FanGraphs Baseball

Last Saturday, Boston Red Sox right-hander Brandon Workman authored an outing that was fairly representative of his 2019 season. He entered the game in the ninth inning, with the Red Sox ahead of the host San Diego Padres by a score of 5-4. At just 6.4% playoff odds according to our own calculations, Boston remained in the American League playoff hunt only on the periphery, but even that could take a significant blow with a loss in a game like this. Workman’s job, then, was an important one.

He began the inning with three straight curveballs to Austin Allen. The first one was called a strike, while the next two eluded Allen’s swinging bat:

He attacked the next hitter, Ty France, in a similar fashion. He threw three straight curveballs, but instead of throwing them at the knees, he aimed them up in the zone. All three missed their target high, and another high fastball gave France a free base. Next up was Josh Naylor, who saw seven curveballs in a row. The first was taken for a strike, followed by three balls and two foul balls. The final pitch of the at-bat froze Naylor in place for the second out:

Next came Manny Machado, who saw five pitches, four of which missed outside, resulting in Workman’s second walk of the inning. That set up the tying run at second and winning run at first for Eric Hosmer, who fouled off a cutter and a four-seam fastball in on the hands to fall behind 0-2. The next pitch was impossible:

Workman isn’t the pitcher who Boston expected to be relying upon to close games this season, but there’s a good reason he has that responsibility now: He’s been incredibly difficult to hit. In 59 innings out of the bullpen, Workman has allowed just 24 hits, just one of which was a homer. He’s walked a lot of batters (35) but he’s also struck out 85. Those numbers have culminated in a 1.98 ERA, a 2.38 FIP, and 1.7 WAR for the 31-year-old this year. In a Red Sox bullpen that has been among baseball’s best — ninth in ERA, fourth in FIP — Workman has probably been the best of the bunch. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

It takes incredible talent just to be a fringe major leaguer, and even more talent to be a first-round draft pick and a top 10 prospect, as Lucas Giolito was earlier in this decade. Yet last year, the 6-foot-6 righty was The Worst, at least among the 57 pitchers who threw enough innings (162) to qualify for the ERA title. While good health and the White Sox’s commitment to rebuilding allowed him to take the ball 32 times and throw 173.1 innings, Giolito finished his age-23 season with the highest ERA (6.13) and FIP (5.56), and the lowest strikeout-walk differential (4.5%) and WAR (-0.1), of any qualifier. Ouch.

This year, it’s been an entirely different story, as Giolito has pitched like an ace, posting a 3.20 ERA and 3.30 FIP in 157.1 innings en route to 4.7 WAR, good for fourth in the league. When I set out to adapt my “Most Improved Position Players” methodology to starting pitchers, I strongly suspected that the now-25-year-old righty would come out on top, just as Cody Bellinger did in that exercise. He not only did, he was the runaway winner, scoring points in eight of the nine categories I chose to measure. In three of them, he had the largest improvement of any pitcher, and in four others, he ranked among the majors’ top four.

For those unacquainted with my previous foray, its basis is our handy but somewhat obscure Season Stat Grid, introduced just over a year ago. The grid allows the user to view up to 11 years worth of data in a single category, and to track and rank year-to-year totals and changes based on thresholds of plate appearances and innings. Echoing what I did for the position players, and some of the feedback I received (thankfully no tar or feathers), I chose nine statistical categories where we might look for significant, skill-driven changes. To qualify, pitchers needed to have thrown just 80 innings last year, and 120 this year; for the position players, I used 400 plate appearances last year and 300 this year, but in retrospect realized that some very improved players, such as Christian Vázquez, had slipped through the cracks. With pitchers such as the Yankees’ Domingo Germán (who didn’t even crack my top 20) in mind, time I loosened the pitcher thresholds a bit. For the top 20 pitchers whose changes went in the right direction (lower ERA, FIP, walk and home run rates on the one hand, higher WAR and strikeout, first-pitch strike, groundball, and chase rates on the other), I awarded 20 points for first place, 19 for second, and so on. I went 30 deep on the position players, but found that among the pitchers, often the 25th- or 30th “best” change might be a negligible improvement or even a step in the wrong direction. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Anderson isn’t exactly toiling in obscurity. Playing in the nation’s third-largest city, he made headlines earlier this year after one of his trademark bat flips drew a retaliatory plunking from Brad Keller. That sparked a benches-clearing brawl and placed Anderson at the center of the sport’s ongoing discussion about the proper way to play the game. In the aftermath, Anderson appropriately defended his right to play with emotion, and the episode helped reinforce the sentiment that he’s the kind of player a healthier league would market aggressively.

And yet, you could be forgiven for not knowing that Anderson has been quite good this season. He missed more than a month with a high ankle sprain, but when healthy, he’s hit .328 while posting a 124 wRC+. He’s posted nearly 3 WAR even with all that time on the shelf, more than a four-win pace over 162 games. (All stats are through the start of Thursday’s action.)

What’s less clear is how encouraged we should be by Anderson’s 2019 campaign. Prior to this season, he had established himself as a reliable big leaguer, albeit one with a mediocre stick. A cursory look at his year-to-year numbers suggests that, big BABIP spike aside, not too much has changed:

Other than the .390 BABIP, there isn’t much in his profile that suggests he’s a new man. The modest reduction in strikeouts is mostly cancelled out by a lower walk rate, and his ISO relative to the league has actually dropped in 2019. His average launch angle is also two degrees lower, for whatever that’s worth.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees and Red Sox were playing the first game of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium in May of 1929 when the skies opened and a sudden deluge soaked the fans in attendance. So alarmed were they by this sudden change in the weather that the fans began a “human stampede” for the exit, killing two people and injuring 70 others, including 14 young boys.

Babe Ruth heard about the incident and did what he did best: Promised to hit home runs. One for each of those boys, he swore, to help their bumped heads and bruised sternums ache a little less.

“Now there’s a real boy’s hero,” wrote one newspaper in a glowing review of the gesture.¹

It took Ruth until July 17 to fulfill that promise, but he likely made it with the confidence that he was Babe Ruth, and in most seasons, he was going to hit a ton of home runs anyway. With it being only May, he still had a few dozen in him, so why not dedicate the next 14 to a couple of fellows who’d almost been trampled to death?

For anyone other than Ruth in May, promising home runs can be a gamble. Aaron Judge took the risk on August 25, though with much less on the line; his home run promise was made to an unflattened adult man sitting in Dodger Stadium’s most expensive seats. Playing in Los Angeles, Judge shared a moment with John Brown, the father of Yankees catching coach Jason Brown, and, according to Judge, with a twinkle in his eye, “I told him I’d get one [that night].” Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 869

I welcome Ringer staff writer Michael Baumann to the program to discuss his recent piece on the Cleveland Browns and football’s burgeoning analytics revolution. We discuss the insights offered by erstwhile baseball executive Paul DePodesta on the lessons he took from the rise of empirics in baseball and the mistakes from sabermetrics early days that he’s keen to avoid in a football front office. Plus, Michael shares the things he’s most keen to watch in the final month of the regular season.

You can read Michael’s Paul DePodesta Browns piece here. You should also check out his recent deep-dive on Shane Bieber. And be sure to follow him on twitter @MichaelBaumann.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

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

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 51 min play time.)

A little over a decade ago, the soft-tossing lefty was all over the place. There was Barry Zito, Mark Buehrle, and Ted Lilly. Late-career Tom Glavine, Kenny Rogers, and Jamie Moyer were getting by on guile, too. Even Mark Redman and Chris Capuano were getting outs without much velocity. Looking around today’s game, we have Jason Vargas trying to hang on and CC Sabathia declining with age, along with diminished velocity and stuff from Dallas Keuchel and Gio Gonzalez. The last four years have seen just three low-velocity left-handers put up three-win seasons, and the only pitcher with two such campaigns is Marco Gonzales, king of the soft-tossing lefties.

On June 2, Gonzales gave up 10 runs to the Angels on the heels of giving up eight runs to the Rangers. It ended a five-start stretch that saw him allow 30 runs in 24.2 innings. He struck just 15 batters and walked nine in that span. Still, due to a solid start to the year, his FIP stood at a decent 4.33 and his ERA was a little worse than average at 4.89. Since that game, roughly half a season of starts has passed and Gonzales has been one of the better pitchers in the game with an ERA and FIP both around 3.50 and his 2.3 WAR ranking 11th, just behind Justin Verlander and just ahead of Lucas Giolito. Gonzales isn’t a great pitcher, but he’s uniquely good, and this is the second straight season he’s accomplished that feat.

There are only 10 qualified starting pitchers in the game who put up a three-win season last year (3.4 for Gonzales) and have already eclipsed that mark this season (3.5 for Gonzales). Verlander, Max Scherzer, Patrick Corbin, Jacob deGrom, Trevor Bauer, and Gerrit Cole are the easier guesses. Zack Wheeler, Jose Berrios, and German Marquez are also in there along with Gonzales. His 6.9 WAR ranks ahead of only Berrios in that group, but it is worth mentioning even lowering the bar to two 2.5-WAR seasons in a row only adds Jake Odorizzi, Charlie Morton, Zack Greinke, Aaron Nola, Jon Gray, Kyle Hendricks, and Kyle Gibson. We are still talking about a relatively small group. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 25, Masahiro Tanaka allowed a career-high 12 runs in just three and a third innings. It was a sobering outing in a marquee matchup against the Red Sox, but it was also a catalyst for him to make a major change to one of his pitches. His splitter has been his signature pitch for almost his entire career, both in Japan and in the States, but it hasn’t been nearly as effective this season. The ineffectiveness of his splitter has been a big reason why he’s leaned so heavily on his fastball and slider, and it’s been a constant source of frustration for him.

The source of his problems with the splitter is somewhat unexpected. Instead of a mechanical issue, it’s been the ball itself that’s caused his consternation. Tanaka discussed the issues he’s had with his splitter with both James Wagner of the New York Times in an article dated August 5, and Lindsay Adler of The Athletic in an piece posted yesterday. Here’s how he explained it to Wagner: “You grip the ball, and it feels a little bit different. And then when you’re throwing with that difference in hand, obviously the movement of the ball becomes a little bit different, too.”

The effect of the dragless ball on the explosion of offense seen in the major leagues and Triple-A has been widely studied. The baseball used in the majors was introduced in Triple-A for the first time this season and home run rates are skyrocketing. In a study published by The Athletic, Dr. Meredith Wills determined the biggest physical changes to the ball were lowered seams and leather smoothness, both contributing to there being less drag on the ball in flight. But the effects of the new ball on how pitchers grip and throw the ball hasn’t been examined as closely. In Tanaka, we have a specific case study on one of the other unforeseen effects of the new ball. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs, we strive to provide you with entertaining baseball content. In the past, that often meant articles written by Jeff Sullivan. Now that he works for the Rays, that’s not an option — but still, some of our articles resemble his work. For the most part, that’s not on purpose, just a side effect of all of us reading so many of his pieces over the years. Today isn’t that. Today I’m going to riff on a classic.

Twice a year, Jeff wrote about the worst called ball and strike of the half season. Sometimes it was a comedy. Sometimes it was a straightforward discussion of how a pitch down the middle was called a ball. Either way, it was a wild ride, and it’s wholly Jeff’s.

That’s okay, though, because called strikes and called balls aren’t the only things that can be bad. Okay, fine, the worst called ball was pretty bad:

But that’s not why we’re here! Today, I want to look at the worst swinging strikes of the season.

The worst swinging strike is harder to pin down than the worst called strike. For example, this swinging strike is on a pitch that’s incredibly far out of the strike zone:

That’s not a good swing. It’s not particularly close to being a good swing. About the best thing you can say about it is that maybe the ball will get away from the catcher, but with a runner on first, that’s scant comfort. If the ball could travel through the ground with no resistance, Statcast projects that it would have crossed home plate nearly two feet below ground level. Read the rest of this entry »