The worst thing you can do in baseball as a hitter is swing through a fastball right down the pipe. That’s the pitch you were waiting for all along, and you turned it into a strike as surely as if you’d swung at a slider in the dirt. Conversely, that’s the best thing you can do as a pitcher. If your mistakes turn into strikes, it’s like playing on easy mode. Every pitcher is great when they’re dotting the corner, but turning middle-middle happy accidents into free strikes is the domain of an elite few.

If you look at the starters who did this most frequently in 2022, you’ll find a ton of good names and Eric Lauer:

Maybe that was harsh to Lauer, even. He’s clearly doing something right, given his two straight solid seasons despite lackluster raw stuff. It’s enlightening seeing him alongside a list of pitchers with dominant fastballs, and even if the other ten aren’t exclusively aces, they’re all solid starters with the chance to be more than that. Shane McClanahan, Spencer Strider, and Max Scherzer just missed the top 10. Zack Wheeler is way up there. This is clearly a desirable pitcher skill. Read the rest of this entry »

This offseason’s free agency action is basically over, so let’s go take a look ahead at next offseason. Where shortstops dominated the conversation this winter, in nine months’ time we’ll be talking about pitchers. Shohei Ohtani is in a class of his own, obviously, but the market also stands to include Yu Darvish, Julio Urías, Blake Snell, Max Scherzer (if he opts out), and Sonny Gray. Jack Flaherty and Lucas Giolito could also both cash in huge if they rediscover their recent ace-like form.

Also bound for the open market: last season’s leader in WAR among starting pitchers. Anyone care to guess who that is? That’s right, by a fraction of a win, it’s Aaron Nola. By any standard he’s been one of the best pitchers in baseball over the past five years. So how much money should he be out to make this offseason? Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 ZiPS projections have all been incorporated into the site, and while there will be some additions (platoon splits), changes (there’s a weird RBI bug affecting a handful of very poor minor league hitters) and updates to come, the player pages now contain the projections for the upcoming season. Our Depth Charts also reflect ZiPS along with Steamer, enabling David Appelman to crank up all the dials and flick all the switches, and you to blame me as well as Steamer when a team’s projection doesn’t look right to you!

Spring doesn’t actually start in the Northern Hemisphere until March 20 this year, but the real spring, baseball’s spring training, kicks off in a week when pitchers and catchers report. While it’s unlikely that these are the precise rosters that will eventually start playing exhibition games, the vast majority of the significant shifts in player talent have already happened.

So where do we stand?

Naturally, I used the ZiPS projection system to get the latest run of team win totals. The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, meaning there will naturally be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion — the computational algorithms, that is (no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing baccarat like James Bond). Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves are the team of stability. At six of nine offensive positions, they have locked an above-average-to-star-level player down to a contract that will keep him under club control for at least the next five seasons. We could probably get away with literally not writing any Braves roster construction thinkpieces until 2026 or so. Nevertheless, I want to pick at the one imperfection in Atlanta’s cavalcade of cost-controlled stars: the whole left field/DH situation. Specifically, I want to propose an idea that isn’t a joke, or a bit, or a troll… but it’s also not not a joke, or a bit, or a troll: Make Sam Hilliard the starting left fielder. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2021, John Means rode a command-first approach to the best pitching season on the Orioles. In 2022, Means missed most of the season – and Jordan Lyles and Dean Kremer both rode command-first approaches to the best starting pitching performances on the team. Now Lyles is gone and Means isn’t yet back from Tommy John, so the Orioles did what they had to do: traded for Cole Irvin, who will now inevitably ride a command-first approach to post the best numbers of any Orioles starter in 2023.

That’s my main takeaway from last week’s trade with the Oakland Athletics. The full trade: Irvin and prospect Kyle Virbitsky are headed to Baltimore in exchange for prospect Darell Hernaiz. In broad strokes, the deal makes sense: the A’s are continuing to get rid of every major leaguer they possibly can, while the Orioles look to make marginal improvements to their major league roster to back up last year’s breakthrough. But Irvin is hardly a slam dunk rotation topper, so I think it’s worth investigating what the O’s might see in him.

The first-level reason to acquire Irvin is probably the best one. He’s a left-handed fly-ball pitcher, and the new configuration of Camden Yards favors that skill set. The team pushed the left field wall back in 2022, and righties simply stopped hitting homers. In 2021, Baltimore was the easiest place for righties to hit home runs. In 2022, it was the sixth-toughest, a massive swing. Oakland has always been a pitcher-friendly park, and Irvin took good advantage of that; he should find similar success in the newly-spacious Camden. Read the rest of this entry »

Originally a 36th-round pick in the 2013 draft by the Yankees, Nestor Cortes spent time with the Orioles and Mariners before returning to the Bronx and putting it all together toward the end of the 2021 season, his age-26 year. Even upon breaking out, he was dubbed an “everyman” by the New York Post, overlooked by scouts because he didn’t stand as tall as other hurlers and because he lacked overpowering velocity. Yet in 2022, Cortes mowed hitters down to the tune of a 2.44 ERA and 20.3% K-BB rate. Far from an everyman, he was a standout athlete.

The southpaw’s breakout wasn’t a product of a mid-career growth spurt. If anything, his emergence came in spite of his 5-foot-11 height; his 159 ERA+ in 2022 tied him for the 27th-best mark among sub-six-foot hurlers since the Live Ball era began in 1920. Rather, the most concrete reasons for Cortes’ improvements include a velocity jump in both 2021 and ’22 (though his velo is still below average) and the introduction of a cutter paired with a revamped slider. Yet despite the ambiguous impact it has on his game, what perhaps differentiates Cortes the most from other pitchers is his approach on the mound, including but not limited to his varying arm angles.

The hurler’s drop-down moves have been the subject of many an article, including Lucas Kelly’s piece on this very site. The discussion on arm angles more broadly, however, has been rather muted, save for Logan Mottley’s (now of Fanatics, previously of the Texas Rangers) post describing how they can be calculated from Statcast data and Ben Palmer’s piece for Pitcher List digging into the Mottley data.

Even in these articles, there is no mention of how stature might play into the effectiveness of certain arm angles. Instead, there seems to be an implicit assumption that if one arm slot proved more effective on average (which, to be fair, no one has concluded), it should automatically be utilized more, without regard for what might feel most natural for a given pitcher. What would happen if we tried to convert more pitchers to a sidearm slot, or at least push them to vary their arm slots a la Cortes? Using Mottley’s calculations, I took a crack at these questions myself. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley introduce the 11th annual Effectively Wild season preview series, then kick things off by previewing the 2023 San Francisco Giants (13:03) with The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee and the 2023 Minnesota Twins (55:48) with The Athletic’s Aaron Gleeman, plus a Past Blast (1:33:43) from 1965.

Audio intro: The Bevis Frond, “And Away We Go”
Audio interstitial: Woods, “Twin Steps”
Audio outro: Justin Townes Earle, “Here We Go Again”

Link to preview series wiki
Link to guest/predictions spreadsheet
Link to FG team projections
Link to The Athletic farm rankings
Link to ESPN farm rankings
Link to payroll rankings
Link to The Athletic offseason grades
Link to Giants offseason tracker
Link to Giants depth chart
Link to Grant’s author archive
Link to Twins offseason tracker
Link to Twins depth chart
Link to Aaron’s author archive
Link to Correa WBC news
Link to The Hustler’s Handbook
Link to SI book preview
Link to Chicago Tribune book ad
Link to Veeck As in Wreck
Link to Ben on Veeck As in Wreck
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to MLBTR on Guzmán
Link to Stanky Draft EW episode

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There are a lot of ways to look at the numbers George Springer put up in 2022. Here’s the simplest: He had an All-Star season, posting a 132 wRC+ and piling up 4.2 WAR. That’s excellent. On the other hand, you could argue that he has been slipping for a while now. His wRC+ has declined in three consecutive seasons, and now that Kevin Kiermaier and Daulton Varsho are both Blue Jays, his days as a center fielder are officially over.

Analyzing Springer is tricky because he’s always been a great hitter no matter what was going on under the hood. He reached his offensive peak in 2019, posting a 155 wRC+ with the help of a career-high 43.2% hard-hit rate. Then in 2020 and ’21, his hard-hit rate came back to earth a bit, his pull rate spiked, and he literally doubled his launch angle. Despite the drastic changes, his wRC+ fell by just over 10 points, dropping him from elite all the way down to very nearly elite. Read the rest of this entry »

While the Mariners’ front office has been rather quiet in terms of acquiring new free agents this offseason, they did plenty of work locking up their existing personnel before free agency opened, extending star outfielder Julio Rodríguez and starting pitcher Luis Castillo with combined guarantees up to $578 million. Now, they’ve agreed to a three-year extension with utility man Dylan Moore worth $8.875 million. This contract buys out his final two years of arbitration as well as his first season of free agency, keeping him in Seattle through his age-33 season.

Moore was a late bloomer, first making the Mariners roster in 2019 at the age of 26, and he’s primarily served in a utility and platoon role ever since. While his career wRC+ sits at exactly 100, that mark jumps to 112 against left-handers. The Mariners have done well to maximize his effectiveness by deploying him on his strong side as much as possible, especially last season, when nearly half of his plate appearances came against left-handed pitching, fourth-most among right-handed hitters.

Platoon usage rate often says more about a team than an individual player — plenty of everyday starters arguably should be sitting more against same-handed pitchers — but the Mariners have the right pieces to put Moore in advantageous situations, including a wide variety of left-handed counterparts like Kolten Wong, Jarred Kelenic, and Tommy La Stella.

It’s difficult to thrive exclusively as a right-handed platoon bat, though, given that a significant majority of pitchers are also righties. Players like Moore and Slater only got to face lefty opponents about half the time; sometimes a reliever comes in, sometimes a starter needs the day off regardless of who the other team has on the mound. Luckily, Moore also handles right-handed pitching decently well. His career wRC+ against them sits at 92, and last season, he had a .344 OBP and 117 wRC+ against fellow righties, a good mark for any big league hitter. He definitely has a stronger side, making more contact and drawing more free passes against southpaws, but he’s certainly not helpless on the other side of the platoon either. Read the rest of this entry »