Bryce Miller has improved on his 2023 rookie season with the Seattle Mariners. Especially notable are his ERA (3.46 versus last year’s 4.32), FIP (3.70 versus 3.98), and OPS against opposite-handed hitters (.685 OPS versus .917). At the same time, many of his numbers have been strikingly similar. When I spoke to the 25-year-old right-hander at the end of July — he’s since made two starts — his win-loss record and average fastball velocity were identical to last year’s marks, as were his FB% and HR/FB%. His strikeout rate differed by just a few percentage points.

I cited those similarities to the righty, then proceeded to ask him what differentiates this season’s version of Bryce Miller from last year’s.

———

Bryce Miller: “I think that type of stuff is very similar, but the lefty-righty splits are quite a bit different. Last year, lefties batted over .300 against me. This year, it’s around .215. I think the addition of the splitter has been big, and I’ve also been locating better. If you look at the heat maps from last year, a lot of the fastballs were in the middle of the plate. This year, I’ve gotten them [elevated] a little better for the most part. So getting the heaters up and the splitters down has helped me out a lot with the lefties. That’s really been the main thing.”

David Laurila: Why is the splitter so much better than the changeup you were throwing? Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday evening, Camilo Doval stepped to the mound without his usual light show. He showed the range of his game right away – after striking out the first two batters he faced, he walked Greg Jones, who promptly stole both second and third. Then Nolan Jones ripped a scorching line drive to center for a triple, Elehuris Montero stroked a line drive single, and two runs had scored just like that. To make matters worse, this wasn’t even against the Rockies – it was against the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.

It’s hard to wrap your head around Doval’s sudden fall from ace closer to minor leaguer. He debuted in the magical 2021 season, picked up closing duties at the tail end of that year, and looked like one of the best relievers in the sport almost immediately. In 2022 and ’23, he pitched to a 2.73 ERA and 2.87 FIP. He was wild at times, overpowering at others, and impossible to square up in every iteration. When you have a 100 mph cutter and a tight 90 mph slider to throw off of it, you don’t need much else. He was fifth in baseball in saves, ninth in reliever WAR, 10th in innings pitched among relievers; in other words, he was a one-man back-of-the-bullpen for the Giants.

One thing always bothered me about Doval, even when he was dominating the opposition for the last two years: His cutter doesn’t cut correctly. That sounds nonsensical, or at best like a weak nitpick. But here, take a look at his cutter as compared to Emmanuel Clase’s best-in-class offering, using our pitch-type splits:

The “cut” in a cutter refers to glove-side movement. A good cutter looks like a fastball out of the hand before the spin takes over; then it veers sharply away from the four-seam path that hitters have spent their whole lives tracking. It’s not just a matter of how differently shaped the cutter is from the rest of a given pitcher’s arsenal – just ask Mariano Rivera. Instead, it’s more about defying the brain patterns batters have built up over decades of playing baseball. That’s just not where a fastball should go, and so hitters either swing fruitlessly over it or, in the case of opposite-handed batters, end up breaking their bats when the pitch bores in on their hands.
Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I wrote about Jake McCarthy’s BABIP, and touched on an assumption about which kinds of hitters are going to put up outlier numbers in that stat. McCarthy hits a lot of grounders, which generally produce a higher BABIP than fly balls (though they’re less productive by other metrics). He’s also left-handed and very fast, which means he ought to be able to beat out grounders for infield singles.

So let’s take a little gander at the infield hit rate leaderboard for qualified hitters. This is the percentage of groundballs a batter produces that turn into infield hits. Simple enough:

So yeah, Bellinger is primarily known for grinding hanging curveballs to make his bread, but in spite of his size, he is a left-handed fast guy. That tracks. Peña is a righty, but he’s very fast. His average home-to-first time is actually in the top 20 among all hitters — lefties and righties alike — this season. And because Peña hits so many grounders, he leads all batters in total infield hits with 24.

And then there’s Rhys Hoskins. Wait, what? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about how Jorge López has done since his release from the Mets, Juan Soto‘s underrated dominance, George Springer’s post-replay rage, whether the Rangers are a candidate for Angels-esque August waiver shenanigans, whether Dodgers pitchers are particularly prone to Tommy John surgeries, and the divisive value of Salvador Perez. Then (41:56) they welcome high-school student Bailey Hall, who won an award for the best poster presentation at SABR 52, for a guest Stat Blast about scoring after leadoff walks vs. leadoff singles, followed by (1:10:19) a postscript on recent team TJ totals.

Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Lopez EW episode
Link to Lopez ERA leaderboard
Link to team RP WAR
Link to Judge on Soto
Link to best post-Bonds seasons
Link to WAR through age 25
Link to Springer clip
Link to MLB.com on Springer
Link to BP piece on HBP replays
Link to Becker on the Rangers
Link to Rosenthal on the Rangers
Link to MLBTR on Ryan
Link to Dodgers thread
Link to TJ data
Link to Baumann on Perez
Link to Jaffe on Perez
Link to Perez Reddit post
Link to Ben on HoF framing
Link to Stat Blast song cover
Link to SABR 52 info
Link to SABR post on Bailey
Link to Bailey’s poster
Link to tweet about Bailey
Link to Tango on Bailey
Link to past research 1
Link to past research 2
Link to past research 3
Link to past research 4
Link to past research 5
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

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Thanks to the trade deadline, this is a quiet time of the year for transactions, but baseball’s injured list is always hopping, and Tuesday was sadly no exception. First came the announcement that Dodgers pitching prospect River Ryan, our 21st-ranked prospect on the Top 100, would require Tommy John surgery, ending his 2024 season, and at best keeping him out for the vast majority of 2025. Not to be left out of the UCL injury party, Jazz Chisholm Jr. injured his left elbow on a slide into home plate on Monday night. The exact severity of Chisholm’s injury is still unknown, but with the season rapidly reaching its conclusion, any significant time on the shelf could imperil his ability to help the Yankees in their playoff push this year.

Chisholm was easily the biggest addition the Yankees made at the deadline, a flexible offensive player who the team hoped would bring some emergency relief to an extremely top-heavy offense that has received an OPS in the mid-.600s from four positions (first base, second base, third base, and left field). And Chisholm was more than fulfilling that expectation, with seven home runs in 14 games on the back of a .316/.361/.702 slashline. As noted above, the full extent of his injury isn’t yet known, but in a tight divisional race with the Baltimore Orioles (and with a playoff bye at stake), every run is precious. The Yankees have had a curious amount of misfortune when it comes to the health of their deadline acquisitions in recent years; between Frankie Montas, Scott Effross, Lou Trivino, Andrew Benintendi, and Harrison Bader, you might get the idea that they mostly acquire medical bills in their trades. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite notching two wins over their last six games, the White Sox are flirting with history, and not the good kind. As of this morning, Chicago stands 63 games below .500, 42.5 games back in the AL Central, and on pace to finish 39-123. Out of compassion, I will refrain from reciting the record of the 1962 Mets, but the players from that team who are still with us are likely taking this time to get the champagne good and chilled. Hard as it may be to believe, the goal of this article is not to dunk on the White Sox. Instead, as we enter the home stretch of the season, I’d like to consider how they’ve affected the playoff picture.

The White Sox have played 25 of the other 29 teams in the league, and they have distributed to those fortunate franchises a net total of 63 victories in the same way that an elderly man on a park bench distributes bread to the legion of ravenous pigeons jockeying for position at his feet: indiscriminately. For a few weeks now, I’ve been wondering whether the landscape would look different if those 25 teams never had the good fortune of playing the White Sox. Whom have the White Sox helped or hurt the most? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made no secret of my longtime admiration for Rangers reliever Kirby Yates (formerly Braves reliever Kirby Yates and Padres reliever Kirby Yates), but what he’s doing now even surprised me.

Yates entered Tuesday night’s contest against the Boston Red Sox with an ERA of 1.04; that mark is second among big league relievers, behind only Emmanuel Clase (another favorite of mine). It’s also a career best for Yates, which is more surprising than it would be for most pitchers. Yates already has a season with a microscopic ERA on his CV: 2019, when he posted a 1.19 ERA in 60 2/3 innings, with a strikeout rate of 41.6% and a walk rate of 5.3%. Pitchers who produce even one season of that quality are vanishingly rare; pitchers who produce two are almost unheard of. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I cracked the PitchingBot black box open a tiny bit and asked it to show me the worst pitches of the year. It was for fun, mostly; I think there are some interesting data in there, but the main thing I learned was that the worst pitches are non-competitive balls. That’s always a tough concept to grasp, because the ones that stick with us are the hanging sliders and no-ride fastballs right down the pipe, the kind of pitch that we see and go, “Oh I could hit a home run on that.” Like this one:

That’s the worst pitch in baseball this year by one specific metric: the likelihood that PitchingBot assigns it of turning into a home run. I’ll show you some more of them in a moment, but first I thought I’d lay out how I did this so you can get a sense of how the model is reaching its conclusions.

Cameron Grove, the creator of PitchingBot, wrote about this idea back before he started working for the Guardians, and he was kind enough to nudge me in the right direction when it came to looking at pitches not just for the “worst,” but the ones that are the most crushable.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the 30th anniversary of the 1994 strike and how nice it is not to have the season end in August, the unusual extension of Victor Robles, Tanner Rainey, Patrick Corbin, and the remnants of the 2019 Nationals, Will Wagner and whether the debuts of sons of big leaguers make us feel old partly because big leaguers have kids earlier than average, how MLB could accommodate the 2028 Olympics, changes in BBWAA awards voting patterns and the suddenly competitive MVP races, the return of Mookie Betts, whether the end of pitcher hitting affects pitcher pitching, Seth Lugo vs. Tarik Skubal, Jarren Duran’s suspension, his heckler, and how well one could hit a baseball with a tennis racket, and listener-suggested additions to the Hierarchy of Versatility.

Audio intro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Craig C. on the strike
Link to Rosenthal on Robles
Link to MLBTR on Robles
Link to Robles mic’d up
Link to FG on Rainey
Link to Sam on Corbin
Link to Wagner debut video
Link to Craig on Wagner
Link to MLB father/son data
Link to story on eldest sons
Link to dad age 1
Link to dad age 2
Link to dad age 3
Link to dad age 4
Link to dad age 5
Link to dad age 6
Link to dad age 7
Link to dad age 8
Link to ESPN on the Olympics
Link to Passan tweet
Link to WNBA break
Link to NHL break
Link to World Cup of Hockey
Link to Olympics transportation
Link to Ben on the WBC
Link to Mookie HR
Link to Dan S. on MVP races
Link to FIP-based WAR leaderboard
Link to RA/9-based WAR leaderboard
Link to Lugo comments
Link to DH and HBP research
Link to Duran story
Link to more on Duran
Link to heckle
Link to Heart & Hustle Award
Link to tennis racket question
Link to tennis baseball video
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

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In early April, an article titled “Astros Pitching Prospect Spencer Arrighetti Is All in With Analytics” ran here at FanGraphs, and given what the 24-year-old right-hander had to say, the headline was wholly accurate. In a conversation that took place during spring training, Arrighetti displayed nuanced knowledge of his pitch metrics while comfortably addressing topics like seam-shifted wake and vertical approach angle. He presented as a bona fide pitching nerd.

Four months into his rookie season — he made his major league debut with Houston on April 10 — Arrighetti is a nerd with an altered approach. The evolution of his M.O. has taken place over the course of an up-and-down campaign that currently has him on a high. Over his last two starts, the 2021 sixth-round pick out of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has allowed just three runs while fanning 25 batters in 13 innings. On the year, he has a 5.14 ERA, a 4.18 FIP, and a 27.9% strikeout rate in 105 innings.

Arrighetti explained how and why his approach has changed when we sat down to chat at Fenway Park this past weekend. My first question elicited an expansive, five-minute response, after which we shared a handful of additional exchanges.

———

David Laurila: What’s changed since we talked in spring training?

Spencer Arrighetti: “I have a much better perspective now. When we talked in Lakeland, I was speaking with three big league spring training games under my belt. This is a very different game than I thought at that time. The conversation we had, as great as it was, left out a really big piece of what successful pitching is in the modern era. Obviously, shapes and velocity are really important. Arsenal design is really important. There are people who believe those are primary, but after my time up here, I’m not convinced that chasing shapes is the way to go. Read the rest of this entry »