The White Sox remain serious playoff contenders in 2022, but I doubt many would classify this season as a roaring success. With what appeared in the preseason to be the AL Central’s strongest roster, Chicago has not gone on a leisurely stroll to October. Instead, it’s locked in a brutal three-way clash with Cleveland and Minnesota and currently stands 1.5 games behind both.

The reasons for the team’s struggles are myriad. The entire offense failed to produce, especially early in the season, finishing April with a .212/.264/.348 line and an 8–12 record. When healthy, Yasmani Grandal and Yoán Moncada have not hit at all, leaving two offensive problems in unexpected places. Lance Lynn got a late start to the season and has generally been ineffective. The manager has an odd fetish for getting Leury Garcia into the lineup at every possible juncture. We can play this game all day, but we can now throw a new problem onto the pile in the loss of starting shortstop Tim Anderson to an injured ligament in his left middle finger that requires surgery. Anderson is expected to miss four-to-six weeks of play and make a full recovery, but with only eight weeks left in the regular season, that’s a lot of missed time.

After the trade deadline, I projected the White Sox as having the biggest loss in playoff probability of any team due to transactions made around baseball at the deadline. Whereas they would have been projected with a 59.5% shot at the postseason with the pre-deadline rosters, they came out afterward at 52.2%. Despite not actually losing any ground in the last week to their rivals in the standings, replacing Anderson with a combination of Garcia and Lenyn Sosa sends another chunk of the team’s playoff hopes into eternal oblivion.

For the first time this season, the Sox are projected to have a worse chance at taking the division than both the Twins and Guardians, and roughly a quarter of the scenarios in which they make the playoffs have evaporated. Losing a win is a very big deal for a team in such a tight race, and that gets even a bit worse for Chicago because of the change in MLB’s rules for divisional ties, with tiebreakers being used instead of bonus baseball. Right now, should there be a tiebreaker needed, ZiPS estimates that the Guardians will beat the Sox 74% of the time, and the Twins will come out on top in 69% (not nice!) of tiebreakers. And all that is with projections that assume that Anderson misses an average of five weeks. If he has a setback and can’t get back for the rest of the regular season, it obviously gets worse; in the simulations when he didn’t return (about 10% of sims), Chicago only made the playoffs about three times in ten. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Call’s first cup of big-league coffee came last month with the Cleveland Guardians. A 27-year-old outfielder who had spent his first three professional seasons in the Chicago White Sox system, Call logged two hits and four walks in 16 plate appearances before being returned to Triple-A Columbus on August 1. Six days later, the 2016 third-round pick out of Ball State University was designated for assignment and claimed off waivers by the Washington Nationals.

Call’s first big-league plate appearances came as a pinch hitter on July 11, one day after learning that he was getting called up. The pitcher on the mound was one of his former minor-league teammates in the White Sox system. Eleven days and six at-bats later, Call recorded his first hit in the majors. It came off the same pitcher.

Call, currently playing for Triple-A Rochester, discussed his milestone moments when the Guardians visited Fenway Park in late July.

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On learning that he was getting his first big-league call-up

“It was a Sunday game and I was actually off that day. I’d signed up to do the fun run afterwards — we do those on Sundays in Columbus — and when that was over, Andy Tracy, our manager, told me, ‘Hey, we’ve got a gift card for you. Thanks for doing that for the kids.’ I was like, ‘Sweet. I’ll take a gift card.’ He rustled around some papers in his office, then looked up and said, ‘Well, I can’t find it, but I don’t think you’ll need it in Cleveland. You’re going to The Show.’ After that, I called my family. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a spray chart of Manny Machado’s groundballs this year:

And here’s a heat map of all of the grounders he’s hit in his career:

Oh, hi there. Don’t worry, you haven’t inadvertently stepped into a list of every player’s batted ball tendencies. Part of writing is building a sense of mystery. I’m just setting you up for a payoff later on. Whoops, gave that one away too easily! In any case, let’s move on. Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps nobody in baseball has had a rollercoaster week quite like the one Matt Carpenter just experienced. On Friday, the 36-year-old veteran returned to St. Louis for the first time as a visiting player and received a lengthy ovation from fans grateful for his contributions over the course of an 11-season run, and the warm reception continued throughout the weekend despite his now wearing Yankee pinstripes. On Monday in Seattle, however, Carpenter fouled a pitch off his left foot and suffered a fracture, sidelining him in the midst of an impressive comeback.

The injury happened during Carpenter’s first-inning plate appearance, when he fouled an 0-1 pitch from Logan Gilbert off the top of his left foot. “I knew it was broke. I knew something was wrong when I did it.” he said after the game, speaking to reporters while on crutches. He completed his plate appearance nonetheless, striking out with DJ LeMahieu on third base and Aaron Judge at second. “I thought that I could finish the at-bat and get that run in,” he added.

By the time Carpenter spoke to the media, x-rays had confirmed the fracture. He will meet with a foot specialist upon returning to New York, at which point a timetable for his return should become more apparent. “I’m holding out hope that it’ll be a situation where I could come back in the middle of September and can contribute towards the stretch run,” said Carpenter. “I’m not going to let my mind go anywhere else that I don’t want. I’m not even going to accept the fact that this will be it for me.” Read the rest of this entry »

One of the leading candidates for this year’s National League Rookie of the Year Award was first featured here at FanGraphs last June in a piece headlined “Atlanta Braves Pitching Prospect Spencer Strider Nerds Out on His Arsenal.” Six months later, the 23-year-old right-hander with the triple-digits heater appeared as a guest on episode 952 of FanGraphs Audio. On each occasion, Strider showed that he’s not just one of the game’s most-exciting young pitchers but also a bona fide analytics geek.

On Monday, I caught up to Strider at Fenway Park, where we focused primarily on a relief outing back in mid-May against the Milwaukee Brewers. Our conversation then segued into some nerdy pitching talk and, for good measure, his six scoreless innings with 12 strikeouts against the St. Louis Cardinals in early July.

On the season, Strider has a 1.96 FIP to go with a 3.11 ERA and 138 strikeouts in 89.2 innings. His average fastball velocity has been 98.1 mph, and he’s topped out at a scintillating 102.5.

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David Laurila: You had an inning in Milwaukee earlier this year, your only inning that game, where you stuck out the side on 11 pitches. Take me through that outing.

Spencer Strider: “This was before I was starting. I was still in the bullpen and had sort of just earned some more important innings. We were up [4–3 in the seventh inning], it was only my second time pitching with the lead, and I was facing the Brewers for the third time. They knew fastballs were coming, but I think they wanted to see me throw strikes, too. There was a bit of that ‘wait him out and see what he’s got’ to their approach.

“I just went right at guys with fastballs. I struck out the first guy [Victor Caratini] on three pitches, then the second guy [Kolten Wong] on four pitches. I struck out the third guy [Luis Urías] on four pitches as well.”

Laurila: Was the plan to attack almost exclusively with fastballs? Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a one-number kind of analyst, Teoscar Hernández is having an unremarkable season. After posting a 132 wRC+ last year, he’s back at it with a 129 mark this year. His overall batting line is down – .274/.326/.495 compared to .296/.346/.524 in 2021 – but between playing all of his home games in Toronto instead of Dunedin and Buffalo and the overall decline in league-wide offense, he’s been roughly the same hitter relative to league average in both years.

If you look at his underlying rates, you still won’t see much difference. Hernández is walking 0.5 percentage points more often this season than last season. He’s striking out 1.4 percentage points more often. He’s running a similar ISO, a similar BABIP, and a similar barrel rate. But zoom in juuust a little bit and things splinter:

Here’s one story you could tell about his season: he scuffled to start the year, made some adjustments that righted the ship somewhat but resulted in too many strikeouts, and finally dialed things in. You wouldn’t even necessarily be wrong; descriptively, those things all happened. Under the hood, though, Hernández made a big adjustment, one you won’t see in that data. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs added a source of potential power Monday afternoon, claiming designated hitter Franmil Reyes off waivers from the Guardians. After hitting a solid .254/.324/.522 for Cleveland in 2021, his second season eclipsing 30 homers, Reyes has had a disaster of a 2022, with an OPS barely above .600, easily his worst professional season.

If you had told me at the start of the season that Cleveland would be in a real fight for the AL Central title, I’d have assumed that Reyes would be one of the reasons. The Guardians would probably feel similarly about him, a fixture in the middle of the lineup since his acquisition from the Padres in that 2019 three-way trade that included Trevor Bauer and Yasiel Puig.

It would be inaccurate to call Reyes a well-rounded player. He’s not fast, doesn’t hit for contact, isn’t particularly selective at the plate, and his defense can best be described as “adventurous.” But what Reyes does very well is weaponizing aggression at the plate into hitting baseballs a very, very long way. Even in an age during which we heavily scrutinize the more scientific aspects of batter versus pitcher confrontations, a big dude crushing pitches a mile is a delicacy that should never completely fall off the menu. Of Cleveland’s 14 homers of at least 450 feet since the start of 2019, Reyes owns five of them.

Reyes’ raw physical tools were why the Padres were so interested in signing him as a 16-year-old for $700,000 in 2012, and while it took four years for him to break out in the minors and turn his physicality into performance, the team didn’t mind being patient. The power eventually came, though without the universal designated hitter in the National League, his weaknesses with the glove diminished his value in San Diego. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife spent three months working in Australia in 2019. I didn’t get to visit her thanks to a hectic work schedule, but that’s okay, because she brought back plenty of mementos from the trip. There were delicious snacks, wonderful pictures (check out the Twelve Apostles sometime if you haven’t), a t-shirt from the Australian Open, and excellent stories. None of that’s relevant for today, though. What’s relevant for today is what one of her coworkers called sharks: bitey boys.

That’s an excellent turn of phrase. It calls to mind a certain laziness combined with purity of purpose. They’re just boys hanging out, except for their one hobby: biting. Take an unsuspecting swim in their waters and you might be in for a bite. That’s just what they do.

Why bring this up on a baseball blog in 2022? I’d like to talk to you about a major league player who embodies that ethos. He’s mostly just there to hang out and live life. Sometimes, though, it’s time to bite – or in this case, swing for the fences. Meet Daniel Vogelbach, a shark lying in wait for a delicious fastball to devour. Read the rest of this entry »

Toward the beginning of the season, strength of schedule isn’t all that important. The divergences in it are minuscule, not enough games have been played to differentiate team strength, and so on. There are projections, yes, but that doesn’t mean the actual season is never volatile. But as spring gives way to summer, providing a more accurate overview of the season, schedule strength becomes a variable that matters. Fans love to imagine that a contender would have an easier shot at reaching the playoffs with a cushy schedule, and it’s true. What kind of team wouldn’t want an easier road ahead?

Normally, early August would be a tad late to write an article on remaining schedule strength. But due to how late the season started, we’re only now two-thirds of the way in. Also, we just recently wrapped up the trade deadline, which saw some teams bulk up and others slim down, often at the expense of each other. It’s these additions and subtractions that have shifted the playoff picture. All in all, it felt like an an appropriate time to sit down, crunch the numbers, and figure out whose schedules are forgiving, and which are less so. Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to weathering an endless barrage of Jethro Tull jokes, Ian Anderson has played an outsized role in the Braves’ success since reaching the majors in late 2020. The 24-year-old righty has struggled this year, however, and on Sunday, the Braves optioned him to Triple-A Gwinnett in hopes that he can recover the form that helped his team come within one win of a trip to the World Series in 2020, then win a championship last year.

Anderson has pitched to a 5.11 ERA, the sixth-highest in the majors among pitchers with at least 100 innings, and a 4.24 FIP in 105.2 frames this year. He has been frustratingly inconsistent, allowing four runs or more in eight of his last 14 starts, five of those while failing to complete at least five innings. In his other six outings in that span, he’s allowed two runs or fewer.

Consider the sequence of Anderson’s last eight starts, a mix of good and bad outings versus good and bad teams: 4 IP/4 ER (vs. Dodgers on June 24), 2 IP/7 ER (vs Phillies on June 30), 5 IP/1 ER (vs. Cardinals on July 5), 5.2 IP/2 ER (vs. Nationals on July 10), 5.2 IP/ 1 ER (vs. Nationals again on July 15), 3 IP/7 ER (vs. Angels on July 24), 6 IP/0 ER (vs. Diamondbacks on July 30), and 4 IP/4 ER (vs. Mets on August 5). In the penultimate start in that stretch, he held Arizona to one hit and one walk, matching his season high of nine strikeouts, and on Friday, he yielded seven hits and four walks to the Mets, striking out just three. That’s not only a lot of variance, but it’s also a 6.62 ERA and a 12.4% walk rate over a six-week stretch, too much for any team — particularly a contender — to stomach.

“We need to get him right,” said Braves manager Brian Snitker of the move. “Hopefully, he can take a step back, reassess things and get himself going. He’s experienced a lot during his young Major League career, but he’s not a finished product.”

“They think I’m a big part of this,” said Anderson. “I need to get back to what I know I can be, and what they know, as well… Now it’s just kind of about getting confidence back and figuring some things out.”

Anderson relies on a three-pitch mix, with his changeup — thrown from a high and vertical arm slot — the star of the show. That pitch is still exceptional, but his results on both his four-seam fastball and his curve have receded significantly since he reached the majors, in part because he throws the latter less often when he falls behind in the count — and he’s falling behind more often. Always a pitcher with a reverse platoon split, he’s also been rocked for a .316/.380/.505 line by righties this year.

Anderson’s jump from last year’s 3.58 ERA is the third-largest in the majors among pitchers with at least 100 innings in both seasons:

Factoring parks and scoring environments into this, Anderson’s 39-point gain in ERA- (from 83 to 122) drops him to fifth, with Giolito and Ray leapfrogging him, but any way you slice it, that’s an unflattering list to land on. Read the rest of this entry »