Luis Robert debuted in 2020 as our No. 7 prospect in baseball and put up up a strong rookie season with league average offensive numbers (100 wRC+), and stellar center field defense (8 Defensive Runs Saved), helping the White Sox return to the playoffs. Under the hood, though, there were some red flags. He had the worst SwStr% in baseball at 22.1%, as well as a 32.2% strikeout rate. His O-Swing rate of 43.1% was fourth worst in baseball, and even when he did make contact, he had a below-average exit velocity of only 87.9 mph. The 2021 season started off with a similar level of production until Robert suffered a torn hip flexor in early May that would end up costing him the middle three months of the season.

When he returned to action in early August, he immediately looked like a different hitter, putting up a 173 wRC+ over the rest of the season and, perhaps most impressive of all, dropping his SwStr% all the way down to 14.5% — not quite league average, but nowhere near the outlier he had been prior to his injury. Check out the contrast in his career numbers before and after his injury:

As you can see, his gaudy offensive performance is now being backed up by a huge improvement in his strikeout rate, as well as much better quality of contact. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And it’s chat time!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Well, yeah, but in the sense that everybody should want to.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Good luck, though!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: He’s too young and talented to give up on, but the last 1.37 seasons should make you extremely worried

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. It was initially written for The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books and has been updated for FanGraphs. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

“Papi is even more famous than he is great, occupying his own space in baseball’s cultural catalog with the likes of Mickey Mantle, Dizzy Dean, Satchel Paige, and others who layered personality upon skill in outsized measures. October has much to do with that space.” — Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated David Ortiz Special Retirement Tribute, October 2016
 
In December 2002, the Twins released David Ortiz, which is to say that they looked at the bulky, oft-injured 27-year-old slugger coming off his first 20-homer season, considered the possibility of doubling or tripling his $950,000 salary in his first year of arbitration eligibility and thought, “Nope.” Five weeks later, and two months into his new job, Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein signed Ortiz on the cheap as one of several potential first base and designated hitter options. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of October, I wrote about the alterations José Urquidy made to his arsenal during the postseason, trying to estimate how much better or worse his pitches might have been given their velocity and movement changes. In that piece, I briefly touched on raw movement changes but mostly relied upon the vertical and horizontal approach angles (along with location and release point changes) of Urquidy’s pitches to try to fully encapsulate their movement. While the concept and value of vertical approach angle is rather intuitive, I figured it would be useful to go into horizontal approach angle here today and have fun with a little exercise.

This post is inspired in part by all that we have been able to grasp in the public sphere when it comes to vertical approach angle. Measuring the up-down angle of a pitch as it enters the zone is largely derived from the vertical movement measures we’re so accustomed to. Steep vertical movement on breaking pitches and “rising” four-seam fastballs in the upper parts of the zone have been coveted for a while now because we know those pitches are associated with whiffs and therefore success. Much less can be intuited by simply looking at the pitches with above average horizontal movement. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

ZiPS doesn’t usually catch me completely by surprise, but the Tigers’ 2022 offensive projections are, as a group, a solid step or two ahead of what I expected. In fact, the difference is enough to make me think a bit more positively about exactly where the Tigers are in the American League Central. Detroit didn’t hit all that well in 2021, but they were a galaxy ahead of a ’19 season when they literally scored about 200 fewer runs than the average offense. Last season, they almost clawed their way to the middle of the pack, and that was without really getting all that much good fortune. Sure, they got a very good year out of Jeimer Candelario and Akil Baddoo seemingly came out of nowhere, but nobody really hit a level of performance that looks like it will be a challenge to repeat. Read the rest of this entry »

John Means is the best pitcher on the Baltimore Orioles. In a different world, that might be exciting to Baltimore fans as the team builds a contender. An 11th round draft pick in 2014, Means climbed the minor league ladder, burst into the majors with a 3.60 ERA in 2019, and started throwing harder over the subsequent years. Can he be the best pitcher on a playoff team? I’m skeptical. But can he be the third-best? Definitely, and that’s a really cool outcome for someone who was never supposed to make it this far.

Of course, modern baseball being what it is, Means likely won’t be on the next playoff team in Baltimore. Instead, he’ll probably get traded for whatever the O’s can get, because he’s arbitration-eligible and only three years from free agency. You don’t build generational team wealth by passing up the opportunity to trade your good players for future considerations, at least not the way Baltimore is attempting to build for the future. The team is reportedly looking to trade Means, and I think they’ll find a match. So let’s talk about what the team that wins the Means bidding will be getting for their prospects and salary relief.

If you trade for Means, you’re not doing it for the strikeouts. You could look at his career numbers to tell you that, or you could look at his performance in his last 14 starts after returning from an IL stint. He struck out only 20% of the batters he faced, which isn’t cover-your-eyes bad but definitely shouldn’t top your rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

I feel a bit of disquietude when projecting the 2022 Giants. Following up on your biggest team projection miss in nearly 20 years of making said projections doesn’t feel great. Even worse is when your current projection is far closer to the previous year’s very wrong forecast than it is to the previous season’s actual win total. It’s a challenge to convince people that I didn’t write a model for sour grapes and reassure them that I’m an egalitarian who hates every team equally, no matter which one you root for!

In this case, I generally agree with ZiPS that the most significant regressions toward the mean will come on the offense. Let’s start with catcher. At least with the bat, Buster Posey matched some of his best seasons with his stunning 2021 campaign, this despite sitting out the entire 2020 season. With a 35-year-old catcher, it was already likely that some of those wins were going to melt off San Francisco’s total, but Posey’s retirement makes the position even more uncertain. Joey Bart is an outstanding prospect, but even just replacing Posey’s 2022 projection is going to be a tall order. ZiPS does like Bart’s bat a little better than Steamer does, but I don’t think he’s going to make fans forget their retired franchise player particularly quickly. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late 30s did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremiah Jackson made meaningful developmental strides this season. More mental than mechanical, they came amid an injury-interrupted campaign that saw him miss 11 weeks with a torn quad. Playing almost exclusively with the Low-A Inland Empire 66ers, the 21-year-old middle infield prospect homered 10 times while putting up a healthy 128 wRC+ over 218 plate appearances.

How satisfied was he with his performance?

“Satisfied is a word you kind of don’t use in baseball,” said Jackson, whom the Los Angeles Angels drafted 57th overall out of a Mobile, Alabama high school in 2018. “But under the circumstances, I was happy with how I played when I did play. I obviously could have been better, but I’m by no means mad. I learned a lot.”

Jackson feels that his time on the shelf — he was out from late June until early September — contributed to his education. Having more time on his hands allowed him to take a step back and study pitchers throughout the course of a game. How are they attacking certain hitters? What are they seeing that makes them want to throw a certain pitch? What are their mindsets on the mound?

Translating those observations to the batter’s box remains the objective. Read the rest of this entry »