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More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About First-Inning Scoring

July 1, 2019

Any new fans coming to major league baseball through this past weekend’s London Series between the Yankees and Red Sox got a rather distorted sense of the game’s scoring and temporal norms, particularly in the first inning of each contest. In Saturday’s series opener, each team sent 10 batters to the plate, scored six runs, and chased the other team’s starting pitcher (New York’s Masahiro Tanaka and Boston’s Rick Porcello). The 12-run, 58-minute inning was just the opening salvo of a slugfest that seemed to be imported straight from Coors Field, a 17-13 slog that took four hours and 42 minutes to play. Sunday’s game, won 12-8 by the Yankees, wasn’t quite as high scoring, but it did feature a four-run first inning by the Red Sox that clocked in around 26 minutes, not to mention a nine-run seventh inning by the Yankees in a game that lasted four hours and 24 minutes.

Though neither team in Saturday’s game came close to outdoing this year’s first-inning high score (10 runs by the Phillies on April 16 against the Mets), and the two teams fell short of the combined record of 16 runs most recently accomplished by the A’s (13) and Angels (3) on July 5, 1996, the rivals did make some history. According to STATS, this was the first time since June 23, 1989 (Blue Jays at A’s) and just the sixth time since 1912 that both teams scored at least six runs in the first inning. Via the Baseball-Reference Play Index, that game was one of just three since 1908 in which neither starter got out of the first inning after allowing at least six runs, with an August 4, 1948 game between the Red Sox and Browns, and an April 16, 1962 game between the Cardinals (not Bob Gibson’s best day) and Phillies being the others.

The Yankees’ big numbers in London helped them overtake the Twins for the major league lead in scoring (5.80 runs per game). While Saturday’s game was the second time in less than two weeks the team chased a former Cy Young winner in the first inning after clobbering him for six runs — they did so on June 19 against the Rays’ Blake Snell as well as Saturday against Porcello — they’re actually not the majors’ most prolific first-inning team. They entered Sunday ranked eighth in the majors with 0.62 first-inning runs per game, a per-nine rate of 5.56.

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Blake Snell and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Luck

by Ben Clemens

July 1, 2019

On November 14, 2018, Blake Snell won the AL Cy Young award. It was a close vote, but no one could say Snell didn’t deserve at least to be in the discussion. He compiled a 1.89 ERA, best in the AL, and his peripherals (2.95 FIP, an outrageous 31.6% strikeout rate) weren’t far behind. He was, simply put, one of the best starters in baseball — unfair, as future Rays employee Jeff Sullivan put it. Just more than seven months later, on June 29, 2019, Blake Snell’s ERA was on the wrong side of 5. By RA9-based WAR, he was barely above replacement level in 2019. A strong start yesterday moved his ERA down to a still-inflated 4.87, but it’s worth asking: is something wrong with Blake Snell?

Now, as my RotoGraphs colleague Al Melchior recently put it: nothing is wrong with Blake Snell. Still, it seems like it might merit investigating. Guys with stuff like Snell’s aren’t supposed to even be capable of putting up near-5 ERA’s this far into the season. Al focused on Snell’s strike-throwing, and that’s always a make-or-break issue for a guy with such dynamite stuff, but Snell’s walk numbers, while high, aren’t crippling. He’s actually walking fewer batters than last year, and his K-BB% is a career high. No, Snell’s 2019 has been alarming because of his inconsistency, and that’s worth looking into.

In 2018, Snell made only four starts in which he didn’t last at least five innings. One was his first start back from injury, which hardly counts. This year has been an entirely different story. Snell’s start on June 25, when he survived only 3.1 innings against the Twins, was his sixth outing of 2019 to see him not finish the fifth inning. There’s always batted-ball luck involved in short outings, but still, Snell’s 2019 feels extreme. Did he change something in 2019 that’s leading to more abbreviated outings?

It’s worth saying again that Blake Snell is incredible. All four of his pitches are weapons. His four-seam fastball is the fastest thrown by any left-handed starter, and it generates whiffs on more than a quarter of batters’ swings against it. Its rise and fade are near-unmatched; only Justin Verlander gets more total movement on his four-seam. Snell’s curveball, which he’s throwing 27% of the time this year, is awe-inspiring. Batters whiff on 55% of their swings against it, the second-best mark for any starter who has thrown 100 curveballs this year. His changeup? It generates the fourth-most whiffs per swing, 44%. He rarely throws his slider (7.6% of the time so far this year), but you guessed it: no starter’s slider gets more whiffs per swing than Snell’s. Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 7/1/2019

by Dan Szymborski

July 1, 2019