A few weeks ago, the Cubs ended months of waiting by signing Craig Kimbrel to be their closer. Due to the lack of a spring training, Kimbrel was sent down to the minors for a bit to make sure he could still pitch. In Triple-A Iowa, Kimbrel made four appearances and pitched 3.2 innings. He struck out four of the 14 batters he faced, walked just one and gave up a lone run on a solo homer. The Cubs, satisfied that he was well enough to face major league hitting, called Kimbrel up yesterday.

After the Braves jumped out to a 6-1 lead, it didn’t look like Kimbrel’s services would be needed. But the Cubs stormed back with eight runs across innings four through six and the new Cubs’ closer was asked to come on for the save in the ninth inning, protecting a 9-7 lead. The first batter to the plate was catcher Brian McCann. After taking a 98 mph fastball at the bottom of the zone for strike one, McCann fouled off three more fastballs. Then Kimbrel tried to drop in his curve:

McCann was obviously displeased, but the pitch might have been even closer to the strike zone than the box on the television suggested, as it did look to catch the corner. Kimbrel threw seven curves among his 20 pitches. As for the movement on the pitch, it was in line his numbers from last season, though its drop yesterday and last season wasn’t quite as big as it had been in the years prior. Read the rest of this entry »

News broke last night that Rays’ prospect Brendan McKay will make his debut on Saturday; Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times had the initial report. The reasons for Tampa calling up McKay, who was ranked 14th overall this spring by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel before moving up to 11th on THE BOARD in the post-draft update this month, are threefold. First, the Rays need a pitcher Saturday. As Topkin noted in his piece, Ryan Yarbrough pitched three innings in last night’s 18-inning win over the Twins, and he won’t be able to take the bulk of the innings tomorrow as originally planned. Second, the Rays are in what should be an incredibly close race for the playoffs and need every competitive advantage they can get. And third, tying into the second, McKay is a very talented pitcher who gives the Rays the best shot at winning.

Before getting to McKay’s talents, let’s first examine the competitive landscape in the American League. Much has been made of the parity in the National League, with nearly every teams having some shot at the playoffs halfway through the season. The top-heavy nature of the American League has made for a bunch of haves and have-nots, with only a handful of teams having a realistic shot at the playoffs. Looking at the playoff odds, the Rays are one of those teams:

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Brandon Belt isn’t having a particularly good year. For once, I don’t just mean that his counting numbers are unimpressive; he’s long been a player whose production has outstripped his reputation, as light-slugging first basemen tend to be, and playing in San Francisco’s extreme scoring environment hasn’t helped. From 2012 to 2018, he produced 3.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances, All-Star-level production, despite never really hitting for power or average.

This year, his defense has dragged him down near replacement level (note to the Giants: Belt really shouldn’t play the outfield), but his hitting isn’t up to his usual standards either (a 107 wRC+ that equals last year for his worst full-season rate). Even as Belt’s production wanes, though, he’s actually getting more fun to watch. Why? Well, you never know when he’s going to drop down a bunt, regardless of situation, and bunting for a hit is among the most fun plays in baseball.

When you picture the ideal player to shift against, Brandon Belt is almost a perfect match. He’s left-handed, pulls a ton of his groundballs, and isn’t fast enough that a second baseman in shallow right field might not have time to throw him out on a grounder. When shifting exploded in frequency from 2014 to 2016, Belt was the kind of player who gave teams a reason to do it. In 2015, 54% of the balls he put in play were against a shift, up from 14% in 2013. By 2016, that number climbed to 78%, and it’s bounced around 80% ever since.

At first, Belt had no clear counter. By the end of 2016, he’d bunted only five times in his major league career, going 2-4 with a sacrifice. Teams shifted on him with impunity, and Belt lashed grounders into the shift. His groundball rate decreased, but that’s not a way to punish shifting; it’s merely a way to ignore it. He tried bunting more in 2017, but it was only middlingly effective — he finished 3-6 on the year, and two of those singles were bang-bang plays; he easily could have been 1-6. “Bunt against the shift” is a great idea in theory, but Brandon Belt wasn’t doing it well enough in practice.

Bunting skill isn’t fixed, though, and Belt proved it. His bunts in 2018 were crisper, better-executed, and better-aimed. Take a look at this surgical strike against the Padres:

Freddy Galvis’s kick-stop drives the point home: there’s no reason to bother fielding that ball. For the season, Belt went 4-6 on bunts, and none of the singles even drew a throw. That .667 on-base percentage will do, even if he did embarrass himself in a Bay Area tilt:

Hey, they can’t all be perfect. That’s no different than a grounder into the shift, even if it probably feels worse.

Remember all the way back in the previous paragraph where I said they can’t all be perfect? Well, I lied. Brandon Belt is perfect on bunts this year, and he’s getting increasingly audacious. He’ll bunt in situations where a runner is valuable, sure. Leading off an inning against a decent reliever in a close game? That’s a great time to get a runner on first, and the shift is just asking for it. He doesn’t even hesitate:

That’s too obvious, though. Brandon Belt isn’t about bunting only in situations where a runner on first is most important. He’s in it for the love of the bunt. 1-1 count with two outs and a one-run lead? Sure, Belt will bunt on you:

Are runners on first valuable with two outs? Not at all! Still, Belt’s feeling it. Put away your run expectancy tables and feel the magic. Sometimes you just have to bunt.

How about against an Orioles righty in Camden Yards, a situation where Belt is probably as likely to hit a home run in a single plate appearance as he’ll ever be? Oh yeah, absolutely:

Keep your home runs; Belt will take his not-even-guaranteed base and be happy with it. The Giants hit three long balls in this game. Brandon Crawford, he of the .141 career ISO and 8.7% home run per fly ball rate, hit two home runs. Lefties batting against Oriole righties are in the best possible situation to succeed. Gabriel Ynoa has a 6.45 FIP and 6.75 ERA this year, for crying out loud! Belt doesn’t care, though. He’s bunting.

If you think those last two bunts are questionable, his latest one takes the cake. With the bases empty, a bunt single and a walk are exactly the same. Honestly, a bunt single and a walk are the same almost all the time, but especially with the bases empty. 3-0 count, pitch that might well be called a ball? Bunts away!

Bunts on 3-0 are rare, because they’re ridiculous. 3-0 counts often end in walks, without the hassle of having to connect on a bunt and reach base safely. When Matt Carpenter did it last year, I looked into it and found that he was only the third player to get a fair bunt down with a 3-0 count and the bases empty in the last 10 years. Well, that statistic is now outdated, because Brandon Belt is the fourth.

Think about what bunting on 3-0 entails. A 3-0 count is the best place a hitter could ever find himself. After 3-0 counts this year, major league hitters as a whole walk 60.6% of the time. They get on base 72.8% of the time. On the rare occasion where they don’t walk, they often hit home runs — 5% of non-walk at-bats that hit 3-0 end in a dinger. Literally every offensive stat is improved; batters have posted a .233 ISO (against .180 ISO overall), a .322 BABIP (.296 overall), and a .309 batting average. Brandon Belt doesn’t care. He just wants to bunt.

At this point, I think we can say that Brandon Belt is drunk with bunt power. In a twist, though, that isn’t really new. When Cody Bellinger bunted on 3-0 in 2017, Jeff Sullivan investigated and found a 3-0 bunt attempt from Belt that went foul in May 2017. Brandon Belt wasn’t even a good bunter in 2017! That bunt rolled foul, and it might be good that it did; the Dodgers weren’t particularly over-shifted. He just felt like bunting.

Hittable righties, favorable counts, spots where a runner on first isn’t all that valuable? That’s all irrelevant. Brandon Belt sees an opening, and he attacks. It’s not going to stop teams from shifting against him — he’s grounded into a shift 41 times this year, which means the shift is saving more in grounders than it gives back in bunt singles. Still, if you’re playing against Belt, maybe keep your third baseman close to home until the count gets to two strikes. Honestly, maybe leave him there with two strikes, too. Belt hasn’t attempted a bunt with two strikes yet in his career, but at the rate he’s turning bizarre situations into bunt singles, it’s only a matter of time.

The MLB All-Star Game is just two weeks away, and the Baltimore Orioles have been campaigning hard for Trey Mancini to appear on the American League roster. This is understandable — at 22-58, the Orioles have given fans little to cheer for this year, and Mancini is rather unambiguously the best player on the club. Teammate Chris Davis has been vocal in his support for Mancini, and the organization went so far as to put together a full-fledged (if tongue-in-cheek) campaign video for him.

Baltimore’s enthusiasm surrounding Mancini’s All-Star candidacy helps draw attention to what has been a fantastic bounce-back season for the 27-year-old. He owns a .303/.362/.557 line and a 139 wRC+, good for 24th-best in the majors. His 7.9% walk rate and 19.5% strikeout rate are both career bests, and his xSLG, xBA, and xwOBA figures each put him in the 87th percentile of all major leaguers or better.

That set of numbers contrasts sharply with where we found Mancini in 2018. He smacked 24 homers for a second year in a row, but that was the lone bright spot in an otherwise underwhelming offensive season. He hit just .242/.299/.416, posting a 93 wRC+ and 0.29 BB/K figure. Because Mancini was a nightmare in the field — his -17.2 defensive runs above average were the fifth-worst in baseball — he finished the season as a sub-replacement level player. In most other organizations, he likely would have lost his starting job, but on the talent-bereft Orioles, he’s gotten a second chance. How has he made the most of it? Read the rest of this entry »

2018 was the end of an era for the Washington Nationals. After failing to get Bryce Harper to agree to a long-term contract with the organization, his final year in D.C. appeared destined to have something of a valedictory nature, a long farewell to the player who was drafted to be the face of the franchise. The script seemed to be in place for one last hurrah. After all, this was a team that during the Pax Brycetania won the NL East four times in six seasons, with their 555 wins second only to the Dodgers. 2018 would be the year they finally got over the playoff hump and won the World Series, after which the credits would roll, and captions would indicate what had happened to each of our favorite characters.

Oops.

Projected to go 89-73 by ZiPS, the Nats underperformed by seven games, finishing 82-80. Thanks to the Braves misbehaving and butting into contention before their number was called, Washington fell out of the postseason race for good by the All-Star break. There was a silver lining in the emergence of Juan Soto, who somehow needed just a month more seasoning to turn from a South-Atlantic League star into a major league one, effectively becoming better at being Bryce Harper than Bryce Harper. The way forward in 2019 was clear: a full season of Soto and Victor Robles, together with Patrick Corbin, would make up for the loss of Harper, and constitute enough of a gain that it wouldn’t be a major problem that Brian Dozier was a poor replacement for vintage Daniel Murphy. ZiPS even projected the Nats to be better in 2019 than it did in 2018.

Oops.

An 8-18 run from mid-April to mid-May left Washington rubbing elbows with the Marlins in the wastelands at the bottom of the NL East. The team’s gone 20-9 since, but that’s only been enough to get them to the precipice of a .500 season, rather the edge of greatness. At 39-40, they still stand eight games behind the Braves, a team with a lot more prospect currency to trade for short-term improvement at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

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Six weeks ago, the Miami Marlins looked dead in the water. They were 10-31 at the time, and given their tough schedule ahead, they had a small yet tangible shot at eclipsing the 1962 Mets’ record for the most losses since integration. Jay Jaffe covered Miami’s putrid start, and the details were very grim indeed:

They’ve lost seven games in a row… They scored a grand total of eight runs in that span, never more than two in a game… Did I mention that it’s been a full week since the last Marlins position player drove in a run, or 11 days since one of their players homered? Or that it’s the team’s only homer this month, hit by a 29-year-old rookie named Jon Berti?

Miami’s ineptitude at the plate explained most of the trouble; the Fish were scoring barely 2.5 runs per game. They were also on pace to hit fewer than 100 home runs, an astonishingly feeble output in today’s dinger-happy game.

But in baseball, yesterday’s trends are tomorrow’s distant memory. Miami commenced a six-game winning streak the day Jaffe’s post went live, and they’ve gone 20-17 since publication — an 88-win pace. Obviously, they’re not that good: even terrible squads can string together a .500 stretch over 40 games. Still, the club’s recent surge has given them a better record than four other teams in the majors. Even stranger, the Marlins are… gulp… surprisingly entertaining! Read the rest of this entry »