Zack Greinke shouldn’t still be this good. His fastball velocity has ticked down yet again; per Pitch Info, his four-seamer is averaging under 90 mph for the first time in his career. This isn’t a new phenomenon — his velocity has been in slow decline since his masterful 2015 season, when he posted a 1.66 ERA and finished second in Cy Young voting. These days, Greinke makes the news for shunning no-hitters and hitting like a position player more than he does for his pitching. Quietly, though, he’s having another superlative season, defying the slow ravages of time to amass a vintage stat line. His ERA and FIP are both lower than his career averages, which must be gratifying for someone who cares about his FIP more than perhaps any other active pitcher.

The way Greinke has adapted to aging is particularly interesting when compared to his former teammate, Clayton Kershaw, whose adaptations Ben Lindbergh recently chronicled. Kershaw was a singular marvel at his peak, and he remains so today. He’s always been predictable, and it hasn’t seemed to matter. When he was all-caps KERSHAW, he basically never threw a curveball when he was behind in the count. Hitters knew it, and it didn’t matter. Now, he’s throwing more pitches in the zone than ever on 0-0 before throwing fewer than ever in the zone after that. He’s still predictable, only in different ways.

Greinke, by contrast, was never as dogmatic as Kershaw. He’s thrown 62.5% fastballs when down in the count for his career, compared to Kershaw’s 72.8%. His first-pitch zone percentage this year, 52.3%, is actually below his career average, whereas Kershaw’s 61.3% rate is the highest of his career. Greinke has also always erred on the side of more pitches rather than fewer, throwing most of his pitches in any count and any location. Despite this difference in mindset, though, Greinke and Kershaw’s 2019s share two major themes: fewer fastballs, and using the count (and base/out state) to their advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

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Cavan Biggio has turned yet another corner this season. One year after blasting 26 home runs in Double-A New Hampshire, the 2016 fifth-round pick has ridden a torrid start at Triple-A Buffalo to a spot in the Toronto Blue Jays lineup. And while he remains an unfinished product, the early returns have been promising. Since debuting on May 24, the son of Hall of Famer Craig Biggio has a 114 wRC+, and he’s gone deep five times.

What type of hitter is the 24-year-old infielder? Part of that answer can found within our Blue Jays Top Prospects writeup, which dropped prior to spring training. A more recent, and much more comprehensive look, went up just one week ago, courtesy of my colleague Devan Fink.

And then there is Biggio’s own take. The young Blue Jays basher broke down his mechanics, as well as his power-and-patience approach, in a wide-ranging conversation that took place last weekend.

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David Laurila: What is your hitting philosophy?

Cavan Biggio: “My goal is to get a pitch I can square up, and drive. Hitting the ball hard is my No. 1 goal. If I don’t get the pitch I want in the first couple of strikes, I’m going to take. Once I get to two strikes, I’m going to battle and just try to get on base.”

Laurila: Are you basically looking fastball middle?

Biggio: I’d say I’m pretty traditional in trying to hunt the heater. I look for a heater in the middle thirds: middle-in, middle, and middle-away. Those are the parts of the strike zone where I can do the most damage. I’ve also gotten better at recognizing offspeed while looking for the fastball, so if it’s a mistake— if it’s a hung breaking ball — hopefully I’m able to hold off a little bit, put a good swing on it, and barrel it up. So I’m basically trying to hit the heater, but if a guy makes a mistake with a breaking ball, I’m ready for that as well.”

Laurila: What is the key to recognizing an off-speed pitch, particularly one you can handle? Read the rest of this entry »

After putting up an MVP-type performance in 2018, José Ramírez has not been a good baseball player this season. It’s not like last season came out of nowhere either. In 2016, Ramírez broke out with a five-win campaign and followed that up with a 6.5-WAR season in 2017. That the Cleveland third baseman would take another step forward last year as a 25 years old was not unexpected. What has been unexpected is the fall Ramírez has taken in 2019. With nearly half the season gone, Ramírez has been a replacement-level player with a 68 wRC+ and a near-complete evaporation of the power that led to 68 homers leaving the yard over the previous two years. Ramírez has been terrible, but he might not actually be that far off from being good again.

Early in the year, Devan Fink noted that Ramírez actually started slumping in the last few months of the 2018 season, and theorized that perhaps Ramírez was trying too hard to beat the shift.

Why would Ramírez start trying to hit the ball the other way, especially if that’s not what works for him? One answer could be that he began trying too hard to beat the shift. Ramírez is a switch-hitter, and he was shifted at a drastically different rate when he batted right-handed (6.3% of the time) versus left-handed (53.0% of the time). If Ramírez was truly getting in his head and trying too hard to beat the shift, then we’d expect to see his pull percentage drop even further for when he hit lefty versus when he hit righty. And that’s exactly what happened. While Ramírez did see his pull-rate drop by not-insignificant 9.2 points as a right-handed hitter from prior to the slump to during it, his pull-rate dropped by 19.2 points (!) as a lefty.

Nearly halfway through this season, Ramírez’s pull rate as a lefty is now pretty close to where it has been the past few seasons. That doesn’t mean that Fink was wrong about what was going on, as Ramírez could have made an adjustment to start pulling the ball again. If Ramírez has made an adjustment, it clearly isn’t working. On twitter, Mike Petriello advanced the following argument.

There’s got to be something to the increased launch angle causing more poorly hit balls. Petriello started a new thread here discussing weaker contact, and Mike Podhorzer discussed the weaker fly ball contact over at RotoGraphs. A year ago, Ramírez hit 67 balls with a launch angle of at least 40 degrees as a lefty, essentially automatic outs. This season, he’s already hit 41 such batted balls. That can’t really be all of the issue though. Much of Ramírez’s increase in launch angle has happened on the right side of the plate, and he’s actually performed reasonably close to last season as a right-hander. The switch-hitter’s average launch angle from the left side has only moved from 19.4 degrees to 21.0 degrees. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not causing a 100-point drop in wRC+ over the last year when hitting against right-handed pitching, either. Read the rest of this entry »

As an outfielder for four years at St. Mary’s College, three of which were as a starter, Tony Gonsolin hit .305/.383/.453. During the summer after his junior year, he was an all-star for the Madison Mallards in the prestigious summer collegiate Northwoods League, slugging 11 home runs and hitting .316/.403/.510 with a wood bat. Moonlighting as a pitcher, Gonsolin never struck out more than a batter per inning at St. Mary’s and had nearly as many games saved as he did games started. He was drafted as a senior in the ninth round of the 2016 draft as a pitcher – a decision that was a surprise to some, given his power potential in the outfield and lack of refinement on the mound. In Gonsolin, the Dodgers saw a plus athlete with untapped skills who had immense upside if he focused solely on pitching.

On Wednesday, three years after being selected as a proverbial money saver, the first place Dodgers will call on Gonsolin to make his major league debut against the Diamondbacks. Gonsolin debuting as a big league starter might be even more unexpected than him debuting at all. His first 61 professional appearances were all as a reliever, and it wasn’t until he opened the 2018 season as a member of the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes rotation that the transition from outfielder to reliever to major league starter began materializing.

Gonsolin’s professional career began in the hitter-friendly Pioneer League, as a member of the Ogden Raptors in 2016. There, as a reliever, Gonsolin touched 94 with his fastball and worked 89-92, flashing some feel for two different breaking balls. He displayed solid feel for his arsenal but lacked an out pitch. Still, the foundation was there. The delivery was clean and efficient and relatively low effort. The high arm slot with which he released the ball was repeated pitch-after-pitch. The athleticism was evident and the aptitude for adjusting on the mound was growing by the day. Read the rest of this entry »

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Christian Walker has always been able to hit well. While he was coming up through the Orioles organization, he compiled a 124 wRC+ across five minor league seasons. Unfortunately, Chris Davis and his massive contract blocked Walker from breaking into the big leagues with Baltimore and they designated him for assignment after the 2016 season. He bounced around that offseason and was claimed by two other teams before finally latching on with Arizona, and he’s continued to hit since joining the Diamondbacks organization. He compiled a 142 wRC+ across two seasons in Triple-A, but was again blocked by Paul Goldschmidt at the major league level.

By 2018, Walker had managed to accumulate just under 100 plate appearances in the majors but couldn’t break through. The dreaded “Quad-A” label was looming. Then the Diamondbacks traded away Goldschmidt this offseason, and suddenly Walker had a path towards regular playing time. He earned a part-time job out of spring training that quickly turned into a full-time job after Jake Lamb injured himself five games into the season. Walker seized the opportunity. He collected seven hits in his first 15 at-bats and continued to produce well through the first month of the season. In April, he collected 17 extra-base hits while posting a 152 wRC+.

Despite the hot start to the season, there were a few warning signs that his performance wasn’t sustainable. He struck out almost 30% of the time in April, and his BABIP was elevated at .393. Unsurprisingly, he came back down to earth in May.

It’s not as if Walker’s success in April was completely BABIP driven. His average exit velocity ranks in the 83rd percentile in the majors and he’s making hard contact nearly half the time he puts the ball in play. His expected wOBA on contact ranks 28th in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

Edgar Martinez’s story — at least as recounted in Edgar: An Autobiography, written with veteran Seattle sports scribe Larry Stone and published by Triumph Books earlier this month — reads like something of a fairy tale. Born in New York City in 1963, he moved to Puerto Rico when his parents split, and was raised in the Maguayo neighborhood of Dorado by his maternal grandparents, whom he chose to stay with at age 11, even after his parents reconciled and returned to New York. Though his love for the game was kindled by the heroics of Roberto Clemente in the 1971 World Series, and his development stoked by his relationship with cousin Carmelo Martinez, who spent nine years in the majors (1983-91), he didn’t sign a professional contract until just before his 20th birthday; putting aside $4-an-hour work on an assembly line, he received just a $4,000 bonus from the Mariners. Despite hitting a homerless .173 in his first professional season (1983), and battling an eye condition called strabismus, in which his right eye drifted out of alignment, the Mariners stuck with him.

While Martinez debuted in the majors in 1987, he spent three seasons trying to surmount the Mariners’ internal competition at third base, wound up shuttling back and forth to Triple-A Calgary, and didn’t secure a full-time job until 1990, his age-27 season. Though he won a batting title in 1992, a slew of injuries — shoulder, hamstring, wrist — threatened to derail his career until the Mariners convinced him to become a full-time designated hitter. Once he did, he became one of the AL’s most dominant players; from 1995-2001, he hit .329/.446/.574 for a 162 wRC+ (third in the majors) and 39.9 WAR (seventh, less than one win behind teammate Ken Griffey Jr.).

His heroics not only helped the Mariners reach the playoffs for the first time in 1995 (a year in which he also won his second batting title), but he became a one-man wrecking crew in that year’s Division Series against the Yankees, capping his .571/.667/1.000 performance with a series-winning double in Game 5 that basically saved baseball in Seattle. Remaining with the team for the duration of his career, which lasted through 2004 and included three other postseason appearances, further endeared him to a city that watched Griffey and fellow Mariners Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez depart for greener pastures. When he retired, Major League Baseball renamed its annual award for the best designated hitter in his honor. Earlier this year, in his 10th and final cycle of eligibility, he was elected to the Hall of Fame, that after more than tripling his support from just four years earlier.

Martinez’s arc seems so improbable, and yet it’s all true. Over the course of Edgar’s 352 pages, Martinez candidly details the highlights and lowlights of his career, the big decisions, unlikely events, and tactics that helped him surmount so many obstacles. Stone provides testimony from his former managers, coaches, and teammates in the form of sidebars that offer additional perspectives and enhance the narrative.

Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals announced Monday afternoon that their closer, Jordan Hicks, has torn the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. The news didn’t immediately come with a prognosis, a course of treatment, or a timetable for his return, some of which we’ll likely find out in the coming days. With a healthy elbow being a highly useful part of the body for a pitcher to have, there certainly isn’t much in the way of optimism that can emerge from this development.

While the news about Hicks has not been highly specific as of yet, I have not seen the word “partial” used to describe the tear. Assuming, for the sake of pessimism, that Hicks’s injury will require Tommy John surgery, the typical recovery time quoted these days is 12-15 months for a pitcher. That quite obviously would put 2019 out of the question and, given that we’re almost into July, would also seriously threaten all of 2020.

A lot of the initial buzz surrounding Hicks’ injury focused on his status as the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball today, with fingers pointed at his velocity as a key factor in his injury. According to Statcast, of the 100 hardest-thrown pitches in 2019, 94 were thrown by Hicks. The only pitchers to intrude on this list are Tayron Guerrero (Nos. 24, 31, 54, and 70), Aroldis Chapman (No. 87), and Thyago Vieira (No. 61). 45% of all 100 mph pitches this year were thrown by Hicks. The fastball cred is real. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Shelby Miller, Daniel Norris, Tyler Olson — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Shelby Miller, Texas Rangers

“I probably didn’t start throwing a curveball until high school. Growing up, my dad always told me they’re not good for your arm — not at an early age — and that changeups are better. But then there was this guy named Jerry Don Gleaton in my hometown — he played professionally, and was a baseball coach at Howard Payne University and I worked with him. He taught me some mechanical things, showed me some grips, and it kind of went from there. Read the rest of this entry »