One of my favorite pieces I wrote last year was about players whose baserunning value was at odds with their footspeed: specifically, those who were squandering the God-given advantage of their legs. A year later, I have a new crop of baserunners to write about. We also have an updated version of our metric for calculating baserunning value (BsR) in 2024. So, I decided the topic was worth a fresh look.

I took a pretty subjective approach when I wrote about this last season. I went through the sprint speed leaderboard on Baseball Savant, compared it to our BsR leaderboard, and scanned for players who stood out. This time around, I decided I could be a little more scientific. I made a spreadsheet featuring every player who has taken at least 300 plate appearances and recorded at least 100 competitive runs this season – nice, round, arbitrary cut-off points to limit small sample size randomness. Then, I determined the percentile value for each player’s BsR, as well as the percentile value for two different measurements of speed: sprint speed and the time it takes to run from home plate to first base (HP to 1B).

As I compared the results, three names immediately caught my eye: Jo Adell, Jeff McNeil, and Mickey Moniak. Adell has, by far, the widest gap between his sprint speed percentile (86th) and BsR percentile (9th). That’s approximately a 77% difference; no other runner has a gap bigger than 60%. Meanwhile, McNeil boasts the widest gap between his HP to 1B percentile (86th) and BsR percentile (19th). Finally, Moniak ranks among the top 20% in both sprint speed and HP to 1B, yet he ranks among the bottom third in BsR. He has the third-largest gap between his sprint speed (84th) and BsR (32nd) and the fifth-largest gap between his HP to 1B (83rd) and BsR. He is the only player with one of the five largest gaps in both areas: Read the rest of this entry »

I first learned of the kick change while in Chicago for Saberseminar in late August. Chatting with Garrett Crochet and Jonathan Cannon in the White Sox clubhouse prior to a Saturday game, I heard the term from Cannon, who was describing a new pitch that one of their rotation mates, Davis Martin, had recently begun throwing. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

The following day, I learned even more about the atypical offering. Brian Bannister presented at Saberseminar that Sunday, and the kick change was one of the subjects he brought up. Moreover, the White Sox Senior Advisor to Pitching subsequently spoke about it in more detail while taking questions from the audience, this particular one coming, not surprisingly, from my colleague Michael Rosen.

As luck would have it, two opportunities to hear even more about the kick change were right around the corner. The White Sox visited Fenway Park this past weekend, and with Boston being my home base, I was able to sit down with Martin to get his perspective on the pitch, as well as the story of why and how he learned it. Then the Orioles arrived in town, so I talked to reliever Matt Bowman, who not only has something similar in his arsenal, but he also is Bannister-esque when it comes to the art and science of pitching. I spoke to the veteran right-hander about the kick change and its close-cousin relationship with the better-known split change.

Here are my conversations, lightly edited for clarity, with Martin and Bowman.

———

David Laurila: What is the kick change?

Davis Martin: “It’s basically for supinators. I’ve never been a pronator. It’s for guys that have really good spin talent and have always had the ability to get to that supination plane. But pronating is very unnatural for us from a physiological standpoint. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Crow-Armstrong just had a really good night. He made multiple highlight-reel catches in center field, including robbing Max Muncy of a home run with two outs in the ninth inning.

That was a great play even by PCA’s lofty standards, but his speed and defense are a known quantity. I just had to stop myself from using the word “gamebreaking,” like he’s a cornerback and punt returner from the 1990s or something. Crow-Armstrong’s glove is going to get him on SportsCenter, but it’s on the other side of the ball where he’ll determine how much he can help the Cubs while he’s there, as well as how long he stays in the lineup and how much money he makes over his career. The really exciting part of PCA’s Tuesday night only shows up in the box score: He went 2-for-4 with two RBI. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last year, we’ve put a lot of effort into improving our player pages, which underwent a full redesign in June. When we updated the player page navigation as part of that redesign, we included pitch modeling in the season stats. Earlier this week, we announced the beta of our Membership-only player page dashboard cards. And today, we’ve added PitchingBot and Stuff+ pitch modeling stats to our game logs. This feature is available to all of our readers.

The layout of these pitch modeling stats reflects the season stat pages and the leaderboards. We have both Stuff+ and PitchingBot, including the three model types within each of those broader models (Stuff+, Location+, and Pitching+ for Stuff+, and Stuff, Command, and Overall for PitchingBot). Those model types can be selected in the sidebar on desktop or the navigation drop-down on mobile:

Desktop

Mobile

If you want more information on the pitch modeling stats available at FanGraphs, be sure to read the entries on PitchingBot and Stuff+ in our glossary.

Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions, either by leaving a comment below or emailing support@fangraphs.com.

Relief pitching is hard work. More than that, it’s work whose difficulty builds on itself. If you’re covering a single inning in a single game, you can use your best reliever. Second inning? You’ll need your second-best guy, and so on. Second day in a row? Now your best relievers are tired. Third day in a row? Now maybe everyone is tired. And relief work never stops; through Monday’s action, there have been 4,322 starts in baseball this year and 26 complete games.

There’s an inherent tradeoff between how much teams rely on their bullpen and the average quality of the relievers who come in. No one does this anymore, but a team that was only asking its bullpen for a few innings a game could use its best arms for a high proportion of its overall innings. A team full of five-and-dive starters has to go much further down the depth chart; covering four innings per game with relievers requires more contributors.

There’s no obvious correlation between relief innings pitched and quality, for various reasons. Teams aren’t passive observers here; the teams that expect to need more relief innings tend to acquire more relievers, because they know they’ll be needed. Front offices are always on the lookout for innings eaters to lighten the bullpen load. But increasingly, this is just a cost of doing business. Teams and starters are both of the opinion that their best work is done in short bursts. If that’s the case, there will be more relief innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the solution to a Carlos Estévez prediction cold case, share a baseball-sicko experience prompted by the band Hinds’s new single, put actors on baseball-movie Mount Rushmore (in honor of the late, great, James Earl Jones), scrutinize two suggestions for HBP policing, assess the risks and history of ceremonial first pitches, Nora Ephron’s fandom, and the “first ball” in the movie My Blue Heaven, and banter about a White Sox ad for MLB.TV, the call-up of Jasson Domínguez, Gerrit Cole’s return to form, whether Corbin Burnes’s free agency could play out like Blake Snell’s and Jordan Montgomery’s, the Mets-Braves wild card race, Francisco Lindor, Trea Turner, and fan ovations, the unsung A’s offense, Jerry DiPOBO’s Seattle staying power, and more.

Audio intro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to player predictions EW wiki
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Justin Verlander did not have a good night on Sunday against the Diamondbacks in Houston. The 41-year-old future Hall of Famer retired just nine of the 19 batters he faced, allowing eight runs in three innings in one of the worst starts of his 19-year career — and not an isolated one, either, as he’s been struggling since returning from his second stint on the injured list. For as difficult as it is to believe, even in a rotation that’s been beset by injuries this year, Verlander might not be one of the Astros’ starters when the playoffs roll around.

At Minute Maid Park on Sunday evening, Verlander worked a scoreless first inning, getting ahead of all four hitters he faced and allowing just one baserunner; he hit Joc Pederson on the left leg with a two-out, two-strike curveball. His second and third innings were another story, however, as he allowed seven runs on a pair of homers by Pavin Smith, and, well, you can do the math as to the traffic that preceded them.

Struggling to command his fastball and not fooling anyone with his secondaries, Verlander netted just four swings and misses from among his 75 pitches, all on his four-seamer, and got just six called strikes from his curve, slider, and changeup combined (18% CSW%). For just the fifth time in 523 career starts and the first time since July 2, 2017, he didn’t strike out a single hitter. The eight runs he allowed were one short of his career high, set on April 15, 2017; he hadn’t allowed exactly eight runs since June 26, 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Statistically speaking, Joey Loperfido has gotten off to slow start in his major league career. Over his first 222 plate appearances, the lefty-hitting outfielder is slashing just .229/.281/.371 with four home runs and an 86 wRC+. Those numbers are split fairly evenly between two organizations; the 25-year-old Loperfido was traded from the Houston Astros to the Toronto Blue Jays shortly before July’s trade deadline as part of the four-player Yusei Kikuchi deal.

He’s projected to produce more than he has thus far. The Duke University product put up a .933 OPS in Triple-A prior to making his major league debut at the end of April, and as Eric Longenhagen explained in mid-June, Loperfido “has done nothing but perform since breaking into the pro ranks.” Our lead prospect analyst assigned Loperfido, who was selected in the seventh round of the 2021 draft, a 45 FV while ranking him third on our 2024 Astros Top Prospects list.

Loperfido sat down to talk hitting when the Blue Jays played at Fenway Park in late August.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite ice-breaker questions in this series: Do you approach hitting as more of an art or as more of a science?

Joey Loperfido: “I think it’s somewhere in between. When you look back at it, you can see the parts that would be considered more of a science. But when you’re doing it, and as you’re feeling it, a lot of it is an art. There are a lot of calculated actions and movements, and for me that’s kind of the question of feel versus real.”

Laurila: How has that perspective evolved over the years? When you’re a kid, you’re basically just up there swinging a bat… Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

The final stretch of the season is now upon us, and it sure is going to be fun. The Orioles and Yankees are jockeying for the AL East title, with a first-round bye almost certainly going to the winner. The NL Wild Card is a beautiful mess, with four teams fighting for the three spots and two other clubs, the Cubs and Cardinals, still lurking in the distance. And the under-the-radar Tigers are roaring, trying to pull out a last-minute postseason berth after selling at the trade deadline.

Last month, when I wrote about the players who were added off the waiver wire, I mentioned that another batch of waiver claims would come at the end of August, after more teams fell out of contention. So now that we’re well into September, let’s take a look at some of the notable players who’ve switched teams over the last few weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »