Have I got news for you. The J.P. Crawford you know and love is now 50% more powerful! After running an ISO of .099 over the last two seasons, the Mariners shortstop is at .150 in 2023. And that’s not all. With that power has come increased production: Crawford’s 133 wRC+ is not just the best of his career, it’s second among all shortstops, trailing only Corey Seager’s 179 wRC+. Let’s act now and figure out what Crawford is doing differently this season.

With Crawford, plate discipline is always a good place to start. Crawford has always run low chase rates, but this season, he’s down to 21.2%. That’s fifth-lowest among all qualified players, and it’s led to a 15.6% walk rate, fourth-highest. However, while Crawford is chasing less and walking more, he’s also striking out more. While his 19% strikeout rate is still better than the average player, it’s a jump of more than five percentage points from last season.

Crawford is running a career-best 37.3% hard-hit rate. That’s still well below average, but it’s a huge jump for someone who was in the fifth percentile in 2022. It may seem like Crawford has made the classic power-for-contact tradeoff, but that’s only true to an extent. Players who make that tradeoff usually whiff more because they’re being more aggressive at the plate. Crawford is hitting the ball harder and striking out more, but he’s actually been more passive than ever. His swing rate has dropped by almost exactly the same amount on pitches inside the zone and outside the zone.

I’m going to show you three heat maps. The one in the middle is Crawford’s slugging percentage on balls in play over the course of his career. It shows where he does damage. On the left is Crawford’s swing rate in 2022, and on the right is his swing rate in 2023:

This is as big a change as you’re going to see. Last year, Crawford would swing at pretty much anything over the heart of the plate. This year, he’s focused on a much smaller area, pitches in the absolute center of the zone, much closer to where he really does damage. Here’s what that looks like in terms of Baseball Savant’s swing/take decisions:

Crawford is chasing less, so the improvements in the shadow and chase zones shouldn’t surprise us much. The heart of the plate is where things get interesting. Let’s break those numbers into their constituent parts:

In both 2022 and thus far in 2023, when Crawford took pitches over the heart of the plate, he was worth -11 runs. That’s makes sense, as all of those pitches end up as called strikes. When he has swung at pitches over the heart of the plate, he’s been 16 runs better than he was last year! His wOBA on those swings has gone from .312 to .400. Crawford is taking more strikes, which hurts a little, but he’s more than making up for it when he does swing.

Still, none of this explains why he’s making less contact. Here’s the thing I think is really fascinating. Take a look at Crawford’s whiff percentage broken down by pitch type:

Crawford is gearing up to hit the fastball in a way he hasn’t been in previous seasons. He’s missing them a bit less often, and his wOBA against them has jumped from .315 to .394. Gearing up to hit the fastball can have a side effect: getting fooled more often on softer stuff. Crawford is whiffing a lot more against breaking balls and offspeed stuff. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s performing worse on softer stuff. Take a look at his actual results, once again using Baseball Savant’s run values:

Crawford is indeed doing worse against breaking stuff, but he has completely turned himself around against both fastballs and offspeed stuff. How is he doing so well against changeups and splitters when he’s whiffing on them over 50% more often than he did last year? Furthermore, since he’s now much worse against breaking balls, why haven’t pitchers started throwing them way more often?

The answer to the first question is that Crawford is offsetting all those extra whiffs by hitting the ball much harder, especially against offspeed stuff. His soft contact rate has dropped to a career low, and his 95th-percentile exit velocity increased from 105 mph to 106.2. As for the second question, breaking stuff often requires a hitter to chase in order to be effective, and Crawford doesn’t do that. If your plan is to get Crawford out by deluging him with soft stuff, you’re likely to end up behind in the count.

As I pulled all these numbers together, I was reminded of something Robert Orr wrote back in June for Baseball Prospectus. Orr detailed how Ronald Acuña Jr., previously a dead-pull hitter, had begun letting fastballs travel a little deeper and sending them the other way, which led to a convenient knock-on effect:

“What happens when Acuña thinks a fastball is coming and he’s wrong. If he starts on time for 96 and gets 96, then he laces a base hit into the gap. That’s good. If he starts on time for 96 and gets 87, though? That’s when he can catch the ball out in front of the plate, and that’s where homers are. That’s better.”

Crawford is coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. He ran a 34.2% pull rate last year, compared to Acuña’s 44.5%. But this year, they’ve ended up in the same place: Crawford at 41% and Acuña at 40.5%. Here’s what the change looks like when you break it down by pitch type:

Crawford is pulling the ball way more often, especially against non-fastballs. Those pulled balls haven’t turned into homers, because even this version of him is still way less powerful than Acuña, but he’s gone from the bottom end of the spectrum up toward the middle. Further, Crawford’s 39.2% groundball rate is the lowest it’s been since he became a regular starter. Meeting those balls out in front is helping him pull them in the air, making the most of his increased power.

Under normal circumstances, I might have ended this article here. We’re pushing 2,000 words, and I’ve typed the name Crawford so many times that I’ve lost the ability to comprehend its meaning. It’s just a string of letters to me, and that A-W-F-O section in the middle is really starting to freak me out. Who does that? The only word I can think of that contains an A-W-F-O stretch is ‘clawfoot,’ and I think we can all agree that that’s one of the creepiest words in the English language. However, there are two things I’d still like to address. The first is how Crawford came about this extra power. You might remember that he’s tried to improve his power output before. Before the 2021 season, he packed on 20 pounds of muscle in hopes of increasing his slugging. Unfortunately the Get Yoked, Go Smash method only raised his ISO by 20 points, while his hard-hit rate actually got worse.

This year, he’s increased his average exit velocity by 3.9 mph, the third-highest jump among qualified players. Some of this can be explained by choosing better pitches to hit and pulling the ball more often. Some of it can likely be explained by improved health, since Crawford played through back, pec, leg, and knee injuries last season. Lastly, Crawford trained at Driveline this offseason, after taking six weeks to recover from all of the injuries to all of his body parts.

While I was researching this article, I stumbled onto an episode of the Sea Level podcast that featured Maxx Garrett, the hitting trainer who worked with Crawford this winter. I’m normally reluctant to draw a straight line from a swing change to improved results. There are so many factors involved in hitting. Seemingly everybody comes into spring training in the best shape of their life and with a new swing. Some of those players are bound to improve, and while the hard work they put in during the offseason likely helped, giving all the credit to their new bat waggle is often a facile conclusion. However, Garrett gave host Ben Ranieri some pretty interesting details that dovetailed nicely with what I found in the numbers.

First, Garrett confirmed that the focus was on improving Crawford’s bat speed, as his plate discipline is already elite. Referring to his notes, he said that Crawford’s bat speed was measured at 65.6 mph at the beginning of training and 71.1 at the end. “We saw some movement things, especially with his setup, his load, kind of that load, stride, into landing, where he was in some unique positions that not many of our high-level hitters get into,” said Garrett. “And it was making it harder for him to produce as much force as he was capable of.”

Let’s go to the tape. On the left is a swing from 2022, and on the right is a swing from 2023:

I’ve pulled some stills below to illustrate the differences. Crawford starts off with his stance much more closed. He’s changed his bat angle, lowered his hands, and tucked both his hands and elbows closer to his body. Once he gets into his leg kick, he’s crouching slightly deeper, his front shoulder is angled downward, and his shoulders are rotated further away from the pitcher. If not for his hair, his entire name would be visible on the back of his jersey. The follow-through makes it easy to see how much harder Crawford is swinging, and how much higher he’s finishing. Keep in mind that Crawford crushes both of these pitches. They’re both middle-middle four-seamers that result in hard-hit balls to right-center. Crawford actually hits the ball on the left much harder, but look at how he finishes. He’s much more upright, much less athletic. The swing on the right is clearly more explosive:

Garrett also said that they focused on Crawford’s attack angle, helping him to hit the ball in the air more. This is the part that made me sit up and listen: Garrett described a drill that involved feeding Crawford fastballs from an extremely high attack angle and from off to the side, beyond the right base side of the rubber. “So basically, an extreme lefty release,” he said. “And that was forcing him to get his barrel out front, have it work up. His intent was to move fast, hit the ball higher, to the pull side. Really get his barrel out front, working up more into the ball.” To me, that sounds like a pretty good explanation for the way Crawford has been able to attack fastballs, punish offspeed stuff, and pull the ball in the air this season.

The last thing I need to mention is less fun. Crawford’s defense has been quite bad this year. A Gold Glover in 2020, Crawford’s 14 errors are tied for fifth-most in the league, and most defensive metrics rank him as one of the game’s worst fielders. That’s a real bummer, because if Crawford rated as even a league-average defender at short, he would be a top 20 player in all of baseball this season. It’s always good to take defensive metrics with a grain of salt, and any player experiencing such a big drop-off is a candidate to regress back to the mean the following season. Crawford has already turned himself into an All-Star caliber player this season. If he can hold on to some of his gains at the plate and get his defense back toward the middle of the pack, the future is even brighter.

All numbers are as of Wednesday morning.

Between Shohei Ohtani, Félix Bautista, and now Tony Gonsolin, the fragility of ulnar collateral ligaments has been an all-too-frequent topic of conversation within the past week. Gonsolin, in case you haven’t heard, is headed for Tommy John surgery on Friday, while we’re still waiting to hear whether the UCL injuries of Ohtani and Bautista are significant enough to merit going under the knife. Between that trio and the Rays’ Shane McClanahan going down earlier this month — and the fact that neither Gonsolin nor McClanahan are the first members of their teams’ rotations this year to need such surgery — it certainly feels as though we’re dealing with a lot of Tommy Johns lately, so it’s worth cutting through the numbers.

First, however, let’s spare a few paragraphs for Gonsolin and the Dodgers. The 29-year-old righty was coming off an All-Star season in which he posted a 2.14 ERA and 3.28 FIP in 130.1 innings, and owned similarly impressive career marks (2.51 ERA, 3.45 FIP) despite his intermittent availability due to injuries, which included a six-week absence near the end of last season due to a forearm strain, and just two appearances totaling 3.1 innings afterwards, one of them a four-out start in the 2022 Division Series. After spraining his left ankle during fielding drills in early March, he was playing catch-up and never seemed to find a comfort zone. He began the regular season on the injured list, finally debuting on April 26, and while his run prevention numbers looked good in the early going, his peripherals told another story, and his average fastball velocity was down. On June 11, manager Dave Roberts alluded to some health issues with Gonsolin, noting that his between-starts recovery “hasn’t been great,” and wondering if he was having trouble getting loose or pacing himself. In his next start two days later, Gonsolin threw six shutout innings but averaged just 91.1 mph with his four-seamer, two full ticks below last year.

To that point, Gonsolin had a 1.93 ERA but a 4.25 FIP, and soon he began to get roughed up on a routine basis. Over his next seven starts, he allowed four or more runs six times, producing a 7.25 ERA. Following a 3.1-inning, five-homer, 10-run stinker on August 18, Gonsolin’s second bad start out of three, Roberts told reporters that Gonsolin had been pitching through an unspecified “arm issue” for four to six weeks and would likely head to the injured list. On Sunday, the Dodgers acknowledged that surgery was an option, and on Monday it was revealed he’d undergo Tommy John on September 1. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Correa seems like he should be a good baserunner. He’s a young shortstop with great instincts in the field. He’s tall and lean, with a long pair of legs. In his rookie season, he stole 32 bases in 37 attempts across Double-A, Triple-A, and the majors. Yet despite what you’d think, Correa is decidedly not a good baserunner. In fact, he’s been the least valuable runner in the game this season. Over the past two years, he has been worth -13.6 baserunning runs (BsR); only Christian Vázquez (-14.0 BsR) has been worse. Surrounded by catchers, first basemen, and aging veterans, Correa is a fish out of water at the bottom of the BsR leaderboards.

The Twins shortstop recently opened up about his baserunning to Do-Hyoung Park of MLB.com, calling himself “slow as f–k.” It’s no surprise Correa is down on himself amid a career-worst season. Moreover, in a textual medium, it’s hard to gauge just how tongue-in-cheek his comment was. Still, whether he was dramatizing, joking, or a bit of both, it’s worth clarifying that Correa isn’t quite that slow. His sprint speed, as measured by Statcast, ranks in the 34th percentile – slow, sure, but it’s not like he’s walking around the bases. There are 177 players with a slower sprint speed this season (min. 10 opportunities) and 115 with a slower home-to-first time. If Correa is “slow as f–k,” I don’t even want to know what expletives he’d use to describe Miguel Cabrera and Yasmani Grandal. Correa may not have much speed to work with, but even so, his problem is that he isn’t making the most of the speed he’s got.

Correa isn’t the only player guilty of squandering speed, either. Indeed, there are much faster players who have hurt their teams on the basepaths this season, guys who can’t rely on the “slow as f–k” defense. Inspired by Correa’s comments, I looked at the sprint speed for the 50 worst players by BsR this season and took note of some interesting names. I also conducted my search the other way around, checking out the BsR for each of the 50 fastest runners by sprint speed. These are the guys who stood out. Read the rest of this entry »

The idea of the Mets trading Pete Alonso would have seemed positively preposterous six months ago. Coming off a 101-win season, the Mets committed to a half-billion dollars in new contracts over the winter, entering the season with the most expensive team in history. But rather than battle the Braves for NL East supremacy, they’ve instead been fighting to stay ahead of the Nationals for fourth place, a mêlée they’re currently losing. The Mets have already traded off some of their veterans, including both Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, so the idea of parting with Alonso doesn’t seem quite as farfetched as it once did.

There have been some sports radio rumblings about Alonso-related clubhouse issues, but I tend to not take those things too seriously. And even if I did, it’s not a surprising development in the context of a wreck of a season; unless you’re the late 1970s Yankees, winning tends to make people get along better. What I do take seriously are the reports from Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic. No deal was close, but the Mets reportedly talked to at least the Brewers and Cubs around the trade deadline, getting to the point where the players to be sent to New York were discussed.

The facts on the ground, divorced from any specific rumors, also make such a trade plausible this winter. Players a year from free agency are frequently discussed in trades, and while there’s no reason to think the Mets are going to tear the team down to a small, long-term core, a 75-win season — and that’s only if the Mets play decent baseball in September — makes some kind of short-term retool quite possible. In that case, trading the unsigned Alonso for players who can contribute past 2024 is an idea with considerable merit. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Brown had yet to pitch above High-A when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in April 2021. Two years removed from being drafted in the fifth round out of Wayne State University, expectations surrounding the Detroit-area native were high coming into that season, as he was ranked as the no. 2 prospect (50 FV) in the Houston Astros system. He’s since lived up to those expectations. Brown not only made his big league debut last September, he went on to log three scoreless appearances in the postseason, including one in which he blanked the Seattle Mariners in the 12th and 13th innings of an epic 1-0 Astros win that took 18 frames to complete. This season he’s been a mainstay in the Houston rotation. Over 25 starts, the hard-throwing right-hander is 10-9 with a 4.47 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, and 152 strikeouts in 133 innings.

Brown discussed a recent change to his delivery, and the current quality of his curveball, on Monday, one day before celebrating his 25th birthday.

———

David Laurila: We talked pitching two years ago. Outside of being in the big leagues, what has changed since that time?

Hunter Brown: “My stuff and my pitch shapes are similar, but I actually made a bit of a change in my last outing. There’s a difference in my windup, and in the stretch, where my hands are coming set. And my shoulders are already lined up out of the windup. It’s just a little rocker step kind of deal. That’s something we’ve been talking about for a while. We’re trying to clean up some inconsistencies that came with my previous [delivery]. It worked against the Tigers [on August 26], and hopefully it will continue to work.” Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think you understand. You probably think you understand, but you don’t understand. Oh, you know that Spencer Strider is a bolt of lightning, a strikeout pitcher so overpowering that he might as well have been created in a lab. You know that he’s having a good season, surely; he’s locked in a tight race for NL Cy Young with Zac Gallen and Blake Snell. You know that he’s the logical continuation of the high-strikeout ace lineage, Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax or Roger Clemens for a new age. But I doubt you grasp how much of an outlier Strider’s 2023 season is, because I didn’t either until I took a closer look.

We have pitch-by-pitch data for every major league game on our leaderboards starting in 2002. That means we can calculate swinging strike rate, the percentage of pitches that result in a swing and a miss, for all of those years. I’ll tell you right off the bat that the single-season leader in this category is Jacob deGrom in 2020. In fact, four of the top five seasons on the list are from 2020; they’re outliers that were likely aided by the inherent randomness of a shortened schedule, in other words. For a rate statistic, that makes sense; the fewer innings you can throw to qualify, the easier it is to put up a wild number. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s voice and the potential for an ambidextrous superstar who blends the skill sets of Shohei Ohtani and Pat Venditte, then discuss all the implications of the Angels (and a few other teams) placing prominent players on outright waivers right before the deadline for postseason eligibility. After that (44:43), they talk to Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard about his beloved Mariners’ surge into first place, his relationship with this Mariners team, his thoughts on the postseason field and the new rules, his upcoming two-way-player tour featuring full performances of Transatlanticism and Give Up, and more, plus (1:31:29) a Future Blast from 2053.

Audio intro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Jon Becker’s waiver FAQ
Link to Ben Clemens on the Angels
Link to Zach Kram on the Angels
Link to outright waivers explainer
Link to The Athletic on the waiver moves
Link to The Athletic on waivers again
Link to MLBTR on the Angels
Link to Craig Goldstein on the Angels
Link to FG handedness filter
Link to “Ichiro’s Theme”
Link to Death Cabby for Cutie Day
Link to “An Arrow in the Wall”
Link to period/quarter mix-up
Link to Larry Stone article
Link to Transatlanticism
Link to Give Up
Link to Asphalt Meadows
Link to Gibbard’s album ranking
Link to “Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand”
Link to Gibbard’s two-way tour
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to Future Blast wiki

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The Cubs are in playoff contention at the end of August, and Kyle Hendricks is getting hitters out with a tasting menu of exquisitely located mid-80s funk. (Grabs nearest passerby) “The date! I need you to tell me the date!…God Almighty, my time machine works!”

For most of the late 2010s, Hendricks was not quite an ace but was a bankable no. 2 or no. 3 starter. Even in his relative youth, he never threw hard; the fastest pitch of Hendricks’ entire career was 93.1 mph, and he hasn’t even hit 91 since 2016. People who apparently never watched Greg Maddux loved to stamp a “next Greg Maddux” label on any bookish right-hander with great command, and of those, Hendricks probably came the closest to living up to the comparison. Read the rest of this entry »