As much as I love a partisan crowd in a playoff game, there’s something to be said for a tournament that has a dedicated home. Having experienced firsthand both the Men’s College World Series in Omaha and the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the cultural ecosystem that springs up around these festival sites is unlike anything else in baseball. College baseball fans know the quirks of Charles Schwab Field, they’ve walked the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge from Omaha to Council Bluffs, Iowa, they know the jello shot leaderboard at Rocco’s Pizza. (Whatever else happens in baseball this season, nothing will be funnier than LSU fans finding themselves in a drinking competition with Oral Roberts fans.)

I can’t recommend it enough, even to watch on TV. My pitch for a mixed college-pro baseball fandom remains: College teams are playing meaningful games while MLB teams are still in spring training, and they play high-stakes postseason games during the meaningless major league doldrums of May and June.

Yes, high stakes. You want to know what a big deal this is? Here’s University of Tennessee right-hander Chase Burns, stomping out a rally in the seventh inning of his team’s latest win over Southern Mississippi with a trip to the College World Series on the line:

M7 | CHASE BURNS IS AN ELECTRIC FACTORY!!! ????????

102 by 'em and Tennessee wiggles out of the seventh with a 4-0 lead!!#GBO // #OTH // #BeatUSM pic.twitter.com/HrRt24Lfuu

— Tennessee Baseball (@Vol_Baseball) June 13, 2023

This guy pumped in 102-mph gas, then stomped off the mound positively convulsing with adrenaline. I have never been as excited about anything in my entire life as Burns is to spend at least a week of his summer vacation on a work trip to Nebraska. If this doesn’t get you amped up, you might actually be dead. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Shohei Ohtani leading MLB in WAR and the number of times his hitting has leapfrogged his pitching or vice versa, the EW audience’s verdict on who won the pod’s recent 26-under-25 draft, the suddenly-quite-competitive A’s-Royals race for the worst record in baseball, a painful ending to a college playoff game and the evolving conversation about pitch counts for college starters, the pitch clock’s impact on performance and injuries, one potential downside to the pitch clock reaching NPB, the Diamondbacks’ “victory vest,” and The Athletic’s layoffs and the state of sports media, plus a Past Blast from 2019.

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

Link to Ohtani’s first homer
Link to Ohtani’s second homer
Link to MLB.com on tired Ohtani
Link to The Athletic on tired Ohtani
Link to FG WAR leaderboard
Link to B-Ref WAR leaderboard
Link to 26-under-25 draft
Link to draft voting results
Link to Carroll/Henderson awards
Link to Royals/A’s post
Link to Rob Mains on mobility
Link to tweet about college game ending
Link to college TOOTBLAN
Link to college dropped ball
Link to Cooper on pitch counts
Link to Jake on Mathews
Link to longer thread on Mathews
Link to Romano’s quote tweet
Link to 2016 study on college workloads
Link to 2018 college workloads study
Link to Dan S. on the pitch clock
Link to Jim Allen on the NPB clock
Link to report on the NPB clock
Link to victory vest story
Link to MLB’s Realmuto tweet
Link to “cyclone” tweet
Link to hockey’s “three stars”
Link to FG’s three players of the game
Link to WaPo’s The Athletic report
Link to FOS The Athletic report
Link to 2017 story about The Athletic
Link to Axios media newsletter
Link to 2019 Past Blast source
Link to 2015 robot-ump game
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to MLBTR on the Nevada vote
Link to Pujols hiring post

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2:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks and welcome to a special edition of my Tuesday chat. I’m a few days into the annual family trip to Wellfleet  — this is the seventh year in a row that my wife, my daughter, and my mother-in-law have rented this house — and the wi-fi is a bit dodgier than back in Brooklyn, but I always like to do a chat from here if I can.

2:04	Jay Jaffe: As it’s a two-week trip, it’s something of a working vacation, with the work front-loaded. Today I did a piece on Nick Castellanos’ rebound from a dismal 2022 https://blogs.fangraphs.com/nick-castellanos-is-mashing-again

2:04	Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I took a look at the impact of Pete Alonso’s hand injury https://blogs.fangraphs.com/skidding-mets-lose-pete-alonso-when-they-c…

2:05	Jay Jaffe: Yes, we’re planning to get down to at least one Orleans Firebirds games. I think we have four to choose from in terms of their home games. Haven’t looked at rosters or fully sketched out a calendar yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I last checked in on Nick Castellanos, he was not in a good place. Though he was playing in a World Series with the Phillies, the team with which he signed a five-year, $100 million contract after the lockout ended in March, his season had been a disappointment, and aside from the occasional big hit here and highlight-reel catch there — the latter class of which had seemed particularly unlikely given his defensive metrics — his postseason had been bleak as well, right down to his making the final out in Games 5 and 6 of the World Series as the Phillies fell to the Astros. Fortunately, after turning the page on 2022, Castellanos has reemerged as one of the Phillies’ most productive hitters.

When the Phillies signed Castellanos, he was coming off the best season of his career, having made his first All-Star team while setting across-the-board career highs with a .309/.362/.576 line, 34 homers, a 139 wRC+, and 3.6 WAR. He had opted out following the second year of a four-year, $64 million deal with the Reds, but despite notable interest from multiple teams including the Padres and Marlins, he didn’t secure a deal before the lockout began in early December. Once he did finally agree to terms with the Phillies, eight days after the lockout ended, he felt as though he had to rush into the season, adjusting to a new team, new city, new fanbase, and new media… and with a new child on the way. Soon, Bryce Harper’s elbow injury forced Castellanos to play right field on a regular basis instead of DHing a significant amount of the time as initially planned.

Things did not go well. Castellanos matched his career-worst 94 wRC+ via a .263/.305/.389 line, set career lows with a 5.2% walk rate and 6.6% barrel rate, and homered just 13 times. He was dreadful afield (-10 RAA, -8 DRS, -7.3 UZR) as well, and while his -0.8 WAR didn’t make him the majors’ least valuable position player, none of the 31 others with WARs that low or lower — including future Hall of Famers Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto — had just set sail on a $100 million contract. Adding further insult, in the postseason, Castellanos hit .185/.232/.246 in 69 plate appearances. Not even a few memorable diving catches could offset that. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that Andy Warhol didn’t actually say “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”? I was shocked to learn the truth. Apparently, two museum employees invented the quote when they were working on a Warhol exhibit. That makes the saying more interesting to me, actually: two anonymous people creating the work of someone famous for the democratization of art is enjoyable. But I digress: the point of bringing that quote up is that Nick Anderson is well into his second fifteen minutes of fame, and I’m pretty sure that this, too, is something Warhol would approve of.

It’s hard to imagine a better pitcher getting a worse contract than the one Anderson signed this offseason. He was one of the best relievers in baseball, period, from his 2019 debut until tearing his UCL in 2021. Heck, he was top 15 in reliever WAR from 2019 to ’21, and he basically didn’t play in one of those years. Sub-3 ERA, sub-3 FIP, the fourth-highest strikeout rate in baseball (39.6%) — Anderson was an elite closer, and the Rays used him accordingly. The Braves are paying him only $875,000 this year. That’s some kind of bargain.

As Esteban Rivera detailed last November, there were reasons to doubt that Anderson would come back strong. He looked diminished in his last few appearances before hitting the IL; his biggest weapon, a fastball with excellent carry that left batters flummoxed, lost its usual carry. Vertical approach angle is all the rage in pitch design these days, and that’s the case because it neutralizes the biggest weapon hitters have: power on contact. You can’t hit a home run if you can’t hit the ball, and flat-angled four-seam fastballs are great at doing just that. Read the rest of this entry »

I was contemplating Kyle Schwarber recently, as one does, and was amused by the notion that a player could post a batting average in the .170s and still be a valuable hitter overall. We’ve known that batting average isn’t everything since… well, I was going to say the nascent moments of the sabermetric revolution in the late 20th century, but it’s been way longer than that.

There’s a thread in popular history that casts the latter-day Brooklyn Dodgers as a team of romantic literary figures. Between the righteousness of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, the tragic brevity of the careers of Pete Reiser and later Roy Campanella, and the juxtaposition with the shiny, all-conquering Yankees, there’s a sense that the Dodgers succeeded through some combination of moral rectitude and poetic necessity.

In truth, they won because they drew an absolute crapload of walks. In 1947, Reese and Eddie Stanky both drew over 100 walks, and the Dodgers drew 30% more walks than the NL average. The 2002 A’s beat the AL average by 16%, so the team that made walking cool looks like a bunch of hackers next to the 1947 Dodgers.

If Branch Rickey knew the limitations of batting average, what took the rest of us so long? Read the rest of this entry »

As a measure to improve baseball for the average fan — or even the decidedly non-average fans who frequent our pages — I think the pitch clock has been a resounding success. Trimming almost half an hour from the length of games hasn’t diminished baseball itself, with the cutting room floor mainly littered with the things that take place in between the action. Now, you can argue that we’ve also eliminated some of the dramatic tension from crucial situations in important games. But for every high-stakes matchup between two great players in a big moment, there were a multitude of unimportant ones stretched out endlessly by a parade of uniform readjustments and crotch reconfigurations. I enjoy having a leisurely Campari and soda with a friend while waiting for dinner, but I certainly don’t want to do that for every meal, and if I could chop down cocktail hour to get my food more quickly, I’d happily find other moments for social bonding.

Of course, game length isn’t the only consideration when assessing the pitch clock. I’m frequently asked in my chats if I think a given pitcher’s underperformance relative to expectation can be attributed to the clock. It can’t feel great to do a job for a number of years and suddenly experience such a monumental change in how you go about executing it. Steve Trachsel ain’t punching no time clock!

Another big question is whether the pitch clock, which can result in mechanical changes, could have an effect on injuries, a subject Will Sammon, Brittany Ghiroli and Eno Sarris explored for The Athletic after a high injury rate in April. While we obviously don’t have enough data to reach a verdict on the long-term effects of the clock (and things like Tommy John surgery count are still going to involve relatively small samples), as we near the halfway point of the season, we do have enough information to look at how the data are shaking out and arrive at some kind of preliminary conclusion about what’s going on. Read the rest of this entry »

Games are shorter this season due to the pitch clock, which means that starting pitchers are usually throwing an outing’s worth of offerings in less time than they typically did in previous years. Whereas a quality start of seven innings and 100 pitches might have taken two hours and 15 minutes in the past — this before a call to the bullpen — it can take as little as an hour and 45 minutes in 2023. Those times will obviously vary, with the effectiveness of the opposing pitcher playing a major role, but the fact remains that such an outing now regularly takes place within a more condensed time frame.

How different is this for starting pitchers? Moreover, is throwing that number of innings and pitches in a narrower time frame harder, or is it actually easier? I’ve asked those questions to several pitchers since the start of the season, with their answers sometimes extending to other aspects of the new pitch clock. Here is what they’ve had to say.

———

Shane Bieber, Cleveland Guardians: “Good question. To give you a real response on the impact… we’ll probably see at the end of the year after a great big body of work. Right? The number of quality starts, or whatever you want to call them. But for me, personally, I’m not finding much of a difference. I work pretty quick, especially without runners on. Last year, I think I was the second fastest without runners on base. Maybe the first. Wade Miley works extremely fast, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

I hate to admit it, but I’m a bit of a grump these days. Specifically, I’m a grump about position players pitching. Every time Jay Jaffe chronicles the spread of the tactic, I get annoyed right alongside him. When some disinterested backup infielder lobs the ball in at 40 mph, I cringe. I was a fan of the rules that limited when teams can send hitters to the mound; in fact, I remember being disappointed that the rules weren’t more stringent when they first came out.

With that said, I have to take it all back now. I’m in on position players pitching – as long as we’re specifically talking about Brandon Crawford. He took the mound to close out a 13-3 Giants victory yesterday and did so in a way that position players simply don’t anymore: He tried as hard as he could.

There have already been multiple excellent breakdowns of how Crawford had always wanted to pitch and how he got the opportunity. I can’t match that kind of coverage – but I can take a different angle. He looked borderline acceptable out there, something you can’t often say of hitters taking the mound. How acceptable? Let’s do a pitch breakdown. Read the rest of this entry »