Matt Vierling has been a versatile player for the Philadelphia Phillies this season. Primarily a center fielder, the 25-year-old University of Notre Dame product has also seen action in the outfield corners, as well as at first, second, and third base. He’s also capable with the bat. While not yet fully established against big league pitching, Vierling has a 95 wRC+ in 229 plate appearances with the NL East club, plus the potential to produce at a higher level as he matures.
Vierling discussed his simple-meets-cerebral approach, and how he’s evolved since entering pro ball as fifth-round draft pick four years ago, during spring training.
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David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite Talks Hitting openers. Do you approach hitting as more of an art, or as more of a science?
Matt Vierling: “I would lean more towards art, although I see both sides. It’s definitely science with the mechanics; if you don’t make the right swing, there’s a mechanical reason why. But when you’re up there and in the flow of things, it’s more like an art. I’d have to lean more in that direction.”
Laurila: This is maybe a hard question to answer, but how would you describe your art?
Vierling: “That is a hard one. I guess it would be being in rhythm — a lot of rhythm and a lot of timing. It’s not so much dancing with the pitcher, but kind of just being in his rhythm, being on time with him.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley are joined by FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen to banter about what accounts for the variability in how quickly prospects acclimate to the majors and detecting holes in swings, discuss (10:50) which teams have the prospects to trade for Juan Soto, review (22:59) impressive performances from the Futures Game (including a booming BP by Francisco Álvarez and a record throw by Masyn Winn), recap (31:02) the highs of the Home Run Derby and All-Star Game (with a focus on Julio Rodríguez’s standout Derby and the events’ best promotional moments), then break down the amateur draft, touching on the top three picks, the Orioles’ fruitful draft, the Rangers’ surprising Kumar Rocker selection, why so many sons of major leaguers were drafted, atypical players and potential two-way players, the teams with the best and most perplexing draft classes, the impact of the draft combine, and more, followed (1:45:09) by a Stat Blast on César Hernández and historic power outages, and a Past Blast from 1879.
This weekend in Cooperstown, six Era Committee candidates will be inducted alongside the BBWAA-elected David Ortiz. Among them are some of the most long-awaited honorees whose supporters agonized for decades over their being shut out, both before and after their deaths. Negro Leagues player/manager/scout/coach/ambassador Buck O’Neil and Negro Leagues and American League star Minnie Miñoso both hung on well into their 90s hoping they could see the day of their induction but died before it happened. Star first baseman and manager Gil Hodges died of a heart attack at age 47, before his candidacy became the ultimate “close-but-no-cigar” example, both via the BBWAA and Veterans Committee processes. Black baseball pioneer Bud Fowler, who was raised in Cooperstown, went largely unrecognized until the centennial of his death in 2013. Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat, both of whom are 84, are thankfully alive to experience the honor, but they, too, had a long wait, after falling one and two votes short, respectively, on the 2015 Golden Era ballot.
The festivities will be tinged with more than a hint of bittersweetness due to the deferred honors, but there won’t be any shortage of joy and catharsis that these men are finally being recognized. Yet even as they take place, it feels as though a gate is swinging shut behind them — one that may not open again for awhile given the the shakeup of the Era Committee process that the Hall announced in April which reduced the numbers of committees, candidates, and votes available. I won’t rehash the road to this point (you can see the gory details in the aforementioned link), but here’s the new format, which will roll out in this order over the next three years starting in December:
December 2022 (for Class of 2023): Contemporary Baseball – Players. For those who made their greatest impact upon the game from 1980 onward and have aged off the BBWAA ballot.
December 2023 (for Class of 2024): Contemporary Baseball – Managers, Umpires, and Executives. For those who made their greatest impact upon the game from 1980 to the present day.
December 2024 (for Class of 2025): Classic Baseball. For those who made their greatest impact upon the game before 1980, including Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black players
The Classic Baseball Era Committee now has purview over all of the candidates previously covered by the Early Baseball (1871–1949) and Golden Days (1950–69) committees — the two that produced this weekend’s honorees and which otherwise weren’t scheduled to convene again for 10 and five years, respectively — as well as about half of those covered by the Modern Baseball (1970–87) one. In other words, voters for that ballot now have to weigh candidates whose contributions may have taken place over a century apart. What’s more, where there were 10 candidates apiece for each of those ballots under the older system, the new ones contain only eight, and where the 16 committee members (a mixture of Hall of Famers, executives, and writers/historians) could previously vote for four of those 10 candidates, that number has been reduced to three. Candidates will still need to receive a minimum of 75% of votes to be elected.
In other words, there’s a new bottleneck in place for the older candidates, and it has happened just as the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues candidates — players and non-players alike — finally returned to eligibility after the books were closed on that period following the aforementioned 2006 election, which produced 17 honorees but froze out O’Neil. For those who make it to the ballot, the math that was already very tough is undeniably tougher. Instead of a maximum of 64 votes spread across 10 candidates (an average of 6.4 per candidate), there are now 48 spread across eight candidates (six per candidate). Electing four candidates from a single slate, which happened for the first time on the 2022 Golden Days ballot, would require each of those four to receive exactly 12 votes. Read the rest of this entry »
Ty France was named to the American League All-Star team this past Sunday. Added when Mike Trout bowed out due to injury, the Seattle Mariners first baseman didn’t simply merit the honor, his addition was overdue. Statistically the best hitter on baseball’s hottest team — 14 straight wins heading into the break! — France is slashing .308/.376/.470, with club-bests in both wOBA (.369) and wRC+ (148).
He’s not a flash in the pan. A 34th-round pick by the San Diego Padres in 2015 out of San Diego State University, France has long shown an ability to square up baseballs. A .300/.388/.463 hitter over all professional levels, all he’s really needed was the opportunity.
“That’s really all it is,” France said prior to a game at Fenway Park in late May. “Honestly, it’s being able to play every day — being in the lineup and getting those consistent reps — more than anything else. This game is a lot of ups and downs, and the more comfortable you can be, the more you’re going to find yourself in a good spot.” Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a good thing that baseball writers don’t get tested on our ability to do fractions. Since time immemorial, we’ve called the All-Star break the halfway mark of the season. It’s not. Every team has played at least 90 games, even in a season with a delayed start. In fact, this is the season where calling the All-Star break the halfway mark would make most sense, and it’s still wrong.
Why do we do it? Partially, it’s because it sure would be convenient if the break really did mark the halfway point. Dividing the season into two halves makes for some fun analysis, and it works a lot better when the division occurs at a point with an event around it, rather than some random Tuesday in early July. It’s also because it creates something interesting to write about during a gap when game play would otherwise be stopped. There’s dead air every year around this time; filling it with “in the first half of the season” stories makes good sense.
I’m rambling, though. The point is, it’s the All-Star break, and I want to write an article about terrible swings. What was I going to call it, the worst swings of the first 55.5% of the season? That’s not catchy enough. “First half” just sounds better. And so here, perpetuating a bad sportswriter generalization, are the worst swings of the first half of the season.
A few ground rules: I’m focusing on swings at fastballs. Bad swings at breaking pitches are funny, but they’re understandable. Those pitches were designed to deceive, and they accomplished their goal. Sure, maybe swinging at a slider that bounces in the opposite batter’s box isn’t a good look, but I can understand how a hitter might end up there. Baseball is an unfair game. The pitches move funny. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley continue their celebration of the 10th anniversary of Effectively Wild by bringing on former cohost Jeff Sullivan and Most Frequent Guest (for now) Grant Brisbee to banter about Jeff’s job with the Rays and draft their favorite baseball stories from the past 10 years (plus a Past Blast from 1878).
Audio intro: Joel Plaskett Emergency, “Old Friends” Audio outro: Willie Nelson With Waylon Jennings, “Old Friends”
Even for a player with six previous All-Star selections to his name, Paul Goldschmidt is having a career year. The 34-year-old first baseman finished the first half of the 2022 season leading the National League in all three slash-stat categories (.330/.414/.590) as well as wRC+ (184). He’s deservedly the starting first baseman for the NL squad in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game, and he provides a great point of entry when it comes to the players who have helped their causes toward eventual enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
This may not seem like an obvious time to check in on such players, but July is quite the logjam when it comes to the baseball calendar. In addition to the All-Star Game and its high-profile auxiliary events (the Futures Game and the Home Run Derby), we now have the amateur draft and the run-up to the trade deadline, even if the actual date of the latter has slipped to August 2 this year. Right in the middle of this is the Hall of Fame’s Induction Weekend, which kicks off this Friday and culminates in Sunday’s ceremony. It’s a time that I get a lot of questions about active players vying for future elections, and in the interest of providing a one-stop shop, here we are.
I’m punting on pitching for this installment as well. I owe readers a couple more entries in the S-JAWS series I was working on during the lockout, and when I get back to that, I’ll look a bit more closely at Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Max Scherzer, all of whom have already cleared the standards. At some point I’ll also take a look at the trio of closers — Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen, and Craig Kimbrel — who have each wandered into the weeds at a crucial time.
That still leaves plenty of players to discuss, even if they’re clustered in just five of the eight remaining field positions. For this exercise, I will be referencing Baseball Reference’s version of WAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, as well as the ZiPS rest-of-season projections created by Dan Szymborski, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season rather than crunching the numbers as if the season has ended. Read the rest of this entry »
All-Star Week may be a relaxing midseason respite for most players, but for front offices, it’s business as usual. For the Padres, it may be a high-stakes one, as they’re reportedly closing in on a long-term deal with their best starting pitcher, Joe Musgrove. Without a deal, he hits free agency for the first time in his career, and there’s not much that teams like less than being drawn into a bidding war over their ace.
The starting pitchers the Padres have acquired over the last few years have mixed in many lows with their highs, but Musgrove has been rock-solid in mustard-and-brown, putting up a 2.90 ERA, a 3.48 FIP, and a hair under six WAR in 47 starts since coming over from the Pirates. During last season’s late-year debacle that saw San Diego in desperate enough straits to sign Jake Arrieta as a free agent and throw him into the rotation, Musgrove was a rare example of solidity, with only one truly awful start in the last month of the season. While he’s lost some strikeouts from 2021, he’s also bid adieu to some of the walks — not an unpleasant tradeoff, given that he ranks fifth among qualifying starters in lowest average exit velocity at 86.7 mph.
Fewer walks and strikeouts have allowed Musgrove to get through innings slightly more efficiently. As a result, he’s averaged almost a full inning per start more than last year while throwing just three more pitches per outing. Getting through the sixth more often has resulted in his quality start percentage shooting up from 48% to 88%; among MLB qualifiers, only Framber Valdez has racked up a higher rate. Musgrove’s five-inning loss to the Rockies last Wednesday was the first time he failed to finish six innings this season. This durability and consistency are crucial to the Padres, given their experience last season when they tried to keep the rotation’s inning count low in the early going, resulting in an exhausted bullpen breaking down by July.
With the trade deadline fast approaching, getting some certainty about Musgrove’s future with the club has quite a bit of value. The Padres seem likely to add a bat, and getting a better idea of how many pitchers they’ll need to replace over the next few years should provide some guidance on which prospects they can afford to give up. Sean Manaea and Mike Clevinger are also free agents after this season, and Blake Snell and Yu Darvish will be after 2023, so getting Musgrove inked for most of the rest of the decade takes at least one problem off their plate.
So, what kind of deal is Musgrove likely looking at? Let’s fire up ZiPS and run him through the mathematical wringer. Read the rest of this entry »
Unless you count Stephen Strasburg’s much-hyped debut, a top pitching prospect’s first start usually doesn’t have much to write home about. While talented, the player in question is understandably an unfinished product who’s facing big league hitters for the first time, in addition to fighting off nerves and perhaps pressure to perform. If you’re looking for some razzle-dazzle, it’s best to wait out a season of adjustments, maybe two. I mean, just look at how Shane McClanahan is taking off this season!
At a glance, Max Meyer’s debut is emblematic of the rookie pitcher’s all-too-common plight. Sure, he did strike out five and hold his own through five innings, but things quickly unraveled afterward. In the top of the sixth, the Phillies got to see Meyer for a third time, which resulted in a home run, walk, and a double. Richard Bleier then took over, but the lefty allowed both runners to score, ballooning Meyer’s earned run total to five. You never got the sense that Meyer was in control of the Phillies, and you couldn’t be blamed for thinking he was ill-prepared.
But c’mon, FanGraphs doesn’t just stop at the box score. From a different angle, Meyer’s debut is one of the more striking ones in recent memory. Read the rest of this entry »
When he was first featured here at FanGraphs three years ago, I wrote that Nestor Cortes “barely registers a blip on the national radar.” With his multiple windups in mind, I called the then-24-year-old southpaw “probably the most unique member of the 2019 New York Yankees.”
A lot has changed since that time. Cortes is still unique — the funkiness and deceptive deliveries remain part of his M.O. — but he’s otherwise a much different pitcher. He’s also become a household name. Traded to Seattle in November 2019, Cortes returned to New York in free agency prior to last season and has since been remade into one of the top starters in the American League. A first-time All-Star with a 2.63 ERA and 99 strikeouts in 95-and-two-thirds innings, Cortes attacks hitters with a different arsenal than the one he employed as an obscure reliever.
How has Cortes evolved, and just as importantly, can he continue to thrive if he doesn’t evolve further? Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake addressed those questions when the team visited Fenway Park earlier this month.
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David Laurila: You’ve obviously been asked about Nestor Cortes numerous times already this season. That said, why has he been so good?
Matt Blake: “When he first started going last year, the league didn’t really know who he was. I mean, they knew of Nestor, but they hadn’t necessarily seen this version of him, where there’s a little bit more velocity [and] the fastball has kind of a true riding profile, one that’s a little bit closer to cut than run. And then the cutter off of that creates a really tough visual for hitters to identify. He’d also added the sweeper slider to be able to slow guys down and steal some strikes. Read the rest of this entry »
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