, projects to the back of a rotation, but Bieber’s ability to locate gives him a chance to be a mid-rotation arm. It’s possible he has elite command and becomes something more.

Last season, after walking seven batters in 13 minor league starts, Bieber came to the majors and continued his stingy ways by walking only 23 batters in 114.2 innings. His 3.23 FIP was great, but a .356 BABIP meant his ERA was considerably higher at 4.55 and probably raised concerns that his fastball was a bit too hittable despite good command. Nine of his 13 homers came against the fastball, and batters had a 146 wRC+ against the pitch a season ago while he threw it nearly 60% of the time. Bieber paired that fastball with a nasty slider and solid curve. He threw an occasional changeup, but it wasn’t a very good pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

The book on Luke Weaver was written before he had played a game of professional baseball. Great changeup, good fastball, no third pitch. I mean “the book” metaphorically here, but I also mean it literally. Here’s Eric Longenhagen on Weaver before the 2017 season:

“Those who have questioned Weaver’s upside (myself included) did so because, in college, he lacked a good breaking ball. Weaver’s fringey curveball remains so today, but he’s a good athlete who has developed plus command and added an average cutter to his repertoire in pro ball.”

Cardinals fans got two years of data to back up that assessment — a scintillating 2017 (3.17 FIP, 28.6% K-rate) and a frustrating 2018 (4.45 FIP, fewer strikeouts and more walks) were worth a combined 2.7 WAR, but between underperforming his FIP and losing his rotation spot in the second half of 2018, Weaver felt like a surplus arm. The changeup and sneaky good fastball were as good as advertised, but batters consistently teed off on his curve. When Weaver and top catching prospect Carson Kelly were sent to the Diamondbacks in exchange for Paul Goldschmidt, it felt like a needed change of scenery for both of them.

If the book on Weaver was written while he was still in college, it’s a safe bet that he’s had time to read that book. He has worked towards developing a better breaking ball more or less every offseason of his pro career, and 2019 was no exception. This time, though, he had technological help. He bought a Rapsodo, a portable pitch-tracking camera, and used it to work on his curve. He took his cutter (or is it a slider?) out of mothballs, telling David Laurila he was picking up the hybrid pitch after years of being mainly fastball/change/curve.
Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Pineda has always had a bit of a weak spot in his pitching profile. From his debut in 2011 until his 2017 ended with Tommy John surgery, he threw 680 innings while allowing 91 total home runs. That translated to a 1.20 HR/9, putting Pineda in the bottom 20th percentile in the league among pitchers with at least 650 innings pitched.

Despite the eye-catching rate, the home runs were a manageable issue; Pineda’s FIP in those years was a fine 3.60. More than avoiding home runs, Pineda needed the health he enjoyed between 2015-16 to be an average starter. Even setting aside the Tommy John, his time in the majors is riddled with stints on the disabled list for a variety of maladies. Now in 2019, with the health of his arm finally restored, the home run issues looms larger.

After his first nine starts of the year, Pineda is leading the majors in home run rate among qualified pitchers with a 2.49 HR/9. Following his last start, he became the first Minnesota Twins pitcher to allow at least three home runs in consecutive outings since Bartolo Colon in 2017.

This is still a small sample, and Pineda’s home run rate will probably go down as he keeps pitching. However, given his previous home run issues, the recent spike merits a closer look.

First, let’s examine his fastball. Of the 13 home runs he has allowed this year, six have been against fastballs in the middle or upper part of the zone. Pineda has always liked to throw his fastball in the zone, challenging hitters with good gas, and he has been doing exactly that this year. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox called up Michael Chavis on April 19, they were 6-13 and had no shortage of troubles. Every member of their rotation save for David Price was regularly being lit up like a pinball machine, and their no-name bullpen was shaky as well. Reigning AL MVP Mookie Betts was hardly himself offensively, and both Jackie Bradley Jr. and Steve Pearce were impossibly cold. Amidst all of that, the team’s hole at second base was just one more problem, albeit similar to last year, when even replacement-level play in the absence of the injured Dustin Pedroia did little to prevent them from winning a franchise-record 108 games as well as the World Series.

Just over one month since Chavis’ arrival, the Red Sox are now over .500 (25-22). Their pitching has come around, as has Betts, and their leading hitter in terms of both slugging percentage (.592) and wRC+ (156) is Chavis, a 23-year-old righty-swinging rookie with “a bit of a beer-keg physique” (h/t Baseball Prospectus), one who had never played second base before this season. His nine homers (in 113 PA) is tied with J.D. Martinez for second on the team behind Mitch Moreland’s 12. He homered in Boston’s wins both Sunday against the Astros and Monday against the Blue Jays. Here’s the former, in which he drove a Wade Miley cut fastball 420 feet, a towering shot over the Green Monster:

Long blasts are hardly a rarity for Chavis. Despite his late arrival, he’s tied for fourth in the majors with six homers of at least 420 feet, and he had another estimated at 419 feet. His average home run distance of 426 feet ranks seventh among players with at least 50 batted ball events (he has 68). Monday’s 389-footer off of the Blue Jays’ Edwin Jackson was just his second homer shorter than 400 feet.

Two months ago, Chavis barely registered as a player likely to make an impact on the 2019 Red Sox, in part because he had just eight games of Triple-A experience to that point along with 100 games at Double-A. Our preseason forecasts estimated he’d get just 14 big league plate appearances. Now he’s one of the players who has helped to salvage their season. So what gives? Read the rest of this entry »

It was rainy, it was short, and yet, it was the first time in 382 games that a Chicago White Sox pitcher had recorded a complete game.

On Saturday, in an effort that required just 78 pitches, Lucas Giolito became the first White Sox pitcher to throw a complete game since Chris Sale on September 16, 2016. He allowed just one run on three hits and struck out four.

The catch? Let Giolito explain it himself. As he told NBC Sports Chicago after the game, “I don’t consider it a complete game until I get nine.” Indeed, Giolito’s effort to snap a long stretch of bullpen usage was only five innings long. The game only lasted an hour and 31 minutes, if you choose to exclude the three-hour delay. A rain-soaked Chicago took care of the rest.

What’s lost in this whole story is that Giolito was solid on Saturday yet again. He’s had an up-and-down career so far, from being the Nationals’ prized pitching prospect to struggling in his first taste of the majors in 2016 to being the centerpiece in the Adam Eaton trade to posting the worst K-BB% among starters last year. But in Saturday’s start, never mind its length, Giolito lowered his ERA to 3.35. His 3.00 FIP is sterling. His 1.3 WAR in just 43 innings represents a 1.7-win improvement over his career total entering this season.

In sum, Giolito went from being league-worst to pretty, pretty good. The next step — the excellence — still comes in flashes, as it often has over his young career. Since the start of May, Giolito has posted a 1.85 ERA with 27 strikeouts to just eight walks over 24.1 innings. By WAR, he’s been the eighth-best starter this month. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets were one of the more active clubs this offseason, pulling off a big trade for Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz while signing Wilson Ramos, Jeurys Familia, and Jed Lowrie to free agent contracts. Through 46 games, the team is just 21-25, and multiple reports calling manager Mickey Callaway’s job “safe” have been issued, including a team meeting with GM Brodie Van Wagenen, which is never a good sign. The team had lost five straight games before their win last night, including a three-game sweep to the lowly Marlins despite both Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard pitching in the series. The final two games saw the team shut out offensively. There’s something wrong with the Mets, and a lot of people are at fault.

During the course of a 162-game season, there are going to be stretches where teams don’t play well. The Mets getting swept by the Marlins looks pretty bad because it just happened, but bad teams sweep good teams a fair amount during the season because three games represents less than two percent of the season. The Mets are at 21-25 — fewer wins than they would like — but keep in mind, what the Mets are doing now isn’t a massive departure from the team’s projections at the beginning of the season. This is what our playoff odds projections looked like before the season started.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Sean Doolittle’s delivery and Steve Pearce’s even/odd-year pattern, then discuss current record chases (involving Cody Bellinger, Christian Yelich, and the Orioles’ pitching staff), whether it’s possible to have exciting record chases based on Statcast stats, the significance of five-tool players (and scouting tools) in 2019, and more, plus a bit of one-sided banter about the Mets.

Audio intro: Dinosaur Jr., "Stick a Toe In"
Audio outro: Said The Whale, "Record Shop"

Link to story on Cubs’ Doolittle protest
Link to Doolittle vs. Edwards GIF
Link to Sam on .400 hitters
Link to story on .300 hitters
Link to Jeff on Raburn
Link to Ben on five-tool players
Link to Ben on Cano’s hustle
Link to Dan on Orioles homers allowed
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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