FanGraphs Baseball

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In October 2011, a Q&A titled Zach Britton, Oriole in Progress was published in these pages. Britton had just completed a rookie season in which he went 11-11, with a 4.61 ERA, in 28 starts. He’d thrown his signature pitch 53% of the time.

Fast forward to today. Britton is still in Baltimore, but much has changed. He became a reliever in 2014, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular. Since moving to the bullpen, the 28-year-old southpaw has appeared in 199 games and fashioned a 1.42 ERA. Relying more heavily on his power sinker — he now throws it over 90% of the time — he has the highest ground-ball rate in the game (80.8% this year). He also misses bats. Britton strikes out better than a batter per inning.

This season he’s been next to un-hittable. In 61.1 innings, Britton has allowed just 34 hits. He’s recorded a microscopic 0.59 ERA and has 45 saves in as many chances. As August Fagerstrom wrote last month — many have echoed his opinion since that time — Britton is very much in the mix for this year’s American League Cy Young award.

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Britton on his pitch mix and changing roles: “There were a lot more four-seamers back [in 2011]. As a starter, you throw more pitches and mix in different things. It was probably a negative for me that I wasn’t learning how to command the sinker as much as I am now. That was really the big focus when I went to the bullpen — the command of my sinker. The results have been really good once I got that focus.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Boston at Baltimore | 19:05 ET
Price (211.2 IP, 79 xFIP-) vs. Tillman (164.2 IP, 105 xFIP-)
Owing to their recent form, the Red Sox have unceremoniously resolved whatever mystery might have surrounded the likely outcome of the American League’s easternmost division. They’ve now recorded as many wins as the Orioles are projected to record before the end of the season — and one more than the Blue Jays are — which information is conveyed here in visual form, as well.

That’s not to say this particular game is without consequence, however. For, while the Bostons have more or less settled their affairs for the moment, the Baltimores’ world is full both of shadows and fog. Indeed, they possess roughly a 50% chance of qualifying for a wild-card berth — which is also to say they possess roughly a 50% chance of fulfilling or failing to reach their dearest professional ambitions.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Baltimore Television.

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This is not how a catcher reacts to your typical regular-season caught stealing:

And this is not the sort of enthusiasm with which a catcher is typically met in the post-game high-five line:

If you missed what happened in the ninth inning of Wednesday’s game between the Cleveland Indians and the Kansas City Royals, I’ve already spoiled the surprise. Terrance Gore, pinch-runner extraordinaire, was caught stealing in a regular-season game for the first time in his career. He’d gone 17-for-17 before Wednesday night. He’d gone 4-for-5 in the postseason, too, and his only caught stealing came at third base on a play in which he beat the throw and was originally called safe, only to have the verdict changed because his foot came off the bag for a split-second.

For more than a century prior to the advent of instant replay, Gore’s only caught stealing before Wednesday night wouldn’t have been a caught stealing at all, and even with replay, the ruling was dubious. Gore was damn near 21-for-21 in steal attempts to begin his career before Wednesday night, and the major-league record in the expansion era is 26, set by Mitchell Page in 1977. What was amounting to an historic streak has now come to a close, at the hands of Indians catcher Roberto Perez and reliever Cody Allen.

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I don’t know how else to begin, so let’s begin like this: Over 126 games spent with the Astros, Carlos Gomez was worth 0.6 WAR. Over 25 games spent with the Rangers, Carlos Gomez has been worth 0.7 WAR. Now you know the story — there are characters, there’s a plot. When the Astros acquired Gomez in the first place, they figured he could be a real difference-maker. He’s making a difference now, just for a division rival instead.

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Alex Reyes was only called up in August. He’s appeared in just 10 games, started just three and thrown only 35 of the Cardinals’ 1352.1 innings. He is certainly not the most valuable player on the team. He isn’t the most important, either. He’s not their best reliever (because of Seung Hwan Oh’s great performance), and he’s not the best starter on the team (that’s Carlos Martinez). When it comes to being in the right place at the right time, however, and taking on multiple roles out of the bullpen and, most recently, pitching seven shutout innings against a team also threatening for a Wild Card spot in the Giants, there is an argument to be made that Alex Reyes has saved the Cardinals’ season.

Reyes is the type of prospect over whom fans drool, and his arsenal has translated immediately to the majors. He’s already topped 100 mph on his fastball 18 times this season. He has a curveball with more vertical movement than any other pitcher in the big leagues. He has a changeup that averages 89 mph and earns a swing and a miss 25% of the time Reyes throws it. He’s far from the perfect pitcher, of course, and continues to struggle with command — both with the fastball and his offspeed offerings. The problems Reyes experienced with control in the minors — where he recorded at least a 10% walk rate at every stop — have carried over to the majors, where’s he’s produced a 13% mark so far this season. He doesn’t always have great command of his pitches, but thanks to a lack of homers, his FIP is still a quite low 2.76 while a low BABIP and high left-on-base percentage has left his ERA at an unsustainably low 1.03 on the season.

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In the past, I’ve done a few Let’s Watch posts about Billy Hamilton’s baserunning. This is because Billy Hamilton is probably the best baserunner in baseball, so some of the things he’s able to do are extraordinary. I know we’ve all gotten used to it — one of the great shames of existence is how quickly we get used to certain things — but Hamilton is legitimately amazing, regardless of whether he ever hits. Mike Trout is the Mike Trout of baseball, but Billy Hamilton is the Mike Trout of the running-the-bases part.

At the suggestion of Ryan Tinetti, this is going to be a Let’s Watch post about Miguel Cabrera’s baserunning. Hamilton, again, is probably the very best baserunner. Cabrera has been nearly the very worst baserunner. That doesn’t have to be about his instincts; people love to compliment Cabrera’s baserunning instincts. But he’s just, you know, not so physically capable. Hamilton could probably outrun a Mazda. Cabrera moves like a lawnmower falling out of a pickup truck. And yet, in part specifically because Cabrera isn’t great at running the bases, Tuesday night he made a run happen. As the Tigers try to make a charge to the playoffs, Cabrera is pushing himself beyond his own limits. Let’s watch, in detail, his 360-foot tour around the diamond.

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In 2012, Kenta Maeda threw a curveball or two a game. He threw three or four four-seam fastballs for every sinker. He was a four-seam/slider guy with the occasional changeup, is what he was. And that’s what I had to work with when I tried to find a comp for him and settled on pitchers like Aaron Nola and a young Kenshin Kawakami.

I was probably wrong, but it’s also possible that what we’re seeing now is a different Maeda. He allows that it’s possible, too.

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On Monday, I published a post about Addison Reed, and his Andrew Miller-like transformation with the New York Mets. Within that post, I talked about the Mets’ abundant, high-leverage usage of Reed, and to support that claim, I drew from some numbers hosted on Baseball-Reference — a combination of multi-inning relief outings (meaning three outs or more) and average leverage index upon entering the game — and found that only three relievers with more multi-inning outings also had a higher average leverage index.

And honestly, I’d never really thought to combine those two figures before. Each is capturing, at the upper limits, a very different type of pitcher. At the top of the multi-inning outing leaderboard, one finds a group of swingmen, long relievers, and mop-up pitchers. At the top of the leverage index leaderboard, one finds the game’s most elite closers and set-up men. Very little overlap exists between the two.

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