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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 thirteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Dennis Eckersley, Michael Fulmer, Miguel Gonzalez — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

———

Dennis Eckersley (Hall of Famer) on His Slider

“I couldn’t throw a curveball because of my angle. I couldn’t get on top of it. That’s all they’d ever tell me. Every time somebody would whistle at me, it would be, ‘Get your arm up! Get your elbow up!’ But a slider came pretty easy. It was just, ‘Turn your wrist a little bit.’

“I went straight from high school to pro ball [in 1972], and all of a sudden my fastball didn’t play. I was in the California League when I was 17, and they could hit. The next thing you know, I’m throwing a lot more breaking balls than I ever did in my life. I didn’t have any choice.

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June is Pride Month in the United States. By way of explanation:

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month (LGBT Pride Month) is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. The Stonewall riots were a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as “Gay Pride Day,” but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the “day” soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBT Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.

You can read more about the Stonewall riots here for greater context. Essentially, though, Pride Month is a time not just to celebrate gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the United States, but also to highlight the current state of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. For our purposes, it also represents an opportune moment to examine the current state of LGBTQ+ issues in baseball.

A couple of years ago, Gallup found that 4.1% of Americans overall, and 7.3% of millennials, identify as LGBT, although the demographer who published that data suspects that, after accounting for those respondents who are unwilling to disclose details regarding their sexuality, the overall figure is probably closer to 10%.

Britni de la Cretaz, who’s written a number of fascinating stories on the intersection of sport, gender, and sexuality, wrote an article last month exploring queer women in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a facet ignored by A League of Their Own. And two major leaguers have come out as gay: Glenn Burke and Billy Bean.

But in another sense, baseball generally, and MLB specifically, has a lot of work to do when it comes to LGBT inclusion. Both Burke and Bean came out after their playing days were over. David Denson, the first openly gay player in affiliated ball to come out while still playing, has since retired. And while Denson said his retirement wasn’t related to his coming-out – and that his teammates were largely supportive – he nevertheless related to Bleacher Report some cringeworthy tales from his time in baseball clubhouses.

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Jeimer Candelario is establishing himself as one of the best young players on a young Detroit Tigers team. Playing in his first full big-league season, the 24-year-old third baseman is slashing a solid .251/.346/.476 with 10 home runs. His 2.0 WAR leads all Tigers.

Acquired along with Isaac Paredes in the deal that sent Alex Avila and Justin Wilson to the Cubs at last summer’s trade deadline, “Candy” is a switch-hitter with pop. His M.O. is gap-to-gap, and the orientation of his top hand is a focal point of his swing.

“I want to hit the ball with palm up,” explained Candelario. “If you’re palm up and you hit the ball, you finish up. I try to be connected. My back side, my hands, my hips, and my legs come in the same moment. That way, when I hit the ball I hit the ball with power, with palm up.”

Candelario credits Cubs assistant hitting coach Andy Haines — at the time the club’s hitting coordinator — for helping him develop his stroke. Now that he’s in Motown, he’s heeding the advice of Lloyd McClendon, who is emphasizing “How to load and then follow through, which helps me have some doubles and homers. If I just concentrate on hitting line drives, the ball will carry.”

McClendon is bullish on the young infielder’s future. Ditto his here and now. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on Terry Collins, trick running plays, Steven Brault‘s disappointing strikeout, the Mariners, and Justin Miller, banter about Takuya Nakashima’s 200th career sacrifice bunt, the Astros’ enviable depth, the most exciting rookies of 2018 (including Juan Soto, Gleyber Torres, Walker Buehler, and Adam Cimber), and MLB’s attendance decline, and talk to Hans Van Slooten about his years building and maintaining Baseball-Reference.com as Sports Reference’s manager of baseball operations, his decision to accept a new job as a baseball systems developer with the Minnesota Twins, the pros and cons of working for an MLB team, writing words vs. writing code, the differences between public and private and big and small(er) data, how Baseball-Reference adds (or doesn’t add) information, the expanding Sports Reference empire, his favorite finds on B-Ref, Barry Bonds’s WAR, comparing current players and long-retired players, how the “opener” strategy and Shohei Ohtani affected the site, and how to have his job.

Audio intro: The Police, "Too Much Information"
Audio interstitial: Elf Power, "Back to the Web"
Audio outro: Keith West, "On a Saturday"

Link to Steven Brault strikeout GIF
Link to Takuya Nakashima t-shirt photo
Link to Travis Sawchik’s attendance post
Link to Sports Reference site index
Link to Sports Reference web developer job listing

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels, and (most importantly) FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel* and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing Longenhagen and McDaniel’s most recent update have also been excluded from consideration.

*Note: I’ve excluded Baseball America’s list this year not due to any complaints with their coverage, but simply because said list is now behind a paywall.

For those interested in learning how Fringe Five players have fared at the major-league level, this somewhat recent post offers that kind of information. The short answer: better than a reasonable person would have have expected. In the final analysis, though, the basic idea here is to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Josh James, RHP, Houston (Profile)
Every time James produces a strong start — an event that has occurred with considerable frequency this season — FanGraphs contributor and traveler within the world of ideas Travis Sawchik sends a note to the present author that reads, “His name is JOSH JAMES.” While I can’t argue with the literal sense of Sawchik’s message — namely, that this right-hander’s given name literally is Josh James — I suspect that my colleague is attempting to communicate something more profound than a single datum from James’s biography. Have I pursued the topic? No. Not because I’m afraid to, either — but rather because I am infested by indifference.

James made one start this week, recording an 11:2 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 23 batters while facing Houston’s affiliate in Fresno (box).

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We spend a lot of time fretting about baseball. Baseball games take too long; teams use too many pitchers and make too many visits to the mound. There are too many strikeouts; there aren’t enough balls put in play. These complaints are dressed up in anxiety over the game’s future, but I think the real worry is closer to home. It’s about us. I think what’s really at the center of it is a gnawing concern that these slowdowns will make us want to watch something else entirely, that we might come to find baseball boring.

But there are worse things than being bored. Wednesday night, in the fourth inning of the Dodgers-Rangers game, Adrian Beltre scored on a close play. It appeared that Austin Barnes had tagged him out, but home-plate umpire Sean Barber disagreed. A man in the crowd was inspired to make a face.

Dave Roberts challenged and it went to a replay, which began at 2:02:25. The home broadcast showed some slo-mo.

https://gfycat.com/GloriousDearestClam

The broadcast was confident the replay would go the Dodgers’ way. Enrique Hernandez, whose throw looked like it had nabbed Beltre, seemed confident. Beltre looks pretty out.

But at 2:05:00, the call on the field was upheld. The crowd booed. They’d spent more than two-and-a-half minutes waiting around — only to lose out. It didn’t end up mattering: the Dodgers won in the 11th inning after Hernandez evaded a tag of his own. But for those few minutes in the fourth, Dodger fans were something worse than bored. They were bored and angry. It’s a terrible combination of things to feel, and one that replay seems to inspire often, which is understandable, though I’ll admit it makes me worry about how passionate we are for justice. And so, in all our fretting about the game, I thought I’d check in on replay and see how it is going so far this season.

Baseball Savant maintains a handy replay database, but it doesn’t include 2018 replays yet, so it’s Retrosheet to the rescue. Retrosheet’s data also includes the duration of each replay — an indispensable data point for those concerned with the dull and enraging. They update their data every two weeks; the replays I’m analyzing are through May 31.

Two quick notes. First, the time listed for each replay is from the beginning of the review until New York’s decision is announced. That might seem like an obvious point, but it may, in some cases, undersell the length of the delay on the field. Last year, I wrote about an 18-minute long replay at Dodger Stadium. It was a rules check and the longest replay of 2017. Retrosheet has it taking 8:34. So there’s a bit of squishiness here.

Second, in case you’ve forgotten (and honestly, why would you remember?), before the 2017 season, MLB released new guidance that, with a few exceptions, the Replay Operations Center in New York has two minutes to render a decision on a play. That’s what they’re driving toward. It’s part of keeping us from feeling bored and angry.

Now, some observations.

You might ask, “When is replay most likely to occur?” Maybe you’re naturally curious about things. As you might imagine, challenges become more common the later into a game a team gets.

Through May 31, managers initiated 436 challenges, a full half of which have came between the sixth and ninth innings; indeed, since replay expanded in 2014, close to 49% of the replays in nine inning games have come between the sixth and ninth innings. The eighth inning saw the greatest number of challenges, but also the lowest success rate, among non-extra innings frames. That makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. Late in games, I would imagine, managers are more inclined to challenge borderline calls, both because the stakes are higher and because why the heck not? You can’t take those challenges with you. More borderline calls also means more calls on the field that stand or are confirmed, but why not try? Maybe that runner in scoring position is actually out on the tag!

And speaking of tags, you might also wonder, “What is getting reviewed, and for how long?” The below table shows all 2018 replays by type, along with the average and median duration of the replay in minutes, and the success rate for challenges of each type.

Fans have, for the most part, stayed out of the way. Despite recent dustups, the slide rule that caused so much controversy in years past hasn’t been much of an issue, or at least has merited little investigation. Umpires mostly know what a catch is. Force plays seem a bit trickier, though they didn’t take long on average to sort out. Stadium boundary replays took the longest, both by average and median length in minutes, though there weren’t many of them. With the exception of the boundary plays, replay officials are, on average, adhering to their two-minute guidance. Of the 490 total calls, 377 have been two minutes or under in length.

But I think the most common category of replay underscores the enterprise’s greatest challenge (no pun intended). Now, I haven’t watched all 197 tag replays, but I would hazard a guess that some portion of them — perhaps a significant portion — involve runners coming off a base ever so slightly for just a teeny tiny touch of time. We’ve seen this sort of replay play out, sometimes in big moments of important games, resulting in a guy who would have been safe for the 100 years prior suddenly being out. We can’t exactly blame managers for asking that tags be reviewed; we’ve told them there might be an out hiding in there. And some portion of these allow us to examine swim moves and close plays, and that isn’t a terrible use of time. But we’ve spent some part of 288 minutes peaking under guys’ fingers and toes. Avengers: Infinity Wars, for sake of comparison, was only 160 minutes and involved a bunch more people. I submit that this is when we are at our most bored, and certainly our most angry.

And of course, fans of some teams should be angrier and perhaps more bored than others.

None of these samples are large enough to tell anything definitive, but as an indication of efficacy so far, we can learn a few things. The Royals, Phillies, and Yankees have fared the best in their challenges. The Braves have challenged more times than any other team, but have a middling success rate. They are still doing better than the Padres, who (in admittedly fewer attempts) have a league-worst success rate. The Orioles fare only marginally better.

Baltimore did initiate the longest challenge of the year, a review of a fair/foul call that lasted 4:32 they ultimately won.

Everyone looked thrilled as they waited.

Just a great day at the office.

We can also see something interesting when we look at the distributions of how long reviews take, grouped by their result.

The graph isolating 2018 is a bit rougher, but retains the same general shape.

From 2014 to -18, a “stands” call took about 40 seconds longer than “confirmed” or “overruled” calls did, which I think shows that replay is generally working how you would want it to when you consider that the standard for overturning calls made on the field is having “clear and convincing evidence” that the call was incorrect. One would hope that if a call were obviously right or obviously wrong, it wouldn’t take very long to reach that conclusion. Absent some bit of striking evidence, best to leave it be.

I think it is worth adding a small bit of perspective to this analysis. We’ve all had the experience of seeing a replay go the “wrong” way. We’ve all felt like our boys have gotten jobbed. We’ve been Wednesday night’s Dodgers’ fans. We begin to question the whole endeavor.

But we might benefit from recalling how frustrating it was, in the era of slo-mo and hi-def, to know that a call on the field was wrong, to be able to see it right there, and then have to watch as a baserunner trudged back to the dugout when he should have been on base, or as a pitcher was left to contend with a runner who should have been erased by a tag. It felt unfair. It felt silly. It felt like an injustice. We’re sometimes bored and angry now, but we were also bored and angry then! And it isn’t costing us that much. The season isn’t done, but so far, 2018 is following a trend of replay times decreasing as the years go on.

These aren’t huge numbers to begin with; I doubt even a close observers could perceive the difference between 2015’s average replay time of 1.85 minutes and 2017’s 1.46. But it isn’t ballooning out the other way, either. Through May 31, MLB was on pace for 1,285 replays, which would be the lowest number since replay was expanded in 2014. That could change, of course, but it hasn’t been so bad so far. It’s an attempt to get things more right more often.

I calculated how much time each team had spent under replay review, including both those reviews they had initiated and those initiated by their opponents or by umpires, and compared that time to their total game minutes in 2018. I’ll spare you another long table, but the team that has spent the most time in replay as a percentage of their total playing time is the Blue Jays at… 0.57%. That’s a little more than 58 minutes across all their games, and theirs is the worst of it.

That isn’t so bad. Replay gets things wrong from time to time; we all have bad days at work, after all, and humans remain fallible, even with slo-mo. But I’m not sure the game is well served by putting too strict a clock on justice. Not even when we’re bored and angry.

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