12:01

Dan Szymborski: It’s April, but I’m still having this lousy Smarch weather!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: What format?

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Well, he could get a deal he likes, but yes, he’s rapidly becoming the only player in free agency!

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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 — Corbin Burnes, Ty Buttrey, and Steve Cishek — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

Corbin Burnes, Milwaukee Brewers

“Coming out of high school I was mainly fastball-curveball-changeup. When I got to college, my coach approached me and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about throwing a slider?’ I was all for it. My fastball had a little bit of cutting action, so if we could kind of extend that cut, it would make for a good deception pitch off my fastball.

“I’ve tinkered with grips a little over the years. What I’ve come to is basically … it’s like my four-seam fastball, but with a little pressure adjustment. Originally it was going to be more of an extended cutter — we were going to try to keep it hard — but the more I threw it, the more it turned into a slider. That was more natural for me. Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers came within one win of a trip to the World Series last year thanks in part to the performance of a dominant bullpen that helped to offset a shaky, injury-wracked rotation. Thus far this spring, however, that bullpen has borne the brunt of the Brewers’ injuries. With Jeremy Jeffress having already started the season on the injury list due to shoulder weakness, the team just suffered an even bigger loss, as Corey Knebel revealed on Friday that he will undergo Tommy John surgery.

The 27-year-old Knebel originally suffered a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament in 2014, while pitching for the Rangers’ Triple-A Round Rock affiliate. He was just over a year into his professional career at that point, having been chosen as a supplemental first-round pick by the Tigers out of the University of Texas in 2013, then dealt to the Rangers in a July 2014 trade involving Joakim Soria. The injury wasn’t severe enough to require TJS, so he rehabbed it and kept pitching, establishing himself in the majors after being traded to the Brewers in the Yovani Gallardo deal in 2015, then taking over closer duties from the struggling Neftali Feliz in 2017. That year, he earned All-Star honors while saving 39 games, making an NL-high 76 appearances, and pitching to a 1.78 ERA, 2.53 FIP, and 2.7 WAR; the last mark ranked fourth in the majors among relievers with at least 50 innings.

The 2018 season was a different story for Knebel. He made just three appearances before missing a month due to a left hamstring strain, and pitched so erratically that he was sent back to Triple-A Colorado Springs with a 5.08 ERA and 4.29 FIP in late August. Fortunately for the Brewers, he was thoroughly dominant upon returning, holding batters to a .096/.175/.135 line while striking out 33 of the 57 he faced in 16.1 scoreless innings through the end of the regular season, then striking out 14 out of 33 hitters over 10 postseason innings while allowing just one run. Overall, his 3.58 ERA was more than double his 2017 mark, though his 3.03 FIP wasn’t so far removed; in both seasons, he posted top-five strikeout rates (40.8% in 2017, 39.5% last year) and top 10 K-BB% (27.8% and 29.6%, respectively), with a jump in home run rate (from 0.71 per nine to 1.14) the big difference. Still, between that and a lesser workload (from 76 innings to 55.1), his WAR dropped from 2.7 to 1.0. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about Sam’s cabin sojourn, how well Major League has held up, an exciting development in strategic bat tosses, a big day for Willians Astudillo, the difficulty of drawing conclusions about baseball early in the season, the early-season home-run rate, the paradox of sports radio, Sam’s Jose Ramirez hot take, bunting against four-man outfields, service-time manipulation and Kyle Freeland, whether we would notice if MLB stealthily implemented robot umps, and check-swing mistakes, plus Stat Blasts about Luke Voit and perfect starts to the season, the most MLB games ever played in one day, the longest gaps between pairings of the same pitcher and catcher, and Yu Darvish and the most pitches thrown in a game before the first ball in play.

Audio intro: Disclosure, "Together"
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, "We’ll Be Together Again"

Link to Sam on strategic bat tosses
Link to Swanson bat toss
Link to research on hitters being ahead of pitchers
Link to Martin pitching appearance stats
Link to article about position players pitching with leads
Link to day with the most games played
Link to longest gaps in pitcher-catcher pairings
Link to list of games with most pitches before first BIP
Link to box score for Darvish start
Link to box score for Martinez start
Link to article about MLBPA grievance
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Spring training numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s no denying that Ryan McMahon has been a monster in the month of March. In 59 Cactus League at bats, the Colorado Rockies infielder banged out 25 hits while slashing a behemothic .424/.470/.763. His 1.233 OPS led the leaderboards in Arizona and Florida alike.

No, he isn’t about to approach those numbers in games that count — this isn’t Ty Cobb we’re talking about — but the 24-year-old is being counted on to provide value to the Rockies lineup. Three games into the regular season, he’s done just that. McMahon has four hits, including a pair of doubles, plus two walks, in a dozen plate appearances. Lilliputian sample size? Sure, but it’s nonetheless a nice start for the 2013 second-round pick.

His 2018 rookie season was a disappointment. In 202 big-league PAS, he fanned 64 times, and logged a .683 OPS. That came on the heels of spring training numbers which, while not as heady as this year’s, suggested he was ready to rake at the highest level. Instead, he scuffled.

McMahon is self-aware enough not to have forgotten last year. Asked a few weeks ago about his scorching spring, he reminded reporters that it had only been a few dozen at bats — spring training at bats, no less — and that “Baseball is a very humbling game. You never have it all the way figured out.” Read the rest of this entry »

UMP: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Episode 12

This is the 12th episode of a mostly 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 week we have a one topic show featuring special guest Meg Rowley of this very website. In honor of March Madness, we held a draft of active baseball players on major league 40-man rosters for a round robin basketball tournament. Listen to the episode to hear our logic and then use this poll to vote on who has the best squad. Warning: the poll contains a recap of our rosters, so don’t click on the link before listening if you don’t want those spoiled!

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

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

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 32 min play time.)

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about their Opening Day experiences, the pleasure of immersing themselves in baseball again, baseball players being better than ever, and MLB’s arbitration championship belt, then (22:25) talk to Joey Mellows, AKA “The Baseball Brit,” about how he became a baseball convert, his worldwide baseball travels and his quest to see 162 games this season, the logistics of his journey, the fan experience in the U.S. compared to South Korea and Japan, watching indy ball vs. watching MLB, baseball’s popularity in the UK, the upcoming MLB games in London, his best and worst ballpark experiences, how he explains baseball to non-fans, how he’s learned about baseball history, and much more.

Audio intro: The Mountain Goats, "First Few Desperate Hours"
Audio interstitial: The Pretty Things, "Joey"
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, "Day By Day"

Link to Ben’s story about MLB’s improving caliber of play
Link to story about the championship belt
Link to THT piece about Joey Mellows
Link to story about Caps Off
Link to Bat Flips and Nerds
Link to Joey’s map of all the U.S. ballparks
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Phillies third baseman Maikel Franco has been with the Phillies since signing as an international free agent in 2010, and since he made his major league debut in 2014, the Phillies haven’t had a winning season. Before this season, he had only 59 career plate appearances batting eighth in the order. During the Phillies’ rebuild, Franco was a middle-of-the-order bat, despite never truly evolving into one. Of his career 2,115 plate appearances, over half of them (1,068) came in either the No. 3 or No. 4 hole.

On Thursday, Franco batted eighth, not because of any personal struggles on his part, but because of the Phillies’ depth up and down their lineup. In the sixth inning, in a 3-2 count (and on the seventh pitch of the at-bat), Franco turned on a Shane Carle fastball and drove a three-run home run into the left field seats. With one swing of the bat, the Phillies’ 3-1 lead became 6-1, with this at-bat serving as the icing on the cake in the Phillies’ eventual 10-4 win.

“Our eight-hole guy hit a three-run homer,” Phillies outfielder Andrew McCutchen told MLB.com. “It just shows you how deep the lineup is. Franco, he’s not an eight-hole hitter. Not the typical one. It just shows you what we can do, one through eight. Yeah, we can do it on a daily basis. It’s not going to be one or two guys that’s picking the team up, we’re going to picking each other up because we have that type of lineup to do it.”

Why did this one at-bat in this one Opening Day game pique my interest? It’s because this at-bat might foreshadow one of the key themes of the 2019 Phillies season: depth. Read the rest of this entry »

Yasiel Puig may or may not have been swinging a Birdman in yesterday’s opener. The Cincinnati Reds slugger — according to Birdman Bat founder Gary Malec — is “one of those guys who’ll you see go back and forth” with bat models over the course of a season. Last year, several of the minus-twos and minus-threes Puig wielded were supplied by Malec’s Bay-Area company.

If you’re not a player yourself, “minus-two” and “minus-three” are likely unfamiliar terms. How bats are manufactured, regulated by MLB, and typically purchased are probably also foreign to you. Frankly, there’s a decent chance you haven’t even put any thought into those things. You simply know that players swing bats, and sometimes those bats propel baseballs far distances.

Two members of the Birdman crew — Lars Anderson and Cody Silveria — were pleased to inform me that Puig’s longest 2018 home run came off the barrel of one of their bats. Ditto the ball Puig hit with the highest exit velocity, and San Francisco Giants outfielder Chris Shaw’s first big-league homer. More importantly — at least in terms of the purpose of this article — they explained how the bat business works.

With continuity and flow in mind, Anderson’s and Silveria’s voices aren’t differentiated within the text of this interview. The conversation itself took place during the Winter Meetings.

———

Anderson and Silveria: “There are currently 35 licensed bat companies — Birdman was licensed in January 2018 — and to get certified you have to go through a process. You pay a fee. You do a blanket insurance policy. You send two test bats to the TECO test lab in Wisconsin. Then you’re sent to a test course — this is one 12-hour day — where they show you how to do the slope-of-grain test, which is the ink dots you see on all major league bats. This is to make sure the safety of the wood is good. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this spring training, everyone cringed a bit when it was reported that Brandon Nimmo became sick after eating under-cooked chicken (his own recipe, naturally). I think most people had the same thought about it: what the heck? It turns out that his illness was a result of a virus instead of food poisoning, so now Nimmo is free to eat as many under-cooked chickens as he wants, but the (subjective) fact remains that it is quite gross.

Anyway, this isn’t about Nimmo’s illness or his ill-advised recipe. This is about baseball. Nimmo had one of the biggest breakouts of 2018. Because the Mets were not great last year, I don’t think a lot of people appreciated how well he performed. Nimmo put up a 4.5 WAR, which was 29th-highest among all positional players, coming in his age-25 season. Among all 25-year-old position-player seasons from 2010 to 2018, Nimmo’s campaign ranks 24th. There are some nice names on the list as well — Christian Yelich, Trea Turner, and Nolan Arenado, for instance.

FanGraphs’ own Eric Longenhagen told me that there’s an untapped potential in Nimmo that could be uncovered as he plays more. “There’s always a chance that he grows and changes into a different player as he ages, and that might be especially true here because his amateur background is so bizarre compared to most pro baseball players.” Nimmo is from Wyoming and did not get to play regular high school baseball. He had to drive anywhere between 45 minutes to 10 hours to play American Legion ball to get exposure. Nimmo has a cool story that could get cooler as he gets more playing time in the majors. This invites the question that applies to every young player: who can Nimmo be? Is there a particular role model?

ZiPS expects him to hit .240/.359/.402 (116 wRC+) with a 2.3 WAR, with his No. 1 comparison being Andy Van Slyke. That feels conservative, but that’s the nature of projection systems — Nimmo doesn’t have a long history of being an excellent major league player, and he did put up 89 and 118 wRC+ marks in the previous two seasons.

I became curious and decided to search for someone whose numbers resembled Nimmo’s walk and power tendencies from the 2018 season. Why those two? For one, Nimmo boasted a high walk rate of 15%, which engineered a .404 OBP. The only players who were ahead of him in on-base percentage last year were Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, and Joey Votto. Nimmo was ahead of known superstars such as Bryce Harper, Alex Bregman, and Yelich, which is significant, especially for a youngster playing in his first full major league season. Nimmo also put up a .219 isolated power mark, which is above average and contributed to his 4.5 WAR. It’s not a top-notch number yet, but because of Nimmo’s youth, one might expect it to rise in coming years. I looked up seasons from 2000 to 2018 to find players whose walk and power numbers profiled similarly to Nimmo’s, and one name in particular stood out.

First off, let’s compare Nimmo and the mystery player’s ages 23 to 25 seasons:

The walk and power numbers aren’t the only similarities. Their batted ball profiles also share a resemblance. We actually don’t have the mystery player’s ages 23-to-25 data for that, so we’ll use his career numbers from 2002 to 2014.

Lastly, here’s an excerpt of one of the mystery player’s scouting reports from 1995:

Physical description: Athletic actions, frame has chance to carry more strength.

Strong points: Outstanding approach to hitting, sweet short compact stroke w/outstanding balance, knowledge of K-zone, good 2-strike hitter, spray ball to all fields. Gap to gap guy, run well especially 1st to 3rd, arm avg to above w/ good carry and rot (rotation?), 4.16 speed to 1B, can play LF-RF fairly well occasionally gets good jumps.

Summation: Young good looking hitter. Mark Grace type and when strength comes he should be able to linedrive some HRs. Defense skills are a little short and experience will help improvement. 3 tool guy now with a high ceiling.

And here’s an excerpt of Brandon Nimmo’s scouting report from Baseball America (subscription required) after the 2015 season:

 On-base ability always has been the bedrock of Nimmo’s game, for he excels at working counts and lining the ball to left field if pitchers work him away. He shows pull-side power in batting practice but prefers to work the entire field in games with a handsy, lefthanded swing geared more for line drives than home runs. Nimmo tracks the ball well in center field and grades as at least an average defender with ordinary running speed. He’s graceful and reliable in the outfield, though his average arm would be stretched in right field, if he has to move. Nimmo hasn’t attempted many stolen bases as a pro, and that probably won’t change.

The scouts’ eyes saw similarities as well. They both point out line-drive power that could develop into more home runs in the future (which it did for the mystery player). The scout from 1995 noted the mystery player’s “outstanding approach to hitting” and “good knowledge of K-zone” while the BA praised Nimmo for his plate discipline.

If you haven’t identified the mystery player yet, the answer is Bobby Abreu. The thing is, there are also quite a lot of differences between these two. As you saw from the first table, Nimmo struck out way more than Abreu did. In 2018, Nimmo’s strikeout rate was 26.2%, which is much higher than Abreu’s career average (18.3%), and his career high in a full season (22.6%). Nimmo could improve there, of course. Young hitters tend to lower their strikeout rate until their peak age. According to research from Jeff Zimmerman, Nimmo is at the age where his strikeout rate might be as low as it will get, but we can give him the benefit of the doubt due to his weird amateur background and relative newness to the majors. When I looked up Nimmo’s walk rate and strikeout rate compared to hitters’ seasons from 2000 to 2018, he profiled closer to Adam Dunn and Jim Thome — two sluggers that had way more power than Nimmo is projected to have. Due to Nimmo’s scouting profile, particularly his walk and power tendencies, I felt Abreu would be a better fit.

It is worth noting that hitters strike out much more now than they did during Abreu’s time. One can assume that Abreu would have struck out more if he were to play today than in the early 2000s. As for Nimmo, there have been instances where players drastically improve their strikeout rate, but it’s not really something to count on. You can expect improvements, but as far as the pure numbers go, Nimmo is likely to stay a bigger strikeout hitter than Abreu was.

I mentioned the batted ball profile before. There’s also a stark difference between those two on that score.

Something that jumps out here is the infield fly ball rate. Also, Nimmo seems to have a more pull-happy approach, which became more apparent in 2018, when he pulled 44.7% of his batted balls. Travis Sawchik examined this back in June, noting that his new pull approach may have helped his overall power numbers. Perhaps it’s not something Nimmo would like to give up for now — it did help his power breakout last year, after all.

Writing this, I was originally thinking along the lines of “how Nimmo can become Abreu,” because becoming a two-time All-Star who enjoyed a fruitful 18-year career is a heck of a thing. But after realizing that a major difference between those two — Nimmo’s pull tendency — actually helped the youngster’s ascendance to being an exciting major league regular, I’m not so sure anymore. Would he change his swing for a different approach? Longenhagen doubts it.

“I think that kind of thing is harder to change. I’d expect him to be pull-heavy for the duration of his career,” he said.

There are numbers that indicate that he could be the newer-age Abreu while not completely being an Abreu. I’m not guaranteeing that Nimmo will end up a player who will get Hall of Fame consideration, but there are stats that indicate similarities with a player who will certainly be on next year’s HOF ballot. Some things are nice to dream on.