Dan Szymborski: There’s a time for every purpose under heaven, even SzymChat
12:03
Guest: why is ZiPS still so in on Jack Suwinski’s bat?
12:03
Dan Szymborski: One thing is I’m not sure taht wRC+ is working correctly on the FG page at the moment
12:04
Dan Szymborski: But it’s still an extremely small sample
12:04
Dan Szymborski: and full fat ZiPS isn’t that much more negative
12:04
Guest: With the new BatCast data, do you think it will turn out to be better to have tightly clustered A and B swings (in terms of length or bat speed), or to have a smooth continuum?
I like to amuse myself by imagining a scenario in which Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane has to replace a departing Juan Soto. Now, if Moneyball came out in the 2020s, Soto would’ve been traded years ago and Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand would be heroically figuring out how to procure a block of taxpayer-funded stadium-adjacent condos for Steve, the cheapskate owner. But it’s my imagination, so it doesn’t have to be that bleak.
This is a kind of reverse-Six Million Dollar Man scenario: “We have to rebuild him; we don’t have the money.” Soto doesn’t provide any special value in the field or on the bases; even the cheapest team in the league can find an unremarkable defensive corner outfielder who steals 10 bases a year. The tricky thing about finding a poor man’s Soto is replacing his ability to get on base.
Guys who run a .400 OBP, or a walk rate in the high teens, are rare but not unique. Especially if you exclude those high-OBP guys who also bat near .300 and have 30-plus home run power, the tools that price the imaginary A’s out of Soto’s market. (Or Bryce Harper’s or Aaron Judge’s or Kyle Tucker’s.) Read the rest of this entry »
Statcast releasedbat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:
It’s not quite right to say that Fernando Cruz was a late-blooming prospect. That would imply that he was a prospect, and he wasn’t, at least not really. He was picked in the sixth round of the 2007 draft as a hitter, but never made it out of A-ball in four years. He tried pitching after that, and it worked, but not enough for the Royals to keep him. He kicked around the minors, indy ball, and the winter league circuit for more than a decade. He played in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. He was living a full baseball life, and almost exclusively outside of affiliated ball. Over the 2021-2022 winter, though, Cruz put on a show, racking up a 2.03 ERA with 81 strikeouts in 61 innings of work across three leagues and the Caribbean Series.
You can have big league potential without pitching in affiliated ball, and the Reds saw it. They signed Cruz to a minor league deal before the 2022 season and sent him straight to Triple-A, where he was one of the best relievers in the minors right away. He earned a promotion to the big leagues that September, and he hasn’t looked back since. Now, at 34, he’s off to one of the best starts of any reliever in baseball when it comes to missing bats. It’s a remarkable story, and he’s a player worth celebrating. How in the world did he sneak past everyone for so long, and how is he thriving now? I hope I’ll be able to tell you. Read the rest of this entry »
Kyle Finnegan might be the most underrated closer in baseball. Flying below all but D.C. radar, the 32-year-old right-hander logged 28 saves for the Washington Nationals a year ago, and this season he has 13 saves — no one in the majors has more — to go with a 1.56 ERA. Relying primarily on a 97.3-mph fastball and an 89.8-mph splitter, he’s holding opposing hitters to a .138 average and a .259 slugging percentage in the current campaign. Finnegan’s peripherals (4.41 xERA, 4.06 FIP, 3.45 xFIP, .154 BABIP) suggest that he likely won’t remain this dominant all season, but so far, he has been on of the league’s top relievers.
His ascent to the big leagues took time. Selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft by the Oakland Athletics out of Texas State University, Finnegan was just shy of his 29th birthday when he debuted in July 2020, seven months after he’d signed with the Nationals as a minor league free agent.
How did he go from a low-profile prospect to a high-level MLB closer?
“It’s kind of been like a slow burn for me, picking up different things and building off past experiences,” Finnegan told me prior to a recent game. “I’ve always had potential. I’ve thrown hard since I was a sophomore in college — I could run it up to 97-98 [mph] — so I really just needed the offspeed to come along. I’ve also been fortunate to be healthy throughout my career. Outside of that, I wish I could give you a rhyme or reason. I think I’ve just gotten a little better every year.” Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago Cubs. 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 »
Clarke Schmidt has a thing for spin. This season, there are only 14 breaking pitches in the entire league that average 3,000 rpm or more; Schmidt throws two of them. To find another South Carolina alum with such mastery of spin, you’d have to go all the way back to Andrew Card, who was George W. Bush’s chief of staff during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Schmidt’s breaking balls would fit perfectly in a turn-of-the-century alt-rock milieu, alongside the Spin Doctors, or Lifehouse’s “Spin,” or the Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl.
Baseball Savant recently started publishing bat tracking data, and the public sabermetric community is currently working out what this new avalanche of dataactually means. So it was in the early days of spin rate: How much is too much, and how little is not enough, and how does it vary pitch by pitch? It took a minute to actually sort this stuff out, and as ever, the characteristics of a pitch don’t matter very much if it’s poorly located.
For example: Last year, Schmidt spent his first full season in the Yankees’ big league rotation. And he was fine. His ERA was 4.64, his FIP 4.42. Even though he achieved that vanishingly difficult feat of starting 32 games and throwing 159 innings, he was only a 1.8 WAR pitcher on the season. Opponents hit .265 against him, and his two outrageous breaking pitches landed him smack dab in the 50th percentile for breaking ball run value. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
The Kansas City Royals’ strong start has been one of the most surprising stories of the season thus far. With a comeback win over the Mariners last night, the Royals raised their record to 26-18 and pulled into second place in the AL Central, just a game and a half behind the Guardians for the division lead. Bobby Witt Jr. is playing like a legitimate MVP candidate, Salvador Perez is walking more and striking out less than ever (at age 34!), and Seth Lugo is pitching like he wants a Cy Young award in his trophy case.
But take a look at Kansas City’s lineup and offensive statistics and it doesn’t exactly look like one of the best teams in the American League. Entering Tuesday, the Royals had a 94 wRC+ (22nd in the majors) and a .307 wOBA (16th); they also ranked 14th in average (.242), 20th in on-base percentage (.304), 14th in slugging (.390), and tied for 18th in home runs (40). That’s a middling offense at best and a bottom-third group at worst.
The easy explanation for Kansas City’s success this year is its pitching staff, which entering Tuesday ranked ninth in baseball with a 3.49 ERA and a 3.73 FIP. More specifically, the rotation has been one of the best in the majors. Royals starters have combined for a 3.26 ERA (5th), a 3.44 FIP (4th), and 4.6 WAR (2nd), again as of the start of play Tuesday.
But a great rotation alone doesn’t make a good team. If the season ended yesterday, the Royals would be in the playoffs right now because they are producing at the plate in the moments that matter.
That 94 wRC+ overall? Forget it. Their wRC+ was 132 with runners in scoring position, 131 with runners on, and 137 in their few dozen bases plate appearances with the bases loaded. They weren’t as excellent in high-leverage spots (101 wRC+), but that’s still notably better than their wRC+ in all other situations (94).
So, is this a skill? Eh, probably not, but if you’d like to re-litigate Esky Magic from 2014 and 2015 in the comments, have at it. More likely, it’s some combination of luck and random variation in a quarter-season sample. Players don’t suddenly become better or worse depending on the situation, they just perform better or worse. The statistics I shared above are merely what has happened; they’re not predictive of what the rest of the season will hold. Jeff Sullivan put it best back in 2018 when looking at “clutch” through a win probability lens: The most important thing about clutch is that you shouldn’t count on it continuing.
Now, this isn’t to say that the Royals are frauds, because the flip side of the above statement also holds true. Just because you shouldn’t count on clutch continuing doesn’t mean that it won’t. Also, Kansas City isn’t winning only because of its situational hitting. They’ve got Witt and Salvy and all that starting pitching! The Royals may not be this good, but they certainly aren’t bad. And when it’s all over, they might just be good enough. They’re a weird team in a weird division, and maybe they can ride that weirdness all the way into the postseason.
Quick Hits
• Bob Nightengale put it best: “Break up the Colorado Rockies!” Wednesday’s win over the Padres gave the Rockies their sixth straight win, and if five meant we should break them up, what are we supposed to do now? And they haven’t beaten bad teams either! The streak started with a win against the Giants, followed by a three-game sweep of the Rangers and a back-to-back victories against the Padres at Petco Park.
This strikes me as positive regression more than anything else (like the White Sox being above .500 since Tommy Pham joined the team), but Colorado’s sweep of the Rangers was quite the spoiler. Scoring just six runs across those three games, the vaunted Texas lineup was shut down by starting pitching luminaries Ryan Feltner, Austin Gomber, and Ty Blach. Even Dakota Hudson got in on the fun on Monday against the Padres. After going 0-6 in his first seven starts, he earned his first win of the season.
• You’re not a baseball writer if you don’t write a story that needs to be updated after it is published. So I would, of course, like to note that after I filed Monday’s column about how infrequently the Braves use their bench, Austin Riley left Sunday night’s game with an inflamed oblique. Riley isn’t expected to go on the IL, but he was kept out of Atlanta’s lineup on both Monday and Tuesday, allowing Zack Short to beef up those ghost bench statistics.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the “effectively wild” debut of Paul Skenes and the Pirates’ bases-loaded walkathon, an in-development TV series about Ippei Mizuhara, the demotion of Craig Kimbrel and possible trade dangling of Mason Miller, the continued success of Davis Schneider, the impact of replay review on the increase in catcher’s interference calls, and whether teams should go back to rearranging their rotations based on opponent quality, then (39:14) bring on Mike Petriello of MLB.com to explain and discuss the present and future of MLB’s new Statcast-based bat-tracking metrics, plus (1:27:51) a few follow-ups.
Jay Jaffe: All of which is to say that in addition to having a good time interacting with our readers in these chats, they’re a good place to get an idea of what you folks are interested in, and I come out of each one with at least a couple of ideas — not all of which come to fruition, but they’re still useful. So thank you for that. And now, on with the show
2:04
Shotamania: Shota has the lowest ERA in his first 8 starts (0.96) since Fernando Valenzuela way back in 1981. I’m just old enough to remember Fernando-mania. Should we be talking about Shotamania?
2:06
Jay Jaffe: As somebody whose baseball fandom was in full flower during Fernandomania — I cut his box scores out of the Salt Lake Tribune and taped them into a three-ring binder — I’ve thought about this comparison, and even considered doing a Shotamania piece, but Kyle Kishimoto, who’s not old enough to remember Fernando, beat me to the coverage https://blogs.fangraphs.com/shota-imanaga-is-pitching-like-an-ace/.
2:10
Jay Jaffe: Obviously, Imanaga is on an impressive run, with a 0.96 ERA and 2.30 FIP through eight starts. Is it a mania? I don’t think it’s had anywhere near the cultural impact of Fernandomania, which tapped into the Los Angeles Dodgers’ original sin of building their ballpark at Chavez Ravine, which forced the eviction of nearly 2,000 Mexican-American families living there.
Dan Szymborski: There’s a time for every purpose under heaven, even SzymChat
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