So there’s this thing called the old man test. It’s been around for at least five or six years, but it’s making the rounds on the Internet again. The idea is simple enough. You have to put on your socks and shoes without letting your feet touch the ground as you do so. You raise your left foot and keep it in the air while you reach down to the ground to grab your sock, put it on, reach down to the ground to grab your shoe, put it on, and tie it, then you do the same thing with your right foot. It tests your balance, strength, flexibility, and all those other things bodies are supposed to have. If you fail the test, then you’re an old man, I guess? Maybe you instantly turn into an old man? Maybe a healthy old man just appears right outside your window to point and laugh at you? That part’s less clear.

I tend to buy into the idea that the old man test is measuring something important, just because whenever I’ve had to do physical therapy, I’ve been forced to do a lot of one-legged exercises. If you’ve ever been in physical therapy, I bet you’ve had to do them too. There’s nothing physical therapists love more than turning up the difficulty level of an otherwise simple exercise by forcing you to do it while standing on one leg. Once you get good at doing it one-legged, they’ll make you stand on a bouncy ball or something, and if you nail that, they’ll literally just start shoving you to make it even harder. Truly, no one on earth is hornier for balance than physical therapists.

I bring all this up because I noticed something fun about Steven Kwan while playing around with Baseball Savant’s batting stance graphics the other day. The graphics take after ballroom dancing diagrams of old, showing fun little footprints for each player at three points: their resting batting stance, when the pitcher releases the ball, and when their bat actually intercepts the ball. Here’s Kwan’s 2024 graphic:

Kwan has one of the narrowest batting stances in the game, so his front foot moves out toward the mound quite a bit, but aside from that, nothing about it stands out all that much. He’s a little guy with a little stance, film at 11. But this is the calm before the storm. Here’s the same graphic for this month. Keep your eye on the blue footprint:

I was so confused when I watched this. Is Steven Kwan actually stepping on home plate as the pitcher releases the ball? It seemed like something I would’ve noticed before, but there was that blue footprint, right on top of home plate, clear as day. How could anyone start a swing with their body so closed off? And is it even legal to step on home plate in the middle of your swing? That definitely seems like it would be illegal. I pulled up the rulebook and started looking before I realized what was actually going on. If you’re familiar with Kwan’s swing, I’m sure you already know the answer, and it brings us back to the old man test.

Kwan doesn’t step on home plate, but he has one of the game’s most dramatic leg kicks, and right in the middle of it, he dangles his foot directly over the plate. There’s no way to indicate in a two-dimensional diagram that his foot is 18 inches off the ground. Sometimes, and I’m not exaggerating here, Kwan’s entire foot is inside the strike zone while the ball is already on its way to home plate. No batter has ever come closer to tying their shoe in the middle of a pitch:

I went back to Baseball Savant and watched every single qualified player’s batting stance diagram, hundreds of cleats dancing across the batter’s boxes, black to blue to red. I would very roughly estimate that half of today’s hitters don’t move their front foot all that much, but that still leaves scores and scores of players with dramatic leg kicks, their blue front feet moving every which direction. None of those players does what Kwan does. None of them does anything remotely resembling what Kwan does. When batting from the right side, Ozzie Albies does place most of his left foot outside the batter’s box, but that’s mostly because he sets up five inches closer to the plate than Kwan does, and his foot is still nowhere near home plate. Nobody’s diagram looks like Kwan’s because nobody’s leg kick looks like Kwan’s.

Here’s Kwan’s secret. He doesn’t just have a leg kick. He has a leg kick, and then, right in the middle of it, he has second leg kick. It’s a double kick. A normal leg kick just involves lifting your foot off the ground, and it’s maybe worth noting that this is a bit of a misnomer. Everywhere outside the baseball diamond, there’s a difference between raising your leg and kicking. In baseball, they’re one and the same. Regardless, Kwan does that, pulling his knee straight up until his femur is parallel with the ground, but he’s just getting going. At that point, he kicks his foot forward toward home plate and sweeps it out toward the pitcher in a circular motion as he puts it down:

Kwan has a leg kick, and then he has a foot kick. It would not be at all unfair to say that he puts his right foot in and shakes it all about. It’s an impressive display of balance, and so far as I can tell, it’s unique. I didn’t just watch all the diagrams. I watched the swings of every player I could think of who has a big leg kick. I watched YouTube videos that compiled huge leg kicks of the past. The closest leg kicks I could find belonged to Alek Thomas and Gary Sánchez, both of whom move their front foot while they get into their swing, but they’re far from doing a double kick. No one else does this.

Kwan didn’t start executing the double kick all at once. It seems like it’s been coming on for a while now. When he was drafted out of Oregon State in 2018, Kwan had a small, controlled leg kick, with no double kick in sight. I can’t find any video of him from the next two years, but he started 2021 with the very beginnings of a double kick:

It’s very subtle in the video above. By the time Kwan debuted in 2022, the double kick was there to stay, but it’s still evolving. As he told the MLB Network during spring training, he went into the 2024 season looking to impact the ball harder, and that meant a more aggressive leg kick. “Before, I’d get up and then I would just put it right back down,” he said. “So then my hands are able to work and I can manipulate the bat as I need to. But last year, I tried to – hitter leverage, early in the count – really try to get that stride out, and now I’m going out to get it. I can stay in the legs, and then now I can stay slotted, catch it out a little more in front.” The funny thing is that in the video, even as Kwan demonstrated the leg kick (which he called a leg lift), he wasn’t doing the double kick. He may not even know he’s doing it. It’s only in the heat of the game that the double kick happens.

This focus on going out and meeting the ball earlier is likely the reason it only started showing up on the Baseball Savant diagram this season. It has to do with his timing. This year, the second kick actually seems like it’s not quite bringing his foot as far forward or as high, but it’s also quicker. If Statcast could show us its full path, it would likely look nearly identical to the 2024 or 2023 path, but it’s only showing us its position at the moment the ball is released. At that point, Kwan is further along, so his foot is already over the plate. He’s also getting his foot down a fraction of a second earlier, and it’s possible that getting started that little bit earlier is part of the reason he’s running a career-low opposite field rate.

Watch any baseball game and you’ll see 18 different hitters with 18 different timing mechanisms. Nobody’s exactly the same, but they tend to fall in a couple of categories. There are players with quiet feet, players with toe taps, and players with leg kicks. Those leg kicks take their feet in pretty much every direction. Some players lift their leg straight up, some pull their foot way back as a cocking mechanism, some use the leg kick to true up a very open stance, some start narrow and push their foot toward the pitcher. But Kwan is the only one who just dangles his foot there, then kicks it out into the strike zone before he attacks the pitch. It’s a feat of ingenuity as well as a feat of balance. At the very least, he should be every physical therapist’s favorite player.

Last December, 33 years after he last played, Dave Parker was finally elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The lefty-swinging, righty-throwing “Cobra” had once been regarded as the game’s best all-around player, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound slugger who could hit for power and average, had plenty of speed as well as a strong and accurate throwing arm, and exuded as much charisma and swagger as any player of his era. But injuries, cocaine use, and poor conditioning curtailed his prime, and while he rebounded to complete a lengthy and successful career, in 15 years on the writers’ ballots, he’d never drawn even one-third of the support needed for election. He hadn’t come close in three tries on Era Committee ballots, either, but buoyed by the positive attention he had generated while waging a very public battle with Parkinson’s Disease, and backed by a favorable mix of familiar faces on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, he finally gained entry to the Hall, alongside the late Dick Allen.

Unfortunately, Parker did not live to deliver the speech he said he’d been holding for 15 years. Just shy of one month from the day he was to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, he passed away at age 74 due to complications from Parkinson’s Disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2012.

Parker is the third Hall of Famer to die between election and induction. Eppa Rixey, a lefty who pitched in the National League from 1912 to ’33, was elected by the Veterans Committee on January 27, 1963. He died one month and one day later, at the age of 71. Leon Day, a righty who starred in the Negro Leagues from 1934 to ’46, and later played in Mexico and in the affiliated minor leagues, was elected by the Veterans Committee on March 7, 1995. He died six days later, at the age of 78. Read the rest of this entry »

Cam Schlittler has emerged as the top pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization. His ability to overpower hitters is a big reason why. In four starts since being promoted to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on June 3, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound right-hander has logged a 1.69 ERA and a 40.2% strikeout rate over 21-and-a-third innings. Counting his 53 frames at Double-A Somerset, Schlittler has a 2.18 ERA and a 33.0% strikeout rate on the season.

The 2022 seventh-rounder out of Northeastern University is averaging 96.5 mph with his heater, but more than velocity plays into the offering’s effectiveness. As Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, Schlittler’s “size and arm angle create downhill plane on his mid-90s fastball akin to a runaway truck ramp, while the backspinning nature of the pitch also creates riding life.”

I asked the 24-year-old Walpole, Massachusetts native about the characteristics our lead prospect analyst described in his report.

“Arm slot-wise it’s nothing crazy,” Schlittler said in our spring training conversation. “I’m more of a high-three-quarters kind of guy, but what I didn’t realize until looking at video a couple months ago is that I have really quick arm speed. My mechanics are kind of slow, and then my arm path is really fast, so the ball kind of shoots out a little bit. With my height, release point— I get good extension — and how fast my arm is moving, the ball gets on guys quicker than they might expect.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday afternoon, Paul Skenes and Jacob Misiorowski met in one of the most exciting pitching matchups of the season so far. Skenes is the best pitcher in baseball, while Misiorowski is the hardest-throwing starter. It was must-see TV. Michael Baumann covered the event in the most Baumann way possible, focusing on its hugeness — literally. “As impressed as I was with this display of firepower, awe at the future of pitching was not my primary takeaway. No, watching Skenes and Misiorowski do battle made me feel uneasy,” Baumann wrote. “See, these guys are huge.” He followed those words up with one of my favorite paragraphs in the illustrious annals of baseball writing:

This is too big. Both of them. The modern baseball field was designed for Scots-Irish immigrants with bad childhood nutrition and kidney disease. When 5-foot-11 Honus Wagner was the biggest, strongest player in the league. If you told the founding fathers of baseball that one day ballplayers would get so big they couldn’t borrow pants from Dave Bautista… well first of all, I guess you’d have to explain Dave Bautista to Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright. You get my point.

I’m not going to write about the Skenes-Misiorowski matchup. What more could I possibly add? Instead, I will begin this week’s mailbag by answering a question about Misiorowski’s earth-shattering velocity. Before I do, though, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Kutter Crawford’s mysterious wrist accident, then discuss Wander Franco’s conviction (14:58) and Walker Monfort’s promotion (19:57) before checking in (33:36) on the players and teams on pace to overperform or underperform their preseason projections the most at the precise halfway point of the season. Finally (1:12:44), they answer listener emails about “secret teams” in MLB, throwback, quiet games at the ballpark, and Denzel Clarke.

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme 2”
Audio outro: Cory Brent, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to WhatIfSports offer page

Link to Crawford story 1
Link to Crawford story 2
Link to Sale accident
Link to Barmes story 1
Link to Barmes story 2
Link to Kent story
Link to injury cover-ups
Link to Franco story 1
Link to Franco story 2
Link to Monfort story
Link to halfway point
Link to Rays playoffs story
Link to projections comparison spreadsheet
Link to preseason projections
Link to on-pace projections
Link to preseason playoff odds
Link to listener emails database
Link to Belanger club
Link to most PA with low OPS+

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret the Dodgers have been hurting for pitching because, well, their pitchers have been getting hurt. As during last October’s championship run, at times they’ve resorted to bullpen games, including a couple with Shohei Ohtani serving as an opener while rebuilding his pitch count following UCL reconstruction surgery. Taking a page from previous seasons under manager Dave Roberts, they’ve also snuck in a handful of innings from position players, not only when they’ve been on the short end of blowouts, but when they’ve led. Enrique Hernández has pitched five times, four in games in which the Dodgers thrashed opponents. Even with tighter rules in place for when teams can hand the ball to position players, the trend is nearing its height in popularity again following a recent dip.

It’s been nearly three years since I checked in on the trend of position players pitching. What was once a fun little beat to cover became less enjoyable as the practice proliferated to the point that Major League Baseball had to codify when teams could do it. Thankfully the occasions themselves are still appropriately light-hearted, full of giggles, eephus pitches, and batting-practice fastballs.

Here’s the evolution of the trend over the past decade, expressed as a percentage of total relief appearances:

Read the rest of this entry »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Nico Hoerner hit a home run on Tuesday. It wasn’t exactly a tape measure shot – the ball left his bat at 97 mph and traveled a projected 364 feet, making it 31 feet shorter and nearly 8 mph softer than the average home run this season – but he certainly got all of it. Plenty of players have hit even softer and shorter homers. It was mostly noticeable because it was Hoerner’s first home run of the season.

Among qualified players, Hoerner ranks in the bottom 10 in hard-hit rate, barrel rate, and both max and 90th-percentile exit velocity. He’s a contact hitter, not a power hitter, and it works just fine. He’s running a 102 wRC+ this season, a mark he’s bettered in each of the last four seasons. Still, he’s hit at least seven home runs in each of the last three seasons, and he was due to get on the board at some point. You can’t say the same for Xavier Edwards.

Over three partial seasons in Miami, the 25-year-old Edwards has hit just one home run in 678 plate appearances. He’s the only qualified player this season with a barrel rate of 0% — that is to say he has not yet hit a barrel over his 291 plate appearances and 216 batted balls. I bring all this up because Hoerner’s home run leaves Edwards as the only player who currently has enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title without a single home run. He’s the only player on pace to join an increasingly exclusive fraternity: The Homerless Qualifier Club.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.

1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.

Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:

What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:

Read the rest of this entry »