It doesn’t take a keen eye for analysis to watch a baseball game and guess which player is the slowest. You could grab a stopwatch and time them running to first, or you could just take a look at the short and stout guy crouching all game and wearing body armor. I’m not breaking any ground when I tell you that catchers are the slowest major leaguers.

A less settled question: why are they so slow? Is it the armor? Is it the short and stout part? Is it the deleterious effect of crouching all day? We have eight years of sprint speed data, so I decided to dig into it and look for an answer.

First things first: I constructed a sprint speed aging curve. To do that, I took every player-season with at least 10 competitive runs starting in 2015. For each player-season, I noted their age, position, sprint speed in year one, and change in sprint speed in the subsequent year (assuming they made at least 10 competitive runs). For example, Byron Buxton was 21 in 2015 and posted an average sprint speed of 30.9 ft/sec on competitive runs while playing center field. The next year, he again posted an average sprint speed of 30.9 ft/sec. Thus, I recorded 21, CF, 30.9, and 0 (change). Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have any reason to suspect that Sandy Alcantara is a sadist or a misanthrope, but if he is, the next week will be quite entertaining.

Certainly the Marlins right-hander has caused no end of pain or suffering, inflicting failure and frustration upon National League hitters to a level unmatched this season. Alcantara’s strikeout and walk numbers haven’t been exceptional this year. Nevertheless he’s done the most important thing a pitcher can do — prevent runs — at a conspicuously high level; his 2.32 ERA is second among qualified NL starters. Combined with the staggering volume of his work (he leads the league with 220 2/3 innings pitched in a season when no one else has broken 200 yet), Alcantara is among the favorites for NL Cy Young.

That individual hardware would obviously be the biggest prize for a pitcher who’s done great work for a fourth-place club. But with two series left in the regular season, Alcantara could — if he so chooses — have a greater impact on the remaining pennant race than any other player. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the inadequacies of dental insurance and Ben’s rewarding trip to Citi Field, a Marlins marketing strategy, Richard Bleier’s balk debacle, pitchers getting the memo about throwing strikes to Aaron Judge and Judge’s difference-making performance even when he doesn’t homer, preliminary Stat Blasts (41:33) about the most consecutive secondary pitches thrown to a batter in a game and the redundancy of RBI as a Triple Crown stat, finding things to savor in the regular season even with a shortage of standings suspense, more Stat Blasts (59:33) about the Braves’ extreme day/night split revisited, Fibonacci Sequence scoring, getting replaced before a second PA in both ends of a doubleheader, combined/relay cycles, Albert Pujols and homering on the most dates during the regular season, and games getting away from cruising pitchers, plus a Past Blast from 1909 (1:33:56) and a real-time reaction to Judge’s 61st (1:38:40).

Audio intro: Ezra Furman, “My Teeth Hurt”
Audio outro: Son Volt, “Afterglow 61”

Link to Marlins marketing tweet
Link to Dan S. on Meneses
Link to Bleier balks story
Link to Bois’s balk rules
Link to Sam Miller on balks
Link to Rob Mains on the Year of the Balk
Link to first episode about Judge/strikes
Link to consecutive secondaries sheet
Link to FG Junis post
Link to article on HR/SB leaders
Link to FG standings suspense post
Link to Stathead
Link to Stathead webinar
Link to Ryan Nelson on Twitter
Link to Atlanta day/night data
Link to Fibonacci Sequence explainer
Link to Fibonacci games
Link to doubleheader replacement data
Link to post on relay/combined cycles
Link to relay/combined cycles sheet
Link to Seinfeld reference clip
Link to info on ex-cruising pitchers
Link to Russell on replacing pitchers
Link to EW emails database
Link to 1909 story source
Link to Tim Murnane SABR bio
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to video of Judge’s homer
Link to Lindsey on relievers catching HR

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At the trade deadline, the Nationals shipped out their franchise player, Juan Soto, to the Padres in return for an admittedly impressive array of prospects. Losing him, along with first baseman Josh Bell, removed the last two dynamic hitters from one of the worst offenses in baseball this side of the Tigers. Replacing your best offensive player, especially one as talented as Soto, isn’t an easy tax, though it’s one the Nats managed to do last time when the Bryce Harper era smoothly gave way to the Childish Bambino one. And for the very short term, at least, Washington has pulled this trick for a second time.

No, the Nats haven’t found another phenom to succeed Soto, but instead, they went with journeyman minor league outfielder Joey Meneses. He isn’t a prospect of any type, or even a young player; he’s older than not only Soto but also Harper. But what Meneses has done in defying expectations is impressive, with his 158 wRC+ in more than 200 plate appearances actually besting Soto’s pre-trade wRC+ of 152. I’m not going to suggest that Meneses is actually able to replace Soto, but it is extremely cool to see a minor leaguer be able to capitalize on such a rare opportunity.

For the background on Meneses, I urge you to check out the piece written by our friend Ben Lindbergh over at the Ringer earlier this month, for which I supplied a ZiPS minor league translation for Meneses’ 2022 season, which came out as a useful but un-enthralling .260/.303/.430 line and a 110 OPS+. Yet the supposedly imminent Cinderella-esque pumpkinification has yet to happen, and Meneses has continued to hit in September, with a .324/.364/.560 line and six homers. After a couple hundred visits to the plate, it becomes harder to dismiss performances like this, so I thought I’d jump in and take a more detailed look at the future of Meneses. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2018, a Philadelphia Phillies team made up mostly of homegrown players ran out of gas down the stretch. Rookie manager Gabe Kapler’s club held first place into the second week of August, then (to use the scientific term) crapped the bed. After an 8-20 September, Philadelphia ended the season in third place, two games under .500 and 10 games adrift of the first-place Braves.

So they went out that offseason and got some reinforcements: Bryce Harper, obviously, but also one Jacob Tyler “J.T.” Realmuto, one of the best catchers in baseball. The same thing happened in 2019, so the Phillies cashiered Kapler and replaced him with Joe Girardi, and lavished a nine-figure contract on Zack Wheeler. In 2020, they once again fumbled an easy path to the playoffs, so ownership cleared out the front office. In 2021 it happened once more: Hot start, followed by months of stepping on banana peels, and wobbling to a record in the neighborhood of .500.

The Phillies, despite not having made the playoffs in a decade, have been in win-now mode for four or five years, and with each brigade of reinforcements (most recently Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos), Realmuto gets taken more and more for granted. He’s now one of six Phillies on a contract worth $70 million or more, and just another foot soldier in a lineup that features the reigning National League MVP, this year’s NL home run leader, and two recent first-round picks.

But Realmuto is the primary reason the great annual bed-encrappening has not befallen Philadelphia this year. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember the first time I heard Marcus Semien talk about hitting. Coming off a fantastic season with the Blue Jays, he was a finalist for the AL MVP award along with teammate Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the eventual winner, Shohei Ohtani. Not many likely paid him much attention during his interviews on MLB Network’s award show; as you would expect, everybody was patiently waiting for Ohtani to talk about his historic season on a national stage. But in every Semien soundbite during his interview with Greg Amsinger, there was a fascinating tidbit about hitting and progressing through a season. Since then, I have looked at his at-bats differently.

That’s what made watching Semien in the first two months of the season mind-boggling. He was one of the worst hitters in baseball, with a 55 wRC+, and couldn’t keep the ball off the ground. I’m a big fan and supporter of his swing, but that performance had me doubting what his future would be. But the Rangers’ second baseman got hot in the early summer, posting a 137 wRC+ over June and July, and after an average August, his September has been one of the best months of his career, with a .337/.388/.589 line and a 177 wRC+.

Through all that, Semien’s hard-hit rate stayed consistent, including his awful start and two great months in June and July, but since hard-hit rate is strictly a measurement of exit velocity, that isn’t all that surprising. What is a shocker is how he’s nearly doubled that same rate month over month.

On the year, Semien ranks 95th in all of baseball in hard-hit rate, but in September, he has ascended to 15th among all qualified hitters. That type of jump is sticky and often indicative of a concrete swing adjustment. In other words, you don’t luck yourself into hitting rockets for this long. So let’s find out what that change was. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets are the current World Series favorites, with 17.7% odds of winning a championship, according to ZiPS. They have a 76.4% chance of earning a first-round bye through capturing the NL East and a starting rotation fronted by Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom. In an ideal world, Scherzer and deGrom would pitch every postseason inning, with the occasional Edwin Díaz appearance sprinkled in, because that song with the trumpet is quite a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, people are frail. They’re full of oddly shaped parts that break and swell and stiffen and rupture. Starting pitchers are more susceptible than most. They’re the four-note motif at the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: They come out guns blazing and then need a nice, long break before they’re ready to think about doing it again. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alex’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Alex is a recent honors graduate of Vassar College, where he served as the sports and senior editor of the award-winning Miscellany News. He has also written for PitcherList and Sports Info Solutions, the latter of which he video-scouted for as well. His main interest lies in cognitive psychology, a woefully under-studied area of baseball research. For his senior thesis, he constructed a neural network that predicted pitch speed and location based on early trajectory information; he used the model’s errors to learn more about how batters might integrate a pre-pitch “guess” with their real-time perceptions. He is fascinated by pitch sequencing and is a swinging-strike enthusiast.

Julio Rodríguez. Michael Harris II. Adley Rutschman. We all know the names atop this year’s extraordinary position player rookie class. You have to go back to 2015 for the last time three different first-year hitters each accrued four or more wins; then it was Kris Bryant, Matt Duffy, and Francisco Lindor. Those names should put into perspective just how much baseball has gone by since then. But when Steven Kwan surpassed the 4-WAR mark on Sunday with a three-hit, five-RBI effort, cementing the Guardians’ American League Central crown, this year’s class became the first since 1964 to have four rookies each with four or more wins.

All told, the big four at the top have overshadowed some other stellar performances. Bobby Witt Jr. has joined the 20-20 club already; along with Rodríguez, they make up the first rookie duo to do so since 1987. Jose Siri has authored an excellent defensive season, ranking fifth in the majors in Statcast’s Runs Above Average. While not the age of a traditional rookie, Joey Meneses has come out of nowhere to post a 158 wRC+ across the last two months of the season. And among hitters with at least 400 PAs this year, Brendan Donovan ranks seventh in the majors with a .389 OBP. Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves don’t bunt much. To be fair, most teams aren’t bunting all that often these days, especially since the introduction of the universal designated hitter. The Braves, however, still stand out from the pack. In an age of reduced bunting, Atlanta is leading the charge.

Of the thousands of balls the Braves have put into play this year, only four have been bunts. Of their 1,327 hits this season, only one has come on a bunt. One. You’d be hard-pressed to find any other counting stat category on the FanGraphs leaderboards with the number one written next to a team’s name.

The bunt-tracking era at FanGraphs began in 2002. (Side note: I’m going to take credit for coining the phrase “bunt-tracking era.”) Records for sacrifice bunts were kept long before 2002, but the data for bunts and bunt hits only goes back 21 years. In that time, the lowest number of bunts for a team in a full season is 12, courtesy of the 2018 Toronto Blue Jays. With a mere four bunts this season, the Braves are nestled amongst most teams from the shortened 2020 season at the bottom of the team bunt leaderboards:

Read the rest of this entry »