I thought this week couldn’t get any better. I got to write about bunts, one of my favorite things to do, and about the Giants picking up tiny edges, another personal favorite. I got to write about Yordan Alvarez and how people underrate him; now I can cross that off my yearly to-do list. But Thursday took the cake. Have you seen this nonsense?
"When was the last time you saw somebody intentionally walked on 1-2?"
I love writing about bad intentional walks. I love writing about bad managerial decisions. But I can’t really wrap my head around this one, hard as I try. Let’s try to do the math, such as it is, while keeping in mind that no amount of math is going to make this make sense.
Let’s start at the top. Trea Turner is an excellent hitter, and Bennett Sousa is a lefty. Turner boasts average platoon splits for his career. Sousa has hardly pitched in the majors, so let’s just consider him an average lefty. With a runner on second and two outs, passing up an excellent righty hitter against your lefty pitcher is standard operating procedure. Read the rest of this entry »
With Meg Rowley on the road, Ben Lindbergh talks to a trio of guests. First (4:10), he’s joined by Mr. King, the creator of Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, to talk about baseball as ASMR, crafting a fictional league, broadcaster, and collection of players, replicating the soothing, white-noise sounds of a baseball broadcast, putting his listeners to sleep, and more. Then (34:32) Ben brings on coach and journalist John W. Miller to examine how the rise of private travel baseball clubs and pay-to-play tournaments has reshaped youth baseball and excluded some kids from the sport, discuss the ramifications from Little League to the major leagues, and propose some solutions. After that (1:18:12), former major leaguer (and former EW guest) John Poff rejoins, along with John Brave Bull and Ardyce Taken Alive from the Standing Rock Reservation, to talk about their histories, explain their efforts to bring baseball to kids at Standing Rock, and ask the EW audience for help (plus a reading of a Poff poem). Finally (1:50:05), Ben shares a baseball-history anecdote from 1860.
As anyone who does a lot of work with projections could likely tell you, one of the most annoying things about modeling future performance is that results themselves are a small sample size. Individual seasons, even full ones over 162 games, still feature results that are not very predictive, such as a hitter or a pitcher with a BABIP low or high enough to be practically unsustainable. For example, if Luis Arraez finishes the season hitting .350, we don’t actually know that a median projection of .350 was, in fact, the correct projection going into the season. There’s no divine baseball exchecquer to swoop in and let you know if he was “actually” a .350 hitter who did what he was supposed to, a .320 hitter who got lucky, or even a .380 hitter who suffered misfortune. If you flip heads on a coin eight times out of ten and have no reason to believe you have a special coin-flipping ability, you’ll eventually see the split approach 50/50 given a sufficiently large number of coin flips. Convergence in probability is a fairly large academic area that we thankfully do not need to go into here. But for most things in baseball, you never actually get enough coin flips to see this happen. The boundaries of a season are quite strict.
What does this have to do with projections? This volatile data becomes the source of future predictions, and one of the things done in projections is to find things that are not only as predictive as the ordinary stats, but also more predictive based on fewer plate appearances or batters faced. Imagine, for example, if body mass index was a wonderful predictor of isolated power. It would be a highly useful one, as changes to that over the course of a season are bound to be rather small. Underlying reasons for performance tend to be more stable than the results, which is why ERA is more volatile than strikeout rate and why strikeout rate is more volatile than plate discipline stats that result in strikeout rate.
MLB’s own method comes with an x before the stat, whereas what ZiPS uses internally has a z. I’ll let you guess what it stands for! I’ve written more about this stuff in various places such as here and here, so let’s get right to the data for the first two months of the MLB season. Read the rest of this entry »
Even if you aren’t a Braves fan, you probably have a general idea of how their season is going so far. Max Fried? He’s still good, and still the ace for the defending world champions. Kyle Wright has taken a step forward and Charlie Morton has taken a step back. The hitters? You pretty much know them all; Dansby Swanson, Austin Riley, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Matt Olson lead the offense this year.
If you’re paying the barest bit of attention, you’d already know all of those names. They either starred in last year’s postseason, made headlines in a big offseason trade, or starred early in this season. When you get to the bullpen, though, you might be lost. Remember that stalwart relief crew from the playoffs? Will Smith has been abysmal, half a win below replacement level. Tyler Matzek has an ERA above 5, a FIP above 5, and an xFIP above 6. Luke Jackson hasn’t even pitched this year; he tore his UCL before the season and will miss the entire year.
Some of that slack has been picked up by new names. Kenley Jansen has been solid. Spencer Strider is electric, though he’s now a starter — nice problem to have. But the fourth member of last year’s bullpen quartet, A.J. Minter, is making up for the rest of his cohort’s absence. He’s off to the best start of his career, and one of the best starts of any reliever in baseball.
In some ways, Minter is like a lot of other relievers you’ve seen. His best pitch is a high-spin, high-velocity fastball. He backs it up with a breaking pitch that’s somewhere between cutter and slider, 90 mph with a touch of horizontal break. To keep righties honest, he also has a hard changeup. There are a lot of relievers who fit that general mold, and until this year, you might have easily lost Minter in the crowd.
Why bring him up, then? Surely, he’s just on a good streak, a few weeks and home runs away from just being another plus reliever instead of an unsolvable hitting riddle with an ERA around 1. Maybe that’s true. Maybe this is as good as Minter will ever be — and to be clear, it’s as good as most pitchers will ever be. But I’m interested in something else:
A.J. Minter, Zone and Walk Rates
Year
Zone%
BB%
2018
43.5%
8.5%
2019
39.6%
15.6%
2020
42.3%
10.6%
2021
44.9%
9.0%
2022
37.2%
4.4%
Yes, Minter is throwing fewer pitches in the strike zone than ever. He’s also walking batters at a career-low rate (excluding a 15-inning cameo in 2017 that I’m leaving off my charts). That makes about as much sense as clicking on a pop-up ad, but let’s see if we can disentangle what’s going on here. Read the rest of this entry »
Since the day he was selected with the second pick of the 2018 draft out of Georgia Tech, Joey Bart was considered the heir apparent to Buster Posey. His progress to the majors was closely tracked, and when Posey opted out of playing during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season for family reasons, Bart arrived in the majors ahead of schedule. When Posey retired suddenly last fall after a stellar age-34 season, all eyes turned to Bart as well. His major league career thus far hasn’t gone as hoped, however, and on Wednesday the Giants optioned the struggling backstop to Triple-A Sacramento.
With Posey putting together an All-Star season as he helped the Giants to a franchise record 107 wins, Bart was left with some oversized shoes to fill, but he began the season with great fanfare, homering on Opening Day off the Marlins’ Sandy Alcantara. Alas, the 25-year-old backstop has hit a meager .156/.296/.300 with four homers in 108 plate appearances overall. He started 21 of the team’s first 34 games, capped by a ninth-inning homer off Albert Pujols (!) on May 15, but after that, he started just eight of 20 games, going 2-for-25 with 15 strikeouts.
Particularly with the team going 9–11 in that span, and 3–5 in the games Bart started, the Giants felt some adjustments were in order, and that they would best be made in the minors. Via The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly, president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi said, “Our sense was it was weighing a little more on Joey. It’s one thing to be struggling and still feel like the team is firing on all cylinders. That allows you to be in a better mindset. But when it starts weighing a little more, an intervention makes sense.”
Via the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser, Zaidi said, “We still think Joey is an everyday catcher… In the broader scheme of things, we thought it made sense to get him a little bit of a reset. We’re very open to the notion that at-bats at Triple-A out of the spotlight can help get a guy on track.”
Via MLB.com’s Maria Guardado, manager Gabe Kapler reiterated the team’s commitment to Bart but said, “The number one message is that he has some adjustments that he needs to make.” More:
Kapler said the Giants would like to see Bart even out his shoulders and hips, as well as have more of a gather on his front side to help him cut down on some of the swing-and-miss in his game and tap into more of his right-handed power. The first order of action, though, will be to give Bart a bit of a breather following one of the more challenging stretches of his young career.
As for that swing-and-miss, while Bart’s overall 81 wRC+ is nothing to write home about, it’s only three points below the major league average for all catchers. Of much greater concern is his 45.4% strikeout rate, the highest of any player with at least 100 PA:
Minimum 100 plate appearances. All statistics through June 7.
In the 74 plate appearances in which he’s reached two strikes, Bart has hit just .060/.160/.104; that’s 4-for-67 with eight walks, a homer, and a 66.1% strikeout rate. That’s not much better than what major league pitchers hit with two strikes on them in 2019 (.076/.103/.093) while striking out 67.8% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Two weeks ago, the Angels beat the Rangers to climb to 27–17 and pull within a game of the AL West-leading Astros. While they had slipped out of first place in the midst of a four-game losing streak earlier that week, they owned the league’s fourth-best record and appeared to be on track to make the playoffs for the first time since 2014. They haven’t won since, however, and with their losing streak reaching 12 games, on Tuesday they fired manager Joe Maddon and named Phil Nevin as interim manager for the remainder of the season, then dropped their 13th straight game with a 10-inning loss to the Red Sox.
The losing streak is the longest in the majors this year and the longest single-season skid in franchise history; it matches a wraparound streak of 13 straight that spanned from late 1988 to early ’89 (a stretch that encompassed the entirety of the Moose Stubing managerial era, such as it was). The current streak, which offsets what had been the team’s best 44-game start since 2004, has dropped the Angels to 27–30, 9.5 games behind the first-place Astros and 2.5 out of the third Wild Card spot. Their Playoff Odds, which stood at 77% before the streak began, with a 20.1% chance of winning the division and a 3.6% chance of winning the World Series, are down to 26.7%, with a 1.9% chance at the division and a 0.7% chance of winning the World Series.
The Angels were outscored 78–35 over the 12 games that preceded Maddon’s firing. Few things were going right at either end, as they allowed 6.5 runs per game and scored a hair under three per game, though four of those losses were by a single run (as was Tuesday’s post-firing defeat). A few major factors have contributed to the slide, including Mike Trout’s ill-timed slump, a couple of key injuries, and a particularly rough schedule. Read the rest of this entry »
The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and we’re once again hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment, presented in a Q&A format, features Seattle Mariners reliever Paul Sewald on his slider.
Since signing with Seattle as a free agent prior to last season, Sewald has won 12 of 16 decisions, logged 15 saves, and has a 2.86 ERA, a 3.20 FIP, and 123 strikeouts in 85 innings. The 32-year-old right-hander has thrown his signature slider — a pitch he completely revamped after coming over from the New York Mets — 42.8% of the time.
———
David Laurila: You’ve developed a great slider. What’s the story behind it?
Paul Sewald: “Since the beginning of time — before TrackMan, before Rapsodo, before everyone realized exactly what the pitch does — every pitching coach in the history of the world said, ‘You need two planes on your slider, you can’t have it go just sideways. That’s not how you get outs.’ So that’s what I thought. I tried to make it have two planes.
“When I first started throwing it, it was very slurvy. It wasn’t very hard, but it did move in two planes. It wasn’t a curve. It wasn’t a slider. It was somewhere in the middle. That’s how I grew up throwing it, and I always went back to that line of thinking. Slurvy or not, it had to have two planes.
“Then I got over here to the Mariners and it was, ‘We don’t care if it moves one centimeter down, we just want you to sweep it as far as you can possibly sweep it.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s interesting. I haven’t been trying to do that, but I throw across my body, so it seems like something I could do.’
“Immediately that worked. It was overnight. In camp last year, I didn’t pitch very well, but that was because of my fastball. The slider was very good. As soon as they told me, ‘We don’t care about any depth, we just want sweep,’ I took off with the slider. It was a very easy and very comfortable switch for me.”
Laurila: Outside of having the right delivery — throwing across your body — how did you go about getting the action the Mariners were looking for? Read the rest of this entry »
This season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin will have periodic minor league roundup post that run during the week. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.
I noticed what felt like an unusually high number of rehabbing big leaguers (and some prospects) in the box scores over the last several days, so I called around to get info on how these pitchers have looked on their way back from injury.
The Rays have two prominent members of their pitching staff currently working back through the minors: former top prospect Luis Patiño and current top prospect Shane Baz. Patiño, who was put on the IL on April 12 with an oblique strain, has only just begun his climb through the minors. He threw one inning in the Florida Complex League on Monday night and sat 94–96 mph with his sliders in their usual 84–87 range. He threw just one changeup. Baz, who is coming off of arthroscopic surgery of his right elbow, has been rehabbing at Triple-A since the end of May, working on four days rest and ramping up to about 80 pitches in his most recent outing, in which he struck out 10 hitters in 4.1 innings on Sunday. He looks like his usual self, sitting 94–97 and touching 99, and is poised to rejoin the Rays’ rotation within the next week.
(Another Rays note: former first rounder Nick Bitsko, who is coming off of a prolonged rehab from labrum surgery, was sitting 92–95 during his Extended Spring outings and has moved up into the 40+ FV tier now that he’s shown his arm strength is mostly back to pre-surgery form.)
Also set to return to a big league rotation is Nationals righty Stephen Strasburg, who has made three rehab starts with Triple-A Rochester, also on four days rest, recovering from thoracic outlet surgery. While he’s still showing plus secondary stuff, especially his changeup, his velocity has been way down, hovering in the 88–92 range with poor shape. Of all the pitchers who I’ll cover today, he’s the only one who hasn’t looked anything like himself. Read the rest of this entry »
Coming into 2022, Mike Yastrzemski was something of a cipher. Was he a late bloomer who suddenly learned how to hit? From 2019 through the 2021 All Star break, he was excellent, to the tune of a .266/.350/.514 slash line, a 128 wRC+, and 48 homers in 932 plate appearances. Or was he old news, a flash in the pan that pitchers developed a counter for? In the second half last year, he hit .212/.281/.483, struck out nearly 30% of the time, and generally looked like the career minor leaguer he’d been before 2019.
This year, he’s been back on track, and it’s largely been due to a better on-base percentage. Some of that is striking out less; he’s turned in a career-low swinging-strike rate and career low strikeout rate to go along with it. Just as importantly, though, he’s doing better on balls in play, and doing so partially by bunting — something of a San Francisco specialty this year.
In the first 300 games of his career, Yastrzemski bunted ten times. That generally tracks; he’s not particularly fast and hits for power. Why would he do anything other than clock balls over the fence — or, in spacious Oracle Park, into triples alley and off the wall? In fact, you might think that 10 bunts was 10 too many, if it weren’t for the fact that he turned six of them into hits.
This year, he’s put that plan into overdrive, with three bunt hits already after a third of a season. He’s been part of a concerted San Francisco bunting effort so far this year. The team has gone after shifts that don’t respect bunting ability by targeting them early and often, and its captain, Brandon Belt, is something of a bunting enthusiast himself. In fact, the Giants lead baseball in bunt hits, with 11, despite having exactly zero of the 75 fastest runners in baseball this year, per Statcast’s sprint speed leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »
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