On September 1, one day after baseball’s no. 5 overall prospect made his major league debut, Dan Szymborski wrote that the Baltimore Orioles “showed mercy to minor league pitchers … officially calling up infielder Gunnar Henderson.” As my colleague pointed out, the 21-year-old left-handed hitter had slashed .297/.416/.531 with 19 home runs over 112 games between Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk. His wRC+ was a healthy 154.
Henderson has continued to impress at the big-league level. In 110 plate appearances with the O’s, the young slugger has punished pitchers to the tune of a 139 wRC+, with 12 of his 27 hits going for extra bases. He’s left the yard four times, with the latest of those blasts leaving his bat at 111.1 mph and traveling 428 feet into Fenway Park’s center field bleachers.
Henderson sat down to talk hitting on Tuesday, one day before he was named Baseball America’s Minor League Player of the Year.
———
David Laurila: Let’s start with your evolution as a hitter. What do you know now that you didn’t when you were drafted by the Orioles [42nd overall in 2019 out of Selma, Alabama’s John T. Morgan Academy]?
Gunnar Henderson: “I would say that it’s the number of good pitches you get to hit. In high school, you’ll get multiple pitches to hit within an at-bat, and then as you progress, at each and every level, it’s less and less. Especially here in the big leagues. You really have to take your walks and not give in to what the pitcher wants you to do. You’ve got to hunt for that one pitch, because you might only get one, maybe two, a game.”
Tuesday night, I watched Ryan Helsley face the middle of the Brewers order in the bottom of the eighth inning. It went roughly how you’d expect – strikeout, groundout, strikeout. He came back out for the ninth, and after an inning-opening walk, closed out the frame with another two strikeouts and a groundout. It didn’t feel surprising; that’s just what great relievers do at the end of games.
That wasn’t always the case. The game has changed over the years. Relievers are pitching fewer innings per appearance, and doing so in better-defined roles. Strikeouts are up everywhere. Velocity is up everywhere. Individual reliever workloads are down, which means higher effort in a given appearance despite bullpens covering more aggregate innings. I’m not trying to say that the current crop of relievers doesn’t have structural tailwinds helping them excel. But seriously – top relievers now are so good.
Look at the top of this year’s WAR leaderboard for relievers – either RA9-WAR or FIP-based WAR will do – and you’ll see a veritable wall of strikeouts. Edwin Díaz, Devin Williams, A.J. Minter, Helsley, and Andrés Muñoz are all in the top 10 and all run preposterous strikeout rates. They’re good in an in-your-face way. Since I’ve watched baseball, dominant late-inning relievers have succeeded by striking batters out, but that trend has accelerated in the past decade or so. Here, take a look at the strikeout rate of the 10 top relievers in baseball, as determined by fWAR, every year since integration:
The Texas Rangers are seeking multiple apprentices in Player Development. Each Apprentice will work with one of the Rangers’ minor league affiliates and report to the Minor League Video Coordinator. Apprentices will operate as an extension of the coaching staff and be a resource for both players and coaches. They are expected to manage the collection and application of data and technology at their respective affiliate and will gain experience across multiple areas of Baseball Operations.
Job Responsibilities:
Video & Technology Operation:
Operate bat/ball tracking technology and baseball technology
Capture game video and manage upload process for all games
Gather high frame rate video of hitters and pitchers
Manage data and collection process and assist with interpretation with coaches and players
Advance Scouting:
Collaborate with coaching staff and player development staff to monitor player goals and player progress
Conduct research and analysis, both at the request of staff and independently
Use internal system tools to assist
Communicate research in simple and concise manner to Minor League coaches, players, and Player Development staff
Systems Support:
Support field staff with on-field responsibilities
On field skills such as throwing BP is a plus
Support field staff and players with coach education and various administration tasks
Support Strength and Conditioning and Athletic Training staff to provide assistance and application to their fields of your finding
Education and Experience Requirements:
Bachelor’s degree
Demonstrated passion and understanding for biomechanics, pitching or hitting analysis or sports science.
Spanish speaking a plus
Job Requirements:
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Availability to start working in January 2023
Ability to work seamlessly in teams
Working knowledge of advanced baseball statistics and publicly available research
We hear about Emma’s upcoming piece on Austin Riley and get insight into her interview and transcription process, as well as the nitty gritty when it comes to sitting down to write. The duo then discuss Emma’s recent article on the unionization of the minor leagues, and what led to that effort coming together much more quickly than most expected. We also hear about how fun it is to talk to Ron Washington, being glued to Aaron Judge’s plate appearances, some playoff predictions, and who they are excited to see next season. Finally, Eric introduces the concept of “showmakase” and asks Emma to share a curated list of episodes from one of her favorite television shows, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @dhhiggins on Twitter.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the fight for the third wild card in the National League and the way in which the expanded playoff format shifts attention toward middling teams, appreciating postseason success and regular-season success, the regular-season dominance of the Dodgers, home-run-record derangement syndrome (17:52) and a middle ground between the warring absolutists worked up one way or another about Aaron Judge (or pitchers not pitching to him), a better name for the combined cycle, a suspicious Carlos Correa quote, a counterintuitive observation about Yadier Molina’s basestealing suppression, Tony La Russa reportedly not returning to the White Sox next season, Rich Hill planning to pitch again, pedantic questions (1:13:01) about non-baseball ballparks, payoff pitches, and long balls vs. big balls, plus a new name for the Grand Junction Rockies, a new use for a descending mound, and a Past Blast (1:26:09) from 1910.
But how do we know if these performances are sustainable? Story never reached those heights again but he still became an excellent big leaguer. Kwan is a Rookie of the Year candidate, but his teammate Owen Miller has fallen off after hitting .400 in April. Joe, meanwhile, has had a pedestrian .230/.334/.323 slash line since the beginning of May. We know that stats like OPS can take nearly a full season to stabilize, so how can we separate the Millers from the Kwans?
This is where plate discipline metrics come in. Because the average batter sees nearly four pitches per plate appearance, plate discipline stats reach a reliable sample size much more quickly than the surface-level stats that are tracked on a plate appearance basis. The primary plate discipline stat we’ll be examining here is chase rate (listed as O-Swing% on the site). To my mind, chase rate is probably the best single stat to use when assessing a hitter’s swing decisions. Some hitters have outlier levels of plate coverage that allow them to do damage on pitches in specific spots out of the zone, but in general, chasing less is almost always better than chasing more. A quick glance at the relevant metrics will show you exactly why:
Batter Results on Pitches In and Out of Zone
Avg. Exit Velocity
Slugging
Whiff Rate
In Zone
90.7 mph
0.564
17.8%
Out of Zone
80.5 mph
0.215
42.6%
For a variety of reasons, swing decisions are quite difficult to improve at the major league level. The average hitter’s plate discipline metrics don’t change by more than a few percentage points over the course of their career. Still, many of the most patient hitters in baseball have managed to make improvements. Mike Trout’s evolution from young phenom to the best hitter of his generation involved a steady drop in his chase rate throughout his mid-20s, while others make adjustments during their time in the minors that enable their breakouts as big leaguers.
When we see a player go ballistic during the first couple months of a season, it’s exciting. But when these big performances are backed by noticeable improvements in the player’s swing decisions, they have much greater potential to be sustainable. So who were the biggest early-season plate discipline improvers of 2022? To answer this, I looked at every hitter with at least 200 plate appearances in 2021 and compared their chase rates that season to their chase rates through the end of May this season. The biggest improvers can be seen below:
Min. 200 PA in 2021, min. 100 PA in 2022 through 5/31.
Despite his excellent 24.7% chase rate through the end of May, you won’t see the aforementioned Steven Kwan here, as he debuted in the majors this season. Because minor league pitch data is largely unavailable for most players, we’ll solely be analyzing players who made swing decision improvements compared to previous major league seasons. There’s a wide variety of players on this list, but something they all have in common is that even when we look at a larger sample over the full season, they all have lower chase rates in 2022 than they did in ’21. Let’s take a look at a few of these players to see how their plate discipline development has impacted their overall results.
One player who made Herculean improvements to his plate discipline was Taylor Ward. Ward was one of the biggest stories of the early season, putting up a Barry Bonds-like slash line of .384/.505/.744 with eight homers through his first 25 games. Equally impressive, though, was the fact that he walked just as much as he struck out; his chase rate of 17.9% ranked first among all hitters with at least 100 plate appearances over that stretch. ZiPS absolutely bought into the breakout, forecasting a 20-point increase in projected wRC+ as compared to previous seasons. And while his 1.249 OPS in the early season (aided by a .439 BABIP) didn’t last, he’s still kept up an excellent level of production in his first season as an everyday player. He has a 131 wRC+ with a very reasonable .318 BABIP, and at 3.2 WAR, he’s surpassed his ZiPS projection for the year.
More importantly, Ward’s elite plate discipline gains have been sustained over the full season. He’s walked in 11.2% of plate appearances, and his career-best 23.4% chase rate ranks in the 93rd percentile of all hitters. According to Statcast’s swing/take leaderboard, Ward has created 23 runs by laying off pitches in the “chase” zone, pitches that are out of the zone but still close enough to make hitters swing often. Tied with Ward near the top of the leaderboard is fellow plate discipline improver Christian Walker, whose combination of swing decisions and raw power have led to his best season on record.
Taylor Ward started the season with less than a full season’s worth of major league playing time under his belt; by making the necessary adjustments to his approach, he’s locked down a roster spot for the foreseeable future. But what about players who have been everyday big leaguers for the better part of a decade? Are they also capable of significantly slashing their chase rates? In the case of White Sox first baseman José Abreu, the answer here is yes. In his age-35 season, Abreu has the fewest home runs of any season in his career (including 2020) while posting a career-low isolated power. However, he’s on pace to post his best wRC+ in a full season since 2017. Abreu came into the majors in 2014 after lighting up the Cuban National Series (seriously, just look at his stats). In his early days with the White Sox, he was known as a free swinger with huge pop, clubbing 36 homers and finishing second in the league in OPS, while swinging at 41% of pitches out of the zone. Since then, he’s spent most years in the mid-30% range, including a chase rate of 36.4% in 2020, when he won American League MVP. After nearly a decade of big league experience, it was surprising to see Abreu’s chase rate go down to just 30% through May of this season. His current rate sits at 33.6%, the second-lowest chase rate of his career, while his 0.56 BB/K ratio is the best he’s ever posted. So how do we know these late-career gains are real? Let’s take a look at how he’s been pitched to this year as compared to previous ones:
José Abreu Statcast Location Zones
Heart
Shadow
Chase
Waste
2015-2021
24.8%
40.6%
23.3%
10.5%
2022
25.8%
42%
22.6%
9.5%
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
It’s easy to hypothesize that Abreu has just been getting more pitches in the dirt (which are far easier to lay off of), but it turns out the opposite is true. Statcast’s attack zones were created to understand how hitters make swing decisions in four discrete regions, ranging from down the middle (heart) to nowhere near the zone (waste). Abreu has been seeing a lower proportion of pitches in the waste zone, but a similar number of pitches in the shadow and chase zones, where out-of-zone swings can realistically occur. All of this is to say that these improvements are no fluke. Abreu isn’t being pitched differently, he’s simply improved his swing decisions and is likely to finish the season with career-best strikeout and walk rates. Making these changes has proven to be especially helpful at Abreu’s age. We know that a hitter’s offensive production tends to crater when they enter their mid-30s, and many superstars have quickly become mere mortals after losing some of their speed, barrel control, and bat speed (see: Albert Pujols). Abreu’s 43 plate appearances per home run is the worst of his career (by a lot), but despite this, his overall production is even better than it was last year when he hit twice as many homers. Becoming a free agent going into their age-36 season is scary for many players, but Abreu’s improvements in the approach department may significantly lengthen his career.
What about players who significantly worsened their chase rate in the first couple months of the season? Using the same method as before, let’s look at the players who swing at far more bad pitches than last season:
min. 200 PA in 2021, min. 100 PA in 2022 through 5/31
There are many interesting players to analyze among this bunch, including Bryce Harper, whose newfound aggression at the plate may actually be beneficial, but there’s one guy I want to look at specifically because swing decisions are such a huge part of his profile – Joey Gallo.
The quintessential Three True Outcomes player, Gallo has walked, struck out, or hit a long ball in over half his plate appearances every year of his career. As a hitter who puts few balls in play, Gallo’s ability to succeed offensively relies strongly on his ability to demonstrate patience at the plate. Last season with the Rangers and Yankees, Gallo had his best full season with a 122 wRC+ and a career-high 4.2 WAR despite hitting below the Mendoza line. His elite 18% walk rate was supported by a 22.1% chase rate, seventh-best among qualified hitters. In 2019, Gallo missed half the season but had a 144 wRC+ when healthy, and swung at just 24.2% of pitches outside of the zone. In the first two months of 2022, that number ballooned to 33%, near the league average rather than elite. As a result, his walk and barrel rates fell while his strikeout rate rose compared to his career averages. Gallo’s performance this year has significantly declined from last, slashing .166/.288/.364 while maintaining this elevated chase rate all year long.
Going back to Statcast’s swing/take runs, there’s one key area where Gallo made a noticeable change. Last year, Gallo swung at 44% of pitches in the shadow of the zone, a region containing pitches within a few inches of the edge of the plate. This season, that rate has jumped to 55%. While this isn’t necessarily bad for all hitters, Gallo’s elevated whiff rate hurts him when he swings at borderline pitches. While the league as a whole comes up empty on 26.4% of their swings in the shadow area, Gallo whiffs 48.5% of the time. As a result, his chase rate has climbed without him doing any additional damage to pitches in the zone.
These are just a few of the many players whose changes in production this year have been caused by an improvement or decline in their swing decisions. Whether conscious or not, changes in a player’s approach can often have career-altering effects. In Taylor Ward’s case, we’ve seen how a leap forward in approach turned a bench outfielder on the fringes of the roster into an above-average everyday regular, while José Abreu has used his newfound skills to prolong an already sensational career. The fact that sustained reductions in chase rates are so uncommon makes the stories of players whose careers were made or revitalized from swing decision improvements all the more interesting. While we like to imagine what many players would be like if they could make the right adjustments, only a select few can actually do it.
Back in the spring, when the existence of the 2022 season — or at least one that started on time and ran 162 games — was anything but a certainty due to the owners’ lockout, I embarkedon an open-ended Hall of Fame-related project centered around starting pitchers. Having already taken a swing at modernizing JAWS to better account for the changes in starter workloads that have occurred over the past century and a half, I turned my focus to the demographic disparities among enshrined starters, and examined the cream of the crop still outside the Hall, getting as far as those born in the 1950s.
You’re forgiven if this all seems pretty hazy or even unfamiliar, and perhaps confused as to why I’m bringing this up now. With the season in its final week but containing only minimal drama as far as the races go (pour one out for Team Entropy), it struck me that it might be my last chance to delve into the topic until after the playoffs, and so here we are.
I intended to continue this Cooperstown Notebook series during the season, particularly in light of the late-April announcement of the Hall reconfiguring its Era Committee process yet again. Up for election in December will be players on the Contemporary Baseball ballot, defined as those who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present day. The eight-candidate ballot, which will be announced in November, will almost certainly include the obvious candidates who fell off recent writers’ ballots, namely Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Fred McGriff. It will also likely include the holdovers who received significant support on the 2020 Modern Baseball ballot and have been classified as belonging to this period, namely Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker (Dave Parker and Steve Garvey belong to the Classic Baseball period, next up in December 2024).
As for holdovers from the 2019 Today’s Game ballot (the one from which Lee Smith and Harold Baines were elected), all of them except Lou Piniella (who’s now qualified for the Contemporary Baseball Managers, Umpires, and Executives ballot, to be voted upon in December 2023) received “fewer than five votes” out of 16 that year. From that group, Orel Hershiser was one of two pitchers in my review of pitchers born in the 1950s who received my recommendation in light of S-JAWS, though that hardly guarantees him another ballot appearance. Dave Stieb, who’s never graced an Era Committee ballot after going one-and-done on the writers’ ballot in 2004, is the other hurler from that period whose case merits a closer look in light of S-JAWS, but I’m not holding my breath that he’ll be on there.
To backtrack a bit, I fell down this rabbit hole because as things stand only nine starting pitchers born in 1950 or later are enshrined. As a percentage of pitchers with at least 2,000 innings — a practical cutoff but not an absolute one (Dizzy Dean is the only enshrined starter from the NL, AL, and bygone white leagues with fewer) — that’s far lower than what came before:
Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers by Birth Decades
Birth Decade
Qual. (2,000 IP)
HOF SP
Pct HOF
<1870
47
7
14.9%
1870-1879
38
7
18.4%
1880-1889
30
9
30.0%
1890-1899
35
6
17.1%
1900-1909
33
5
15.2%
1910-1919
16
2
12.5%
1920-1929
22
6
27.3%
1930-1939
31
8
25.8%
1940-1949
51
7
13.7%
1950-1959
45
2
4.4%
1960-1969
44
5
11.4%
1970-1979
33
2
6.1%
<1900
151
29
19.2%
1900-1929
71
13
18.3%
1930-1949
82
15
18.3%
1950-1979
122
9
7.4%
Why should we care about this demographic dip? Mainly because we want to equitably represent more recent eras, though doing so requires an understanding that our standards need some tweaking to reflect the evolution of the starting pitcher. While voters have moved past the 300-wins-or-bust mentality by electing Bert Blyleven, Roy Halladay, Pedro Martinez, Jack Morris, Mike Mussina, and John Smoltz along with 300-winners Tom Glavine, Randy Johnson, and Greg Maddux, there are additional candidates from the not-too-distant past who are worthy of recognition, pitchers who may not be significantly better than the average enshrinee (the original stated goal of the JAWS project) but who would hardly be out of place within the broader spectrum of those already honored.
This shouldn’t be taken as a literal call for current and future voters to open the floodgates and elect players to the point that the percentages above are dead even; particularly with the Era Committee reconfigurations, electing anybody might prove to be a tall task. I’m hopeful that eventually we can boost the rates of election for pitchers of more recent vintage while keeping in mind that the somewhat looser standards make it apparent that a few guys from the more ancient eras look even stronger in the light of S-JAWS than in JAWS.
Like JAWS, S-JAWS — which is now the default at Baseball Reference’s Starting Pitcher page — uses an average of a pitcher’s career and peak WAR (best seven seasons at large) for comparisons to the averages of all Hall of Fame pitchers. The idea behind S-JAWS is to reduce the skewing caused by the impact of 19th century and dead-ball era pitchers, some of whom topped 400, 500, or even 600 innings in a season on multiple occasions. I’ve chosen to do this by prorating the peak-component credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings, a level that the current and recent BBWAA candidates rarely reached, and only one active pitcher (Justin Verlander) has, albeit by a single inning a decade ago. The various emphases on pitch counts, innings limits, and times through the order make it unlikely we’ll see such levels again, at least on a consistent basis, and while we can debate, lament, and discuss whether it’s worth trying to reverse that trend, that’s not my focus. Given the current trends in the game regarding starting pitcher usage, it might make more sense 5-10 years from now to look at candidates on a 200-225 inning basis, but for now this is a reasonable place to start the adjustments.
In this piece I breezed through the pre-1900, 1900-29, and 1930-49 periods to identify the starters among the top 100 in S-JAWS who are outside the Hall, and here I went through those born in the 1950-59 period. At last we get to the 1960-69 group, which is better represented within the Hall than the decades on either side because that period produced a bumper crop of very good hurlers. Here are the ones who fall within the top 100, meaning with an S-JAWS of 43.3 or higher:
The self-inflicted wounds of Clemens and Schilling aside, the best of this group is already in Cooperstown, and I don’t need to rehash their credentials here. Of the rest, some might have gotten there with better staying power; of the pitchers I’m highlighting here, only Brown and Finley reached 3,000 innings, a level that all starters who have been elected since Sandy Koufax (1972) reached save for Halladay and Martinez.
Because of the way I designed S-JAWS, none of the six pitchers up for discussion from this batch lose much off their peak scores, but they climb in the rankings. Here’s a look at how things changed for the half-dozen I’m covering here, along with a few callbacks from previous installments:
Above J and Above S refer to the number of Hall of Fame starting pitchers (out of 66) who rank higher than the pitcher in question in the JAWS and S-JAWS ranking (e.g., Brown is outranked by 36 enshrined starters via JAWS, 25 via S-JAWS)
I’ll refer back to these. As I did in the Fifties installment, I’ll start at the bottom, which isn’t to say that I’m arguing on behalf of all of these pitchers.
Dwight Gooden
Of the pitchers here, Gooden is the one who burned most brightly and seemed destined for Cooperstown. A year after being the fifth pick out of Tampa’s Hillsborough High School in the 1982 draft, the 18-year-old fireballer struck out 300 in 190 innings at A-level Lynchburg. In 1984, the 19-year-old Gooden arrived on the major league scene with a rising fastball that could reach 100 mph, and a knee-buckling curveball so good his teammates dubbed it Lord Charles instead of the common Uncle Charlie. The kid set a rookie record with a league-leading 276 strikeouts in 218 innings, became the youngest All-Star ever, won NL Rookie of the Year honors, finished second in the NL Cy Young voting behind Rick Sutcliffe (!) and earned the nickname Doctor K. Then in 1985 he turned in a season for the ages, going 24-4, with a 1.53 ERA (229 ERA+) and 268 strikeouts in 276.2 innings, good for the NL Cy Young, the pitchers’ Triple Crown (league lead in wins, strikeouts, and ERA), and 13.3 WAR (12.2 pitching, 1.1 offense) — a single-season total that stands as the highest of any pitcher in the live-ball era.
It was mostly downhill from those lofty heights. Though he helped the Mets to a World Championship in 1986, Gooden lost the sizzle on his mid-90s fastball and wasn’t nearly as dominant (17-6, 2.84 ERA, 4.3 WAR). Prior to the start of 1987 season, he went into a drug rehabilitation program and missed the Mets’ first 50 games; decades later, he admitted that he missed the Mets’ World Series parade because he was high in a drug dealer’s apartment. He returned from rehab to post a few more good years with the Mets, helping them to the NL East title in 1988 (18-9, 3.19 ERA) while making his fourth and final All-Star team, but he produced just a 103 ERA+ and a total of 23.1 WAR for the 1987-94 span. Shoulder problems stemming from overuse took their toll, as did continued cocaine and alcohol problems. While serving a 60-day suspension for testing positive for cocaine in 1994, he tested positive again and was suspended for the entire ’95 season.
Yankees owner George Steinbrenner offered Gooden a chance at redemption once the pitcher’s suspension ended, and he responded with a solid season that included a no-hitter and 2.6 WAR, but he was left off the postseason roster as the team won its first World Series since 1978. He bounced around for a few more years, relying on luck and guile more than talent — my pal Nick Stone nicknamed him “Granny Gooden” because watching him pitch was “like watching an elderly woman navigate an icy staircase” — with stops in Cleveland, Houston, and Tampa Bay before a return to the Bronx in 2000.
Like former teammate Darryl Strawberry, Gooden’s occasional moments of glory mainly served to remind us — and him — of what might have been. He doesn’t gain much ground in the move to S-JAWS, particularly relative to the other pitchers here, and his 0-4, 3.97 ERA record in the postseason doesn’t help his cause. His recovery continues to be worth rooting for, however.
Chuck Finley
Aside from Nolan Ryan, no pitcher is as closely associated with the history of the California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels as Finley, the franchise leader in wins (165), innings (2,675), pitching WAR (52.0), and a whole bunch of other categories. The Halos tried doubly hard to get the 6-foot-6 southpaw, drafting him in the 15th round in 1984, and again as the fourth pick in the following January’s secondary draft. He threw just 41 innings in the minors before being called up to join the bullpen of the ill-fated 1986 AL West champions.
In 1988, Finley finally nailed down a rotation spot, beginning a 12-year run as the team’s mainstay, during which he posted a 3.70 ERA (119 ERA+) while averaging 212 innings and 4.3 WAR. He ranked in the AL top 10 in WAR five times in that span, made four All-Star teams, and topped 7.0 WAR three times; over that stretch, only Clemens, Maddux, Cone, and Johnson outproduced his 51.5 WAR, while Brown tied him. His career-high 7.7 WAR ranked second in the league in 1990 as he went 18-9 with a 2.40 ERA, but he finished a distant seventh in the Cy Young voting. He never led the league in Ks, but ranked in the top 10 in 10 out of 12 seasons from 1989-2000, and in the top five in seven out of eight from ’93-2000.
Following the 1999 season, Finley left the Angels for Cleveland on a three-year, $25 million deal, which he inaugurated with his fifth and final All-Star season (16-11 4.17 ERA, 4.3 WAR); alas, the club missed the playoffs for the first time in six years. Injuries limited him to 22 starts and an ugly 5.54 ERA in 2001, and he pitched just one more year, a season that was overshadowed by wife Tawny Kitaen (of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” video fame) being arrested for spousal abuse for attacking him while driving the night before he was scheduled to make his season debut. Traded to St. Louis late in the year, he finished strong and helped the Cardinals win the NL Central, but chose to walk away from his next potential payday at age 39.
Finley’s better than most people remember, but he lacks any kind of hook — a Cy Young Award, a big postseason, a signature accomplishment — that would elevate his Hall of Fame case beyond what his very respectable but hardly overwhelming S-JAWS tells us. Hershiser is below Finley in the rankings, but with his 1988 achievements (NL Cy Young, record-setting scoreless streak, and epic postseason run), three other top-five Cy Young finishes, and additional October success, he’s a much more viable, and worthy, candidate for election.
Kevin Appier
An intense competitor with an unorthodox delivery and a killer forkball and slider to complement his fastball, Appier was a first-round pick by the Royals in 1987. He debuted with the club two years later, when Saberhagen was en route to his second Cy Young, and inherited the mantle of staff ace during the team’s last gasp at competitive relevance for a generation. From 1990-93, he finished among the AL’s top four in ERA three times, and from ’90-97, he ranked among the league’s top 10 in WAR seven times; his total of 46.4 (5.8 per year) trailed only Clemens and Maddux. His best season was 1993, when he led the AL with a 2.56 ERA and 9.3 WAR, but finished third in the AL Cy Young voting; his 18-8 record was no match for Jack McDowell’s 22-10 with a 3.37 ERA and 4.4 WAR (ugh). He made just one All-Star team during this stretch, but certainly deserved more.
A torn labrum cost Appier most of 1998 and a good chunk of his velocity, requiring him to get by on finesse and guile thereafter. The Royals traded him to the A’s in mid-1999, and he helped the team to the AL West title the following season while going 15-11 with a 4.52 ERA (104 ERA+). He parlayed that into a four-year, $42 million deal with the defending NL champion Mets, but while “Ape” pitched well in the Big Apple (3.57 ERA, 3.5 WAR), he was traded to the Angels for injured slugger Mo Vaughn the following winter.
Appier turned in a solid season for the Angels (14-12, 3.92 ERA, 1.8 WAR) in 2002, though he was roughed up in the postseason even as the team won the World Series. He struggled the following season due to a torn flexor tendon, however, and drew his release in late July; the Royals picked him up, and he finished out his contract but missed most of 2004, his age-36 season, due to elbow surgery. Comeback attempts in the next two seasons, with Kansas City and Seattle, didn’t pan out.
Had it not been for injuries, Appier might have had a real shot at Cooperstown, but the what-ifs only go so far. He deserved much more recognition during what was a very good career, but with just one All-Star appearance, a single season receiving Cy Young votes, and an 0-2, 5.34 ERA record in the postseason, he doesn’t have anything that would give his Hall case the traction it would need.
Bret Saberhagen
Though he wasn’t Gooden-level, Saberhagen was a pitching prodigy in his own right. A 19th-round pick out of Grover Cleveland High School in Reseda, California in 1982, he spent just one season in the minors before debuting with the Royals one week shy of his 20th birthday, showing up with a 94 mph fastball, a great changeup, and what teammate and future manager John Wathan would call “the curveball of a lifetime.”
Saberhagen’s solid performance helped win a weak AL West that season, but it was his 20-6, 2.87 ERA performance the following year that had the greater impact. Leading a young rotation to another division title, he garnered his first Cy Young award, topped the circuit with 7.1 WAR, and won World Series MVP honors on the strength of complete-game victories in Games 3 and 7 against the Cardinals, the latter a shutout that helped finish an umpire-aided comeback from a three-games-to-one deficit.
Saberhagen struggled the following year, (7-12, 4.15 ERA, 2.0 WAR), beginning an unfortunate pattern of strong odd-numbered years and lackluster even-numbered ones that included his first All-Star selection in 1987 and a second Cy Young in ’89 (23-6 with a league-low 2.16 ERA and league-high 9.7 WAR), slotted between sub-.500 records and league-average-ish ERAs in ’88 and ’90. Notably, injuries were part of the pattern; arm troubles limited him to 25 starts in 1986 and surgery to remove bone chips in his elbow cut him to 20 starts in ’88. Through his eight seasons in Kansas City, he went 36-48 with a 3.70 ERA and 10.9 WAR in the even years, and 74-30 with a 2.85 ERA and 29.9 WAR in the odds — nearly triple the value!
In the last of those seasons, Saberhagen pitched his first no-hitter, against the White Sox on August 26, 1991, but also missed a month due to tendinitis in his shoulder; even so, his 5.1 WAR ranked eighth in the league. After the season, the Royals, who had grown increasingly wary of his $2.95 million price tag, traded him to the Mets in a five-player deal that included Gregg Jefferies and Kevin McReynolds heading in the other direction. Alas, tendinitis in his right index finger and a torn medial collateral ligament in his right knee limited Saberhagen to 34 starts over his first two seasons in New York. While injured, he made headlines and was docked a day’s pay for spraying bleach at reporters as a poorly-received practical joke during the Mets’ dismal 59-103 season in 1993. He made his third All-Star team in the strike-shortened 1994 campaign, going 14-4 with a 2.74 ERA and an 11.0 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He finished second in the NL in WAR (5.5) and third in Cy Young voting while turning in his first good season in an even-numbered year.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep it up. Saberhagen made 25 just starts in 1995, during which he was traded from the Mets to the Rockies, and while he helped the upstart third-year expansion team claim the NL Wild Card, he was pummeled in his lone postseason start by the Braves. He missed all of 1996 due to a pair of shoulder surgeries, the first to repair ligament damage shortly after the ’95 season ended, his second the following May, to implant a titanium anchor to hold his rotator cuff together. After the Rockies declined their $5 million option on him in late 1996, he signed with the Red Sox and spent most of the ’97 season rehabbing, pitching in just six late-season games. It paid off. In 1998, the 34-year-old Saberhagen went 15-8 with a 3.96 ERA while making 31 starts, his highest total since 1989, and helped the Red Sox claim the AL Wild Card. Despite three separate trips to what was then the DL in 1999, he pieced together a strong follow-up, with a 2.95 ERA and 3.8 WAR in 119 innings.
His shoulder was in no shape to continue. Where Dr. David Altchek recommended orthopedic surgery to clean up Saberhagen’s frayed rotator cuff, he didn’t expect to discover a 90% tear when he operated. Not until July 27, 2001 would Saberhagen take a major league mound again, but on that day he spun six innings of one-run ball for his 167th and final major league win. Alas, that was followed by two rough outings, more pain, and one final trip to the DL. He retired that winter at age 37; as of 2007, when I first wrote up his Hall of Fame case, he held the record with 1,016 days on the disabled list.
Given how much time he spent convalescing, rehabbing, or pitching through injuries, it’s remarkable how well Saberhagen did pitch. As I noted in the previous installment of this series, despite not debuting until 1984 and missing some time thereafter, he ranked seventh in WAR during the ’80-89 span. Extend that for a second decade and his ranking is even more impressive:
+ = Hall of Famer. WAR/250 = Wins Above Replacement per 250 innings pitched.
That’s one hell of a pitcher. By S-JAWS, Saberhagen has some separation above the previous trio as well as Hershiser and Stieb, and rankings-wise, he’s in the same neighborhood as Hall of Famers as disparate as Jim Bunning, Pud Galvin, and Don Sutton, not to mention CC Sabathia. His overall postseason numbers (2-4, 4.67 ERA in 54 innings) aren’t great, but between his 1985 heroics and his two Cy Youngs, he’s got a legitimate case.
Spoiler alert: so to do the last two pitchers on my list, Cone and Brown, but that will have to wait for my next installment.
Mike Trout has as many MVP awards (three) as he has career playoff games, a fact that can haunt those of us who long to see generational stars get their chances in the brightest spotlights. It is an unfortunate side effect of the otherwise redeemable fact that in baseball, somewhat uniquely, no individual player has so much of an impact on his team’s performance as to secure them a playoff spot. Even the combination of Trout and fellow MVP Shohei Ohtanihasn’t been enough to nab the Angels so much as a Wild Card since 2014, instead playing out as a sort of macro Tungsten Arm O’Doyle scenario.
This year, Trout and Ohtani will once again be watching from home, the Angels having guaranteed a seventh straight season under .500. But them aside, the 2022 postseason is poised to be what it has failed to be in seasons past: a true showcase of the league’s finest offensive talent.
As it stood Wednesday, each of the league’s top 13 hitters by WAR are headed for postseason play, an entirely unprecedented level of October-bound talent at the top of the league. Led by Aaron Judge’s historic 10.9 WAR and a slew of NL MVP contenders, the top 13 represent nine of the 12 playoff teams, including each division winner. In fact, if the season ended today, 21 of the top 23 offensive players by WAR — all but Boston’s Xander Bogaerts and Trout, who, to be fair, both could have found themselves in the top 13 were it not for injuries — would qualify. Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: And we are here! There’s no queue, so feel free to ask anything off the top of your head.
12:09
Dan Szymborski: I had some technical difficulties.
12:09
Champdo: What are your thoughts on Kerry Carpenter and Ryan Kreidler
12:10
Dan Szymborski: Definitely curious to see Carpenter’s ZiPS this year. His improvement in power this year has been insane, more than can be explained by the big bump in offense in the minors
12:10
Dan Szymborski: He’s in the right organization to continue to get opportunities.
12:11
Dan Szymborski: Would be funny if he turned out to be Spencer Torkelson instead of Spencer Torkelson
Nick Frasso has a high-octane heater and an intriguing ceiling. Acquired by the Los Angeles Dodgers from the Toronto Blue Jays at this summer’s trade deadline, the 23-year-old right-hander was described by Eric Longenhagen prior to the season as “an uncommon sort of prospect,” a projectable hurler who’d had a velocity spike before undergoing Tommy John surgery shortly after being selected 106th overall in the 2020 draft.
Loyola Marymount University product has only elevated his profile since returning to the mound in mid-May. Featuring a fastball with more juice than the one he displayed pre-injury, he logged a 1.83 ERA with 76 strikeouts and just 33 hits allowed in 54 innings. Moreover, he did so while climbing from Low-A to Double-A in three months time.
Frasso — No. 20 on our Dodgers prospect rankings, with a 40+ FV — sat down to discuss his repertoire, and recent change of scenery, following an August outing with the High-A Great Lakes Loons.
———
David Laurila: Let’s start with your early-career development. What do you know now that you didn’t when you signed your first professional contract?
Nick Frasso: “My last year in college is when we finally got a TrackMan at our school and as that was the COVID year, I didn’t even get to use it a ton. It wasn’t until I jumped into pro ball that I really got access to all the analytical stuff — the metrics that allowed me to see what my pitches do, what works better in certain situations, and stuff like that. I’ve kind of gone from there.”
Laurila: I was at last night’s [August 16] game and saw you hit triple digits a couple of times. How does your fastball profile outside of the velocity? Read the rest of this entry »
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Dan Szymborski