Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about April’s low offensive numbers and Zack Greinke’s deadball-style success, then (7:11) talk to 32-year MLB umpire Dale Scott and SABRcast host Rob Neyer, co-authors of Scott’s new memoir The Umpire is Out: Calling the Game and Living My True Self, touching on the definition of “nutcutter,” how Dale and Rob teamed up, whether Dale’s memories were accurate, the art of the umpire memoir, whether the book is a tell-all, umpire mechanics, the 7th inning of 2015 ALDS Game 5, whether players and managers know the rules, what makes someone want to umpire, replay review, the automated strike zone, why the zone expands and shrinks depending on the count, how pitch-tracking tech has improved umpires’ calls, how umps get graded and whether deserving umps are promoted and demoted, whether some umps disapprove of other umps, how Scott lived as a gay man while umpiring in MLB, and how he came out.

Audio intro: Nick Lowe, “Blue on Blue”
Audio outro: The Moon, “Come Out Tonight”

Link to Ben on pitcher roster limits
Link to Taylor HR robbery video
Link to Canó DFA news
Link to Ben’s “oral history” of ALDS G5
Link to ALDS G5 highlights video
Link to EW episode on ALDS G5
Link to Passan on umpire grading
Link to Ben on robo umps in 2021
Link to Ben on robo umps in 2013
Link to BP on robo umps in 2018
Link to article on compassionate umpires
Link to article on Bayesian umpires
Link to article on umpire improvements
Link to The Umpire is Out
Link to Dale’s first EW appearance
Link to Dale’s website
Link to SABRcast
Link to Ben on pitcher deception

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“If something cannot go forever, it will stop.” Credited to economist Herb Stein, this tautology, sometimes known as Stein’s law, has broad application past the field of economics: the Earth will end, the sun will end, the ability of the universe to sustain life will end, all the non-Top Chef shows on Bravo will end (hopefully), and we’ll end. Joey Votto does not exist outside of the space-time universe, and his 2022 season so far makes it look like his career will end before all of these things. Or will it?

Votto’s career has looked shaky at times before, but he has made comebacks before: from a leg injury that cost him half a season, a mid-career power outage, and a huge dropoff in play at age 35. He’s had enough successful comebacks to become a rarity in baseball: a highly paid star first baseman who doesn’t make his team regret a very large contract covering his 30s. But while he’s gotten off to slow starts before, a .122/.278/.135 line is something else.

Perhaps even worse is that so many of his non-baseball card stats look abysmal as well. Votto is striking out at nearly triple the rate of his 2017 peak. His soft-hit and hard-hit percentages of 22% and 20%, respectively, are closer to Ben Revere than a slugger, and those numbers are twice and half his career rates, respectively. Votto’s average exit velocity of 86.4 mph is six ticks off last year’s 92.9 mark, and his 70% contact rate is the lowest of his career. Read the rest of this entry »

Another week of the 2022 season is in the books and there’s been some significant movement in the power rankings. We’re still at the point where a hot or cold week can really change the outlook for a team, but we’re also starting to see some clubs separate themselves from the pack — for good or for ill.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on their expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking that is then presented in tiers below.

It’s a good time to be a baseball fan in New York. Both the Yankees and Mets have been playing fantastic baseball to start the season and both teams lead their respective divisions after a month of play. The Yanks rattled off a nine-game win streak with sweeps of the Guardians, Orioles, and the Royals. It took a little while for their bats to wake up earlier in the season, but they scored 7.4 runs per game during this stretch, including four games with double digit run totals. Unsurprisingly, it’s been their sluggers who have led the way. Anthony Rizzo’s nine home runs lead all of baseball, with a three dinger day on Tuesday and another on Friday padding his total. Not to be outdone, Aaron Judge blasted five homers last week, including two on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, when I was waxing poetic about Jeff McNeil’s ability to wait for a good pitch and then drop it into left for a single, I made an offhand mention to the player with the best swing decisions of 2021: Mike Tauchman, who doesn’t even play in the major leagues anymore. Then I moved on.

That wasn’t an accident. It’s what we in “the business” (no one calls it this) like to think of as a preview. I got multiple texts (another pro writer tip: “multiple” sounds better than “two”) from friends this weekend asking where the whole list of hitters was. That list is right here!

As a quick refresher, the idea here is to take every swing decision a hitter makes and compress them into one number. Every hitter who saw at least 50 pitches in each of the four attack zones (heart, shadow, chase, waste) is on the list. I took each of those rates and gave them league-average production for those decisions. The result looks like this, stated in terms of run value per 100 of the relevant zone/decision combination (take a waste pitch, say, or swing at a pitch in the shadow zone):

From there, I assumed a league-average percentage of pitches in each zone. Combined with each hitter’s swing rates, that let me produce an overall run value assuming an average rate of pitches in each zone.

Here’s a quick guide on how to interpret these numbers. For each hitter, there are three numbers. The first two are just the same statistic said different ways. The first metric, “RV/100,” is how many runs above or below average each hitter on the list would be, per 100 pitches, if they got exactly average results on every zone/decision combination. The higher the number, the better positioned a hitter is to succeed, by taking tough pitches and swinging at good ones.
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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 features Wil Crowe on his circle changeup and Nick Martinez on his made-in-Japan Vulcan changeup.

———

Wil Crowe, Pittsburgh Pirates

“I learned a changeup when I was about eight or 10 years old. Ex-big leaguer Steve Searcy lived in Knoxville, and my dad wanted to find me lessons — he’d played college ball, but wasn’t a pitcher — and that’s who he found. Steve was always big with fastball/changeup. I didn’t throw a curveball or slider until I was a senior in high school. Growing up, it was fastball/change. Locate the fastball, and the changeup comes off of it.

“The grip is a circle change. Now it’s a little modified; it’s out in my fingers a little more than it used to be. Middle finger and ring finger hold onto the laces, and the thumb is underneath. So it started out more of a traditional circle ball, and now it’s more on the end of the fingers. I did that in college, after I grew into my body. My hand was bigger and I was able to grip the ball better. But I think that starting at such a young age helped, because it’s a comfort thing. Read the rest of this entry »

Hoby Milner was credited with a win on April 12. For the vast majority of pitchers in their sixth big-league season, that wouldn’t be particularly notable. It was for Milner. The 31-year-old Milwaukee Brewers reliever was pitching in his 96th career game, and it was the first time he’d been awarded a W. Moreover, it was the first time Milner had been awarded a decision.

That’s a record. No pitcher in MLB history had ever made that many appearances to start a career without getting either a win or loss. And it isn’t even close. Michael Tonkin went his first 62 before getting a decision — he also got a win — with the Minnesota Twins in 2016.

Milner had an inkling that he might be a record-holder well before he became the pitcher of record in Milwaukee’s 5-4 win over the Baltimore Orioles on April 12.

“I knew around 60-something that it was kind of a lot,” Milner told me at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park earlier this week. “It was a big enough number that I did some research on my own and saw that some guy had around 60 to begin his career. I don’t remember what the website was, but it didn’t necessarily seem like it was 100% legit.”

It turns out that it was. A member of the Brewers’ media relations staff confirmed it after Milner’s remarkable streak came to an end. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley react to MLB’s decision to suspend Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer for an unprecedented 324 games, then (22:25) discuss Justin Verlander and Ronald Acuña Jr. looking like their old selves and pitcher Tucker Davidson’s critiques of the minor league pitch clock before answering listener emails about the Cardinals and how to evaluate teams whose pitching approaches seem out of step with the times, skeuomorphs and baseball terminology of uncertain origin, whether batters should be able to decline intentional walks (and whether they would even if they could), when “modern baseball” begins, and more.

Audio intro: Gladys Knight & The Pips, “Go Away, Stay Away”
Audio outro: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Modern Mystery”

Link to ESPN’s news story about Bauer
CW // Link to latest WaPo report about Bauer
Link to MLB DV and sexual assault policy
Link to video of Acuña’s return
Link to Davidson thread
Link to Ben on pitch clocks
Link to Baseball America on new pitch clock
Link to Jeff Passan on new pitch clock
Link to MLB.com story on baseball terms
Link to “in the hole” explainer
Link to “around the horn” explainer
Link to Joe Posnanski on declining IBBs
Link to Lindsey Adler on IKF
Link to Matthews bat flip video
Link to Posnanski on new HoF changes
Link to Jay Jaffe on new HoF changes
Link to Marvel’s sliding timescale
Link to Rob Mains on Mets HBPs
Link to golf story about DECADE

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The Los Angeles Angels are off to a 13-7 start. A couple of the big reasons for that are not unexpected. Mike Trout, who hadn’t played in a regular-season game in 11 months, is off to a blazing start even by his robust standards, sporting an OPS north of 1.200 and already nearing the sort of WAR we expect a league-average player to post over six months. Shohei Ohtani isn’t torching the league to quite the same degree but he’s also on a 6-WAR pace when you combine his hitting and pitching. Still, in the past, the team has struggled even with two superstars at the top of their game. What’s working for Los Angeles now is truly unusual compared to recent years: getting lots of contributions from the other guys. And none of “the other guys” have stood taller so far than Taylor Ward.

I’m always one of the first to yell “April!” about small-sample-size stars, but Ward’s performance has still been stunning. His .381/.509/.762 line calculates out to a 269 wRC+, besting his teammate Trout and everyone else with at least 50 PA this season. What makes it even more impressive is that some of the numbers fueling that line are of the sort that are meaningful in a small sample.

There’s a bit of a fallacy with extreme data in small samples (if it has a name, I don’t know it). In baseball, when a .280 hitter hits .300, people accept it as normal, but when a .280 hitter hits .500, it is generally written off as a fluke. But while the “hitting .500” part is, the .280 hitter who is hitting .500 is more likely to have improved than the one posting .300. Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to what is going to be an abbreviated version of the usual festivities, as I have to be out the door at about 3:15 ET.

2:02

Jay Jaffe: The quick housekeeping: My week featured pieces on the Hall of Fame’s Era Committee shakeup https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-hall-of-fame-shakes-up-its-era-committ…, Mike Trout’s hot start https://blogs.fangraphs.com/amid-fits-and-starts-mike-trout-might-be-g…, Bryce Harper’s elbow https://blogs.fangraphs.com/checking-in-on-bryce-harper-full-time-desi… and more.

2:07

Jay Jaffe: I haven’t had a chance to lay eyes on Wright but I know people are talking about his hot start. He’s been lit up at the major league level before, but the Braves thought highly enough of him to make him a top-5 pick five years ago. We know pitching development is non-linear, so it shouldn’t be a shock when a guy takes a big leap forward, especially when it comes with a jump in velocity — often suggesting cleaner mechanics and possibly better command as well.  I imagine we’ll have coverage of him soon enough, either from me or someone else

2:10

Jay Jaffe: They should be comforted by the strong start, but I think they have reason to be concerned about the team’s catching situation, the overreliance upon aging players, and the fact that they didn’t land one of the star shortstops who hit the market. As irate as they were in the spring? No, but I think ownership could be doing more to fortify this team (even given their huge payroll).

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