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.
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.
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 »
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.
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.
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 »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
The Blue Jays were our staff pick to win the AL East, moreso due to the strength of their lineup than their pitching, though I think it’s safe to say that nobody thought their run prevention would be this bad, this early. Indeed, the team gave up nine runs to the Cardinals in an Opening Day victory, then lost three straight, surrendering nine runs in two of those games. Whether in Canada or the United States, that’s not a good exchange rate.
It’s not often that a team gives up nine or more runs in three of its first four games, and as you might guess, it’s rarely an indicator of quality. It’s happened just 12 times in the Wild Card era (1995 onward), including twice this year:
Most Time Giving Up 9 or More Runs in First 4 Games
Team
Season
Count
W
L
W–L%
MIN
1995
3
56
88
.389
CHW
1995
3
68
76
.472
OAK
1996
3
78
84
.481
MIN
1999
3
63
97
.394
TBD
2001
3
62
100
.383
STL
2001
3
93
69
.574
DET
2002
3
55
106
.342
COL
2005
3
67
95
.414
CLE
2009
3
65
97
.401
OAK
2021
3
86
76
.531
TOR
2023
3
—
—
—
BAL
2023
3
—
—
—
Total
693
888
.438
SOURCE: Baseball-Reference
The 10 previous teams to get beat up with such frequency to start the season combined for a winning percentage that equates to a 71–91 record. Five of those teams went on to lose 95 or more games, and only two finished at .500 or better, with the 2001 Cardinals the only ones to make the playoffs, and that as a Wild Card team.
That’s not great company to be in, and yet the Blue Jays aren’t alone even among teams in their division; the Orioles gave up exactly nine runs in each of their first three games, making them the fourth Wild Card-era team to allow at least nine in all three and the first since the 2005 Rockies. Yet neither of them came close to allowing as many runs as the Phillies did over their first four games: 37, as compared to Toronto’s 31 and Baltimore’s 27. The reigning NL champions entered Tuesday night with a staff ERA of 9.28 as the team went 0–4; at least the Blue Jays won one game and the Orioles two. Funny enough, the three teams combined to allow four runs in their victories as I was writing this, as if you needed a reminder that such ugliness was unsustainable.
Admittedly, it wasn’t pretty for the Blue Jays’ starters in those four games, as they were rocked for a 10.80 ERA and 6.49 FIP in 18.1 innings. While one turn through the front four of the rotation is just that — a mere 2.5% of the season — the lack of surrounding data feeds into anxieties about what could go wrong. As a matter of due diligence for those who might consider riding the Blue Jays’ bandwagon as well as those who are already hyperventilating, let’s take a closer look.
Alek Manoah had the honor of the Opening Day start after a season in which he made his first All-Star team and finished third in ERA (2.24) as well as the Cy Young voting. Facing the Cardinals, he was staked to a 3–0 first-inning lead but quickly gave back a run via an infield single, an error, a walk, and a single by Nolan Arenado in a laborious 29-pitch frame. After a scoreless second, he served up a two-run homer to Tyler O’Neill in the third, then gave up a two-run homer to Brendan Donovan in the fourth before getting the hook with two outs. Final line: 3.2 innings, nine hits, five runs, two walks, three strikeouts.
Obviously that’s not what you want, but his performance didn’t offer any major red flags. Manoah’s fastball velocity was slightly up from last year (94.1 mph versus 93.8), and while the results on his slider weren’t good (the Cardinals went 4-for-5 with a homer), its velocity and movement were in line with last year (it scored a 117 in Stuff+). Manoah said afterwards he wasn’t aggressive enough. “One thing I’ve got to remember is I’m really good myself,” he told reporters. “Sometimes you might go in there and face a good lineup and the act of giving them a lot of credit makes them even better.”
The Blue Jays did come back to win that one despite Manoah’s struggles. On Saturday, however, they squandered a good effort by Kevin Gausman (six innings, three unearned runs, one walk, seven strikeouts), as starter Jack Flaherty and relievers Drew VerHagen and Andre Pallante kept them hitless through 6.1 frames (albeit with seven walks from Flaherty) before Kevin Kiermaier singled. The unearned runs came with two outs and two on in the third inning, when Matt Chapman’s bobble and throwing error on an Arenado grounder brought in one run and Nolan Gorman followed with a two-run single.
Gausman’s average four-seam velocity was down 1.1 mph relative to last year (93.9 versus 95.0) but off by only 0.5 mph relative to his monthly averages for April and May of that season; he averaged 93.6 mph in his first outing of 2022. Again, probably nothing to worry about.
Far more troubling were the performances of Chris Bassitt on Sunday and José Berríos on Monday. Signed to a three-year, $63 million deal in December, Bassitt had a brutal debut, serving up four homers and allowing nine runs in 3.1 innings. His first official pitch as a Blue Jay, a high changeup to Donovan, ended up going over the right centerfield wall for a 397-foot solo homer. Two pitches later, Alec Burleson hit a high fastball 363 feet over the left field wall. With two outs and one on later in the frame, Gorman destroyed a hanging curveball, sending it to right-center for a projected distance of 446 feet. He hit another two-run homer, 395 feet to right-center off a cutter in the middle of the zone, in the third inning.
By the time manager John Schneider came out to get Bassitt in the fourth, he had secured the worst outing of his career in terms of hits (10), runs, homers, and Game Score v2 (-8). He didn’t walk or strike out a single hitter and induced just four swings and misses and six called strikes from among his 57 pitches, for a CSW% of 17.5%.
As Dan Szymborski noted in his 2023 Bust Candidates rundown, the 34-year-old righty’s velocity was down all spring. “Bassitt’s fastest pitch this spring was 93.5 mph, below his average in more than half of his starts last year,” he wrote. “If he were averaging 90–92 but still hitting 95–96, I’d be less worried, but I’m skeptical that he simply chose to go through a whole month without ever throwing his fastest fastball.”
That trend continued on Sunday, with the velocity on Bassitt’s sinker (his primary fastball) off 1.7 mph relative to last year (91.1 mph versus 92.8), and most of his other pitches were similarly off as well; he reached 93 mph just twice. Afterward, Bassitt found himself “at a loss for words a little bit” because he’d “never had a game” where so many types of pitches from his broad arsenal (he threw eight different pitch types according to Statcast) were hit so hard. Twelve of his 19 batted ball events reached or exceeded 95 mph; among pitchers with at least 10 batted ball events this season, only Chris Sale had a higher hard-hit rate than Bassitt’s 63.2% (Germán Márquez tied him).
“I think it was just mis-executed pitches,” Schneider said. “He just didn’t really hit his spots. A team like that, you can’t make mistakes. I know he focused on the middle of their order, and it was the guys before and after those guys who did damage. I think it just came down to poor execution.”
Absent any reports of injury or discomfort, this should be something Bassitt and the Jays can fix. But if his underperformance ends up being an aberration, Berríos’ struggles against the Royals on Monday had a more familiar ring. He gave up four hits and three runs in the first inning, settled down for a couple of frames, then was tagged for five more hits — four of them with exit velocities of 98.3 mph or higher — in a four-run fourth. He also walked one batter, who scored when MJ Melendez greeted reliever Zach Pop with a sixth-inning homer. The eight runs allowed matched last year’s high and marked the seventh time in his last 28 starts in which he allowed six or more runs.
Berríos’ 93.9-mph average four-seamer velocity was just 0.1 mph off last year, and he did strike out seven with 11 swings and misses (seven on his slurve) and a 30.3% CSW%; his 33.3% chase rate matched his career average. But when he was hit, he was hit hard, with an average exit velo of 94.1 mph and a hard-hit rate of 61.1%. His performance wasn’t as extreme last year — we are talking about one start compared to 32 — but those contact stats were dreadful. His 9.5% barrel rate placed in the 15th percentile, which was at least higher than his 90.0 mph average exit velo (13th), 43.8% hard-hit rate (11th), or 5.11 xERA (ninth); meanwhile, his 5.23 ERA was the highest of the majors’ 45 qualifiers, and his 4.55 FIP was the AL’s second highest. In the context of his being in the first year of a seven-year, $131 million extension, the performance was an unsettling one, to say the least.
Last August, Ben Clemens noted that where Berríos had previously gotten away with leaving a lot of four-seamers in the middle of the strike zone, last year those were getting demolished. More recently, old friend Travis Sawchik added that Berríos threw a career-low 7.1% of fastballs (four-seamers and sinkers) on the edges of the plate against lefties. More:
Berríos allowed a career-worst batting average of .447 to lefties on fastballs in the “heart” of the strike zone, according to MLB’s Statcast data – which was more than .100 worse than his next worst season.
He allowed 29 home runs last year, sixth most in the majors, and left-handed hitters crushed 20 of them; 12 came via Berrios’ fastball. Only Josiah Gray of the Nationals allowed more home runs to lefties.
On the whole, the Statcast value of 17 runs above average on Berríos’ four-seamer made it the majors’ sixth-least valuable heater and the eighth-least valuable pitch of any stripe. Repeating a table from my Madison Bumgarnerpiece:
While Berrios did throw 9% of his fastballs on the edges of the zone against lefties on Monday, 14.6% of such pitches wound up in the heart of the zone, nearly double last year’s rate of 7.7%. Three of the hits he allowed, including a Nicky Lopez triple, came on such pitches, and the six batted balls those pitches produced averaged 102.2 mph with a .957 xSLG. His 13 pitches in that location to lefties had a .559 wOBA, even higher than last year’s .511. All of which is to say that Berríos still has work to do, particularly against lefties.
Thankfully for the Blue Jays, on Tuesday night, Yusei Kikuchi stopped the bleeding with a five-inning, three-hit, one-run performance in a 4–1 victory over the Royals, with a 455-foot Franmil Reyes homer the only blemish. It was only one victory, and that against a team that lost 97 games in 2022, but the winning has to start somewhere.
If you compare our staff predictions for the season to our preseason Playoff Odds, for five of the six divisions our staff picks line up with the crunched numbers, with the Braves, Cardinals, Padres, and Astros all favored to win, and the Twins and Guardians a tossup. Only in the AL East did our staff go against the odds, picking the Blue Jays over the Yankees by a margin of 19–6 despite the latter’s 42.7%–29.4% edge.
I was one of those 19, my own pick influenced — perhaps overly so — by the mountingcasualties within the Yankees’ rotation. First it was Nestor Cortes‘ hamstring and Frankie Montas‘ shoulder, then Carlos Rodón‘s forearm and Luis Severino’s latisimuss dorsi. Of those, Cortes’ injury was minor enough that he still took his first regular-season turn on schedule, and only that of Montas — a shoulder issue that required arthroscopic surgery that could keep him out until late in the season — is serious. Even so, it’s not hard to look at the track records of Rodón and Severino and imagine much longer outages than initially projected.
The Jays’ rotation, though it ranked “only” 11th in our preseason Positional Power Rankings (where the Yankees were first even with their injuries) entered the year seemingly healthy, with the projections for Manoah (2.9 WAR) and Gausman (3.7) feeling a bit light compared to what they’d shown last year (4.1 WAR and 5.7, respectively), suggesting some possible upside. Combine that with a stronger lineup that carried fewer question marks — only at second base did the Blue Jays rank below 11th among the non-pitchers, where the Yankees had three such spots — and you can understand why Toronto was a trendy pick.
The Blue Jays may indeed come out on top, but at the very least, their starters will have to pitch up to their capabilities if that’s to happen. As the first week of their season has shown, it’s not all going to happen simply based on hype.
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Dan Szymborski
