Matt Mervis didn’t get a ton of opportunities to hit at Duke University. He hit a ton this summer in his second full season of pro ball. Signed by the Chicago Cubs as a non-drafted free agent in 2020, the 24-year-old first baseman went deep 36 times across three levels — 15 of his dingers came in Triple-A — while slashing a robust .309/.379/.606. Currently competing in the Arizona Fall League, he has four home runs to go with an 1.103 OPS in 36 plate appearances with the Mesa Solar Sox.

Mervis’s ability to clear fences is his calling card, but that’s not how he views himself as a hitter.

“I have power, but I wouldn’t call myself a power hitter,” said Mervis, who went into yesterday as the AFL’s co-leader in home runs along with Heston Kjerstad. “I like to be a hitter. I hit for average and hate striking out. I try to move the ball, and if it turns into a double or a home run that’s great. I’m a big guy and hit the ball hard naturally, so it was really just simplifying my swing that led me to driving the ball more this year.”

Mervis does recognize that extra-base power is a big part of what will get him to the big leagues. At 6-foot-4, 230 pounds, slashing singles would be a path to nowhere.

“I’m a left-handed-hitting first baseman and it’s what we’re supposed to do in a lineup,” acknowledged Mervis. “That was the case long before the game turned to home runs and strikeouts. I grew up watching guys like David Ortiz, Prince Fielder, and Anthony Rizzo, a bunch of left handed hitters with a bunch of power. I don’t put pressure on myself to do that, but I obviously want to hit home runs and help us win.” Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — There are baseball games, and then there’s the Phillies 10-6 win over San Diego in Game 4 of the NLCS. This game lasted four days, saw 19 home runs, and involved 31 pitchers. It was interrupted in the bottom of the fourth inning by plagues of frogs and locusts and decided in the eighth by the timely arrival of Hessian mercenaries. It was loud, maximalist, and weirdly bawdy, like the works of Ken Russell or Electric Six.

The tactical puzzle of postseason baseball has always been about getting the highest possible percentage of innings from the team’s best pitchers. This has been so since Three-Finger Brown. But since 2015, the pursuit of the lockdown postseason pitching staff has consumed the attention of baseball’s top thinkers and empiricists as never before. Can a team conjure an entire staff of front-line starters and lockdown relievers? The Astros seem to have done that this season, but that might be a unique achievement in modern baseball history.

Still other managers — especially Terry Francona in 2016 and Dave Martinez in 2019 — have schemed, finagled, and cajoled their best starters and most trustworthy relievers into the most important situations available. To some extent, this has become the blueprint in October. Pitchers start on short rest, one-inning relievers get stretched to six or seven outs, starters close games on their throw days. Anything to keep the Other Guys out of close games. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Cristian Javier finally got his turn. After making 12 postseason appearances out of the bullpen from 2020 through this year’s American League Division Series, the 25-year-old righty followed in the footsteps of teammates Justin Verlander and Framber Valdez, stifling the Yankees in Game 3 of the ALCS — and in Yankee Stadium, no less. Javier held the Yankees hitless until the fourth inning and allowed just one hit through 5.1 frames before yielding to a bullpen that the banged up Bronx Bombers remained unable to solve. New York didn’t collect another hit until down to its final out and finished with just three.

Meanwhile, the Astros capitalized on a costly two-out error by Harrison Bader in the second inning and chased Gerrit Cole in the sixth. Houston’s 5–0 victory gave the team a commanding 3–0 lead in the ALCS and put it within a win of its second straight trip to the World Series under manager Dusty Baker and the franchise’s fourth pennant in the last six years. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — Jean Segura experienced the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat all in one inning, Rob Thomson managed as if there were no tomorrow, and Ranger Suárez excelled in the biggest start of his career as the Phillies beat the Padres, 4-2, to go up two games to one in the NLCS.

The Padres and Phillies are not only closely matched, but with their great top-end starting pitching and star power at the plate, they make excellent foils for one another. This was the third consecutive tense, close-fought game between the two. After the pitchers’ duel in Game 1 and Game 2’s tilt between Sir Gawain vs. the Green Knight, Game 3 was a contest of tantalizing opportunities. Each side opened the door to the other through some, um, creative defense, but in the end, the Phillies made more of their opportunities.

The recurring theme of this game was the ball on the ground. The night’s 69 plate appearances produced 51 balls in play; of those, 30 were grounders, 18 by the Padres. And even though both teams shifted heavily throughout the game, these grounders seemed to have a habit of going where the fielders weren’t. The Padres had four infield hits, two by Brandon Drury on balls with a launch angle of -20 degrees or worse. There were three groundball double plays, and there could have been a few more.

While the fate of the game was always figuratively just within or just out of reach, an unusually large percentage of Friday was spent with infielders literally reaching for the ball. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The first six batters of the game hardly indicated what was to come. Two of Suárez’s three strikeouts came in the first two plate appearances of the game, while Joe Musgrove started the bottom of the first by surrendering the only home run and the only two walks allowed by any pitcher on the night. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley follow up on their 2022 minor league free agent draft results, banter about ALDS Game 2, teams “not making excuses,” the Rangers hiring Bruce Bochy, and other news, and answer listener emails about a suggestion for changing the number of games per playoff round, how an average person would do in the field if they knew where the ball was going to go, a 75-foot-tall batter, the most embarrassing kind of whiff, multiple “first” pitches, the phrase “a whole new ballgame,” and a ballpark named after the podcast, plus a Past Blast from 1919.

Audio intro: Sloan, “You Don’t Need Excuses to Be Good”
Audio outro: Billy Corgan, “Black Sox”

Link to 2022 draft results
Link to Raymond’s EW wiki post
Link to Boone comments
Link to Severino comments
Link to data on Bregman HR
Link to data on Judge flyout
Link to FG post on ALDS G2
Link to postseason ZiPS
Link to story on McCullers/champagne
Link to Jay on postseason SP
Link to Bochy news
Link to Dusty report
Link to Profar’s swing
Link to story on Veeck’s “giant”
Link to EW emails database
Link to 1919 story source
Link to SABR’s Eight Myths Out
Link to SABR on the Black Sox scandal
Link to SABR on Speaker’s columns
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to Patreon/Discord instructions

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Framber Valdez threw a spectacular game last night. For seven innings, he bewitched, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled the Yankee offense. As Alex Eisert noted, he notched a career high in swinging strikes en route to a whopping nine strikeouts.

How did he manage it? As best as I can tell, he made one key adjustment: he used his wipeout curveball to start at-bats and ended up with 16 first-pitch strikes out of 27 batters faced, plus a weak grounder that turned into slapstick comedy:

It’s particularly impressive when you consider the beginning of his outing: he started six of his first eight batters faced with a ball and looked like he might struggle to find the zone. But he stuck to his plan, and the Yankees, who had taken the first eight pitches they saw, started swinging aggressively the rest of the night. Read the rest of this entry »

2:09	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks!

2:09	Jay Jaffe: Apologies for the delay, I had a typo in my chat code

2:10	Jay Jaffe: Welcome to the my first solo chat of the 2022 postseason

2:14	Jay Jaffe: Bear with me for a moment while I get back on track. Today I’ve got a piece about the rebound of starting pitcher usage in the regular season and postseason https://blogs.fangraphs.com/postseason-starting-pitching-is-back-baby/

2:14	Jay Jaffe: Earlier this week I previewed the ALCS https://blogs.fangraphs.com/al-championship-series-preview-houston-ast… which required a quicker turnaround from ALDS Game 5 than I would have liked.

2:15	Jay Jaffe: And wrote about the Dodgers’ early exit and the increasing disconnect between the regular season and the postseason https://blogs.fangraphs.com/ousted-dodgers-drive-home-disconnect-betwe…

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, when I wrote about some of the league’s strongest throwers, I ended up exclusively featuring outfielders. The nature of the position is more suited to making full capacity throws than in the infield, and as a result, only outfielders ended up on the list. Because of that, I feel obligated to acknowledge and highlight some of the strongest throwers in the infield. On average, these throws won’t be quite as fast. The footwork and time required to throw the ball is one reason for that, and that will be the focus of this piece.

Similar to last time, we’ll have to sort through some qualifications on how I came up with this short list of names. The first is at least 100 throws in the infield. One thing I ran into when sorting through the leaderboard was that several players near the top were utility players, rather than just strictly infielders. That led me to using the 2B/SS/3B filter and sorting the list by the overall throws at those positions only. See the full leaderboard here.

After working that out, I wanted to select plays where a player needed their plus arm strength to get an out. For example, a shortstop and/or third baseman needs to fire a rocket when moving multiple steps to use their backhand. A second baseman needs to have the correct footwork to fire a ball when ranging up the middle or quickly spinning a double play. Those are the types of plays I’m looking for, but they were harder to find than you would expect, given how so many plays in the infield are routine. I started with about 15 players from the top 20 on the list and worked my way down to a representative sample of five. Now, let’s get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros took a two-games-to-none lead over the Yankees in the American League Championship Series on Thursday night, as Alex Bregman’s three-run homer backed seven strong innings by Framber Valdez, whose two runs allowed counted as unearned due to his two-error play on a Giancarlo Stanton chopper. It was the second night in a row that an Astros starter stifled the Yankees, as Justin Verlander held them to one run over six innings while striking out 11.

The Yankees had Verlander on the ropes, forcing the 39-year-old righty to throw 66 pitches in the first three innings, during which he allowed six baserunners including a solo homer by Harrison Bader. Verlander got the strikeouts he needed to escape those big jams, however, and soon he went on a roll, striking out six straight hitters (tying a postseason record he already shared) and nine of his final 11 — reclaiming the all-time postseason strikeout lead along the way — before yielding to the bullpen, which continued to dominate Yankees hitters in a 4-2 victory in the ALCS opener.

Even given that he got knocked around for six runs and 10 hits in four innings by the Mariners in his Division Series start, Verlander probably had a longer leash than most due to his Hall of Fame resumé and manager Dusty Baker’s trust in him. He also had the wind at his back, so to speak. On the heels of a regular season in which per-game scoring fell 5.5% (from 4.53 runs per game to 4.28), in which the league-wide OPS decreased for the third straight season (from .758 in 2019 to .740 in ’20, .728 in ’21, and .706 this year), and in which starting pitcher usage increased for the second year in a row, starters are working deeper into games in the postseason than at any time since 2015. Read the rest of this entry »

After striking out 17 times Wednesday night, the Yankees ran that number up to 30 for the Championship Series, taking another tough loss in Game 2, this time 3-2. This time, Framber Valdez, the second half of Houston’s two-headed ace monster, was responsible; he struck out nine across seven strong innings. Typically known for his groundball prowess, Valdez racked up a career-high 25 whiffs Thursday night, with 16 of them coming via a nasty curveball. Those curveball whiffs, another career-best and a playoff record since the pitch-tracking era began in 2008, exceeded the next-highest mark from this season (including the playoffs) by three. (For context, three was also the gap between the outings with the second- and 12th-most curveball whiffs this year.)

But Valdez didn’t look all that sharp out of the gate. While his velocity was up 1.3 mph on the sinker, his primary offering, three of the first four and four of the first six hitters he faced went up in the count 2-0. In addition to possibly causing command issues, that extra zip may have led to higher exit velocities for the Yankees: their first three hitters each put 100-mph screamers in play. Luckily for Valdez, they were all hit pretty close to fielders, but with two down in the second, he wasn’t as fortunate; Josh Donaldson hit a perfectly placed 92.1-mph liner — the Yankees’ softest-hit ball to that point — into short right field for a double. But Valdez registered his first strikeout of the game when the next batter, Kyle Higashioka, went down after five straight curveballs, whiffing on the last:

Read the rest of this entry »