Ben Lindbergh, Rany Jazayerli, and Neil Paine discuss the death of Willie Mays, Mays as the last legendary link to an earlier era, the statistical cases for Mays as the greatest all-around player and greatest player, period in major league history, and (36:45) baseball’s new greatest living player, plus (46:02) banter about Kansas courting the Royals with public funding and (50:38) the competitive trajectories of the Royals and Mets. Then (1:01:08) Ben brings on frequent Stat Blast correspondent Ryan Nelson for Blasts about teams that hover near .500, pitchers replacing same-surnamed pitchers, prolific umpire-player ejection combos, the most players with the same first name in the same game, and Alex Verdugo’s grounders.
Willie Mays was the gold standard. We can debate whether he was the greatest baseball player who ever lived or merely on the short list of those with a claim to the title. Based upon both the legend and the statistics, we’re on more solid ground declaring that Mays was the game’s greatest all-around player, accounting for his skill and achievement at the plate, on the bases, and in the field. Combining tremendous power, exceptional speed that factored on both sides of the ball, and preternatural grace afield, the man could do it all on the diamond, and he did it with an endearing, charismatic flair. “The Say Hey Kid” — a nickname bestowed upon him when he was so fresh on the scene that he didn’t know his teammates’ names — projected a youthful exuberance and an innocence that made him an icon.
Mays began his professional career while still in high school, with the Birmingham Black Barons, signing a $250-a-month contract in July 1948, when he was just 17 years old. He was supposed to return to Birmingham this week, one of three Negro Leagues alumni from the 1920-48 period — along with Bill Greason and Ron Teasley — slated to attend a major league game tonight between the Cardinals and Giants at historic Rickwood Field, the country’s oldest professional ballpark. Sadly, Mays passed away two days ago, in an assisted living facility, at the age of 93.
Willie Mays gave this statement to Dusty Baker on Monday, a day before Willie passed, to share with the city of Birmingham: pic.twitter.com/hQ0XmRKsmc
Mays was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. At the time of his death, he was its oldest living member, a distinction he inherited when Tommy Lasordadied on January 7, 2021, and one that now belongs to 90-year-old Luis Aparicio. Read the rest of this entry »
Athletes like Elly De La Cruz can skew our perception of reality. His powerful arm makes most shortstops look like they throw with a wet noodle. His 99th-percentile sprint speed makes most other baserunners look like they’re running on sand. His tall frame, which our website somehow lists at 6-foot-2, makes that guy on Hinge who claims he’s 6-foot-2 look like he’s actually 5-foot-8. Oh, and his 13 steals of third base this year might make you think steals of third are at an all-time high, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
As a fan of highly specific baseball stats – a bold statement to make on this website, I know – I like to check in on the stolen base rates at each bag. Practically speaking, that means I pay particularly close attention to steals of third, the oft-forgotten middle child of stolen bases. Steals of third are too common to receive the same amount of attention as steals of home; at the same time, they’re infrequent enough that they’ll always be overshadowed by the sheer number of second-base steals. Steals of home are almost guaranteed to make tomorrow morning’s highlight reel. Steals of second outnumber all others and thus dictate league-wide stolen base trends every year. Steals of third are stuck in the middle, and that’s especially true this season as their siblings are taking even more of the glory than usual.
The stolen base success rate at home (16-for-29, 55.2%) is the highest it’s been since at least 1969. Indeed, it’s above 50% for only the second time in that span. In addition, runners are on pace to steal home 36 times this year, which would rank second in the divisional era and well within shouting distance of first (38 SBH in 1998). Meanwhile, the overall stolen base rate (i.e. steals per game) is also on the rise, primarily driven by an increase in steals of second. The league is on pace to steal second base 166 more times in 2024 than it did last year, a 5.6% increase, as runners continue to test the limits of the New Rules™. Read the rest of this entry »
You’re surely familiar with the trope of aging sluggers who sell out for pull-side power because they can’t catch up to the fastball like they used to. They need to start gearing up to swing earlier, forcing them to guess what pitch is coming instead of reacting to what they see. They hope that extra homers will offset the extra whiffs that come when they get fooled by slower stuff. The interesting thing about this trope is that its strategy is very similar to the one that swept through the entire baseball world roughly 10 years ago. Justin Turner was a leading light of the launch angle revolution, the movement that emphasized getting on plane early, attacking the ball out front, and pulling it in the air. Essentially, that movement turned the last refuge of an aging slugger into the mainstream way of hitting. At 39, Turner is now an aging slugger himself, with a wRC+ that has fallen in each season since 2020. His swing is already optimized, and now that he’s largely relegated to designated hitter, his 106 wRC+ doesn’t quite cut it.
A cursory look at his stats might tell you that Turner’s been unlucky this season. After all, he’s running his highest xwOBA since 2021 and his highest walk rate since 2018. Meanwhile, his BABIP is the lowest it’s been since 2011, and his wOBA is nearly 30 points below his xwOBA. Unlucky, right? Here’s the problem: Turner’s 30.6% hard-hit rate and 87.1-mph average exit velocity are not just career lows, they’re miles beneath his career averages of 39.6% and 89.8 mph. Turner’s popup rate has also ticked up. If your quality of contact gets drastically worse, luck probably isn’t the thing that’s driving down your BABIP. But there’s still that pesky xwOBA to worry about. Why hasn’t it plummeted along with Turner’s barrel rate? Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been in a ballpark a half hour or so before game time, you’ve probably noticed the starting pitchers playing catch with a teammate or a coach in the outfield. You’ve likely also observed them subsequently going into their respective bullpens to warm up, readying themselves to face hitters once the contest begins. This is integral to a starter’s pregame preparation, but it’s only part of the start-day routine. That routine, which varies from pitcher to pitcher, is typically scripted. From going over scouting reports to the number of throws mades before taking the game mound, everything is planned out.
How exactly does a big league starter prepare for a game? A pair of New York Yankees — pitching coach Matt Blake and veteran left-hander Nestor Cortes — detailed the process in separate interviews last weekend at Fenway Park.
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Matt Blake:
“Some guys are a little more scripted than others. They’re all going to be in the vicinity of 25-35 pitches. You might have some outliers who are closer to 20 or 40, but generally 25-30ish pitches is usually the target to get yourself ready. That’s in the ’pen. There is some level of catch-play before, whether it’s long toss or PlyoCare work, to get your body prepared to get on a mound for the 25-30 pitches.
“Depending on their arsenal, they might carve out a certain amount for each pitch. For instance, Gerrit [Cole] is pretty scripted. He might do 12 or 13 out of the windup, then 12 or 13 out of the stretch, and then assess if he needs any more than that. Some guys might be mostly out of the windup and a couple out of the stretch at the end. We’re always trying to identify the foundational routine. What is it they need to work on to get ready for the game plan that night? Maybe you’re facing a couple of batters at the end of your bullpen. You’re saying, ‘This is the first batter and these are the areas I want to get to. Here is the second batter.’ You’re putting together some sequences that are akin to what you’re going to throw to start the game off. Read the rest of this entry »
No one deserves a .414 BABIP. That’s just not how things work. Hit the ball as hard as you want, spray line drives to all fields with reckless abandon, secretly slather grease on your opponents’ gloves – none of those things can keep your batting average on balls in play at such a lofty level. It’s a good marker of small samples. If someone is BABIP’ing .414, it’s too early to believe their stats.
Let’s use Heliot Ramos as an example. Ramos is on fire so far this year. He’s hitting a ridiculous .319/.394/.560, and doing it while striking out nearly 30% of the time. It doesn’t make sense. No one hits .300 while striking out that often. No one runs a .400 OBP with a strikeout rate that high unless they’re walking like Barry Bonds. Ramos is doing neither.
I can keep listing the things that don’t make sense here. Ramos isn’t exactly a launch-and-crush kind of guy – he’s hitting 1.7 grounders per fly ball, with the league average around 1.4. But it’s working out for him – he’s batting a scalding .367 on those grounders with a .411 slugging percentage. That’s the 11th-best mark (minimum 40 grounders) in baseball for average, and the 15th best for slugging percentage. Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday night, I was at a wedding in Washington, DC. The bride was a Nationals fan and the groom was a Phillies fan. The band played “Dancing on My Own,” and the groom’s friends continued to sing the chorus well after the band had stopped playing. I had only met the happy couple a few times, but due to a last-second swap and a quirk of the venue’s layout, I ended up seated immediately in front of the spot from which everyone made their speeches. And I mean immediately in front of it. I was so close that I slouched down in my chair the whole time so that the back of my head wouldn’t ruin all the pictures. I was so close that I had to alternate between looking down at the table and looking past whoever was speaking and out the window, because I honestly thought that making eye contact from that distance would be too distracting for someone trying to deliver a heartfelt message of love. Otherwise, here’s what they would have seen whenever they looked down at their speech:
I’m aware that I bring some awkwardness with me every time I enter a room, but on Saturday, the room really met me halfway.
Not long after the father of the bride tearfully recounted the time, all those years ago, when he was away on a business trip and he called his pregnant wife from a payphone in the Atlanta airport and found out that they were going to have a little girl, I started vibrating. All of a sudden, my phone was blowing up.
Needless to say, I couldn’t exactly reach into my pocket and start scrolling at that moment. I had to wait until all of the wonderful people finished wishing the beautiful couple a long life filled with love, laughter, and happiness. The answer was worth the wait.
On June 5, I wrote about the Kutina Club for Insistently Unsuccessful Basestealers. This exclusive group is named after first baseman Joe Kutina, who stole zero bases on seven attempts in 1912. It welcomes all players who have been caught stealing at least four times in a season without successfully swiping a bag. At the time, McMahon was leading the big leagues with a sparkling 0-for-4 showing that featured one old-fashioned caught stealing, two pickoffs, and one stolen base that was overturned when a replay showed that his cleat came off the bag for a nanosecond. Not only was McMahon in line to join the Kutina Club, he was very nearly on pace to become its record-holder. Joe Coscarart went 0-for-11 in 1936, while McMahon was on pace to get caught 10.8 times.
Even if he didn’t want the record, all he needed to do to get his membership card and cool embroidered jacket was stay put for the rest of the season. Instead, McMahon not only stole his first base of the season, he stole home! That’s the hardest base to steal, since catchers like to squat right behind it on their big haunches, and pitchers like to throw their pitches right to the catchers, and when catchers are attempting to catch would-be basestealers at home plate, they often put up pop times in the neighborhood of 0.00 seconds. The next morning, I saw how McMahon pulled it off: With some help from Pittsburgh catcher Yasmani Grandal. Grandal, it turns out, is something of a soft-tosser.
We already have a term for when the defense concedes a stolen base: defensive indifference. We might need a new category for this play: indifferent defense, which describes when the team out on the field is indifferent not just to the advancement of the runner, but to the very concept of defense itself. Maybe defensive obliviousness would be more accurate, but either way, this is one of the easiest steals of home you’ll ever see. Grandal had been throwing the ball back to the pitcher like this all game. When McMahon reached third, Grandal started taking a quick peek at the runner before tossing it back, but his lollipops were as soft as ever. In fact, I went ahead and timed him.
From the time the ball left Grandal’s hand to the time it hit Jared Jones’s glove, 1.86 seconds elapsed. Even with 19th percentile sprint speed, that was slow enough that McMahon could time him up and waltz home. To be clear, this wasn’t entirely Grandal’s fault. McMahon was able to take an enormous lead with impunity because Ke’Bryan Hayes was shaded way over toward short and never made the slightest pretense of checking in on him. The side angle tells the story quite elegantly. Here’s the moment that the pitch hit Grandal’s mitt.
McMahon was a solid 20 to 25 feet from the bag, but he could have easily ventured much farther. Hayes was so far from the bag that he’s not even in the frame. McMahon’s lead was so enormous that both the home and away broadcasts cut to shots of it before Jones released the fateful pitch, but nobody on the Pirates showed the slightest concern. Maybe someone told them about the Kutina Club, or maybe McMahon just really wanted out of it. McMahon gave the slightest deke back toward third base when Grandal gave his cursory look down the baseline, but perhaps the most embarrassing part of the whole story is that he started running well before Grandal threw the ball. Here’s a still from the moment when it left the catcher’s hand.
McMahon is already in a full sprint. Hayes is walking even farther away from third base. Only the home plate umpire has noticed that the score is about to change.
In terms of effective velocity, ignoring the arc Grandal put on the ball and solely measuring how long it took for it to cover the 60-foot, 6-inch distance from home plate to the mound, it traveled at 22.2 mph. For reference, there have been only nine balls hit between 22 and 23 mph this season, and seven of them were bunts.
From the time Grandal released the ball, it took just McMahon just 2.43 seconds to touch home plate. Jones knew that home plate was McMahon’s long before he caught the world’s saddest successful Hail Mary pass. Here’s a GIF that shows moment of Grandal’s release, the moment the ball reaches its apex, and the moment it hits Jones’ glove. You can’t even call it a tragedy in three acts. It’s a play where the hero gets stabbed in the first act, and then acts two and three just consist of him slowly bleeding to death.
A few minutes later, the Pirates broadcast noted that third base coach Warren Schaeffer had sneaked over to McMahon right before the pitch, presumably to whisper that home plate was wide open. However, when they cut to a replay, he didn’t appear to say anything whatsoever. All the video showed was Schaeffer shuffling over toward McMahon while attempting to chew a wad of gum the size of a Jeep Cherokee.
I’m not sure Schaeffer could have said anything to McMahon if he wanted to. He looked exactly like my little brother did when he was 8 and he stuffed an entire pouch of Big League Chew in his mouth. Maybe Schaeffer’s stroll represented some sort of non-verbal signal — he was wearing a slight smirk at the end of the clip — but if Schaeffer did tip off McMahon by way of speaking, it probably came out something like, “Roo shud sfeel fome.”
The most amazing part of the whole ordeal is that the next time the Rockies got a man in scoring position — which was in the very next inning — Grandal hadn’t learned from his mistake at all. Here he is throwing the ball back to the pitcher. It’s still a lob! The ball still travels so high that it leaves the frame entirely! It’s one inning later! What are we doing here?
With that, McMahon was out of the Kutina club. What’s more, he led a mass exodus. The list below is from my original article on June 5. It shows all five players who had at least two caught stealings and zero steals at the time.
Jeimer Candelario stole two bases the very next day. Nick Senzel stole a base the day after that, and Brendan Donovan stole one a week later. That leaves Justin Turner and Nick Martini (who picked up his second caught stealing on Monday) as the last players standing to be caught twice without stealing a base. We’ll have to wait until the end of the year to find out whether they end up joining the club. However, McMahon is now in a club that’s only slightly less exclusive.
I was curious how many players ended the season in McMahon’s position, with their only stolen bases coming on a steal of home. This is a tricky thing to search for, so I reached out to Katie Sharp of Stathead, who graciously ran a query and found 183 players and 189 player seasons that met this criteria. The list includes legends like Joe DiMaggio, Roy Campanella, and Edgar Martinez, but I’ve decided to name this club after pitcher Ray Fisher. Five of the players managed to steal home twice in a season, and five players managed to make the list twice, but only Fisher made it three times, in 1915, 1916, and 1919.
So far this season, only McMahon and Andrew McCutchen are in line to join the Fisher Club of Exclusively Domiciliary Basestealers. McCutchen’s steal of home was even flukier than McMahon’s, only coming to pass because J.T. Realmuto threw the ball into center field when the runner at first took off for second. If either player finishes the season without stealing second or third, they’ll join Yordan Alvarez as the only player to enter the club this decade. If they do end up stealing second or third, I look forward to feeling my phone blow up at the most inopportune time possible.
Even before he fractured his right arm during Sunday’s 9-3 loss to the Red Sox, Anthony Rizzo had already endured a rough 12 1/2 months. His 2023 season was wrecked by the aftereffects of a May 28 collision with Fernando Tatis Jr., which manifested themselves as post-concussion symptoms that sapped his production before he was shut down in early August; he didn’t play again that season. He started slowly this year, and while his bat perked up in late April, he fell into a deep slump at the beginning of June and was benched during the Yankees’ recent series against the Dodgers. He showed a few positive signs upon returning to the lineup, but now he’s expected to miss the next eight weeks.
Rizzo’s injury occurred during the seventh inning of Sunday night’s game at Fenway Park. After Alex Verdugo and Giancarlo Stanton both singled off pitcher Brennan Bernardino to start the inning, Rizzo grounded to the right side of the infield. First baseman Dominic Smith ranged over to field the ball and started to throw to second base before realizing he had no shot at forcing Stanton out. He then threw to Bernardino — or rather, behind him. The pitcher dropped the ball as he got to the bag, where a sprinting Rizzo swerved to his right to avoid a full-on collision. He lost his balance and went down hard, rolling over on his right arm. He remained on the ground in obvious pain while being tended to by the Yankees’ athletic trainers, then left the field and was replaced by pinch-runner Oswaldo Cabrera.
Initial imaging with a fluoroscope at Fenway Park was negative, but further testing in New York on Monday revealed that Rizzo had fractured the radial neck of his right arm — that is, the part of the radius near the elbow. Such injuries are more common in children than adults, and often occur on a traumatic fall onto an outstretched hand, which, bingo. Such fractures are usually not displaced, and that would appear to be the case with Rizzo, who won’t need surgery. While initial reports placed his absence in a four-to-six week window, on Tuesday the Yankees said that Rizzo will need about eight weeks before returning to games, with the first baseman saying he was told it’ll be “probably four, five weeks” of no baseball activity. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth 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 »
Jay Jaffe: Tomorrow I’ll have something on the Yankees and Anthony Rizzo’s broken arm. Injuries have cut into my list of players I was planning on checking into; some of those might have to wait until after I return. We’ll see
2:04
MP: Kelenic going to get an article soon about turning his season around? Just a hot streak or do you think some of this can stick?
2:06
Jay Jaffe: Kelenic is 24 years old, and while that’s too young to write off, a quick look at his splits and trends tells me not to get very excited about two hot weeks. Yes, he’s hitting the ball harder but not that hard, he’s also chasing more than you’d like, and unlike last year, he’s really struggling against lefties.
2:06
Section 34: Will Fangraphs ever do an Orioles top prospects list this year?
2:08
Jay Jaffe: Assuming they don’t secede from Major League Baseball, I would think so, but I don’t make the schedule. I imagine they’re coming soon – obviously, it’s a deep system with lots of interesting players who are becoming more relevant as the July 30 deadline approaches.
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Jay Jaffe