Keaton Winn is a rare big league pitcher, and not just because he’s the only one who grew up in Ollie, Iowa, with a population of 201 in the 2020 census. The 26-year-old San Francisco Giants right-hander’s primary pitch is a splitter, and by a significant margin. Through seven starts this season, Winn’s usage breakdown is 42.2% splitters, 23.3% four-seamers, 20.4% sinkers, and 14.1% sliders. No starter in baseball has thrown a higher percentage of splits this season.
With one notable exception, his atypical approach has yielded good results. Winn failed to get out of the first inning when he faced the Phillies in his most recent start, on May 4, but even with that turbulent outing — five runs in 2/3 frames — he has a respectable 4.41 ERA and a 3.97 FIP. In each of the three starts that preceded the debacle, he went six innings and allowed just one run. His next start is scheduled for this afternoon against the Rockies in Colorado, at 3:10 p.m. ET.
Winn’s mix was even more splitter heavy a year ago. He made his MLB debut last June and proceeded to throw his signature offering an eye-opening 55.1% of the time in 42 1/3 innings. It’s understandable that he would prioritize the pitch — last month, our prospect writers Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice called Winn’s splitter “devastating… one of the nastier ones in pro ball” — even if such an approach is unprecedented among starters. San Francisco’s fifth-round pick in the 2017 draft out of Iowa Western Community College is anything but ordinary in the way he attacks hitters.
Winn discussed his splitter when the Giants played the Red Sox at Fenway Park earlier this month.
———
David Laurila: Let’s start with your full repertoire. What was it at the time you signed your first professional contract, and what is it now?
Keaton Winn: “When I signed it was four-seam, curveball, slider, and I maybe threw like five sinkers. No changeup. Now it is four-seamer, sinker, splitter, slider.”
Laurila: You obviously throw a ton of splitters. Given how much you rely on it, would it be fair to say that you’re probably not in the big leagues right now had you never developed a splitter?
Winn: “Yeah. That’s definitely crossed my mind before. I mean, I think I ultimately could have competed to get a role, but having the splitter made it so much easier.”
We’re far enough into the 2024 regular season that a lot of the extreme flukes and outliers have tumbled back to Earth. Mookie Betts leads the league in position player WAR; Shohei Ohtani leads in wRC+; Patrick Corbin doesn’t quite lead the league in earned runs allowed, but he’s close, and everyone ahead of him on the leaderboard has made more starts.
Nevertheless, we do have a few surprises hanging around at or near the top of various leaderboards. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few before they disappear. These (mostly) aren’t surprising rookies; rather, they’re players you’ve probably heard of, but might have forgotten about in the past few years while they sorted some stuff out. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, I wrote about at the mysterious disappearing zone rate of Mookie Betts. Today, we’ll be looking at a player who has seen his zone rate go in the other direction: Adley Rutschman. This season, opponents are throwing 51.7% of their pitches in the zone against Rutschman, up from 47.3% in 2023 (and 45.9% in 2022). That jump of 4.4 percentage points is the fourth largest among all qualified players. The trend is much stronger when Rutschman is batting right-handed, but as you can see from the world’s tiniest table, it’s also there when he’s batting lefty.
In-Zone %
Year
Lefty
Righty
2022
47.2
47.5
2023
46.2
45.0
2024
49.7
54.9
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
In yesterday’s article, I broke down the reasons that throwing fewer pitches in the zone to Betts (or at least the approach that led to fewer pitches in the zone) made some sense. I don’t have any such argument today. If anything, I think pitchers should be throwing Rutschman way fewer strikes. The reason is simple: He’s chasing way more than he did last year. In 2023, Rutschman swung at 23.4% of pitches outside the zone, which put him in the 81st percentile. This season, he’s at 32.5%, which puts him in the 22nd percentile. That is an enormous change, the third highest among all qualified players, and it hasn’t been limited to one side of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »
Daulton Varsho must have been bummed. After a breakout 2022, he got traded to Toronto, a World Series contender with a desperate need for outfielders. Then he had a down season, the Jays got swept out of the Wild Card round, and his old team made a surprise run to the World Series. Gabriel Moreno and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., the players Arizona got back for Varsho, were key parts of that run. Oh, what could have been.
The most worrisome of all those happenings, from Varsho’s perspective, was surely his own performance. Everything else was either partially or fully outside of his control, but this one seemed mostly on him, and it’s hard to add value offensively when you’re getting on base at a .285 clip. Yes, he’s a great defensive player and adds value on the basepaths, but most of a position player’s value comes from hitting, and quite frankly, his just wasn’t good enough.
But ah, how the tables have turned. A year after being one of the weakest links on an excellent Toronto offense, he’s one of the best players on a lackluster unit. Among Jays regulars, only Justin Turner and Davis Schneider have hit better. (Danny Jansen hasn’t played enough yet to count as a “regular” in my eyes.) There’s not much he can do about the rest of the team, but Varsho has reversed his own fortunes for the moment. Now there are two questions: How did he do it, and can he keep it going? Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. 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 »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Pirates calling up top pitching prospect Paul Skenes, Mookie Betts’s shortstop defense, Willson Contreras, the causes of increasingly common catcher’s interference calls, and catcher technique in an ABS world, rampant reliever shuffling, Chase Anderson as a Phiten necklace “endling,” two ways in which amateur prospects are possibly being exploited or disrupted, Ippei Mizuhara’s guilty plea, Shohei Ohtani’s WAR and two-way future, and a momentous mid-plate-appearance pitching change that never was. Then (1:16:53) they talk to The Athletic writer Andy McCullough about his new book, The Last of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness.
Jeremy Peña is off to an excellent start. He’s also been one of the least productive hitters in baseball. How’s that for a lede?
If I told you that without any additional context, perhaps you’d think Peña was struggling at the plate but making up for it in the field. Yet, the former Gold Glove winner currently has -2 OAA and -5 DRS on the season. So much for that theory. Much to the contrary, Peña is on fire at the plate. Over the first six weeks of the 2024 campaign, he is batting .313 with a 129 wRC+. And while his .351 BABIP is likely unsustainable, his .327 xBA ranks second among qualified American League batters. His .363 xwOBA ranks in the 80th percentile, a big step up from his .305 xwOBA (22nd percentile) in 2023. Most impressive, he has cut his strikeout rate down to just 14.0%, ninth lowest in the AL. His strikeout rate has improved from the 30th percentile in his 2022 rookie campaign to the 61st percentile last season, and now it sits in the 92nd percentile in year three.
However, if you glance up from those percentiles on Peña’s Baseball Savant page, you might be surprised by the most important number of them all: His batting run value is zero. The line on the value spectrum is the faintest shade of blue, sitting about a quarter of an inch closer to “poor” than “great.” That doesn’t seem right. Indeed, out of 485 batters to see a pitch this year, Peña is the only one with a wOBA and xwOBA above .350 and a negative batting run value, according to Savant. It’s not hard to understand why he’s an outlier. Typically, when a player is hitting anywhere close to as well as Peña, he provides at least some positive value to his club.
Metrics like wOBA and xwOBA are context neutral, while Baseball Savant calculates run value by considering the runners on base, the number of outs, and the ball and strike count for each discrete event. If you take that general methodology a step further and also consider the inning and the score, you get a statistic like Win Probability Added (WPA) – although Peña might ask that we please, please stop taking the methodology a step further. According to WPA, Peña has cost the Astros far more than he has given back in 2024. Houston ranks second to last in the AL with -3.82 offensive WPA this season. Peña (-1.03) is responsible for more than a quarter of that negative WPA. Only two players have contributed to the team’s misfortunes more than Peña: the now-optioned José Abreu and a deeply slumpingAlex Bregman. Read the rest of this entry »
Aaron Judge, Paul Goldschmidt, and José Abreu aren’t the only recent MVPs off to underwhelming starts in 2024. After putting together a season for the ages last year, Ronald Acuña Jr. has scuffled thus far, both in terms of making contact and hitting for power. His struggles have coincided with those of a couple of the team’s other heavy hitters, with the result that the team recently slipped out of first place in the NL East for the first time in more than a year.
Roughly two years removed from season-ending surgery to repair a torn ACL, Acuña became the first player ever to hit at least 40 homers and steal at least 70 bases in the same season. He clubbed 41 dingers and swiped a major league-leading 73 bags, aided by a couple of rule changes that increased per-game stolen base rates by 41% league-wide. Playing a career-high 159 games, he hit .337/.416/.596 while leading the NL in on-base percentage, steals, wRC+ (170), plate appearances (735), at-bats (643), total bases (383), hits (217), runs (149), and WAR (9.0). Despite a strong challenge from Mookie Betts, he was a unanimous pick for the NL MVP award.
Where has that electrifying slugger gone? With more than a month of play under his belt this season, Acuña has hit just .267/.373/.359 with 14 steals but just two homers. Thanks to his 12.4% walk rate and his high on-base percentage, that slash line is still good for a 116 wRC+, but the 54-point drop in wRC+ is steep, even if it’s “only” the 16th-largest in the majors among players with at least 400 PA last year and 100 this year. Read the rest of this entry »
In-zone rate is one of the most fascinating stats in baseball. It definitely means something, but you sometimes need to sort through a couple different factors in order to determine just what that something is. If pitchers think they can knock the bat out of your hands, they’ll come right after you inside, but if they’re scared you’ll do damage, then they’ll nibble around the edges. If you chase too much, they’ll look to tempt you outside the zone, but if you make good swing decisions, you can force them to throw it over the plate. Fastballs end up in the zone more often than breaking balls and offspeed pitches, so if you struggle to catch up to velocity, you’ll see more pitches in the zone. There’s always some randomness thrown in for good measure too, but generally speaking, that’s the matrix.
If you combine all those factors, you’ll see that most of the time, players who take big hacks see fewer pitches in the zone than those who just try to put the ball in play. Since 2021, Salvador Perez and Bryce Harper have seen the fewest pitches in the zone, while Myles Straw and Ha-Seong Kim have seen the most. But there are some elite players who combine the best of all worlds: They make good swing decisions and they combine power with contact ability. If you hang it, they’ll bang it, and if you bury it, they’ll spit on it. These players usually end up with a zone rate that’s somewhere in the middle, simply because there is no one good way to pitch to them. Think Joey Votto, Alex Bregman, and our subject for today: Mookie Betts.
If you’re a baker, you might be fond of the kitchen sink cookie: the cookie where you mix anything and everything that might be delicious into the dough. Pecans and peanut butter chips? Sure. Toffee bits and white chocolate? The more the merrier. Betts is baseball’s version of the kitchen sink cookie, studded with athleticism, coordination, savvy, skill, versatility, maybe even some shredded coconut. There’s no such thing as a right way to pitch him. He has weak spots, but he’s excellent at hitting the kinds of pitches that are usually located in those spots because he’s good against every kind of pitch. He’s never excelled against pitches at the top of the zone, but he destroys four-seam fastballs. If you want to beat him up there, you really have to hit the very edge, because if you miss high, he won’t swing, and if you miss low, he’ll clobber it. He’s also had trouble low and away, but again, he’s always been solid against the breaking pitches that most righties try and throw there.
This year, Betts is batting leadoff in front of reigning AL MVP and current Triple Crown candidate Shohei Ohtani and perennial MVP candidate Freddie Freeman. There’s nobody in baseball with better lineup protection, so you could be forgiven for assuming that he has been seeing a lot more strikes this season. He has not. In fact, his zone rate has fallen from 49.1% in 2023 to 45.4% this season. That drop of 3.7 percentage points is tied with MJ Melendez for the second largest among all qualified players, behind only Anthony Volpe, who went from 50% to 46.1%. That leaves Betts with a zone rate in the 13th percentile of all qualified players.
So far, 10.1% of the pitches Betts has seen have been in the waste zone, and 24.4% have been in the chase zone. Both of those numbers are the highest he’s ever recorded. Just 23% of the pitches Betts has seen this year have been in the heart zone. That’s the lowest rate he’s ever recorded, and it’s also eighth lowest among the 196 players who have seen at least 400 pitches this season. Pitchers are avoiding him like never before, and it’s not just that he’s seeing fewer strikes. They’re trying to execute a specific plan.
They’re trying to hit that outside corner. Betts is seeing fewer four-seamers, and more sinkers and offspeed pitches. Those offspeed pitches, as well as the breaking balls he’s seeing, are more concentrated on the outside edge of the plate.
Strictly speaking, this plan is not working. Betts is already sitting on a major league-best 3.0 WAR, and his 193 wRC+ is second only to the 217 mark of the player who is, in theory, protecting him in the lineup. It’s hard to argue that the league has finally figured out a player who’s currently on pace for 12.8 WAR.
However, this plan is absolutely changing the shape of the production Betts is putting up. First, the good news: He’s running a career-high 16.3% walk and a career-low 9.6% strikeout rate. His 1.71 walks per strikeout are miles ahead of Vinnie Pasquantino’s 1.36 in second place. Now the bad news: Betts’ hard-hit rate and 90th percentile exit velocity are down significantly. His pull rate is down to 32.6%, the lowest of his entire career and a drop-off of more than 13 percentage points from 2023. He hasn’t hit a homer since April 12 or an extra-base hit since April 28. Here’s what that looks like in heat map form. The map below shows Betts’ value according to Runs Above Average per 100 pitches.
If you’re a pitcher, that makes it pretty clear: outside good, inside bad. Even with Ohtani and Freeman looming, it might make sense to try to hit your spot on the outside corner and risk giving up a walk. Furthermore, this plan is not without precedent. If you go back and look at the heat maps of the pitches Betts has seen in recent years, one of them jumps out as similar to this season.
In 2021, pitchers tried a similar tack, aggressively going after the outside corner. Betts ended up with a 131 wRC+ — the worst mark he’s had since 2017. If you’re an opposing pitcher with no good options — which is to say any pitcher who finds themselves 60 feet, 6 inches away from Mookie Betts — why not try an approach that has, at least grading by the ridiculous curve of Betts’ stellar production, worked before? Look at how many of his hits (especially his extra-base hits) went to left field last year.
Right field is just a sea of gray outs with a few green singles sprinkled in. In 2023, Betts had a .602 wOBA when he pulled the ball, .396 when he hit it straightaway, and .189 when he hit it to the opposite field. Why not do everything you can to keep him from pulling the ball and encourage him to hit it the other way? Unfortunately for opposing pitchers, this tactic requires a high level of precision. Betts doesn’t seem to mind taking his walks, and on the rare occasions when he does get a pitch to hit on the inner half, he’s making the most of it.
However, there are a few signs that he’s had to adjust to combat this approach. He appears to be setting up closer to the plate this season. In the pictures below, I’ve copied and pasted a second home plate right next to the actual home plate to give a better sense of scale.
In theory, moving a few inches closer means that the inside pitches Betts usually mashes are now a little bit further inside, which should give him less time to turn on them. Furthermore, his chase rate is up a bit from last season, and it has been rising in recent weeks.
This could just be regression. Betts has an 83 wRC+ over his last nine games, but it’s not like he was going to run a 250 wRC+ and a 12% chase rate all season. However, he really is chasing more — not a lot, but more than he did in April and more than he did in 2023. We’ve seen him move closer to the plate, and it’s certainly possible that seeing so few pitches in the strike zone has made him a little bit sick of waiting for his pitch and more likely to swing at something he shouldn’t. We’re only a fifth of the way through the season, and all the numbers you’ve seen so far are likely to continue to regress to the mean. Betts will likely face more pitchers who are bold enough to challenge him inside (or at all). But for now, it looks like he’s still adjusting to this new approach.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Riley Greene’s latest pants-related wardrobe malfunction, the Padres-Marlins Luis Arraez trade, the continued scuffling of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., a C.B. Bucknor bit, and more. Then (52:30) they’re joined by Neil deMause, author of Field of Schemes, and J.C. Bradbury, author, stadium-funding researcher, and professor of economics, finance, and quantitative analysis at Kennesaw State University, to discuss the latest wave of attempts by teams to obtain public funding for ballpark projects and whether the public is belatedly pushing back, plus a follow-up postscript (1:28:29)
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