It would be inaccurate to say that Jeff McNeil came out of nowhere, but unless you were a Mets fan with a deep knowledge of the team’s minor league system, chances are that you hadn’t heard of him before he was called up last July 24. Since then, he’s done nothing less than post the majors’ fourth-highest batting average (.339) as part of a contact-centric profile with echoes of yesteryear. Having additionally shown himself capable of manning multiple positions, the 27-year-old lefty swinger has become a staple of manager Mickey Callaway’s lineups, and a key cog in a much-improved offense.

McNeil arrived as a man of mystery largely because of his age and injury history. A 12th-round 2013 draft pick out of Cal State Long Beach, he hit for high batting averages with minimal power (a total of four home runs) in his first three professional seasons, most notably leading the Florida State League with a .373 on-base percentage in 2015. Just as he reached the high minors, surgeries to repair a pair of sports hernias and a torn labrum in his hip limited him to a mere three games in 2016; he played in just 48 games in 2017 due to a groin injury. Between the lack of playing time and minimal power, he barely grazed even the deepest prospect lists. Just before the injury bug bit, Baseball America included him as a 40-grade prospect, 27th in the Mets’ system, in its 2016 Handbook. He was an honorable mention on FanGraphs’ Mets list that same year.

Finally healthy, and sporting 40 pounds of additional muscle relative to his pre-injury days, the 26-year-old McNeil broke out to hit .327/.402/.626 (182 wRC+) with 14 homers (five more than his previous career total) in just 57 games at Double-A Binghamton last year, then .368/.427/.600 (165 wRC+) with five more homers in 31 games at Triple-A Las Vegas. He began garnering attention, from prospect hounds, though even Baseball America’s midseason Mets top 10, published four days before his debut, merely consigned him to the “Rising” category. He arrived in Queens in late July, just before the team traded incumbent second baseman Asdrubal Cabrera to the Phillies. As the Mets went nowhere amid an otherwise sour season, he hit .329/.381/.471 (137 wRC+) in 248 PA while playing a credible second base (0.4 UZR in 54 games), good for 2.7 WAR. Notably, he struck out in just 9.7% of his plate appearances, the second-lowest mark of any player with at least 200 PA. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a kid, my dad taught me about baseball whenever he got a chance. A lot of these lessons were just meaningless baseball truisms: always hit to the right side of second base when there’s a runner on, the best count to steal on is 2-0, catchers are never lefties. Most of these sayings stuck in my brain without ever registering on a conscious level, but one of them fascinated me the moment I heard it. “Throw fastballs when the batter is ahead in the count and breaking balls when he’s behind.” It is known. I’ve pondered the reasoning and factuality of that rule of thumb ever since.

At the most basic level, I totally understand the thinking going on. Fastballs are easier to locate for a strike, and when you’re behind in the count you can ill afford to throw a pitch for a ball. It’s not just that, either. When a batter is down in the count, they need to be much more proactive about swinging at any pitch in the strike zone. If you throw a 1-2 breaking ball that starts out looking like a strike, the batter needs to swing. Throw the same pitch on 2-0, however, and even if it looks like a strike at the start, the batter might not swing — they could be looking for a specific location rather than defending the entire plate.

Go one level higher, however, and things get a lot more confusing. Pitchers throw fastballs when behind in the count, and batters know that pitchers throw fastballs in hitters’ counts. If a hitter knows you’re going to throw a certain type of pitch, that makes their job a lot easier. One of the hardest parts of being a major league batter is that you have to determine how a pitch is going to break after leaving a pitcher’s hand almost instantaneously. Curveballs and fastballs might start at the same place, but they end up in different areas entirely. Take this deception out of the equation, and hitting gets quite a bit easier.

That’s only one level up, though. We can go further. Pitchers know that hitters know that pitchers throw fastballs when behind in the count. If you’re getting a Princess Bride vibe here, you’re not alone. This is a complex issue. What batters expect pitchers to do plays a role in what pitchers should do, and vice versa. There’s an entire field of economics, game theory, devoted to solving this problem. Maybe you saw the movie about it, where Russell Crowe inexplicably writes on every glass surface he can find.

Let’s leave that all aside for now, though. Whatever the theoretical equilibrium is, pitchers do indeed lean away from breaking balls when behind in the count. In 2018, for example, pitchers threw sliders and curveballs 18.8% of the time when behind in the count, versus 27.5% of the time when they were ahead. That’s major league baseball as a whole, though. Collin McHugh has gone to a breaking ball 58% of the time when down in the count. Gerrit Cole is above 40%, and Robbie Ray isn’t far behind him.

Trevor Bauer, on the other hand, seems to have listened to my dad’s advice. Bauer has thrown 139 pitches while behind in the count this year. He’s gone to a breaking ball exactly twice. He’s on pace to set a career low for breaking balls while down in the count, and it’s not even particularly close. In 2016, Bauer fired only 43 breaking balls out of 878 pitches he threw while behind in the count. That was a preposterously low 4.9%, and still triple the rate he’s put up this year so far. Read the rest of this entry »

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Marcell Ozuna has had a solid start to his 2019 season. Through 89 plate appearances, Ozuna has hit .256/.348/.615 (150 wRC+) with eight home runs, producing 0.6 WAR. Ozuna’s WAR total puts him in the 67th percentile among qualified hitters to begin the year; that’s not elite, though it’s certainly not bad, either.

But what if I told you that there is a pitcher who has produced as much position player value as Marcell Ozuna, as Nelson Cruz, as Jean Segura, Whit Merrifield, Byron Buxton, Jay Bruce, Mike Moustakas, and a host of other solid hitters? Would you believe me? Could you guess who it is?

One of the (few) fun things about small sample baseball season is the ridiculous numbers that come from it. Jay Jaffe already covered some of these blips from both the pitcher and hitter perspective, but there’s one overlapping case that, at least to me, was worth discussing in its own separate piece, the answer to the above questions, perhaps obvious given this piece’s title: Zack Greinke.

This whole idea came about when I was glancing over the Statcast leaderboards at Baseball Savant a few days ago. At the time, the default setting on the hitter numbers was just 10 batted ball events, allowing for some smaller samples to sneak their way into prominent positions on the board. But there’s no position more prominent than No. 1, and seeing Greinke leading all major league hitters in barrels per plate appearance made me chuckle. It also made me take a second look at his season stats this year.

In 13 plate appearances, Greinke has slashed .500/.545/1.300 (361 wRC+). He has hit two home runs, two doubles, and a single, all while drawing a walk without registering a single strikeout. That’s better than Barry Bonds‘ slash line after 13 plate appearances (.400/.538/.900) in 2004, when he went on to post a ridiculous 1.422 full-season OPS. Let’s marvel at that for a second while we watch Greinke’s two home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

All major league pitchers throw pretty hard, and on average, fastballs are hitting close to 93 miles per hour these days. Pitchers throwing 95 seems common-place, and we regularly see pitches in the upper-90s. Pitchers throwing the ball really hard seems routine, but that should make us appreciate pitchers throwing the hardest even more. As pitch velocities get higher and higher, there are still upper limits, and the players who tend to reach those upper limits seem to find themselves alone. Right now, Jordan Hicks is alone.

The graph below represents all the fastballs thrown, except those by J.R. Murphy, this season.

It might be difficult to see the bars at 102 mph and above, so here’s a chart showing those pitches.

And to further clarify matters, here’s the average fastball velocity for pitchers with at least 10 fastballs this season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Chavis lived a dream on Saturday. The No. 3 prospect in the Red Sox system not only made his MLB debut, he banged out a pinch-hit double in his first-ever at bat. He did so against Tampa Bay’s Jose Alvarado, with one on and one out in the top of the ninth inning, and the score knotted at five apiece. Boston went on to score, then held on for a 6-5 win.

There’s a pretty good chance that Chavis was the happiest person in Tropicana Dome that night. He was certainly one of the most excited. At age 23, the native of Marietta, Georgia had done in real life what he once fantasized about doing while batting rocks with a stick in his family’s back yard.

Chavis described the thrill-of-lifetime experience prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

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Michael Chavis: “I wasn’t in the lineup — I was on the bench — but I knew the situation. They’d said there was a chance I would get to hit that day. Of course, I didn’t know when, who for, or who would be pitching. Come the eighth inning, looking at the lineup and how the game was playing out, I was thinking there was a chance.

“I’m taking some swings in the cage, and they come in and say, ‘Hey, you’re going to pinch hit in the ninth.’ I’m like, OK. Beautiful. ‘Who’s pitching?’ They say, ‘It’s Alvarado.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, wow.’ He’s a talented guy. Very good fastball.

“I’d faced him in spring training. I’d just come back from being sick, and it was kind of a similar situation in that I didn’t know if I was going to hit. I went up there and K’d on something like four pitches. I hadn’t seen a pitch in seven days, which made a 100-mph fastball that runs like his even more difficult to see. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Rob Arthur and Tim Dix of FiveThirtyEight helped to reveal to the masses that the core of the major league baseball had changed, reducing the air drag and resulting in the ball traveling farther in the air. Ever since then, the ball has been a recurring topic of conversation, including here at FanGraphs. The subject got a re-boot earlier this month when Arthur, writing for Baseball Prospectus, concluded that there’s less drag on the batted balls hit in the 2019 season, which has led to more speculation that the league has “juiced” the ball.

While it is fun to see more dingers and harder hit batted balls, there’s something to be said about how the league may or may not have deliberately manipulated the ball to make it happen. It’s fun to see players like Aaron Judge have a 50-homer season in his rookie campaign or to watch Giancarlo Stanton flirt with a 60-homer mark on the way to earning an MVP award, but fans may question how “authentic” those feats are compared to the pre-juiced ball days, though it’s worth noting that the liveliness of the ball has changed throughout baseball’s history.

Here in Korea, there’s been an opposite trend. Prior to the start of the 2019 season, it was reported that the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) would decrease the coefficient of restitution (COR) value in their baseball. To put it in layman’s terms, the higher the COR number is, the further the ball travels from the impact of the bat. Last year, the KBO allowed baseball COR values between .4134 and .4374. To put that in contrast, Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) in Japan allows it to be between .4034 and .4234; MLB allows between .3860 and .4005. The KBO decided to lower it to the NPB’s Mizuno baseball level of between .4034 and .4234. There’s a reason for such a change. If you’ve followed the KBO for awhile, you know that the league has been quite hitter-friendly for the past few years. Here’s how hitters fared in the three seasons prior to 2019:

To give you an idea how hitter-friendly an environment it was, MLB hitters slashed .248/.318/.409 overall in 2018. The recent baseball change is not the first time the KBO has attempted to curb its high-offense environment. In 2017, they increased the length of the strike zone, which I wrote about during my residency last year. It had an effect, but not really a lasting one. The umpires struggled to maintain consistency with the zone and the hitters adjusted well enough to keep up the league’s high-offense reputation. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 20th, 1977, Billy Martin, then in his first of approximately 176 stints as the Yankees’ manager, pulled a lineup out of his hat. Literally. In order to shake up a team that started the year 2-8 and was suffering the bouts of media drama notable for the team during this era, Martin set the batting order by putting the names of the starters on paper and selecting them from a hat. The team’s usual cleanup hitter, Chris Chambliss, hit 8th, meaning that the lie we tell to little kids about how the No. 8 spot is the “second cleanup hitter” was actually true for possibly the first time in human history. Whether coincidental or not, the Yankees won six games straight with only a couple minor changes to this pseudo-random lineup before the team returned to a more traditionally configured one.

The Yankee lineup on Sunday looked quite a lot like this lineup, but taken one step farther to even make the names random. Of course, this wasn’t due to any homage to the late, great Martin, but a necessity fueled by injuries to, well, nearly everybody. You might be excused if you thought someone goofed and you were looking at one of the team’s Grapefruit League lineups from this spring.

Narrator: You were not.

Only a single player in the lineup, Luke Voit, was both present and playing the position envisioned when the Yankees put together their roster (Gleyber Torres was healthy, but was given an off-day). Four players didn’t even start the season, just over three weeks old, on the 25-man roster, and a fifth, Mike Tauchman, was only acquired a week before Opening Day.

Naturally, the lineup, which would have shocked people a month ago, scored seven runs, eventually winning in ten innings. We’ll have to wait until the Yankees next play the Royals in late May to see if they broke some unwritten rule about crushing pitchers with their B-squad that apparently requires hitting people with baseballs. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The June draft order, slot values, and total pool amounts are here on the site for your reference, and our ever-updating draft rankings on THE BOARD now have 314 names for this draft class, which means it’s time for our first 2019 top 10 mock draft. I think you know how this goes, but I’ll reiterate: I’m projecting what I think will happen after consulting with dozens of industry sources, not ranking these players on talent, as THE BOARD does that.

1. Orioles – Adley Rutschman, C, Oregon State
Rutschman still has a good lead here. It sounds like he had a shoulder injury in high school from football contact, but he hasn’t missed any time in college and clubs have mostly decided that even a worst case scenario for this issue still makes him the best prospect in the draft. There’s chatter Baltimore has made calls to explore backup options/bulk approach like new GM Mike Elias did while running the draft in Houston, but that’s seen as a long shot at this point. It’s also worth noting Baltimore’s history of whacking players’ medicals, but it’s unclear if the regime change alters that propensity.

2. Royals – Bobby Witt, Jr., SS, Coleyville Heritage HS (TX)
Two weeks ago, I mentioned that the early buzz was that Andrew Vaughn had the lead for this pick. Late last spring, GM Dayton Moore saw amateur games for the first time in awhile and Kansas City’s first 11 selections were college picks. This came on the heels of four of their previous six first round picks coming from the prep ranks, with their draft philosophy leaning that way as a whole.

It seemed like a philosophical shift at the beginning of a rebuild, but I’ve talked to about four times as many sources on this topic in the last two weeks as I did before, and almost everyone since then is insistent that Witt is the pick here. Vaughn and possibly Hunter Bishop have been mentioned as backup plans, but the top three picks are thought to be pretty locked in at this juncture, with a couple scouting directors guessing it’s about 90% certain to go the way I’ve outlined here.

3. White Sox – Andrew Vaughn, 1B, Cal
With a recent run in the past three drafts of safer-skewing, college hitters in Chicago’s top three round picks (Nick Madrigal, Steele Walker, Jake Burger, Gavin Sheets, Luis Gonzalez, Zack Collins, Alex Call), and a rebuild reaching the critical stages, a quick-to-the-majors prospect makes the most sense here. With Jose Abreu on the downside of his career, Vaughn even fills a need: exactly what the White Sox are looking for here. Nick Lodolo sounds like the most likely backup option if Vaughn and Rutschman go first and second. GM Rick Hahn has seen C.J. Abrams this spring and some teams think the Sox would take Witt if he slides, but none of those alternate scenarios seem likely, with almost everyone in the industry saying Chicago wants a collegiate player here and covet Vaughn.

4. Marlins – C.J. Abrams, SS, Blessed Trinity HS (GA)
This is where things start to get a little tricky. After NHSI, where new scouting director D.J. Svihlik and VP Gary Denbo were locked in on Abrams and seemingly uninterested in Riley Greene on an adjacent field, industry rumors intensified that Abrams was the preference. Earlier in the spring, most believed there was a preference for a college player here, with Lodolo the most common connection. Svihlik used to be on staff at Vanderbilt and some think J.J. Bleday also makes sense here. I’ll go with Abrams for now, but it’s pretty close between these three options and I get the impression this decision is far from made, anyway. Denbo has also seen Witt a few times.

5. Tigers – Riley Greene, RF, Hagerty HS (FL)
The Tigers have been all over Greene all spring, and one of their scouts has a child that goes to Greene’s high school. He’s struggled a bit lately (his swing was too big when I saw him a few weeks ago and he performed just okay at NHSI) but was a strong performer all summer, so most don’t consider it a long-term concern. There isn’t much consensus on whom else Detroit would consider here as another option, though Witt has been mentioned in the event he slides. Power arms and SEC performers are historically the Tigers’ type, so Bleday and his nation-leading 20 homers also makes some sense, but Greene appears to be their preference and he’s almost certain to be available.

6. Padres – Nick Lodolo, LHP, TCU
The Padres has been heavy on Bleday and Lodolo, appearing to lean to college both because that’s what’s here and because it fits their new competitive window. Bishop just got a long look from the decision makers and appears also to be entering their mix, but is believed to be more of a third option at this point. Given GM A.J. Preller’s past decisions, this would also appear to be a spot where a sliding Witt or Abrams could get snapped up. Kentucky lefty Zack Thompson also seems to be in the mix.

7. Reds – J.J. Bleday, RF, Vanderbilt
It sounds like the Reds are on Greene, Abrams, and Lodolo, who are all gone in this scenario. Bleday (video) is the consensus best guy on the board and sources have indicated the preference here is college, with last year’s pick of Jonathan India serving as a template for new scouting director Brad Meador. Cincy still needs pitching and seems the most aggressive on junior college righty Jackson Rutledge, though he fits more as an overslot second pick than underslot first pick.

8. Rangers – Alek Manoah, RHP, West Virginia
Texas is the toughest club to peg in this mock. It sounds like they aren’t excited about what they think will be available to them, and clubs picking around here also don’t have much feel for where Texas leans. This appears to be the floor for Abrams and Witt if they slide, but they’re unlikely to get here. Manoah and Bishop both make sense, but the most common rumor is that the Rangers go below slot for a pitcher to set up an overslot choice with their second pick. Manoah is perceived to be an easier sign than some other options with a cleaner medical than late-rising Kentucky LHP Zack Thompson.

9. Braves – Hunter Bishop, LF, Arizona State
This pick is compensation for not signing Carter Stewart last year, and he projects to go much later this year, so the Braves appear to have come out ahead in the exchange. This pick also isn’t protected if Atlanta doesn’t sign whoever they take, so a tough sign likely isn’t an option. It appears Atlanta would take Abrams or Witt if they get here, and they’ve been scouting Lodolo, Bleday, and Bishop as primary options, with a good chance one of them gets to this pick. It’s unclear if the other prospects on the board at this point excite them, in the event that Texas takes Bishop and all the players Atlanta has been tied to are off the board.

10. Giants – Bryson Stott, SS, UNLV
This weekend, the Giants sent in their heavy hitters to see Missouri RF Kameron Misner at Georgia (his swing still needs some work). He may have the most upside on the board, but he hasn’t been good in SEC play and lacks a summer track record to fall back on. Stott could be another Brandon Crawford, though it’s unclear how the new regime will make high-profile decisions like these. The rumor is that this is another pick that will go college, and likely a college hitter, with new Giants GM Farhan Zaidi having prized versatility and defensive value when building the Dodgers.

Kentucky LHP Zack Thompson has been closing hard lately (while Lodolo has just been okay the last few weeks), so he could jump into the top 10, but some clubs are concerned about his elbow long-term, so that keeps him just out of this projection. Washington prep CF Corbin Carroll is the other prospect who has been mentioned at more than a few top 10 slots, but more as another player in the mix than a primary target. With picks 6-10 leaning college, and three prep bats in the top five, he slides just out of this projection, but could easily jump in future versions. The next two college bats (North Carolina 1B Michael Busch (vide0) and Texas Tech 3B Josh Jung) would also figure to go quickly if we had continued this exercise, but unfortunately, the information gets much spottier at this juncture of the draft.