Let me tell you a couple of things about Jack Suwinski. First, when Suwinski was still a prospect last winter, Eric Longenhagen had this to say about the young player’s future:

30. Jack Suwinski, DH

“On-paper performance is especially important for a hitter like Suwinski because he’s a positionless defender who needs to rake to have any sort of big league role […] Because he lacks a true position, Suwinski’s chances of playing a significant role increase with the likely implementation of the universal DH.”

It’s rare to see a prospect listed as a designated hitter. Across all 30 lists our team put together last year, only nine ranked prospects had the letters “DH” written next to their name. That’s less than one percent. Even more unusual was the 20/20 grade Eric gave Suwinksi’s fielding tool. That’s the worst grade you can get: a present 20 and a future 20. Essentially, it means a guy is unplayable in the field with little to no hope of improving in the future. Often, the only time you’ll see a 20/20 in any category is to describe a catcher’s speed. Former FanGraphs prospect guru Kiley McDaniel didn’t even bother to define a 20 grade in his overview of the 20-80 scouting scale, explaining “It’s almost never relevant for players that I’ll be writing about or any of their tools.” Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox lost a good chunk of the best parts of their starting lineup to the injured list in 2022. Indeed, it was one of the main reasons the team fell to a .500 record after winning 93 games the year prior. So when Eloy Jiménez was placed on the 10-day IL with a strained hamstring just five games into the 2023 season, it was an unwelcome reminder of both the team’s problems last year and their limited depth in the present.

Jiménez, who was one of the two main prospects acquired from the Cubs in the 2017 José Quintana trade (Dylan Cease was the other), has spent a great deal of time on the shelf since 2020. After an encouraging 138 wRC+ in the COVID-shortened season, he tore a pectoral tendon during spring training in 2021. It required surgery and kept him out until the end of July; last season’s early injury, a torn hamstring tendon, also required surgery. Still, Jiménez was able to come back more quickly than the year before, and his .305/.372/.523 line after returning was one of the team’s highlights over the second half of the season.

Fortunately, this injury does not appear to be on the same level as either of the other two. The strained hamstring, resulting from running the bases in a game against the Giants, is not the same one that required surgery last spring. There has been no talk of surgery, and the team seems relatively optimistic, floating two to three weeks as the timeframe for his return. Jake Burger was called up from Triple-A Charlotte to take Jiménez’s place on the roster. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re only a week into the regular season, which means it’s too early to do any serious analysis. Or, to spin things another way, it’s a perfect time to hurry up and write about something wild that’s happening before everyone regresses to the mean.

So let’s talk about Brian Anderson.

Anderson was the best hitter in baseball in the first week of the 2023 MLB regular season. Through Wednesday’s games, he led the league in wOBA and xwOBA, and was a close second to Adam Duvall in wRC+. Anderson probably won’t finish the season with a wRC+ over 300 — though if he does, I guarantee we’ll cover it — but he’s no Tuffy Rhodes. He was a very good player not too long ago, and this hot start might represent a return to form. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants have an improved farm system, one that is highlighted by the presence of Kyle Harrison (no. 26) and Marco Luciano (no. 97) on our preseason Top 100. There are other promising prospects in the system as well. I recently asked Giants Senior Director of Player Development Kyle Haines about four of them:

• Vaun Brown, a 24-year-old outfielder who was taken in the 10th round of the 2021 draft out of Florida Southern College. Brown slashed .346/.437/.623 with 23 home runs and 44 stolen bases last year between Low-A San Jose and High-A Eugene (plus one game with Double-A Richmond).
• Casey Schmitt, a 24-year-old third baseman/shortstop who was selected in the second round of the 2021 draft out of San Diego State University. Schmitt slashed .293/.365/.489 with 21 home runs between High-A and Double-A (plus five games in Triple-A).
• Carson Whisenhunt, a 22-year-old left-hander who was taken in the second round of last year’s draft out of East Carolina University. Whisenhunt was suspended for his final collegiate season, then made two appearances each in the Arizona Complex League and Low-A.
• Rayner Arias, a 16-year-old outfielder who was signed as an international free agent this January. The son of former Detroit Tigers pitching prospect Pablo Arias is a native of Bani, Dominican Republic.

In the opinion of Eric Longenhagen, all four have “impact FV grades.” Overall, our lead prospect analyst considers pitching development to be the organization’s strength. Read the rest of this entry »

This won’t surprise you if you’re an NBA fan, but I love reading Zach Lowe’s 10 Things column every week. Lowe is a basketball writer for ESPN, and his column is packed with data-driven anecdotes that wouldn’t quite fill a column on their own but are interesting nonetheless. Somehow, it had never quite occurred to me to use that format in baseball, but it feels like a perfect fit.

It had never occurred to me, that is, until I tried to write about the first observation that you’ll see in this piece. I couldn’t turn it into an entire article, but I kept trying because I really wanted to write about it. There just wasn’t enough meat on the bone, but I didn’t want to leave it there. Then I started noticing other little things I wanted to highlight, and a lightbulb went off.

My plan is to start writing up five things that have caught my interest every Friday. There’s a lot of baseball in the world, which means a lot of interesting but bite-sized stories, ones that wouldn’t work on their own but are nonetheless too good to ignore. Without further ado, let’s get to liking (and, occasionally, not liking) things. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether Ben should apply for a full-time job covering Shohei Ohtani, MLB seeking a pitch-clock sponsor, the brilliance of Sandy Alcantara, clock violations leading to ejections, post-Opening Day call-ups for top prospects (most notably Grayson Rodriguez), Alcantara compared to Jacob deGrom, the feud between Tyler O’Neill and Oli Marmol, whether teams in last place will stay there, early playoff odds changes, neither overreacting nor underreacting to early-season stats, and more, plus a Past Blast (1:18:31) from 1990.

Audio intro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: SAVAK, “Reaction”

Link to Ohtani job listing
Link to clock-sponsor story
Link to Ben on pitch-clock history
Link to Ben on Alcantara
Link to Machado ejection
Link to Anderson ejection
Link to Ohtani violations
Link to Ohtani and Hoberg
Link to Elias on Rodriguez
Link to Rodriguez debut video
Link to story on O’Neill and Marmol
Link to tweet about Bader/Marmol
Link to Ben C. on Ohtani’s stuff
Link to playoff odds changes
Link to Joe Sheehan on stats so far
Link to quotes about ball
Link to study on spring training stats
Link to Rob Arthur on batted balls
Link to James on signature significance
Link to “whelmed” quote
Link to 1990 Past Blast source
Link to 1989 Hadley paper
Link to Sale scissors story
Link to Turn Ahead the Clock
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to drag dashboard

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The 2023 season is only a week old, but the Dodgers have to be quite satisfied with the early returns from their outfield. Mookie Betts aside, the unit entered the season full of question marks, and those only got larger once manager Dave Roberts had to start moving players around to cover for Gavin Lux’s season-ending ACL tear. Yet through the team’s first six games, rookie James Outman, holdover Trayce Thompson, and newcomer Jason Heyward have each produced some impressive performances that offer hope they can help to offset the team’s notable offseason departures.

Lux was supposed to be the Dodgers’ regular shortstop, and while the team soon traded for Miguel Rojas to be the regular, his loss pulled Chris Taylor into the mix to a greater degree than expected. In turn, the Dodgers have brought Betts into the second base mix; recall that the future Hall of Fame right fielder — you heard me — began his professional career in the middle infield, and spent the last two weeks of his 52-game rookie season filling in at the keystone for the injured Dustin Pedroia.

Given the anticipation that both Taylor and Betts would spend more time on the dirt, the Dodgers found room for both Heyward, a 33-year-old non-roster invitee who was released by the Cubs last year, the penultimate one of his eight-year, $184 million contract, and Outman, a 25-year-old prospect who entered the season with four games of major league experience. Both lefty swingers are on the roster in addition to the righty-swinging Thompson, who enjoyed a nice little breakout in the second half of his age-31 season, and lefty David Peralta, a free agent whom the Dodgers signed to a one-year, $6.5 million deal mid-February. Read the rest of this entry »

12:31

Dan Szymborski: And here we are, for a slightly time shifted chat!

12:32

Dan Szymborski: Not sure that really fits. Garcia was older but with a better track record

12:32

Dan Szymborski: Wiemer’s .800ish total OPS in AAA last year is actually quite underwhelming for the offensive environment he played in

12:32

Dan Szymborski: So I wouldn’t get excited about a handful of games

12:32

Dan Szymborski: Or are you just trying to get me to answer April!

Read the rest of this entry »

This offseason, FanGraphs got some new stuff. More precisely, we got some new ways of measuring stuff, and command, and pitching overall, via pitch-level modeling. You can read about PitchingBot here and Stuff+ here. They’re really cool! Pitch modeling is a wonderful tool to both verify the eye test – that nasty-looking slider you saw, it’s actually nasty – and to find new pitchers to keep an eye on. Sure, strikeout rate and ERA and FIP can do that too, but stuff is a purer signal, because it’s entirely in a pitcher’s control. There’s no question of whether a hitter spoiled a great pitch, or whether that ball should have been a home run. There’s only the pitch, with its movement and velocity and release point.

Eno Sarris, the proprietor of Stuff+, has written about how quickly that model stabilizes, but for our purposes, let’s just say this: these pitch modeling tools give a great early look at which pitchers are working with the best tools early in the year. That doesn’t mean that they’ll all be great – they might not wield the tools in the correct order, or they might struggle with command, or they might wear down as the season goes on – but it does mean that they’re starting with an advantage.

I’d caution you against using these with excessive granularity this early in the season. If a pitcher’s Stuff+ has declined from 119 to 116, or if your team’s swingman has vaulted two points above the fifth starter, there’s probably not much signal in that. Instead, I’m going to paint with a very broad brush. I’m going to look at three groups of two today: two pitchers who both models agree have great stuff, two pitchers who both models are down on, and two where the systems disagree.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazingly, in an Opening Day game where Shohei Ohtani struck out double-digit batters in six shutout innings, the most memorable highlight of the night didn’t come from him, or even Mike Trout. In the bottom of the fifth, Oakland third baseman Jace Peterson sent a fly ball to right field. Hunter Renfroe gave chase, but it appeared to be going over his head — until he leapt up, stuck out his glove to the left while facing right, and somehow made an incredible no-look catch to the delight of Ohtani and the Angels. Even Peterson had to smile.

WHAT A CATCH BY HUNTER RENFROE ?

pic.twitter.com/j6zxJytYaO

— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) March 31, 2023

Baseball Savant has recently released outfield catch probabilities for individual plays, and we can learn a lot from analyzing the differences between the perceived difficulty of a play from watching it on a broadcast compared to its actual catch probability. Renfroe’s circus catch in Oakland offers a perfect example: While his acrobatics were necessary to make the catch, that was only because of a poor jump. He backpedaled for the first few steps, then ran at less-than-full speed while having to crane his head around to keep track of the ball. Renfroe ended up making the catch 39 feet from his initial position in an opportunity time of 4.2 seconds — a play that has a catch probability of 99%, and that’s even when accounting for the difficulty of running backwards (which is included in calculating the odds).

For comparison, here’s a play with a near-identical distance and opportunity time made by Renfroe’s backup, Brett Phillips.

Phillips didn’t need luck or heroics to make the out here; in fact, he was able to camp out for a bit before the ball fell into his glove. A good chunk of his route was completed before the broadcast had switched to the outfield camera.

In other words, Renfroe’s play is made with little fanfare almost every time. That includes him: He was perfect on fly balls with 99% catch probability in 2022, though he did let a few in the 90–95% range drop for hits. Much of the focus that observers put on the quality of a outfielder’s defense naturally comes from what can be seen on TV – but the data indicates that what we can’t see is what truly separates the great fielders from the poor ones. Read the rest of this entry »