In the wake of a bumper crop of six honorees elected by two Era Committees in December — including the first Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball honorees since 2006 — the Hall of Fame has radically reorganized the way that it handles candidates who are outside the purview of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Last Friday, the Hall announced its latest restructuring, a return to a triennial voting system that would appear to make it more difficult for any candidate besides a modern-day manager, executive, or umpire to land on a ballot.

The new system won’t please everybody, particularly in spots where it appears to counteract the recent flow of honorees. Fourteen candidates have been elected in the past six elections, including seven living ex-players, the first of their kind since the much-criticized 2001 election of Bill Mazeroski. By comparison, 16 candidates were elected via this route from 2003–16, including just three ex-players, all deceased. While critics can argue — and I have – that some of those recent honorees are below Hall standards, others such as Minnie Miñoso, Ted Simmons, and Alan Trammell were ripe for reevaluation via the additional research and advanced statistics that have come forth since their time on the BBWAA ballots. Those following in their wake may have a harder time getting a similar reappraisal. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners were the “luckiest” team in the majors last year. The combination of timely hits in key situations and a great bullpen earned them an incredible 33–19 record in one-run games and 90 wins total, but they couldn’t count on that same blueprint earning them success in 2022. But instead of hoping for clutch hits to squeak out wins, this year’s Mariners have one of the most potent offenses in the majors, leading all of baseball with a 129 wRC+, backed by the best walk rate and fifth-best strikeout rate in the majors. They’ve gotten great contributions from J.P. Crawford, Eugenio Suárez, and Mitch Haniger, but the man leading the charge is Ty France.

During the Mariners’ opening homestand, France collected 18 hits, two doubles, four home runs, and drove in 15 runs. His slash line during those nine games: .474/.524/.842, good for a 309 wRC+ and AL co-Player of the Week honors last week (which he shared with Miguel Cabrera, newest member of the 3,000 hit club). On Saturday against the Royals, France collected five hits, scored three times, drove in five, and blasted a three-run home run in the bottom of the eighth inning to put a dagger in a Kansas City comeback attempt. The next day, he homered in his first at-bat and collected another two hits. It got so bad that the Royals simply intentionally walked him when he came up to bat first in the decisive 12th inning.

This guy flat out rakes. #SeaUsRise pic.twitter.com/1MSOVHJTir

— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) April 25, 2022

Raking isn’t anything new for France. He put up a career .294/.389/.470 slash line (135 wRC+) in the minor leagues coming up through the Padres’ farm system and essentially forced his way onto the major league roster after batting .316/.401/.576 at Triple-A across 2018 and ‘19. But he struggled a bit in his first taste of the majors, slipping to just an 84 wRC+ in 201 plate appearances in ‘19, and was traded to the Mariners in August 2020 in the big Austin Nola deal.

Since then, France has been one of Seattle’s most consistent hitters. Last year, he posted a 129 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR as the Mariners’ everyday first baseman. An early wrist injury hurt his overall numbers a bit; from April 27 through May 13, he collected just three hits in 56 plate appearances. He went on the Injured List a day later and returned after the minimum stay, and from that point on, he’s been phenomenal. Combined with his hot start this year, he’s batted .317/.389/.492 with a 151 wRC+ in 571 plate appearances since May 24; that’s the fifth-best wRC+ among all qualified batters in the majors during that period. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 15 at Camden Yards, the Orioles and Yankees were locked in a stalemate. Both starters had exited, and by the seventh inning, the score remained tied, 1–1. It would be up to each team’s bullpen to keep the game close until their respective bats came alive. The Yankees, of course, sported the league’s finest collection of relievers, a sentiment shared by our preseason positional power rankings. The Orioles bullpen, in contrast, had been deemed one of the league’s worst. A lack of offensive firepower also cast a shadow of doubt on Baltimore’s hopes for victory. It was clear: One side had the advantage, the other did not.

And yet, it was the Orioles who triumphed to secure the win. The projected 28th-best bullpen held its own until the 11th inning, when Ramón Urías drew a walk-off walk against a shaky Aroldis Chapman, bringing a drawn-out conflict to a close. But this isn’t just a one-time, David-beats-Goliath story. As of this writing, the Orioles have the most valuable bullpen in baseball by WAR (I know, it’s early for that, but bear with me). They have the second-most effective bullpen by xFIP. And to really put things into perspective, here’s a comparison between the Orioles and the Yankees:

As expected, the Yankees bullpen has served the team well. But on most fronts, the Orioles’ own unit has kept pace, a fact we can appreciate regardless of how the team is performing. Sure, that’s more mirage than reality. Skeptics can point to an abnormally low home run rate and the fact that it’s early – the Orioles had yet to face a revitalized Mike Trout until Sunday, for example. Consider, though, that Orioles relievers not only own the league’s fifth-highest groundball rate, but also its lowest fly ball rate. In tandem with the altered dimensions of Camden Yards, there’s reason to believe this contact suppression isn’t merely a fluke. They’ve set themselves up for success, in other words. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a story about persistence. I thought I had an interesting way of looking at the marked decline in scoring this year so far; as it turns out, I was wrong. A further investigation, however, revealed that another possible culprit was right around the corner. Does it explain the entire decline in offense? Most certainly not. But I’m interested nonetheless, and I hope you will be too.

If you’ve followed baseball in the past five years, you’re probably used to asking questions about league-wide offense early in the season. Major League Baseball has done itself no favors here; the composition of the baseball keeps changing, and home run rates fluctuate wildly as a result. The same is true this year: despite the adoption of a universal DH, offense is down across the board.

The usual suspects are certainly part of the problem. Pitchers keep throwing harder. Putting a humidor in every stadium affects home run rates in unpredictable ways and might suppress home run rates early in the season. The league used two different baseballs last year, and drag coefficient is up this year. Starters are going fewer and fewer innings, giving batters fewer looks at them a third time through the order.

I think that all of those things have something to do with bad offense. But I thought of another potential cause, one I could investigate without learning fluid dynamics. One of the side bargains between the league and the MLBPA after this offseason’s lockout was for expanded rosters early in the season. Teams are allowed to roster 28 players throughout the month of April. On May 30, that number will revert to the standard 26 — this deadline was recently pushed back from May 1. In addition, teams can carry any number of pitchers on their roster until May 1. After that, they’ll be limited to 14, and 13 after May 29.
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On Sunday afternoon, Byron Buxton demolished a fastball from one of the game’s best pitchers, sending it where balls rarely go at Minneapolis’ Target Field. See for yourself:

That was the longest walk-off homer in the Statcast era, at 469 feet, and the ninth-longest home run in the history of Target Field. Impressive as that swing was, it didn’t come in isolation. It’s worth taking a closer look at the 10th inning to get a better idea of how Buxton ended up turning around a 96-mph fastball, and how this result has been happening more often for the burgeoning superstar. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were looking for fast-paced, high-stakes baseball action, the tenth inning of Saturday’s Rays-Red Sox clash had everything you could ask for. Scoring? Five runs crossed the plate. Drama? There was a walk-off hit. Balls in play? The Red Sox hit a triple, and the Rays scored a run by combining a balk and a throwing error. Like home runs? It had one of them too.

If you were looking for grind-it-out, low-scoring, perfectly pitched baseball, the other nine innings would have been more your speed. Boston and Tampa Bay combined for two hits and seventeen strikeouts. They used ten pitchers. Runs? Only four runners so much as reached second base.

Which one is modern baseball? They both are. If you wish baseball had more balls in play, with more bunts and steals and plays at the plate, I can’t blame you. If you wish it had more dominant starting pitchers and more seven-inning starts that end with a mound conference and a manager talked into leaving his ace out there for just one more batter, I can’t blame you. But the game being played today is just as captivating, the performances just as impressive. They just come in different shapes and sizes.
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We’re a little over two weeks into the 2022 season, which means it’s time to start assessing the teams that have gotten off to a hot start and those that have struggled. It’s way too early to draw any meaningful conclusions yet, but there are some teams who have shown real improvements so far, and others that have fallen flat despite lofty expectations.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated. First, we take three most important components of a team — offense (wRC+) and starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by innings) — 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 than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has OAA/RAA from Statcast 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 which is then presented in tiers below.

No one can really compete with the Dodgers. They possess the best record and the best run differential in baseball, and their Pythagorean win percentage says they “should have” won an extra game too. Their offense has gotten off to a bit of a slow start with Mookie Betts and Justin Turner both mired in early slumps. Luckily, Cody Bellinger’s bat is finally showing signs of life after taking the last two seasons off; he blasted two home runs on Sunday afternoon in a 10–2 drubbing of the Padres. Los Angeles’ pitching staff, meanwhile, has allowed the fewest runs in baseball thus far, with a revitalized Clayton Kershaw leading the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Cabrera had to wait a couple of extra days to make history, thanks to a hitless afternoon capped by a controversial managerial decision and then a rainout. Nonetheless, on Saturday afternoon he collected his 3,000th career hit with a single off the Rockies’ Antonio Senzatela. In doing so, he joined some elite company as not only the 33rd player to reach 3,000 hits, but also the seventh to do so as a member of the 500-homer club and the third to reach both of those round numbers with a career batting average of .300 or better. The other two? Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. You may have heard of them, and even if you don’t put much stock in batting average, you have to admit that’s about as cool as company gets.

What’s more, Cabrera actually owns the highest batting average and on-base percentage of the seven players who have both milestones, with a wRC+ that trails only Mays and Aaron:

For all of his struggles over the past half-decade, Cabrera would still have to go 0-for-352 to drop his batting average to .299. Even with those struggles and his lack of defensive value (he’s 102 runs below average in terms of Defensive Runs Saved, inlcluding 11 below in just 847.1 innings at first base since 2018), he ranks 11th in JAWS among first basemen (68.8/44.8/56.8), in no danger of slipping below Palmeiro (13th at 71.9/38.9/55.4) or Murray (16th at 68.7/39.2/53.9). And while he may be the last to reach 3,000 hits for some time given the dearth of candidates (Dan Szymborski put Jose Altuve, who has 1,783 hits, at 34% and Freddie Freeman, who has 1,723 hits, at 28% last September), he’s hardly the least. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and once again we’re hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features a pair of Pittsburgh Pirates on their quality curveballs; Chris Stratton is one of the club’s back-end relievers, and prospect Mike Burrows is rated by Baseball America as having the best breaker in the system.

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Michael Burrows, Pittsburgh Pirates

“My dad said I couldn’t even try to throw a curveball until I had hair under my armpits; that was the saying for him. But yeah, I really started as soon as I could, maybe at 13 or 14, and then just developed feel for it. As I got older — as I continued to progress — I had to change the shape of it, because as hitters got better I couldn’t have a curveball that was popping out. So it’s really been an evolution of a curveball that was in the low-to-mid 70s and has creeped up into the low 80s. It’s sharper now.

“I would say it [improved the most] over COVID, and then as I got into the 2021 season. That spring training, I really started working on building intent and throwing it harder. Metrically, when you look at a curveball that’s over 80 mph, it’s significantly harder to hit — hitters’ numbers go down — and I think that was the biggest turning point for me. Throwing it harder, there’s not a huge decrease in break, but a better shape to where it tunnels my fastball better.

“[Prior to 2020], I didn’t have Rapsodo, TrackMan, or anything like that. Right before COVID hit, about a month until that spring training, I went out and got a Rapsodo. I started diving into the metrics of pitches — why some are better than others, what spin direction was going to do for me. That’s when I really started developing my curveball. I was also throwing with a guy from the Dodgers, Nolan Long — he’s since signed with Athletics — and they have endless amounts of information over there. Another thing I did was take the Rapsodo course, so I could better understand all of the numbers.

“In terms of adjustments, it wasn’t really mechanics; it was more so thinking about that last five percent, rather than the entire motion. It’s about keeping my body under control, and then in that explosion, when I’m really throwing the baseball, is when the effort happens. It’s like a karate-chop motion, where your hand is staying neutral through the throw. It’s that last bit, where the hand is coming through and it rolls over top.

“The curveball was always there for me. It’s not like it had bad spin or anything like that. Everything was there. All I needed was to find a better shape that was going to tunnel my fastball. I still want that 12–6; I still want that vertical break to it. Again, I want to be able to tunnel it, not have it pop out.” Read the rest of this entry »