Rick Porcello has a plus curveball. That wasn’t always the case. He could really snap one off in his amateur days, but then something strange happened. Shortly after signing with the Detroit Tigers, who drafted him 27th overall in 2007 out of a New Jersey high school, Porcello found that the pitch had gone missing.

When I talked to the 29-year-old Red Sox right-hander recently, the plan was to include him in my ongoing Player’s View: Learning and Developing a Pitch series. As it turns out, the story behind his hook merits a longer look than can be folded into three or four paragraphs. A tale of disappearance and recovery is not only compelling, it takes time to tell.

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Rick Porcello: “When I was a teenager I had a really good curveball. It was something that came naturally to me. Then, when I got into pro ball, I didn’t have a good one in my first start, and I didn’t have a good one in my second start. It turned into this thing where it wasn’t there all year. I completely lost it. But I did have a really good sinker and a really good changeup, so I was fortunate enough to make the big-league team the next year.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

These daily notes are going to be different/sporadic this week, as I’ll be in Southern California for the Area Code Games in Long Beach and then PG All American in San Diego over the weekend. In today’s edition, I’ve got notes on some of the players I saw in Arizona over the weekend, and a reflection on a few specific aspects of our process as it relates to pitcher injuries.

First, a look at Dodgers lefty Julio Urias, who is rehabbing from surgery to repair a tear of his left shoulder’s anterior caspule. Urias threw 1.2 innings against the White Sox’ AZL team on Saturday in his second rehab appearance of the summer. He allowed just one hit and struck out four. His fastball sat 88-91 and topped out at 92, well below the velocity band he has displayed throughout his career, which was typically in the 92-95 range. A scout who was in attendance at Urias’s first rehab outing earlier in the week told me they also had Urias topping out at 92, which conflicts with what was reported just after that outing. Urias’s fastball command was much better in this brief look than it was in his often frustrating big-league appearances, and it has flat, bat-missing plane up in the zone. Overall. though, it’s a 45 fastball right now.

Urias’s secondaries were a bit less crisp than pre-surgery. I saw one slider and several curveballs (flashed plus, mostly average) which were also thrown with less velocity (71-74 mph) than Urias exhibited before injury (75-80). The pitch has good depth and tight snap when it’s down, perhaps not playing within the strike zone quite as well. Urias threw a few average changeups (including a first pitch cambio that Luis Robert foul-tipped) in the 80-83 mph range, but he lacked feel for keeping the pitch down and hung several of them in the top of the strike zone or above it.

Obviously, Urias is returning from a serious shoulder injury, and it’s possible his stuff will tick up with continued work. The Dodgers expect him to contribute to the bullpen in September and he need only wield a competent breaking ball remain left-handed for the next eight weeks to do that. Long term, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen here. Urias was once 6 fastball, 6 breaking ball, above-average changeup, plus command projection. Right now he’s a bunch of 45s and 50s.

Some Thoughts on Process

Before I start discussing some process-oriented stuff on our end, I want to give newer readers a crash course on how we assign FV grades to players and what they mean. A more detailed explanation can be found here.

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Every so often it’s fun to review the preseason FanGraphs staff predictions. We predict standings, but we also predict awards, and, clicking and scrolling down to the National League Rookie of the Year predictions, you can see a lot of love for Ronald Acuna Jr. And, you know, he’s a 20-year-old with a 119 wRC+. Very good! Acuna Jr. ran away with the predictions. There were three votes apiece for Lewis Brinson, Victor Robles, and Scott Kingery. And then there were single votes for J.P. Crawford, Ryan McMahon, Alex Reyes, and Nick Senzel. There were zero votes for Juan Soto. In fairness, there were also zero votes for, say, Brian Anderson and Harrison Bader, but this is a Soto article, so that’s where I’m going to focus.

I wouldn’t consider this a case of staff stupidity. Late last October, Soto turned 19 years old. Injuries limited him in 2017 to just 32 games, all in the very low minors. He came into the season as the FanGraphs No. 50 overall prospect. He was ranked No. 56 by Baseball America. When Soto reached the majors, he did it at nearly record speed. His ascent was as much about major-league injuries as it was about his own performance. Soto wasn’t supposed to arrive as quickly as he has.

There are 240 players who have batted at least 250 times this season. The leader among them in wRC+ is Mike Trout, at 190. In second place, we find Mookie Betts. After Betts, there’s Jose Ramirez. After Ramirez, there’s J.D. Martinez. And after Martinez, there’s Juan Soto. There’s 19-year-old Juan Soto, with a wRC+ of 161. This is a season that hasn’t at all gone the Nationals’ way, but even with that being said, the sudden emergence of Soto has changed the organization’s longer-term outlook. And the shorter-term outlook, too.

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Through Monday morning, José Ramírez has nearly accomplished something very unusual, which to-date has only been done once in baseball history. With just 0.1 WAR in separation, or roughly one run, Ramírez has almost caught Mike Trout. While one might ideally like Derek Fisher – or at least someone named Fry, Cook, or Giantbearpaw – to best a Trout, it’s Ramírez, the still-young Cleveland third baseman, overshadowed as a prospect by Francisco Lindor, who is leading the charge.

Trout, of course, hasn’t just been squeaking out WAR leads, as the average result during his five full, healthy seasons has been a 1.1 WAR lead over the second-place position player, terrorizing the error bars as thoroughly as major-league pitching. Only Bryce Harper has matched Trout so far, a player linked with the Angels center fielder while a prospect but one who has generally fallen short.

Even in Trout’s injury-trimmed 2017, during which he only played 114 games, he still finished fourth among hitters with a 6.9 WAR. That was good enough to be the fifth-best season for a player who appeared in fewer than 120 games since 1901, behind George Brett, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Mike Schmidt, all players you may have heard of.

Ramírez didn’t explode onto the baseball scene as Trout did; in fact, he has been a bit of a surprise. The ZiPS projection season liked him as a prospect, but it didn’t fall CPU-over-RAM in love with him, seeing him more as a cordial fan. Trout is still the favorite, but ZiPS gives him a 35% chance of being surpassed by Ramírez in the year-end WAR count, something that’s awfully hard to do.

After his 2013 stint in Double-A, Ramírez got his first official ZiPS projection for the 2014 season. The computer pegged him at .267/.308/.346 at second base, good for 1.5 WAR in 116 games. While a league-average projection for a 21-year-old is impressive, I can’t make any claim to ZiPS predicting players achieving superstar status.

In 2015, Ramírez’s projection was similar at .263/.304/.360, good for a 90 OPS+ and 2.2 WAR over 138 projected games. This was largely thanks to a .302/.360/.441 Triple-A season in 2014 followed by a .262/.300/.346 line in his first real stint with the Indians. That was enough to get him almost into the top 20 in ZiPS (he would’ve been a top-five prospect in my 2015 list if he hadn’t already lost his Rookie of the Year qualifications).

In 2015, Ramírez began the season as the starting shortstop for Cleveland, and while I don’t have any inside knowledge of Cleveland’s reasoning, I would imagine they wanted to see what they had in Ramírez at short before Lindor hit the majors and cleared out the rest of the suitors, as Odysseus did in legend upon his return to Ithaca.

And what he showed wasn’t that much, at least initially. His defense wasn’t great, at -6 in UZR and -2 in DRS over fewer than 400 innings in 2015. When demoted in June, he was only hitting an Alcidian .180/.247/.240. By the time he returned to the majors in August, Ramírez had lost the shortstop job to the aforementioned Lindor for good, and hit .259/.337/.438, mostly filling in for Jason Kipnis and Giovanny Urshela, both nursing shoulder injuries.

ZiPS still believed in Ramírez going into 2016, but didn’t see quite as much upside, with his 2015 dropping him to 43rd in rest-of-career ZiPS WAR with a .262/.316/.383 line and a 1.9 WAR projection.

By now, you know how the rest of this story went. Ramírez burst into stardom in 2016, hitting .312/.363/.462, good for a 121 wRC+ and 4.8 WAR. Then he got even better in 2017. And this year, he’s ridden the saber-limousine all the way to Crazyville. As of Monday morning, Ramírez stands at .300/.409/.631 with 33 home runs, 26 stolen bases, a 175 wRC+ and 7.5 WAR, all already career highs (except for batting average) and by substantial margins. You can even make a case that he’s actually been a little unlucky, doing all of this with a .277 BABIP, down 23 points from his career average of .300. From his hit profile, ZiPS thinks Ramírez “ought to” have a .315 BABIP this year, or .302 by Andrew Perpetua’s model.

My colleague Jay Jaffe wrote about the greatest seasons by a third baseman a few months ago, so I won’t go too into detail, but I will touch on a few important points.

For position players as a group, the 10-WAR seasons in history can be distributed into a few buckets:

• Hall of Famers, plus one that ought to be on performance alone (Barry Bonds)
• Players who are not yet eligible (Alex Rodriguez, Trout)
• Norm Cash
• Fred Dunlap

Out of those 52 seasons, 50 were players in the first two categories, all with nearly indisputable Hall of Fame talent. Cash isn’t quite as obvious, but he’s at least a borderline category and better than quite a few other Cooperstown-immortalized sluggers. That just leaves Dunlap and his curious 1884 for the St. Louis Maroons, as he hit .412/.448/.621 as a 25-year-old and never hit .275 again. I am unable to find any accusations of performance-enhancing tincture or tonic, so I’ll assume that this was another case of 1800s-baseball-gonna-1800s-baseball, given the variability of play quality at the time.

The mean projection for Ramírez by ZIPS for the rest of the season puts him at 9.7 WAR, tantalizingly close to the 10-WAR barrier, which has been broken by exactly zero third basemen in MLB history. Only Darrell Evans, Adrian Beltre, Rodriguez, and Ron Santo made it to within a half-win of ten. What this means is that as of right now, ZiPS is projecting José Ramírez to have a 53% chance at the greatest season by a third baseman in history and a 20% chance of being the first to hit ten WAR.

Ramírez’s season is not being driven by some freakishly high defensive WAR number, something you occasionally see given how volatile defensive measurements tend to be. The former shortstop’s defense only amounts to 8.7% of his total WAR, 51st among the 85 seven-WAR seasons by third basemen. A few players have seen this share go to over a third, headed by Brooks Robinson’s 1968, in which fielding makes up 58% of his WAR, (Graig Nettles and Robin Ventura both had seasons over 33%).

Naturally, all this uncontrolled awesomeness has altered Ramírez’s career-trajectory, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis and all that jazz. In this year’s FanGraphs trade value series, Kiley McDaniel ranked Ramírez as the player with the greatest trade value in baseball, up from 15th in last year’s edition.

Unsurprisingly, the occasionally anthropomorphic projection system on my desk has also adjusted its gaze. Ramírez’s 2016 campaign got him back up to 25th in future WAR and over 2000 hits for his career. His 2017 rocketed him up to 8th, third-best of players 25 or older for the 2018 season, behind only Trout and Mookie Betts (and their 2500 hits).

As you probably have guessed, 2018 shoots Ramírez even higher in the long-term projections. His top-five near-age offensive comps are all Hall of Famers or should be (Santo, Ernie Banks, Scott Rolen, Chipper Jones, and Brett). Over the next five years, ZiPS projects 32.5 WAR, more than six wins a year, and 52 total WAR remaining, third among position players only behind Trout and Lindor. He already passed the 2500 hit mark in the projections; now he’s up at 350 homers as well. And with some simple math, all of a sudden, his projected final rank among third basemen puts him in Hall of Fame territory.

You can shift these rankings around a little depending on how you categorize players like Rodriguez and Miguel Cabrera, but there’s only limited play possible with these numbers, and however you shuffle the deck, Ramírez is one of the very few players projected to finish with a career of historical, plaqued significance. Projection systems just aren’t designed for exuberance.

José Ramírez is heading on a course that could see him end up as one of the greatest Indians players in history and one of the greatest third basemen, period. And thanks to some shrewd wheeling-and-dealing by the team’s front office to sign him to a five-year, $26 million contract after his initial breakout in 2016, he’s going to be doing it in Cleveland through the 2023 season. Ramírez is now in his third consecutive year of doing things we didn’t know were possible for him; if he manages to pull this off for a fourth, he may just break baseball.

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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 the twentieth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Zach Duke, Kyle Gibson, and Trevor Hildenberger — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Zach Duke (Mariners) on His Two-Seamer

“I didn’t start throwing a two-seam fastball until I got to Triple-A. My pitching coach there was a guy named Darold Knowles, an old-time lefty who could manipulate a baseball as well as anyone I’ve met. He said, ‘You know, Zach, have you ever thought about throwing a two-seamer?’ I said, ‘Well yeah; I throw one.’ He goes, ‘No, a real two-seamer.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“He told me to move my thumb up a little bit on the ball, and put a little pressure sideways. He said, ‘Throw it. You’ll see.’ Sure enough, I throw it and the bottom drops out of the ball. All of sudden I had a true sinker. I thought to myself, ‘How did I get this far without knowing something like that?’ Read the rest of this entry »

A three-homer game by Steve Pearce, a pair of stifling pitching performances by Rick Porcello — an 86-pitch complete game, the fewest needed for a nine-inning outing since 2014 — and Nathan Eovaldi, and an after-midnight comeback from a 4-1 deficit. With that, the race for the American League East flag is all over but the shouting. At Fenway Park this weekend, a banged-up Red Sox squad swept four straight against a banged-up Yankees squad, widening their division lead to 9.5 games, their largest margin since 2013.

At 79-34 (.699), the Red Sox are on a 113-win pace. Even if they go 24-25 the rest of the way, they would surpass the 1978 team’s win total of 99 — still a Bucky Dent homer short of what they needed — for the franchise’s highest win total in the post-1960 expansion era, and they have a good chance of surpassing the highest winning percentages of their pre-expansion forebears:

A recently as July 1, when they were fresh off losing two out of three in the Bronx, Boston (then 56-29) was in a virtual tie with their pinstriped foes (54-27) for at the AL East lead; the two teams owned the top two records in all of baseball. Since then, the Red Sox have gone 22-6, the Yankees just 15-14. A picture is worth a thousand words:

To be fair, the Red Sox have played the cushier schedule of the two teams since that point, with their three-game series against the Nationals from July 2-4 their only games against a team with a winning record until their July 30-31 pair with the Phillies. In between, they played the Royals, Rangers, Blue Jays, Tigers, Orioles and Twins – six of the seven worst teams in the league, a combined 144 games below .500 through Sunday — with a two-game split in Baltimore the only time they failed to win a series.

While they were luxuriating on that pillow-soft slate, the Yankees faced the Braves, Indians and Rays, and won just the first of those series; they also split six games with the Orioles and two with the Mets. That’s a tough way to catch up under the best of circumstances.

Neither lineup has been whole in this span. The Red Sox have been without Dustin Pedroia for all but three games this season in the aftermath of an experimental cartilage restoration procedure in his left knee, and Eduardo Núñez has been so bad that he (and Brock Holt) topped the second base list in my Replacement-Level Killers series. The catching tandem of Christian Vazquez and Sandy Leon also earned a spot among the Killers even before Vazquez suffered a fractured right pinky that required surgery. Likewise for third baseman Rafael Devers, who first missed time due to left shoulder inflammation and then went back on the DL in late July due to a left hamstring strain. Even Ian Kinsler, who was acquired from the Angels on July 30 in order to shore up the keystone, got in on the injury racket by straining his hamstring in his third game for the Sox. Boston also lost starter Eduardo Rodríguez to an ankle sprain just before the All-Star break, and has been without Chris Sale since July 27 due to shoulder inflammation.

On the other side, the Yankees began this stretch without catcher Gary Sanchez, who has been scuffling for most of the season. After being sidelined from June 25 until July 20 with a groin strain, he played in just two games before reinjuring himself, but not before a dumb, only-in-New-York controversy involving his apparent lack of effort in chasing down a passed ball (the point at which he apparently re-aggravated the groin) and then grounding into a game ending force out. Second baseman Gleyber Torres suffered a right hip strain on July 4, sidelining him for three weeks, and then, most devastatingly, Aaron Judge suffered a chip fracture in his right wrist when he was hit by a Jakob Junis pitch on July 26.

Masahiro Tanaka missed a month due to bilateral hamstring strains from running the bases during an interleague game; he returned on July 10. On top of all this, J.A. Happ, whom the Yankees acquired from the Blue Jays on July 26 with an eye towards his career-long success in Fenway Park, missed this weekend’s series because, like the Mets’ Noah Syndergaard, he came down with a case of hand, foot and mouth disease. Chance Adams, who was recalled from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to make his major league debut in his stead, gave the Yankees a five-inning, three-run performance that simply wasn’t enough opposite Eovaldi’s eight shutout innings.

Judge has been the Yankees’ most productive hitter all season, hitting .285/.398/.548 for a 157 wRC+, good for the fifth highest wRC+ in the league. From July 2 until he went down, he was humming along at a similar clip, but remarkably, four Sox hitters have been even hotter in that span:

The Yankees have gotten average-or-better production at every position besides catcher and first base during that span — and it just hasn’t been enough to keep up with the Sox. Pearce, acquired from the Blue Jays for High-A infielder Santiago Espinal on June 28, has clubbed five homers in just 71 PA since the trade, tied with Betts for second on the team behind Martinez’s eight. In other words, he’s even hotter than the players who have ranked second and third in the league in wRC+ overall this year. Those scorching performances have helped to offset the replacement-level ones at second base and catcher, though of course it was Leon’s 10th inning single off Jonathan Holder — just his fourth hit in 34 at-bats since the All-Star break — that turned into the winning run on Sunday night. Everything’s coming up Milhouse.

While there’s been only a slight separation between the two teams on the offensive side, the separation has been massive as far as the rotations go:

Sixty-four percent of the innings thrown by Yankees starters in this span have gone to pitchers hit for ERAs well above 5.00. Most glaringly, Severino has failed to last six innings in any of his last five starts while allowing eight home runs, likely ending his Cy Young hopes. Sabathia has apparently run out of gas, and Gray, an enigma since being acquired from the A’s at the 2017 non-waiver deadline, has pitched his way to the bullpen; his next turn will be taken by July 31 acquisition Lance Lynn.

On the other side, both Sale and Rodriguez were stellar within this stretch before landing on the DL, and Eovaldi picked an outstanding moment in which to put together back-to-back scoreless starts for the first time in his career. As a group, the Sox starters have a home run rate that’s half that of the Yankees (0.9 per nine versus 1.8) while striking out more (9.6 per nine to 8.6) and walking fewer (2.4 per nine to 3.4). Good morning, good afternoon, good night.

I’ll spare you the bullpen table, but where it had tilted towards the Yankees prior to this series (a 3.13 ERA/3.32 FIP ERA versus a 3.87 ERA/3.42 FIP),
it’s now tilted towards the Sox, thanks to the work they did this weekend: 3.79 ERA/3.57 FIP to 4.08 ERA/3.50 FIP. Much of the damage on the pinstriped front owes to Thursday night’s debacle, when manager Aaron Boone pulled Sabathia after three innings and two runs allowed, then sat on his hands as Holder, who entered the night with a 2.06 ERA and 2.52 FIP, allowed seven straight batters to reach base, serving up four extra-base hits including one of Pearce’s homers. Boone then called upon Chad Green, who retired just two of the five hitters he faced. By the time the dust had settled, a 4-2 lead had turned into a 10-4 deficit, and that was before Cessa, who had retired Pearce with runners on the corners to end the frame, allowed five garbage-time runs in his next three innings. As for Sunday, while Aroldis Chapman has looked wobbly lately due to left knee tendinitis, with a 6.10 ERA and eight walks (but 22 strikeouts) in 10.1 innings dating back to June 25, it was only his second blown save of the season.

Both Boston’s Dave Dombrowski and New York’s Brian Cashman were active in the days and weeks leading up to the July 31 deadline, with the former adding Pearce, Kinsler and Eovaldi and the latter Zach Britton, Happ and Lynn. Playoff odds-wise, none of what they did had much effect because the two teams are so far ahead of the pack; per Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, the Yankees’ moves added about one percentage point to their chances of winning the division at the expense of the Red Sox, but those chances are now less than a third of what they were less than a week later because of the Boston trouncing.

It’s not that the Yankees are a bad team — they’re still projected to win 99 games this year. But right now, 99 wins in the AL East gets you a set of steak knives and a date with either the A’s or the Mariners in the Coin Toss Game. This Red Sox team has gotten hot at the right time, and they’ve left the Yankees eating their dust.