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 — Kevin Gausman, Bob Scanlan, and Matt Shoemaker — on how they learned and developed their splitters.

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Kevin Gausman, Atlanta Braves

“I want to say I started throwing it my sophomore year of high school. I had a coach at the time who had pitched — his name is Chris Baum — and he had been trying to teach me a circle changeup. I couldn’t really figure it out, so he showed me this fosh, this split-change, that I throw now.

“It was a pretty frustrating pitch at first, because it’s tough to gain consistency with. He kind of told me from Day One, ‘Hey, if you keep throwing it, you’ll eventually have a feel for it.’ I trusted him, and he was right. It’s a big weapon for me.

“The only thing I’ve really changed is where my thumb is on the ball. I’ll kind of mess around with it when I want to throw a strike, or when I don’t want to throw a strike. Moving the thumb affects the speed, and how much break, and tilt, you get on the pitch. If my thumb is under it, it’s going to be a little bit straighter. When my thumb is on the side of it, it might be a little bigger, with more fading action. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most popular idioms in the English language is “guinea pig.” It’s simple — we’ve probably all used it — and yet it means so much. To be a “guinea pig” is to be the subject of something new or different. It can be as simple as being the first to try a new toothbrush, and range to something as weighty as testing a new drug.

In baseball terms, the Atlantic League is serving as Major League Baseball’s guinea pig this season. In a deal struck in early-March, the two organizations agreed to change certain rules for the Atlantic League’s 2019 championship season as a way to test said modifications before MLB considers implementing them itself.

One of the more contentious rule changes was the prohibition of the infield shift. The rule itself, as explained in the press release, was simply the requirement of “two infielders to be on each side of second base when a pitch is released.” If the rule is broken, “the ball is dead and the umpire shall call a ball.”

Well, last Thursday, the Atlantic League’s Opening Day, the anti-shift rule was utilized in a game between the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs and the Sugar Land Skeeters. Former big leaguer James Loney (remember him?) was at the plate in the bottom of the fourth inning. On the first pitch from Blue Crabs righty Daryl Thompson, Loney hit a soft ground ball to second baseman Angelys Nina, who easily threw him out at first to begin the inning. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Norris has a lot of friends. They include a fastball, a slider, a changeup, and a curveball. The Detroit Tigers southpaw doesn’t actually converse with them — not in the way that Mark “The Bird” Fidrych once talked to the baseball — but they are nonetheless part of his coterie. They are his compadres. His amigos.

Norris is known for his unconventional ways. A few years back he gained a certain amount of notoriety for living in a VW van. His beard — since shorn — is often bushy, his soliloquies on life thoughtful. Moreover, his responses to reporters’ questions have rarely been of the paint-by-numbers variety. A few hours before he fanned the first big-league batter he faced — David Ortiz, in September 2014 — I happened to ask Norris if he’s imagined what his debut would feel like. His response was, “I have, and it will be like that times 10.”

A few days ago, I asked the now-26-year-old about his arsenal. The answer I received didn’t disappoint. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Rich Hill‘s dominant rehab start, the most famous catches in history and Sam’s article about recreating Kevin Mitchell’s barehand catch, their own best baseball plays, and when it becomes objectionable to sit a player who’s pursuing a single-season record, then answer listener emails about the entertainment value of high-strikeout teams, whether rebuilding teams should try to plan for forthcoming rules changes, how fast a pitch would have to be to knock over a catcher, and the pitchers with the most one-pitch outings, plus an email-inspired Stat Blast about teams with DHs who bat toward the bottom of the order (and why apparent positional trends are sometimes spurious).

Audio intro: Billy Idol, "Catch My Fall"
Audio outro: Super Furry Animals, "Show Your Hand"

Link to story on Hill’s rehab start
Link to Sam’s tweet about famous catches
Link to Sam’s Mitchell article
Link to Galvis catch
Link to research on the value of a day off
Link to Sam on third base as a power position
Link to Dave on first base offense
Link to dying DH post
Link to Ben on why WAR always changes
Link to David Kagan’s baseball physics site
Link to Steve on unwritten-rules origins
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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UMP: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Episode 13

This is the 13th episode of a sorta weekly program co-hosted by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel about player evaluation in all its forms. The show, which is available through the normal FanGraphs Audio feed, has a working name but barely. The show is not all prospect stuff, but there is plenty of that, as the hosts are Prospect Men.

This episode is unique because Kiley and Meg Rowley have hot Game of Thrones takes to fire off but Eric is tied up with prospect travel.

0:21 – Surprise, the cohost is Meg and she’s not happy with Kiley’s intro.
0:46 – The elite nut-milk hipster coffee situation has expanded to Twitter beef.
3:11 – Kiley explains what’s happening in this episode.
3:45 – Kiley tries out some standup material about coupon codes.
5:55 – Okay, he has one more chunk about IKEA.
9:20 – Meg launches a lifestyle podcast on the Goop network.
9:40 – The Game of Thrones thoughts flow freely.
31:45 – The GOT episode three Death Draft commences.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @kileymcd or @longenhagen or @megrowler on Twitter or at prospects@fangraphs.com.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 44 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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The hit-by-pitch, as we know it today, predates the American League itself. It was in 1887, a good 14 years before the founding of baseball’s Junior Circuit, that the rules of this sport were amended to award a runner first base when hit by a pitcher’s usually-errant toss to home plate. (Interestingly enough, though, the statistic of a “hit-by-pitch” has been kept since 1884.)

Today, the hit-by-pitch generally flies under-the-radar. Of course there is the notable exception, the retaliatory hit-by-pitch, which does rear its ugly head around every few weeks. And we do often find ourselves talking about a hit-by-pitch when it unfortunately injuries one of our favorite players. But, other than that, it’s an event that just happens. There’s not much else to it.

Or so I initially thought. As the years have gone by, hit-by-pitches have been slowly increasing, and it really hasn’t gathered much attention from the greater baseball community. The 2018 season saw an all-time high in hit batsmen with 1,922. And in 2019, we are on pace to break the 2,000 mark for the first time in baseball’s history. Read the rest of this entry »

Roughly one month into the 2019 season, we’re still in Weird Stats territory. So long as we are, it’s worth appreciating the extreme numbers some players are putting up before they vanish into the ether, and few players are more reliably extreme than Joey Gallo. I checked in on him in last week’s visit to the furthest reaches of hitter performance, but since then, something else he’s doing — not unrelated — has captured my attention.

While it seems that Gallo has been around forever — he was a first-round pick in 2012, made his first top-100 lists in ’14, and debuted in June of the following year — he’s still just 25 years old and has two full seasons and some fragments under his belt. In both of those seasons (2017 and ’18), he reached the 40-homer level, struck out about 36% of the time (with over two Ks for every hit), walked a good deal, and finished with batting averages in the low .200s. For all of the extremes, he produced WARs of 2.8 in both seasons, with better defense as a near-full-time outfielder in the latter season (as opposed to shaky third base play in the former) which offset his wRC+ drop from 121 in 2017 to 110 in ’18. That’s a solidly above-average player before you factor in the added entertainment value he brings with his light-tower power. Here, have a 442-foot homer:

In this young season, Gallo has been something quite a bit more than solidly above average, hitting .284/.393/.689 through Wednesday. He entered Thursday ranked second in the AL in slugging percentage, tied for fifth in homers (eight), sixth in wRC+ (172), and tied for 11th in WAR (1.0). I’ll get to some of the less flashy particulars below, but what drew me in last week was his 62.5% home run-to-fly ball ratio, more than double a 2017-18 rate (28.8%) that ranked fourth in the majors; he’s since dropped to 50.0%, and will continue to fall even if he does remain the highest among qualifiers. What caught my eye in following up was his average exit velocity to date: 99.1 mph, tops in the majors.

Admittedly, exit velocity is not the be-all and end-all of Statcast measures. Launch angle matters, for one thing; 99 mph with a 15 degree launch angle, for example, produces an expected batting average of .726, while 99 mph with a -15 degree launch angle produces an average of .206. A writer-friend who knows much more about Statcast than I do suggested that hard hit rate (balls with an EV of 95 mph or above) might be a more useful gauge of Gallo’s current hot streak, but intuitively, it’s more difficult to grasp what a 50% hard hit rate means, or, in Gallo’s case, a 65.9% rate, without additional context (it’s second in the majors). A 99.1 mph average exit velo? That’s a lot of smoked baseballs. In Gallo’s case, 25 of his 44 balls in play have been hit at 105 mph or higher. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you’re a time-traveling visitor from 900 years in the future, you’ve probably heard that the Bronx Bombers have been struck by a rash of injuries early on this season. Among the more eyebrow-raising of those maladies was the revelation that key setup reliever and very tall human Dellin Betances had been sidelined with a bone spur. As Randy Miller reported for NJ.com:

What’s really interesting about Betances’ ordeal this week – his setback in Tampa, return to New York and second MRI – is Friday night’s revealing that he’s been pitching with a bone spur in his throwing shoulder since high school that never has affected his pitching.

More interesting, GM Brian Cashman said on Friday night that the Yankees have known about the bone spur since Betances had an MRI before signing his first pro contract as a teen in 2006 … and Betances saying Saturday morning that he first heard of it on Friday night.

That’s right – it appears the Yankees knew for over a decade that their right-handed relief ace had a bone spur, and they didn’t tell said right-hander about it.

“I guess from the previous MRIs I’ve always had it,” Betances said Saturday. “I didn’t know about it until now. But, yeah, I’ve always had it. I always come into spring and I feel, I guess .. a little stiff, But for me it usually gets better and this time it wasn’t. That’s pretty much what happened.”

Why did the Yankees never tell Betances about his bone spur?

“He hasn’t had the inflammation before,” Cashman said. “On the various testing we’ve done since we signed him … (After) drafting (Betances) I gave him a $1 million to sign rather than go on to college, and you do a physical and there’s an MRI, and right away that was (a bone spur that was) an incidental incident, meaning it’s not affecting him.

“There is something there. It’s inconsequential, non-symptomatic. He hasn’t had to deal with this. It’s had no affect on his game or pitching in anyway shape or form. The various times we imaged him, if it was for insurance or whatever reason, it’s always been there, but it’s never been something that’s caused a problem.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s start with this: the Yankees not only knew that Betances had a bone spur, they imaged it for insurance purposes. At the same time, they didn’t tell Betances because, as Cashman put it, it was “incidental” and largely asymptomatic. The uniform Major League Baseball contract required Betances to warrant that he has “no physical or mental defects” that would “prevent or impair” his ability to play baseball. The Yankees knew Betances had such a defect, and didn’t tell him. Worse, they had a number of contentious arbitration hearings with the right-hander. In hindsight, Randy Levine’s comments that Betances was “a victim” of his agent’s “overreach,” and comparison of Betances to an astronaut, seem even worse when one considers that the Yankees knew Betances had a medical condition and had seemingly disclosed that to insurance companies but not the player himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Boyd is one the 120 pitchers who have been featured in our ongoing Learning and Developing a Pitch series. In an installment that ran last June, the Detroit Tigers southpaw spoke of how he was introduced to a slider at Oregon State University, and later tweaked his wrist action to give the pitch more consistency and depth. There’s more to the story than was divulged in that telling
— especially when you consider that further fine-tuning has occurred over the past 10 months. Boyd’s slider is better than it’s ever been.

Right now, the lefty is a better pitcher than he’s ever been. Five starts into the season, Boyd boasts a 3.16 ERA, a 2.41 FIP, and has fanned 39 batters in 31.1 innings. The sample size is admittedly small, but there are nonetheless reasons to believe that the 28-year-old Seattle-area product is starting to come into his own. The slider — a pitch he’s throwing 38% of the time — is a big reason. Boyd discussed the offering’s evolution earlier this week.

———

Matthew Boyd: “I’ve worked on it at Driveline a ton in recent years. I worked with Matt Daniels, with Taiki Green, with Kyle [Boddy]. We were just drilling that thing. We got it to a point where it was high-80s, and it was good, but it was inconsistent. It got better, but in 2017 it kind of fell off a little bit, so we worked it again.

“It really started taking off when I was able to match up my delivery. I had been landing in different spots — my land foot would vary by three or four inches, compared to the pitch before. When you have that type of inconsistency with the lower half, it’s going to put your body at changed angles. One degree of wrist angle on the pitcher’s mound is something like 17 inches on the front. That’s huge, right? When I was able to get that consistency… stuff I worked on at Driveline was huge. Things started taking root before [the 2018 season]. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the long-awaited promotion of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., baseball-watching etiquette at a bachelorette party, and Mike Trout if he weren’t trying, then answer listener emails about Rhys Hoskins, Jacob Rhame, and the latest unwritten-rules flare-up between the Phillies and Mets, Tyler Wade, Andrelton Simmons, and a questionable application of replay view, how home-plate umpires would perform with transparent players, what type of MLB players they’d prefer to be, how best to distribute 50 WAR across a career, the odd assortment of baseball players (and fees) on Cameo, balls bouncing into the strike zone, and the potential effects of a bigger and/or heavier baseball.

Audio intro: Camera Obscura, "Number One Son"
Audio outro: Jenny Lewis, "The Next Messiah"

Link to Vlad tweet
Link to Mets/Phillies events
Link to video of hidden-ball trick
Dave on slide replay reviews
Link to Ben on Trout’s defensive improvement
Link to baseball listings on Cameo
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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