Yesterday, we wrapped up our analysis of the league’s infielders with third base and shortstop. Today, we shift our attention to the outfield, starting in left.
The sabermetric era has resulted in hard times for left field as a position. Teams are more willing than ever to give their best young talent every opportunity to stick at tougher defensive positions, which narrows the pipeline to corner outfield jobs. One-dimensional hitters have gone out of style and big home run totals alone don’t result in hefty contracts on the easy side of the defensive spectrum. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, with barely half the number of teams, there were regularly six or seven active left fielders who were future Hall of Famers. Harmon Killebrew, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Frank Robinson, and Carl Yastrzemski all qualified for the batting title as left fielders in 1963. In contrast, there are basically two superstar left fielders today: Juan Soto and Yordan Alvarez, and the latter doesn’t even exclusively play the position. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter euphorically about the unbelievable ending of the World Baseball Classic, from Japan’s semifinal game against Mexico, to the climactic showdown between Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout in the USA-Japan final, to what made the whole WBC such a success. Then (52:02) they close the book on meeting major leaguers from 2022 by talking to James Bailey, author of Major League Debuts: 2023 Edition, about his new series of annual books about every player who makes the majors, his process for researching rookies, whether there are too many major leaguers, and 2022 debutants Jason Delay, Ben DeLuzio, and Donny Sands, followed by a Stat Blast (1:24:15) about Ichiro Cano and the highest-WAR combined baseball names, plus a Past Blast (1:33:14) from 1984.
Last October, I wrote a piece about Jarred Kelenic’s small sample success in the final month of the 2022 season. After a rollercoaster start to his career, he had kept pushing along trying to find the version of his swing that would allow him to adjust at different heights of the zone and be formidable against big league breaking balls. For much of 2022, he could hardly make contact against quality breaking balls, but at the end of the season, his swing began to look more connected. It led to slight improvements in breaking ball contact and contact in general against lefties. It was also a positive way to head into the offseason, where he could have more time to explore his swing and find the best version of himself. Since Kelenic was constantly tweaking during the season while jumping between the majors and minors, it was inevitable he would look at least a little different once spring came around.
That was indeed the case on his first day in Peoria, and so far in spring training, the adjustments he made have been paying off. Yes, it’s only spring training, but sometimes if you read in between the lines and try to find sticky characteristics, this month of baseball can be more than just a tuneup. And Kelenic has been nothing short of incredible at the plate. In his 38 Cactus League at-bats, he has 16 hits, eight of which have gone for extra bases all over the field — many of them crushed at over 100 mph. It’s great to see such a dominant performance from a results perspective, but one key piece of his ongoing changes focuses on the mental aspect of hitting: approach and quality at-bats. That piece has a direct influence on his swing mechanics.
In an interview he did with Seattle Sports in the beginning of March, Kelenic talked about being focused on things you can control as a hitter and battling through unfortunate circumstances. He spoke under the context of an at-bat from the day prior, where he thought the umpire missed two calls that put him down 0–2; he flushed those pitches and ended up scorching a line drive over the center field wall. This mental side of hitting is an important step in the quest to becoming a mature hitter. He talked more at length about this mentality in a separate interview with the Seattle Times. Specifically, he has focused on the idea of “winning the pitch” regardless of the count. This keeps a hitter competitive and able to maintain a short-term memory — a necessary skill in baseball. Kelenic has provided several quotes this spring that give us a better idea of how he is approaching the game, and it allows somebody like me, who has been keen to analyze his changes, to follow his story with better prior knowledge. And the changes have been quite interesting, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Some pitchers approach their craft by trying to hone their established pitch repertoire to make the most of what they’ve always thrown. Then there’s Logan Gilbert. Rather than stick with the pitches that were the foundation of his success in college and through the minors, he’s consistently tinkered with new grips and new pitches to enhance his arsenal, even after reaching the big leagues. Last year, he revamped each of his secondary offerings in an attempt to gain more consistent effectiveness with them. He hasn’t been afraid to make adjustments on the fly during the season either, all in an effort to maximize his abilities on the mound.
This spring, Gilbert debuted a brand-new splitter to replace his changeup. That older pitch was effective in limited action, but he rarely had a good feel for it, making it an inconsistent offering at best. “I’ve always tried the changeup and just kind of struggled with it, [it] just wasn’t natural for me,” Gilbert said in an interview with Daniel Kramer of MLB.com. “So I’m just trying to find basically a variation of a splitter that I can throw like a fastball.”
Before we get too deep into his new pitch, I want to go back and look at how Gilbert’s entire repertoire has evolved over the last two years. To do so, I’m going to be using the new Stuff+ leaderboards recently introduced on the site. Stuff+ is a pitch model developed by Eno Sarris and Max Bay that attempts to quantify the quality of a given pitch using only the underlying physical characteristics of said pitch. Stuff+ becomes reliably predictive very quickly — in under 100 pitches — and is extremely sticky year-to-year. That reliability means it’s sensitive to changes in a pitch’s characteristics, making it an excellent tool to evaluate someone like Gilbert.
The one constant for Gilbert has been his fastball, which possesses excellent raw velocity that plays up even higher when you take into account his elite release extension. With above-average ride and good command, his heater has been the backbone of his pitch mix. If anything, he’s leaned on it a little too much early in his career, but only because his secondary offerings have lagged behind. The graph above puts the inconsistency of those pitches in stark relief. His changeup finally found some sure footing last season, even if he couldn’t command it at all. More importantly, his two breaking balls have oscillated in effectiveness, with neither registering above average at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »
By its very definition, the World Baseball Classic is a global baseball tournament; it’s right there in the name after all. It also feels obvious: Japan won the WBC for the third time, led by the best player on the earth, with a lineup and rotation and bullpen full of NPB All-Stars, and did so by beating Team USA and its All-MLB roster. The United States is the sport’s birthplace and the home of its premier professional league, but the game long ago left its borders, and through the WBC, we’ve gotten to see just how strange and great and flat-out joyful it can be around the world.
If you’ve watched the WBC before, you’ve known this, or at least gotten glimpses of it. If this WBC was your entry point into baseball beyond our shores, then you saw it damn near every day — not just through Japan overcoming its competition but through Mexico almost upsetting them on the way to that title, or through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and Venezuela playing with their motors revved all the way up, or through just how many times the United States, with Mookie Betts and Mike Trout and Nolan Arenado (I could literally just list the entire ridiculous lineup), was pushed up against a wall and forced to fight its way free. That they did is a testament not just to the absurd collection of talent assembled on that roster but also to how good the rest of the world now is, and while it’s too early to declare the results of this year’s tournament to be a sea change, it’s also no overreaction to note that the WBC is a genuine competition with multiple viable contenders and not just a slower version of The Dream Team stomping wildly overmatched countries by double digits.
That fact can get lost given the understandably and disproportionately heavy focus that the United States and MLB receive in the history of the sport. Baseball in other countries is framed primarily as “Here’s when Americans introduced the game,” and foreign players are usually assessed on a basis of “When will they come to MLB, and how good will they be?” (We here at FanGraphs are as guilty of the latter as anyone else.) The rest of the world, in the minds of most American fans, exists as a feeder for MLB, and by default, the rest of the world will always be a step behind, producing greatness but never overtaking the United States as the center of the baseball universe.
By virtue of the money it makes and the level of competition, MLB is the peak of the mountain, and no number of WBC wins by Japan or any other country will change that. Tuesday night didn’t provide a sneak peak at our new NPB overlords. But forget about that hierarchy and its demand that the only game that matters is the one that takes place from April to October on one continent, or the blinkered myopia that unless a team is hoisting a World Series trophy at the end, then it was all for nothing. There’s more to baseball than the narrow confines of MLB, and the sport itself will only grow and improve the more America’s place atop the pyramid is challenged — the more that places like Japan and Cuba and Mexico but also Great Britain and Colombia and Taiwan produce star players at any level.
More than anything, that was the message of the WBC: baseball is global, and baseball is better by being global. No culture, society or art has ever been better for being closed off, or for shunning the wider world. Baseball is no different. Diversity breeds innovation, and innovation keeps the game from getting stale. We should celebrate the version of baseball in which America isn’t the unquestioned champion, in which other countries get to see themselves finding the kind of success that this country tends to monopolize when it comes to organized sports. Spread the joy and receive plenty in return; open the world and delight in who walks in the door. Be happy when the competition gets better and stronger and pushes us to do the same.
The 2023 WBC was roaring Dominican and Puerto Rican fans in Miami, sellout crowds in Taipei and Tokyo, unexpected star turns from Czech and Nicaraguan and British players. It was a sign of how far the game has spread and how deep it lies in the DNA of so many disparate places, with no common culture or connectors other than a bat, a ball, and four bases. It was a celebration of all the different ways that fans enjoy the game, and if you ever doubt that, think about the brass bands and ringing chants in the stands backing Japan or the Latin American fans turning LoanDepot Park into a week-long block party or the videos of people around the world, watching in bars or at home in the darkest hours of the night or at dawn or in the middle of the afternoon, tuning into an exhibition in which the only prize was national pride. It was proof that baseball is more than MLB.
You saw that made plain on Tuesday night, when Shohei Ohtani struck out Trout in a moment so laden with symbolism that you could probably build a book around it, or at least a short 30 for 30 episode. (Fittingly and deservingly, it was Ohtani who was named the tournament MVP.) It’s too soon to tell if that at-bat is one of those hinge points in history, around which baseball empires fall and new ones rise and the course of the sport’s existence is inexorably and irretrievably altered. But that moment doesn’t have to be so lofty or ponderous. It can simply be a reflection of a truth that the WBC made crystal clear: Baseball belongs to the world.
Earlier today, Davy Andrews gave an accounting of the league’s third basemen. Now we turn our attention to the shortstops.
So, so deep. That’s true of the Mariana Trench, which extends some 36,000 feet below sea level, and also of the shortstop position in the major leagues. If you think of an average player as one who accrues roughly 2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, 29 teams are above average at shortstop. That’s because everyone puts their best athletes there for as long as they can, which results in an embarrassment of positional riches. You have to delve down to 25th on this list to get to a team whose aggregate projection is less than 3.0 WAR. No other position’s list of three-WARriors extends past 20th. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, Jay Jaffe and Leo Morgenstern examined the state of first and second base. Today, we wrap up the infield positions, starting with a look at third base.
Third base has featured some truly top-tier stars in their prime for a while now. Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, and José Ramírez are all either 30 or 31 (Arenado turns 32 next month), and all are coming off seasons so spectacular that no projection system worth its ones and zeros would predict a repeat performance. Alex Bregman turns 29 in just a couple of days, and the projections see him notching another five wins in 2023. All of this to say, enjoy peak third base while you can, because aging curves bend but they rarely break. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Good evening, folks, and welcome to our WBC Finals chat!
7:01
Guest: Why isn’t Japan starting one of Darvish/Ohtani? They seem clearly better than Imanaga.
7:03
Jay Jaffe: Ohtani started five days ago so guess they didn’t want to mess with his every sixth-day routine, but he could pitch an inning in relief. Darvish… not sure, as the complaint has been that he hasn’t been getting enough buildup here, but I’d expect he’s good for 2-3 innings tonight
7:03
Kyle Kishimoto: i theorized last night he could get an early hook for darvish to burn some USA bench bats (ex anderson starting over mcneil today)
7:03
Ann Xing: Who are the potential relievers for the US team?
7:03
Kyle Kishimoto: maybe they don’t want to use bard in high leverage, but the combo of williams/adam/bednar/pressly/ottavino will be great, with loup there too hopefully to deal with the 5 lefties stacked atop japan’s lineup.
Earlier today, Jay Jaffe covered the league’s first basemen. Now, Leo Morgenstern examines the state of the keystone.
Second base is going to be a fascinating position to watch this season. Under the new rules limiting defensive shifts, teams must have “at least two infielders completely on either side of second base,” and those players “may not switch sides” within an inning. Consequently, second basemen will no longer have help from a shifted shortstop or third baseman, making defensive range all the more important at the keystone. On the other side of the ball, second basemen could have their best offensive season in years. While excellent bat-to-ball skills aren’t a requirement to play the position, the two often go hand in hand. Second basemen are consistently the best contact hitters (and some of the worst power hitters) in the sport. This means their performance is more dependent on BABIP, so with the distinct possibility that league-wide BABIP will rise this season, second basemen could stand to benefit quite a bit.
And it’s not just about the new rules! Second base is projected to have the most even distribution of talent, from the Rangers at the top to the Nationals at the bottom. It’s the only defensive position where no team is projected for more than 5 WAR, and yet 28 teams are projected for at least two wins. The bottom-ranked Nationals are still projected for 1.8 WAR – the highest among last-place teams at any position. Read the rest of this entry »
Nico Hoerner is a mix of old school and new school when it comes to hitting. He’s also a mix of contact and emerging gap-to-gap power. Drafted 24th overall by the Chicago Cubs out of Stanford University in 2018, the 25-year-old second baseman is coming off a season where he slashed .281/.327/.410 with 10 home runs and a 106 wRC+. Possessing potential that easily exceeds his to-date performance, he projects as a cornerstone in the Cubs’ lineup for years to come.
Hoerner discussed his continuing evolution as a hitter, including how he balances an appreciation of metrics and a keep-it-simple approach, following a recent spring training game in Mesa, Arizona.
———
David Laurila: How have you evolved as a hitter since coming to pro ball? Are you mostly the same guy?
Nico Hoerner: “For the most part, I don’t think guys really change that much. The guys that improve a lot are often doubling down on their strengths. They’re learning what they do best and are more consistent with that. I’ve definitely made improvements — there are things that have changed over the years — but I think my foundation is pretty similar.”
Laurila: I recall reading that you made a swing adjustment shortly after you signed, the goal being to hit more balls in the air. Is that accurate?
Hoerner: “I’ve never wanted to hit a ground ball in my life, to be honest with you. A lot of it comes from the pitches you swing at, how your body is moving, and learning your own strengths.”
Laurila: That said, was there an actual adjustment?
Hoerner: “Yeah. I think what you swing at is going to be the biggest factor in the balls that you put in play. I’m looking to hit the ball hard, hit high line drives as much as I can, and swing at pitches in the middle of the plate. Over time, with more at-bats, more experience, that really comes about.” Read the rest of this entry »
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Jay Jaffe
