Blaine Hardy believes in the value of “screwing around with things.” That’s how the 31-year-old Detroit Tigers left-hander learned how to throw one of his best pitches. Tinkering while playing catch, he discovered a vulcan.

His career was at a crossroads at the time. Five years after the Kansas City Royals took him in the 22nd round of the 2008 draft out of Lewis-Clark State College, Hardy was treading water in the minors. As a low-round pick with a nothing-special fastball, he needed either to dd a new pitch or to improve the quality of one he already threw. With a who-knows-what-you-might-stumble-upon mindset, he kind of did both.

Hardy, who will be on the mound for the Tigers tonight, has made 22 appearances on the season, 12 of them as a starter. He has a record of 4-4 to go with his 3.53 ERA, and he’s thrown the pitch in question nearly a quarter of the time.

———

Blaine Hardy: “I’ve always had a good changeup. Growing up, my dad didn’t want me throwing a curveball or slider — anything with spin — nor did my pitching coach. They said, ‘Just keep it straight. That’s going to help your arm in the long run.’ I was like, ‘Well, alright. So, what are we going to work on?’ Well, a changeup, obviously.

“I basically threw a circle change to start. I learned how to simulate my arm speed to my fastball, and it was a very good pitch for me. It looked exactly like my fastball and would just die a little bit.

“For whatever reason, over the years it kind of straightened out. I was tweaking certain grips to try to make it a little bit slower, a little bit slower, a little bit slower. People would talk to me about trying to dip my back side, which I tried, and it didn’t feel right. Nothing seemed to work. Finally — this was around the time the Royals released me and the Tigers picked me up (in 2013) — I switched to a modified split. It’s not with the main fingers, but rather the ring finger and the middle finger. It’s what’s been called ‘a vulcan.’

“Basically, I was screwing around with every grip I possibly could, and I stumbled on that one. I threw it, and it went straight down. I was like, ‘I want that.’

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This is Nate Freiman’s first post as part of his August residency. Nate is a former MLB first baseman. He also played for Team Israel in the 2017 World Baseball Classic and spent time in the Atlantic and Mexican Leagues. He can be found on Twitter @natefreiman. His wife Amanda routinely beats him at golf.

Editor’s Note: a version of this work was recently presented at SaberSeminar 2018.

In 2011, I was playing at High-A for the Padres. I’d graduated from the Midwest League to Lake Elsinore in the California League. (They have the cool storm-eyes logo, but it scares my toddler so my old hats are in boxes.) Since we were so close to San Diego, we got lots of guys on MLB rehab assignments. I was a senior sign making $1,300 a month, so it was huge when someone like Orlando Hudson came through and bought us Outback.

During their assignments, every MLB guy got The Question: “What’s it like up there?” The best answer I ever heard was, “Chuck E Cheese for adults.” O-Dog, as Hudson was known, had a pretty strong reply, too: “Better balls, better lights, and a better zone.”

In this case, “better zone” means two things. The first is size. (“That’s outside!”) The second is consistency. (“That’s been a strike all day!”) And O-Dog was right: the umpiring (just like the play on the field) does get better as you go up. We’d be in some cramped clubhouse, playing cards, and eating our $11 PB+Js, watching the big club, when a pitcher would inevitably yell, “That’s a strike!” And maybe it was… by Northwest League standards.

But those standards are different than the ones at higher levels. For example: have you ever seen a check swing get overruled? I have. In Boise, back in 2009. The hitter at the plate checked his swing, and the umpire responded by yelling, “Yes he did!” After the batting team complained, however, the home-plate umpire decided to appeal to his colleague at third base, who ruled it not a swing. I’ve never seen something like that before or since.

It’s no secret that the umpiring in the majors is superior to the sort found in the minors. It’s also no secret that part of the superior umpiring is a smaller, more well defined zone. But what about the different levels of the minors? Does the strike zone get smaller at each level? Does it get more consistent? I wanted some answers.

Building the Model

In order to get them, I needed minor-league TrackMan data. That data is all proprietary, but one team sent some of it to me on the condition of anonymity. (If anyone from that organization is reading this, thank you again!) The org in question sent me a sample of 20,000 taken pitches divided across the four full-season levels. The team trimmed the data to contain only horizontal and vertical location, pitcher and batter handedness, count, and a binary “strike” or “ball” call. There was no other identifying information.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Ben’s book activities, David Bote‘s exciting grand slam, Ramon Laureano‘s highlight throw, a few surprisingly (and not-so-surprisingly) streaking players, Taylor Ward’s call-up news, and a weird walk-off win in the minors. Then (26:10) they bring on Zach Ricketts, assistant head groundskeeper at the Oakland Coliseum, to talk about many aspects of being a groundskeeper at the last ballpark to house both an MLB team and an NFL team, including: his daily routine, how to become an MLB groundskeeper, lawn care, configuring the field for baseball and football, moving the mound, groundskeeping equipment, the groundskeeper hierarchy, gamesmanship and field manipulation, sewage encounters, animal encounters, wrestling the tarp, the differences between old and new parks, field-design hypotheticals, playoff shares, what’s under the field, foul-territory size, and more.

Audio intro: Guided By Voices, "See My Field"
Audio interstitial: XTC, "Grass"
Audio interstitial 2: Jack White, "Temporary Ground"
Audio outro: Ocean Colour Scene, "In My Field"

Link to Jeff’s Bote post
Link to video of Laureano throw
Link to video of minor-league walkoff
Link to video of Cardinals groundskeeper cat encounter
Link to video of Nationals groundskeeper getting caught in tarp

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There are certain highlights in baseball you like to watch, but most people don’t care about. Baseball really is a regional game, or a tribal game, and, more often than not, people in Denver don’t care much about what happens in Boston. But then there’s the rare highlight that transcends the tribalism, that sends chills down the spine of anyone who chooses to look it up. You don’t have to like the Cubs to enjoy watching David Bote’s walk-off grand slam. Rian Watt already wrote about Bote a few hours ago, but for the second time on today’s front page, let’s see the clip in all of its glory:

I’m sure you hate that if you’re a Nationals fan. I’m sure you hate that if you’re a fan of the Cardinals, or a fan of the Brewers. But, most baseball fans are none of those things. Most baseball fans can simply appreciate the latest ultimate grand slam — a two-out, walk-off grand slam to erase a three-run deficit. Bote hit exactly the home run every kid dreams about hitting. The only difference, I suppose, is that Bote didn’t win the World Series. (Yet.)

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With trades for Manny Machado and Brian Dozier, the Dodgers did more to improve their playoff odds in the weeks before the July 31 trade deadline than any other NL team, at least according to the projections of Dan Szymborski. However, they didn’t do a whole lot to address one area of glaring need, namely their bullpen, instead choosing to rely upon their internal depth despite a host of injuries. After the past four days in Denver, that looks as though it might have been a serious mistake.

In a four-game series at Coors Field that began on Thursday night, the Dodgers (64-55) lost “only” three games to the Rockies (63-55), but all of them came in the late innings, the last two via walk-offs. For as critical as these intradivision contests between contenders are, the team also endured an even more important and unsettling loss, that of closer Kenley Jansen. After Thursday night’s 8-5 victory, which was closed out by Scott Alexander instead of Jansen, manager Dave Roberts told reporters that the latter had been hospitalized before the game due to an irregular heartbeat then sent back to Los Angeles to undergo tests. He was also placed on the 10-day disabled list. The Dodgers subsequently reported that Jansen’s condition had stabilized, that his issues are considered manageable, and that he will have a follow-up appointment with a cardiologist on August 20, the day before he is eligible to return from the DL. Beyond that, the prognosis is unclear; if the 30-year-old righty is put on blood thinners, he could be out four-to-six weeks.

This is the third time during Jansen’s nine-year major league career that he’s experienced an irregular heartbeat. He missed four weeks in 2011 and three weeks in 2012 with a similar problem; the second episode also occurred in Denver. After the latter season, he underwent cardiac ablation surgery to correct the problem. He also had an incident of high blood pressure while in Denver for a 2015 game, but he returned to action a few days later.

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Thirty-four days. That’s enough time, for some among us, to bike from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back — twice. It’s enough time to build a 57-story skyscraper, then build two-thirds of it again. It’s nearly enough time to write a first draft of The Sun Also Rises, apparently. (I’m cheating a little bit here: Hemingway started the book on July 21 and finished it in early September, but still… what the heck?) And it’s time enough to create the universe four times over, if you’re the Supreme Being whose exploits are documented in the Book of Genesis. Oh — and if you’re David Bote, a 25-year-old infielder for the Chicago Cubs — it’s enough time to author a breakout season.

You may recognize Bote from what he did Sunday night to the Washington Nationals, live and on national television:

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In this week’s typically fantastic Sunday Notes column (if you don’t read them, you should), David Laurila passed along this tidbit which caught my eye:

Red Sox centerfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. was charged with an error on Friday night when he failed a handle a ball that, per StatCast, had a 6% catch probability. Bradley ran 60 feet in 4.2 seconds before having the ball carom off his glove.

That was backed up by David Adler.

Here’s the play in question:

Well, that doesn’t seem quite fair. But it’s becoming an increasing issue amongst official scorers and those who call for elimination of the error as a statistic altogether. Chris Hine, of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote a great piece earlier this summer on different scorers’ approach to using Statcast: how much should Statcast data factor into the hit-vs.-error calculus? And do the Rules allow it?

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Last week, I ran down the latest ZiPS projections for the MVP awards. The Cy Young tends to be a bit simpler to project than the MVP, for a number of reasons: there are no positional differences for which to adjust (outside of starter vs. reliever), no consideration of defense, fewer candidates (because hitters aren’t eligible for the award, where pitchers can win the MVP), and finally, fewer pitching stats from which to measure performance. One historical note of interest is that, while team quality plays a factor, it appears to be a less predictive factor than it is for MVP, also serving to make things a bit less difficult.

Before I begin, one clarification from the MVP post: the award percentages that appear here aren’t based on each player’s mean final projections, but from the whole array of possibilities, 1st to 99th percentile, for each player. So, for example, Giancarlo Stanton’s projected award chance of 2.8% isn’t predicated on him winning the award based on his predicted final line, but from the better scenarios in which he exceeded that current projected final line.

There’s a popular perception that Chris Sale wears out down the stretch. The perception is supported by his career splits: Sale has a career ERA below three for each of the first four months of the season with a 3.22 ERA for August and a 3.78 ERA in September. This data isn’t quite as robust as some suggest, but assuming for the sake of argument that it reflects something real, it’s also worth nothing that Sale’s been used more carefully than in past seasons. At this point in 2017, Sale had thrown at least 110 pitches in 16 starts after having crossed that threshold 10 times in both of the previous two seasons. This year, he’s at only four. The FanGraphs Depth Charts have Sale finishing at just 187 innings for the season, his lowest figure since 2014. ZiPS projects Sale to finish the year with the most strikeouts and best ERA in the AL while also tying for the highest WAR mark. The combination of his own performance plus the strength of the Red Sox make him a strong bet to go over the top.

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