In August, the Phillies hit 59 home runs, which is the highest total for a month in franchise history and tied for the third-highest total in any single month by any team in history. It was a remarkable performance, but perhaps not a particularly surprising one given how this roster was constructed; by design, Rob Thomson’s charges are large, strong, and (of late) increasingly shirtless. They were born to mash.
Last week, I had the good fortune to be present at Citizens Bank Park as five of those 59 home runs took flight in a single evening, off the bats of five different Phillies. This was one of those close, muggy summer nights that define the mid-Atlantic summer; with a pleasant, gentle breeze blowing out to left field, the ball was roaring out of the park. It wasn’t just the Phillies; the Angels dingered three times themselves. Two of those came off the bat of Luis Rengifo, hardly a man whose public stomps and chants are included in the Home Run Derby every year.
But as the Phillies laid 12 runs on their opponents, the play that stuck in my mind was the opposite of a home run. In the sixth inning, the Phillies batted around and scored six runs to turn a 4–2 deficit into an 8–4 lead; one of those came on a squeeze bunt by Johan Rojas. It was a lovely push bunt by a speedy right-handed hitter, the baseball equivalent of spreading room temperature compound butter on a slice of crusty bread. “Man, we should see that more often,” I thought to myself. Read the rest of this entry »
Bobby Witt Jr. is more than just the best player on a bad team; he’s potentially on his way to becoming a superstar. Playing in his second big league season, the Kansas City Royals shortstop has 28 home runs and 39 stolen bases to go with 5.0 WAR. Projected by Eric Longenhagen as “the face of this franchise’s resurgence” during last year’s rookie campaign, he debuted at age 21 and didn’t turn 23 until this past June. And he’s been one of baseball’s best hitters in the second half, posting a .399 wOBA and 152 wRC+ since the All-Star break.
Selected second overall in the 2019 draft behind Adley Rutschman, the Colleyville, Texas native approaches his craft with a keep-it-simple attitude, at the same time continuing to hone a swing that’s always come natural to him. It’s hard to argue with success.
Witt discussed his evolution as a hitter when the Royals visited Fenway Park in August.
———
David Laurila: I’ve asked a number of guys whether hitting is more of an art or more of a science. How do you view it?
Bobby Witt Jr: “I think it’s more of an art, because of the swing. So many people have different types of swings. I feel like you form your swing at a young age, and you pretty much critique it off of that. That’s how I look at it.”
Laurila: There is obviously a lot of data in today’s game. I’m sure you’ve studied your swing.
Witt Jr: “Yes, but I’m not really big into the data. I’m more of a visual learner. I see things that I like to do, whether it’s watching guys on TV, or… like, growing up, I would try to emulate guys’ swings. That was kind of how I made my swing.”
Laurila: Whose swing did you try to emulate?
Witt Jr: “Pretty much whoever I was really liking at the time. I grew up a big Red Sox fan and was always kind of smaller growing up, so Dustin Pedroia was one. I had the narrow stance with the big leg kick. I also liked watching Prince Fielder a little bit and transitioned into a toe tap. So just watching guys and seeing what they’re doing on the field, seeing what their approach was. From a young age, I was trying to emulate that to myself.” Read the rest of this entry »
This year, trade deadline season kicked off when the Rangers acquired Aroldis Chapman from the Royals at the end of June. Texas desperately needed relief help, so it pulled an early trigger in getting Chapman a full month ahead of the deadline. In today’s game, teams moving rental relievers typically do not get anything too exciting in return. That seemed to be the case with Kansas City’s part of the deal: Cole Ragans and 17-year-old outfielder Roni Cabrera. Emphasis on seemed.
Ragans had pitched 24.1 innings in relief across 17 games with the Rangers after an extended but rough debut in 2022. Like last year, things hadn’t gone well. He walked 13.2% of the batters he faced, and hitters slugged .561 against his four-seamer. In that short span, he accumulated -5.2 run value on that pitch alone. Even with a nasty changeup and a four-tick velocity jump from ’22, he was still struggling to get the results he needed.
But after his move to Kansas City and a rough first outing, everything changed. Eno Sarris’ profile of Ragans from last week does a fantastic and thorough job at explaining his career turnaround, from his training at Tread Athletics in the offseason to create his velocity jump to consulting with them and Royals pitching coach Brian Sweeney after his first start in Triple-A Omaha to add his gyro slider. I strongly urge you read the piece, because mine is as a supporting actor to that story. Read the rest of this entry »
Primary Objective: Responsible for supporting all areas of baseball operations through baseball-related data science, including statistical modeling, research, visualizations, and other projects.
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Shares and expresses thoughts in a clear and effective manner through verbal and written communication skills. Exhibits effective listening skills and builds positive relationships with all team members, vendors, and guests. Is diplomatic, tactful, and professional in all forms of communication.
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Primary Objective: Responsible for contributing to projects at the intersection of baseball analytics and broader baseball operations, with an emphasis on creating innovative tools & streamlining communications.
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Proficiency handling large datasets in R, SQL, Python, and/or comparable languages is required.
Shiny application or other web development experience is preferred.
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Possesses working knowledge of modern baseball analytics, strategy, and trends.
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All benefits are subject to eligibility requirements and the terms of official plan documents which may be modified or amended from time to time.
This information is being provided in accordance with the Washington State Equal Pay and Opportunity Act.
Steve Sparks had a solid playing career. The now Houston Astros broadcaster debuted with the Milwaukee Brewers two months before his 30th birthday, in 1995, and went on to toss butterflies in the big leagues through 2004. His best season came with the Detroit Tigers in 2001 when he logged 14 wins and posted a 3.65 ERA over 232 innings.
Sandwiched between the knuckleballer’s stints in Beer City and Motown were a pair of seasons in Anaheim, where his teammates included Orlando Palmeiro. According to Sparks, the left-handed-hitting outfielder wasn’t always a left-handed-hitting outfielder.
“He was originally a right-handed second baseman, but he broke his arm,” the pitcher-turned-broadcaster explained prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “He was ambidextrous to begin with, so he started playing the outfield throwing left-handed, and that’s how he remained. I played with Orlando, but he never told me that. Joe Maddon was a minor league field coordinator with the Angels, and he’s the one who told me.”
Sparks proceeded to point out that Palmeiro made the final out of the 2005 World Series against the Chicago White Sox while playing for the Astros.
Meanwhile, an outfielder whose best big-league seasons came with the Boston Red Sox played with Sparks on the rookie-level Helena Brewers in 1987. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a new browser game called Homer Hindsight, where all the players placed on waivers ended up, the White Sox promoting Chris Getz and the continued comeback of the ex-player GM, Brandon Lowe’s Yankees trash talk, whether load management has diminished the grind, updates to the strike zone and pitch clock in Triple-A, and Bernie Williams’s comments about Shohei Ohtani. Then (42:42) they talk to FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen about the wave of top prospects that crested in August (including Noelvi Marte, Ronny Mauricio, Jordan Wicks, Masyn Winn, Jasson Domínguez, Ceddanne Rafaela, Curtis Mead, and Kyle Harrison), the Angels’ and Padres’ aggressive promotions of Nolan Schanuel and Ethan Salas, respectively, prospects who might still debut this season, and the number of prospects named Jackson, followed by (1:31:54) a Future Blast from 2054.
Late on Tuesday night, baseball fans all over the world tuned their dials to the ninth inning of the Giants and Reds’ matchup in San Francisco. Through eight innings and 25 batters, Giants starter Alex Cobb had allowed just a single baserunner on a Casey Schmitt error, while setting down the other 24 in order. In the ninth, Cobb sandwiched a walk between two routine fly outs before leaving a splitter over the heart of the plate to Spencer Steer, who crushed an opposite-field liner past the outstretched glove of right fielder Luis Matos to end the no-hitter and the shutout. While a splitter ended Cobb’s no-hit bid tantalizingly close to completion, it’s also the reason his attempt got that far in the first place. Even independent of Cobb’s brilliant outing, his splitter made history in its own way on Tuesday night.
Before going into the splitter, let’s talk about Cobb’s general approach to pitching. He’ll try to catch you off guard with a knuckle curveball on the first pitch, hoping to steal strike one (nine of the 11 curveballs in his complete game were on first pitches), but after that he almost exclusively throws sinkers and splitters in near-equal proportion. These two pitches operate similarly – both leverage the power of seam-shifted wake to maximize arm-side movement, missing barrels and getting batters to hammer the ball into the ground when they make contact. But a quick look at the plate discipline metrics shows his distinct goals in utilizing each pitch:
Alex Cobb Sinker and Splitter
Pitch Type
Velocity
IVB
Vertical Drop
Horizontal Break
Zone Rate
Called Strike%
Swinging Strike%
Sinker
94.6 mph
6.9 in
23.7 in
15.9 in
56%
26.4%
5.2%
Splitter
89.6 mph
2.1 in
32.1 in
13.1 in
37.4%
6.2%
14.4%
Like many pitchers who throw splitters, Cobb uses his as a weapon to get hitters to chase below the zone. He’ll get hitters into uncomfortable counts by filling the zone with sinkers, then throw a split that looks nearly identical before diving beneath their barrels. Splitters are pretty uncommon in the majors – while 2023 has represented a peak in splitter usage, they still only represent about 2% of total pitches. While there are others who throw splitters, including Kevin Gausman, Taijuan Walker, and most notably former NPB players like Shohei Ohtani, Kodai Senga, and Shintaro Fujinami, what separates Cobb from the rest of the pack is the sheer frequency with which he throws them. In the past three seasons, he’s ranked first, first, and second in splitter usage rate among starting pitchers, throwing them 38% of the time this year. This splitter, dubbed “The Thing,” ranks second among splitters to Gausman’s in pitch value since Cobb’s debut in 2011. The Thing isn’t just Cobb’s main secondary pitch, it becomes his only secondary pitch in deep counts. And sometimes, he’ll make it his primary pitch.
Cobb threw 83 splitters on Tuesday. Since the pitch tracking era began in 2008, no one else had ever thrown 80 splitters in a single game. Or 70, for that matter. Heck, besides a lone Brad Penny start in 2010 with 66 splitters, no one else had even thrown 60. Cobb’s shattering of the single-game splitter record wasn’t just a result of his pitch count (his 131 pitches thrown is the highest since Mike Fiers‘ no-hitter in 2019); he ranks behind only Penny in single-game splitter percentage, as they comprised 63.4% of his total offerings. Even throwing 50% splitters in a game is a rare occurrence, though it’s unsurprising to see Cobb dominating that leaderboard as well. In fact, all nine of his majority-splitter games have come in the past two seasons:
Cobb’s splitter-first approach in this game offered many advantages over his typical plan of attack, which involves using sinkers to set up the splitter. The first – and most obvious – can be seen from a quick glance at his splits (no pun intended). His splitter is a darned effective pitch, leading his arsenal in chases, swinging strikes, ground balls, wOBA against, and overall run value. If you have a pitch that can do almost everything well, why not throw more of them?
Second, this change in pitch usage was likely a result of advance scouting on the Giants’ part. While the Reds’ offense is middle of the pack versus sinkers, they rank 13th in the NL in wOBA against offspeed pitches. One hitter who particularly struggles against offspeed stuff is TJ Friedl, hitting just .167 with a 34% whiff rate. Cobb capitalized on this weakness by throwing him 11 splitters compared to just four sinkers, three of which came on his first pitches of the game. Friedl’s 0-fer brought his line against splitters to a measly 1-for-19. Reds hitters swung and missed 18 times in their effort to muster up one hit, a season high for Cobb. Unsurprisingly, all 18 whiffs came against The Thing.
Finally, scaling back the sinker in favor of the split has made the sinker even more effective, especially in taking free strikes when hitters were expecting a splitter to dive beneath the strike zone. While Cobb’s surface-level results have been shockingly consistent in the past three years, posting ERAs in the mid-threes, he’s experienced extreme levels of variance under the hood. After posting an impressive 2.80 FIP and 3.15 xERA in his debut season with the Giants, his FIP has climbed by a full run and his xERA has jumped to a scary 4.64. While he’s earning fewer whiffs than before, the most noticeable difference from last year is a near doubling of his home run rate. While it’s easy to point to an outlier HR/FB rate and claim bad luck, his barrel rate has spiked at a rate proportional to the increase in dingers.
The sinker has regressed the most, allowing nine homers so far (compared to just four last year) and a .365 xwOBA, the highest of any of his pitches. On average, he’s thrown his sinkers higher than any other season in his career, preventing it from working its magic as a groundball pitch. And while a difference of a couple inches may not seem significant, just a few mistake pitches can have an outsized effect on barrel and home run rates. Indeed, his sinker’s Location+ has fallen from 105 to 102 over the past two seasons, as higher sinkers tend to be hit harder and on a line. In this start, he missed spots with both pitches along his arm’s path through the zone, but his ability to draw chases on low splitters kept him out of dangerous hitters’ counts:
If hitters are doing more damage to the sinker than they used to, then it’s in Cobb’s interest to get as few swings as possible against it. This is where the splitter comes in. Batters thinking of the splitter as the primary pitch may give up on offerings that they expect to move out of the zone, instead watching them flutter over the plate, even when located suboptimally. In the seventh inning, both Steer and Elly De La Cruz took first-pitch sinkers in the nitro zone, setting the table for a barrage of splitters chased outside the zone that led to a strikeout and groundout. Of Cobb’s 36 sinkers thrown, 17 were taken for strikes, giving him the upper hand in countless plate appearances. While the average hitter swings at about two-thirds of the pitches they see in the zone, Reds hitters saw 23 in-zone sinkers and swung at just six of them. Even when they did swing, none of the balls put in play against it had an xBA higher than .200. In total, Cobb racked up 28 called strikes on the night, tied for the second most of any pitching performance all year.
Leading with the splitter allowed Cobb to maximize the strengths of his wipeout pitch, while simultaneously shielding the weaknesses of his sinker. The synergy of his arsenal, along with added velocity, has brought Cobb to a new career apex at an age when many pitchers are in decline. And he’s doing this despite recovering from two major injuries and temporarily losing feel for his signature pitch. Yet, his 3.20 FIP over the past three seasons is the best stretch of his career, and he’s recently added his first All-Star appearance to the mix. Losing a no-hitter just two strikes away from glory can be heartbreaking, but he’s only come back stronger from adversity before. That’s just The Thing about Alex Cobb.
Ah, the trade deadline. It’s simultaneously one of the most stressful and most fruitful times of year for teams, fans, and writers. I didn’t sleep a lot in the days around the deadline — it seemed like there were always more deals coming down the pike. And yet here I am, a month later, reliving those days. And you’ll probably read it, too, because you want to know who won the deadline. Forget grades and prognostications and promises of future production. Which guys have delivered the most value to their teams so far?
I gathered up the performance of all 63 players who have appeared for a new major league club after being traded at the deadline. I took a liberal approach to defining “deadline” – I included Aroldis Chapman, for example, despite him being traded in the middle of July. I excluded everyone who hasn’t played in the majors, and considered only their statistics on the team they were traded to. Spencer Howard didn’t make the cut because he never appeared for the Yankees, and Paul DeJong’s San Francisco misadventures won’t cost the Blue Jays (though his Toronto misadventures will cost them plenty).
Yes, I know that this isn’t an exact accounting of who did best at the deadline. I’m excluding prospects on purpose. Plenty of people have opined on that, and plenty more will in the years to come as those young players climb the minor league ladder. What I’m interested in is who improved their fate the most right now, in 2023. With half of the post-deadline slate now in the books, we can take a look at which teams’ deadline moves have paid off in aggregate, and which teams would like a mulligan. Read the rest of this entry »
The Angels surprised everyone on Tuesday when they placed six veterans from their big league roster on waivers. Four of the players — Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, Randal Grichuk, and Dominic Leone — were recently acquired by the Angels at the trade deadline, while the final two — Hunter Renfroe and Matt Moore — had been picked up last offseason. The Yankees followed suit by placing center fielder Harrison Bader on waivers. With waiver claim priority going from the team with the worst record to the best, the teams at the back end of the playoff races got first dibs. The Cleveland Guardians and Cincinnati Reds, two teams that would miss the playoffs if the season ended today, scooped up five of these seven players, with the Mariners grabbing a sixth in Leone. Only Grichuk went unclaimed. Carlos Carrasco, José Cisnero, and Mike Clevinger also joined the waiver wire without attracting any interest.
The Guardians were the most active team, adding Giolito, López, and Moore. Giolito was one of the bigger names traded at the deadline, and the Angels thought enough of him at the time to give up Edgar Quero, our 51st-ranked prospect, and former second-rounder Ky Bush in order to bring him and López to LA for one last-gasp attempt to grab a playoff spot. Giolito was a disaster for the Angels. His ERA and FIP were both near seven, and he only managed quality starts in two of his six attempts. López fared somewhat better, but was rather adventure-prone, only throwing a clean 1-2-3 inning once in 13 games for the Halos. Moore had a solid year in Los Angeles, but he can be fairly tricky to use, as he doesn’t have the typical profile of a lefty reliever, with his changeup and his knuckle-curve significantly tougher for righties to hit than lefties these days. Read the rest of this entry »
About two months ago, the Los Angeles Angels were trying as hard as they could to cling onto the back of the AL Wild Card chase. If they could do that, they could maintain the faint hope of convincing Shohei Ohtani, their once-in-six-lifetimes superstar free-agent-to-be, that Orange County was a place where he could win for the rest of his career.
They threw everything at the wall — traded the top tier of their farm system for short-term pitching help, revamped their outfield, and spent a lottery pick on a college first baseman, seemingly with the express purpose of rushing him to the majors in time to help with the playoff push. How’d all that go? Awful, as you might expect. Mike Trout got hurt, Taylor Ward got hurt, then Trout got hurt again. Lucas Giolito allowed 28 runs in 32 2/3 innings in his six starts with the Angels.
This week, the Halos made the unprecedented and controversial decision to put their rentals on waivers, in a last-ditch attempt to get back under the luxury tax threshold so they can receive a higher draft pick as compensation for Ohtani leaving. All that sounds absolutely horrendous, doesn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »
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