I am, it brings me great shame to admit, an inveterate procrastinator. Last summer, the air conditioning in my car stopped working, and instead of taking it in to get fixed, I just waited until the weather cooled off and look, now I don’t have to worry about it all winter.

Perhaps you’re the same way. Perhaps you’re the same way and you run the baseball ops department of one of the 30 MLB teams. Need an outfielder? Eh, we’ll figure that out later. Bryce Harper signed his megadeal in March, for cryin’ out loud. There will always be help left on the market, one might reasonably infer.

But that’s not really the case anymore. Two things struck me when I was writing up the Tommy Pham signing last week. First, very few teams only need three competent outfielders. Even the Mets, who signed veteran starters to long-term contracts at all three positions, still had enough of a hole in the lineup to warrant going out to get a top-notch fourth outfielder/platoon DH.

Second, Pham was one of the last good options on the board. Read the rest of this entry »

Apart from “outside,” the most frequent word to follow “just a bit” in the baseball lexicon is probably “foul.” How many times has your favorite hitter sliced one down the line, only for the first or third base umpire to frantically wave their hands and scream the dreaded four-letter f-word? (I mean “foul” — get your head out of the gutter.) Here’s a Kyle Schwarber example from the World Series:

The Phillies were inches away from avoiding just the second no-hitter in World Series history. Instead, Schwarber was punched out two pitches later. Unfortunately for Schwarber, this situation was all too familiar. Among the 419 hitters with at least 100 fouls in the 2022 regular season, he ranked fifth in foul barrel rate, coming in at 4.6%. That meant 18 total foul barrels; he would go on to strike out after seven of those. Read the rest of this entry »

Last season was a fun one for the Baltimore Orioles. Coming off of five straight sub-.500 seasons and a particularly torturous 110-loss campaign, the Birds had a 24-35 record before starting to turn things around in late June. Just before the All-Star break, they went on an improbable 10-game winning streak to jump over .500, and after the break, they kept the momentum moving their way, even making a short-lived run at the third American League Wild Card spot (they ultimately fell just three games short). It started to look like the dawn of a new era in Baltimore, and much of the spark came from a revamped lineup. Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson made their highly anticipated big league debuts and did not disappoint – particularly the former, who turned in one of the finest rookie seasons by a catcher in recent memory. Cedric Mullins followed up his breakout 2021 with another solid season. Anthony Santander set a new career high with a team-leading 33 home runs. And then there was Ryan Mountcastle.

After leading the Orioles with 33 homers and 89 RBI in 2021 in his full-season debut, Mountcastle’s offensive production faded last season. He hit just 22 home runs, while his slugging dropped from .487 to .423, his wOBA from .335 to .316, and his wRC+ from 111 to 106. His defense improved enough to allow him to reach 1.6 WAR, a new career high, but for a player whose calling card is power, his waning surface-level thump was at least indicative of a sophomore slump and at most a cause for concern.

But Mountcastle’s Statcast profile and expected stats tell an entirely different story. In 2021, the slugger was in the middle of the pack, with an average exit velocity of 89.1 mph (45th percentile) and a 39.7% hard-hit rate (41st); his .245 xBA and .326 xwOBA placed him in the 36th and 47th percentiles, respectively. By these measures, his 2022 was one of the better year-over-year improvements in baseball. He added 2.2 mph to his average exit velocity, the seventh-largest increase among players who qualified in both years, and 6.6 percentage points to his hard-hit rate, the sixth-most in that group. Just four hitters added more to their xBAs than his .032 points, and the only hitters who managed to improve their xwOBAs more than his .036-point jump were Yordan Alvarez (.073), Christian Walker (.048), and Aaron Judge (.045). His was one of just 40 player-seasons in the Statcast era with 60-plus barrels. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about the handful of pitchers who drop their release points significantly when facing same-sided batters. Today I’m going to highlight a few who change their release points by a different method. Before we get to them, I’d like to talk a bit about why anybody would risk messing with their release point in the first place. This is an article about the potentially transformative power of scooching over.

I started thinking about arm angles with a very blunt test. For the last seven years, I pulled every pitcher’s average release point and their wOBA against lefties and righties, then calculated the correlation between them. I also pulled average velocity as a control variable of sorts. The correlation coefficients are small, but they line up with what we’d expect:

Unsurprisingly, it’s always good to throw the ball hard. Against same-sided batters, pitchers who release the ball lower and wider fare better. Against opposite batters, a wide release point is associated with poor results. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday’s trade that saw Pablo López and a pair of prospects go from Miami to Minnesota in exchange for Luis Arraez made sense for both teams. The Twins, who my colleague Ben Clemens wrote got the better of the deal, received a quality pitcher who will slot into their starting rotation, plus the promising-but-raw minor-leaguers. The Marlins got a 25-year-old infielder who just won a batting title and is a .314/.374/.410 hitter over 1,569 big-league plate appearances.

Miami’s top prospect is a big reason why parting with a pitcher of López’s quality is perfectly defensible. While recently-signed Johnny Cueto will take Lopez’s rotation spot in the near term, it is Eury Pérez who promises to make an already-good rotation even better. Arguably the best right-handed pitching prospect in the game — Baltimore’s Grayson Rodriguez and Philadelphia’s Andrew Painter are also on the short-list — Pérez has a Sandy Alcántara-ish ceiling. The 6-foot-8 native of Santiago, Dominican Republic excelled in Double-A this past year as a teenager, and there is a real chance that he’ll reach the big leagues at age 20.

“This kid just has an incredible presence about him,” said Miami GM Kim Ng. “His fastball is 96-99 [mph] with ride, and he’s got a really good breaking ball. And again, the presence, as well as the poise, is unbelievable. He’s not talented beyond imagination, but it’s close.”

Asked who the youngster comps to, Ng initially demurred. As she pointed out, not many pitching prospects are Pérez’s size. When she did ultimately offer a name, it was a notable one. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about 53-year-old Dae-Sung Koo 구대성 pitching in Australia, provide a final(?) update on Brandon Belt’s beloved Toronto chicken tenders, discuss the invisible strike zone as a feature that sets baseball apart from other sports (along with listener responses to other differentiating factors), bemoan the results of a Reddit poll about what to call the extra-inning runner, and marvel at investigations into the effect of the orientation of the baseball on its path to the plate and the predictiveness of ERA vs. FIP. Then (47:25) they answer listener emails about home run robberies vs. home run larcenies, a wrinkle in the calculation of a contract’s competitive-balance-tax cost, the competitive impact of 2023’s balanced schedule (and the Orioles’ impressive prospect rankings), how many defenders a team of 15-year-olds would need to field to keep a game against big leaguers close, ways to make other sports more like baseball, why so many arbitration cases are still unsettled, Henry Rowengartner’s velo in Rookie of the Year, and the best forgettable players, plus a real-time reaction to the Luis Arraez–Pablo López trade, a Stat Blast (1:39:44) about Adam Duvall and the latest-career moves to a premium position, and a Past Blast (1:54:53) from 1958.

Audio intro: Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Anything at All”
Audio outro: Built to Spill, “Center of the Universe”

Link to Twitter video of Koo
Link to Koo on YouTube
Link to article about Koo
Link to Koo’s SABR bio
Link to Koo vs. Johnson
Link to Bois doc on Koo
Link to Belt on chicken tenders
Link to KNBR Belt interview
Link to Ritz chef appearance
Link to Ray/Friedman interview
Link to ball orientation study
Link to ERA/FIP study
Link to BABIP/FIP study
Link to Reddit poll
Link to baseball exceptionalism wiki
Link to Bo-taoshi wiki
Link to EW emails database
Link to Speier on Devers
Link to robbery definition
Link to larceny definition
Link to Szymborski on the schedule
Link to Petriello on the schedule
Link to Guardians prospect list
Link to article on O’s prospects
Link to BP top 101
Link to BA top 100
Link to Sam on derby fielders
Link to requested arb salaries
Link to Ben on arb and extensions
Link to Rookie of the Year wiki
Link to Marlins ZiPS post
Link to Duvall’s first CF game
Link to Duvall’s first CF start
Link to defensive spectrum wiki
Link to Russell on the def. spectrum
Link to 2022 age by position
Link to oldest first-time CF/SS
Link to late movers spreadsheet
Link to Ryan Nelson on Twitter
Link to Russell on position changing
Link to Adam D. on position changing
Link to Russell on emergency catchers
Link to MLBTR on the MIA-MIN trade
Link to Ben C. on the MIA-MIN trade
Link to MLBTR on Chisholm
Link to 1958 story source
Link to Rosie Reds website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

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Trades aren’t inevitable. We hear rumors of some player being on the block all the time. Sometimes, that ends in an actual trade. Frequently, though, it ends in nothing: some team shops a mystery player around, no one bites, and then everyone goes about their business as if the initial trade rumor never happened. But sometimes the rumors are just so strong that they’re bound to come true eventually. To pick a name at random (note: not random), the Marlins have reportedly been looking to trade Pablo López for eons. They can’t hit, they have plenty of starting pitchers, and López seems like the best trade option when considering the combination of potential return and expendability.

Likewise, Luis Arraez has intermittently been the subject of trade speculation. He’s a good hitter and versatile defender, but the Twins have enough infielders that they’ve been reduced to playing the 5-foot-10 (generously) Arraez at first base. When Carlos Correa returned to the fold, it looked like another year of Arraez at first base, so it didn’t take a rocket scientist to surmise that the Twins might look to move an infielder. They needed pitching. The Marlins needed hitting and crave contact ability. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an exceedingly movable object? The trade that had to happen, of course.

As Jeff Passan reported, Luis Arraez is now a Marlin after the Twins traded him for López and two prospects: Jose Salas and Byron Chourio. Both Arraez and López are the kind of player that smart front offices love to build around. They have multiple years of team control remaining at below-market rates thanks to the arbitration process. They’re both borderline All-Stars, and both have utility on more or less any team — Arraez because of his versatility and López because everyone needs pitching. Players like these two form the backbone of every sustainable winner, so it’s no surprise that each team demanded such a player when trading one away. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past five seasons, Brian Anderson has been one of the few steady presences on the Marlins. With a long list of big names leaving town semi-regularly, one of the only things fans in Miami could count on was seeing Anderson’s name every day somewhere in the middle of Don Mattingly’s lineup card. But after starting just 155 games over the past two seasons and suffering numerous injuries, Miami’s front office decided to let him go too, non-tendering him into free agency. And now he is taking his talents to Milwaukee, inking a one-year deal with the Brewers worth $3.5 million.

From 2018 to ’20, Anderson was a consistently above-average performer, with a 115 wRC+ and 7.3 WAR across 341 games. He did basically everything at a solid or better level: he drew his fair share of walks (and was plunked a non-insignificant number of times), his strikeouts weren’t a problem, and while his plus raw power didn’t fully actualize due to a high groundball rate and the unforgiving dimensions of his home ballpark, he still slugged 44 homers during that stretch. He basically defined what it meant to have 50 or 55 grades on every offensive skill, making him successful all around.

After an uneven 2021 season and a left shoulder injury that required offseason surgery, Anderson’s production seemed to rebound at the beginning of 2022. He missed most of June with a back issue but had a very solid 117 wRC+ through the All-Star break, right in line with his best seasons. But on July 23, Anderson dove for a ground ball and landed on his left shoulder — his third left shoulder injury in a little over a year, and one that landed him on the IL for three weeks. After returning, his numbers fell significantly below his career norms, as he slashed just .188/.276/.318 in 174 plate appearances the rest of the way. This prolonged slump dropped his season wRC+ to 90, setting a career low for the second consecutive year. Read the rest of this entry »