It’s rough being a reliever. Your whole career is a small sample. Emmanuel Clase has been one of the best pitchers in baseball since pretty much the moment he set foot on a major league mound in 2019, but over his entire career, he’s thrown just 338 innings. Our leaderboard says that total has been bested in 534 different player-seasons. That’s 534 times that one single player in one single season threw more innings than Clase has over his whole career. Clase set a personal best by throwing 74 1/3 innings last season, and on the individual season leaderboard, that total put him in a 79-way tie for 20,484th place. A small sample size means high variance. Over his entire career, Clase has never finished a season with an xFIP below 2.18 or above 3.42, which is pretty stable for a reliever. But after running a microscopic 0.61 ERA last season, his ERA is currently a so-big-you-can-see-it-from-space 5.51. Five-run swings are decidedly less stable.

When things go wrong to this degree, it’s usually because a combination of factors have conspired to make it happen. When you’re as good a pitcher as Clase, it takes both luck and skill to get results this bad. Our focus today will be on the extraneous factors. You know what else is subject to wild variations in short samples? Defense. And defense is letting Clase down in a big way. We’re here today because Mike Petriello asked me to look into something. Petriello is Major League Baseball’s Director of Stats and Research, and it’s my understanding that as such, I am legally required to investigate any statistical anomalies he assigns me. Here’s what he sent my way:

When Clase was on the mound in 2024, the Guardians racked up 5 Outs Above Average. They were great defensively. This season, even though he’s only pitched roughly one-fifth of the innings he did last year, Guardians fielders are already all the way down at -4. That’s an absurdly big swing. How is that even possible? Is it just luck? Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Chourio is a star. You can see it the second he steps to the plate. He looks like he’s always been in a batter’s box, like hitting comes as easily as breathing. He has easy power and shockingly good contact skills for someone who swings so hard. So, uh, why can’t he take a walk?

Fine, that’s hyperbole. It’s May 8, 38 games into the season, and he’s walked three times in 165 plate appearances. That works out to a 1.8% walk rate, the third lowest among qualified hitters. Jacob Wilson? He’s walked six times already. Michael Harris II? Four walks in fewer games. Name a guy you think can’t walk, with the exception of platoon players Kerry Carpenter and Michael Massey, and you can be sure that Chourio is walking meaningfully less than they are. Chourio didn’t walk a ton in 2024 – his 6.8% walk rate was in the 31st percentile – but this is something different entirely.

Naturally, when I started writing this piece before Tuesday’s game, Chourio had two walks in 161 plate appearances for the lowest walk rate in baseball, but then he walked his second time up in the Brewers’ 9-1 loss to the Astros. (For the rest of this article, I’ll be using stats as of the start of play on Tuesday.) Anyway, the point still stands: Chourio isn’t walking. What’s going on here? Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Seelinger has taken an atypical path to the doorstep of the big leagues. Drafted in the 28th round by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of Division-III Farmingdale State College in 2017, the 30-year-old right-hander subsequently played in the Tampa Bay Rays, San Francisco Giants, and Philadelphia Phillies organizations before getting released and hooking on with the Atlantic League’s Long Island Ducks before the 2024 season. His fortunes turned last summer. The Detroit Tigers signed Seelinger in late June, and since returning to affiliated ball he has logged a 1.26 ERA and a 38.4% strikeout rate over 29 relief appearances between Double-A Erie and Triple-A Toledo. So far this season, the Westbury, New York native has a 4-0 record to go with a 0.57 ERA and a 30.9% strikeout rate over nine appearances, the last five of them with the Mud Hens.

His signature pitch is every bit as notable as his late-bloomer success. Seelinger’s repertoire includes a four-seam fastball and a cutter/slider, but it is his unique offering with an unorthodox grip that most stands out. Seelinger shared the story behind it when Toledo visited Triple-A Worcester last week.

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David Laurila: You throw a unique pitch. What exactly is it?

Matt Seelinger: “So, it was coined on Long Island, where I’m from. It’s called a knuckle drop. Basically, what I do is take a four-seam fastball grip and flip it so that the horseshoe is on the inside. I take my two fingers — my pointer finger and my middle finger — and bend them. I take the top lace, and put them on the bottom of it. I put my ring finger and pinky on the seams. The thumb, I try to get underneath as much as possible, although thumb placement isn’t as big of deal as long as it’s not too high up on the ball. From there, I throw it just like a fastball, only I’m pushing it out.”

Laurila: The bent fingers are straightening as you’re releasing the ball… Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, Paul Skenes — the most electric pitcher in baseball, the future face of the sport, the only reason (apart from potatoes or metallurgy) that anyone would want to go to Pittsburgh — took the mound and did his stuff. He struck out six Cardinals in six innings pitched, allowed just two runs, and threw 22 four-seam fastballs that clocked between 98.0 and 99.1 mph. If you watched the game, you got what you were promised.

But Skenes was outdueled on the evening, by a pitcher whose developmental track took substantially longer than Skenes’. Matthew Liberatore struck out eight batters over seven innings, allowed only one run, put six baserunners on to Skenes’ seven, threw 70 strikes on 99 pitches to Skenes’s 60 out of 102, and got 17 whiffs to Skenes’ 13. Read the rest of this entry »

While the Cubs are 22-15 and own a three-game lead in the NL Central — the largest of any team at this writing — the rotation that’s helped them to that perch has taken its hits recently. Last month, 2023 All-Star lefty Justin Steele underwent surgery to repair his ulnar collateral ligament, and Javier Assad suffered a setback while rehabbing to return from an oblique strain. And then on Monday, the Cubs placed 2024 All-Star lefty Shota Imanaga on the injured list due to a left hamstring strain. While his injury isn’t considered to be major, his loss could tighten the division race and test the depth of the already-depleted rotation.

After leaving his April 29 start against the Pirates after five innings due to cramps in both quadriceps, Imanaga cruised through the first five innings against the Brewers on Sunday in Milwaukee, allowing just three singles while striking out four without a walk. The 31-year-old’s afternoon ended on a sour note, however. With the game still scoreless in the sixth, he yielded a leadoff single to Jackson Chourio and then a one-out walk to William Contreras. It looked as though he might escape unscathed when he got Christian Yelich to ground to first baseman Michael Busch, who started a potential 3-6-1 double play. Imanaga ran to cover first base, but not only was Dansby Swanson’s throw a bit late, the pitcher came up limping, forcing him out of the game.

Reliever Julian Merryweather entered, threw a wild pitch that allowed Chourio to score from third, and by the time he got the final out, three more runs had scored in what ended as a 4-0 loss for the Cubs. They suffered a much more gruesome defeat on Tuesday, when reliever Ryan Pressly allowed eight straight Giants to reach base in what became a nine-run 11th inning and a 14-5 drubbing. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, James Fegan wrote a great story at Sox Machine about how Chase Meidroth became one of the most patient players in baseball. The White Sox want Meidroth to be more aggressive, but after a recent call-up, he’s running a minuscule 17.3% chase rate. He ran that exact same chase rate last season in Triple-A, and it ranked fifth lowest among the 381 players who saw at least 500 pitches outside the zone. Here at FanGraphs, Michael Baumann also covered Meidroth’s overabundance of patience a couple weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, Baumann’s article featured something Fegan’s didn’t: a paragraph about nominative determinism. The defining characteristic of Meidroth’s profile is that he’s a Chase who doesn’t chase. But Meidroth isn’t the only Chase in baseball. Maybe he’s an outlier. Maybe the other players named Chase rack up chases, if only out of a sincere desire to obey the fifth commandment.

Chase Utley was the first major league Chase. He debuted in 2003, conveniently just a year after Sports Info Solutions started tracking pitches. That means that we can track the chase rate of every Chase who’s ever played. I went through his year-by-year chase rates in order to calculate a league-adjusted figure, which we’ll call Chase Rate Plus for the remainder of this article. Utley’s Chase Rate Plus was 88, 12% below the league average, and it helped him run a walk rate that was 6% above the league average. In other words, the first Chase in history didn’t chase much either. What about the rest of the bunch? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I investigated the increasing divergence between the way pitchers approach same-handed and opposite-handed batters. I learned that pitchers across the league are varying their arsenals more and more every year. But that was a broad look, and I had some follow-up questions. Mainly, who specifically? Which teams? Which players? And how? Today, I’ll provide some answers.

As a refresher, I calculated what I’m calling “adaptation score” by comparing how frequently a pitcher uses his top-two offerings, both against same-handed and opposite-handed batters. Adaptation score is simply the difference between how frequently a pitcher throws his two best pitches when he has the platoon advantage and how often he throws those same two pitches when the batter has the edge. I split the data up by teams to see who was driving the move. First, we’ve got the five most and least adaptable teams in 2025:

Not much to see here. The Dodgers’ being on the bottom might suggest that adaptation is bad, even. But truthfully, there’s a big element we’re missing in looking at the data this way: personnel. Changing who’s on your team, even if you have the same philosophy, can change how you score in this metric. The Dodgers were in the middle of the pack last year when it came to adaptation score. Then they overhauled their pitching staff and ended up here.
Read the rest of this entry »

When the Yankees lost Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil before the season started, I thought they were screwed. Turns out, at least so far, that New York’s stripiest sports team is right where it ended last year: First place in the AL East. That’s because the Yankees, as of this writing, lead the league in home runs, OBP, SLG, and (by a pretty big margin) wRC+. It helps that the rest of the AL East (especially the Orioles) has started slow, but the best defense is a good offense and all that.

And it’s not just Aaron Judge, who is 20% of the way through an offensive campaign that makes Babe Ruth look like Rey Ordonez. Judge can only bat four of five times a game; even he can’t do it alone. But even with Giancarlo Stanton hurt and Austin Wells and Jasson Domínguez offering only token offensive contributions, Judge has had the running buddy he needs. It’s… Ben Rice, believe it or not. Read the rest of this entry »