The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last month after being on hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features Peyton Battenfield, Demarcus Evans, and Josh Fleming on their cutters.

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Peyton Battenfield, Cleveland prospect

“Slider, cutter… that pitch is kind of loosely defined. I call it a cutter. The horizontal movement isn’t super high, and I throw it anywhere from 87–90 [mph]. I’d tried throwing a slider in college, but I could never really get it to move. When I got drafted by the Astros, I had the same grip and still couldn’t get it to move. For whatever reason, I didn’t understand the right type of spin that I was supposed to be getting out of it, but then I got showed a cutter grip. This was in October 2020, in instructs, and that’s when it started moving.

“I actually tried learning one back in 2019, when I was with the Astros, but like with any pitch, when you’re first starting to learn it takes time and patience. You’re learning a new grip, so you’ve got to figure out the right release point, what feels right coming out of the hand in order to get the movement profile you’re looking for.

“I came into spring training this year able to throw it for a strike more consistently. I was also getting more consistent movement, the way I wanted it to move, and the velo was higher on it as well. As much as anything, I simplified the pitch. Trusting the grip and throwing it like my fastball was probably the biggest thing. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, White Sox manager Tony LaRussa called first baseman José Abreu “one of the great players in major league history.” That’s certainly a strong statement — probably too strong, but that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with a manager praising his players.

Abreu’s season has been defined by streaks, but he’s getting hot down the stretch for Chicago, and when he’s hot, he’s an aircraft carrier in terms of the ability to put the team on his back if needed.

As he heats up, he’s now on track to lead the American League in RBIs for the third consecutive season, and while that statistic is exceptionally lineup dependent, it still speaks to his value in the middle of the order, as well as his exceptional durability and consistency. His career wRC+ is 133, and his lowest mark in a season is 114, back in 2018. He’s had off years, but only in the context of his own career; he’s never approached anything that could be called bad. Most of his ability comes from his massive strength, as he ranks in the 90th-plus percentile among major leaguers in most any advanced power measurement stat. And while he’s a bit of a free swinger, he barrels balls up at an elite rate, and they tend to have more oomph on them than when your average player squares a ball up.

Is he one of the greatest players in history? He is not, but he’s certainly high on my Cuban-What-Could-Have-Been list. While most baseball fans have only been aware of Abreu since his 2014 rookie season, for many inside the game, last year’s MVP campaign was a long time coming.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in March, all we had to look at for the 2021 season was projection; we’re now on the cusp of September, with just over 80% of the games already played. To the consternation of a percentage of fans, projections on sites like this one look unreasonably grumpy to teams like the Giants, who have played above their projections in 2021. It’s undeniable that they have been off for teams, which is something you should expect. But are these computers actually wrong when predicting middling play from these high-achieving surprises going forward?

The Giants, in particular, have already outperformed their original preseason projections by somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 wins. With a month to go in the season, it wouldn’t be a total surprise if San Francisco ended up with 25 more wins than the predictions. Yet our assembled projections only list the Giants with an expected roster strength of .512 over the rest of the season. Using ZiPS alone is sunnier but also well off the team’s seasonal pace through the end of August.

Yes, ZiPS projects the Giants as the slight favorite to win the NL West now, but that doesn’t take a lot of mathematical courage given that they’re already in first place with most of the season done. With the help of a little math, you can see that the computer projects San Francisco to go just 16–16 the rest of the season; to be more precise, ZiPS thinks the Giants have a roster strength that indicates a .521 winning percentage with their average opponent for the rest of the season having a .520 roster strength, resulting in a mean projection around the .500 mark. That’s up quite a bit from the preseason, when ZiPS thought the Giants were a .467 team with a .502 schedule, ending up with a 75–87 preseason estimate. But it almost feels a bit disrespectful to the team leading the league in wins for most of the season.

So why are projections so grumpy? In a nutshell, it’s because they’re assembled based on empirical looks at what baseball’s history tells us, not (hopefully) the aesthetic valuations of the developer. And in the baseball history we have, seasonal projections do not become this all-powerful crystal ball when it comes to projecting how the rest of the season goes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals aren’t going anywhere this season, but that doesn’t mean they’ve thrown in the towel. In the second half of August alone, they’ve taken series from the Astros, Cubs (a sweep), and Mariners and won 10 of 14 games. One big reason for their surge has been Salvador Perez, who’s homered eight times in that span and gone deep in his last five straight games. After a stellar showing in the shortened 2020 season — his first back from Tommy John surgery — he has already set a career high with 38 homers and appears on his way to several other full-season highs in counting and rate stats.

Indeed, the 31-year-old backstop has been on quite a binge lately. After hitting 21 homers in the season’s first half, Perez participated in the Home Run Derby, losing out to eventual champion Pete Alonso in the first round. His 17 homers since the All-Star break are tied with Joey Votto for the major league lead, and he’s second overall to only Shohei Ohtani (41).

Within that stretch, Perez homered in three consecutive games from July 28 to 30, his longest streak since 2017, then separately matched and surpassed his career-best streak of homering in four straight games, which he did April 6–9, 2017. What’s more, on August 26 against the Mariners’ Joe Smith and a day later, against Logan Gilbert, he hit two grand slams, the first of which erased a 4–1 deficit and the second a 5–1 deficit. In doing so, he became the 25th player in major league history and the first since the Brewers’ Tyler Saladino in 2019 to hit slams on back-to-back days. Here’s a supercut of the homers from his five-game streak:

In the wake of the first home run in that clip, one of the announcers notes that Perez is on pace to become just the sixth catcher to hit 40 home runs in a season, but that’s not quite correct. A player has hit at least 40 homers while spending the majority of his time as catcher six times; he is on track to become the seventh. However, a player has hit at least 40 homers while in the lineup as a catcher — as opposed to getting a breather at another position, whether it’s first base or designated hitter or pinch-hitter — five times, and Perez isn’t anywhere close to becoming the sixth:

Bench, man. In that 1970 season, when he was 22, he homered 38 times in 137 games as a catcher, five times in 14 games as a left fielder, and once apiece as a first baseman and right fielder, that while playing each of those positions seven times. In 1972, he homered 34 times in 127 games as a catcher, four in 17 games as a right fielder, and two in four games as a third baseman. He won the NL MVP award in both seasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

Peyton Battenfield has been one of the best pitchers in the minors this season. The 24-year-old right-hander is 6–0 with a 2.15 ERA, and those aren’t even the shiniest numbers on his stat sheet. In 88 innings — 57 at the Double-A level, 31 more in High-A — Battenfield has 116 strikeouts to go with just 14 walks and 52 hits allowed.

The Oklahoma State University product has logged those numbers with a pair of organizations, the first of which was his second in pro ball. Houston’s ninth-round pick in the 2019 draft, Battenfield was dealt to Tampa Bay the following January in exchange for Austin Pruitt; last month he went from the Rays to Cleveland in exchange for Jordan Luplow and DJ Johnson at the trade deadline. He hasn’t skipped a beat since his most recent change of uniforms. In four starts with the Akron RubberDucks, the former college closer has punched out 21 batters against two free passes and 10 hits over 20.2 frames.

Battenfield discussed his breakout campaign a few days before being traded to Cleveland.

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David Laurila: You’re having a great year. What has been behind that success?

Peyton Battenfield: “For me, it’s just attacking the strike zone with all my pitches. It’s getting ahead and not being afraid to give up hard contact. I’m going to throw my best stuff in there, and whatever happens, happens. The outcome will be the outcome.”

Laurila: Was not aggressively attacking the strike zone ever an issue in the past? Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves have been a revelation over the last month. Jay Jaffe detailed last week how Atlanta turned its season around after the trade deadline, adding 67.4 points to its division odds and 5.3 points to its World Series odds in roughly three weeks. And all of that was in spite of losing Ronald Acuña Jr., for the season to a torn ACL. The Braves have gotten solid contributions across the board from their new-look outfield of Joc Pederson, Adam Duvall, and Jorge Soler, all acquired around or at the deadline. Of the rest of the core, only Ozzie Albies has performed worse post-July 30; the trio of Freddie Freeman, Dansby Swanson, and Austin Riley have been among the most productive players in the NL in that same span.

Aggression in adding outfielders at the deadline in conjunction with a high level of play from star hitters has helped Atlanta surge to the top of the standings. The pitching has held up its end of the bargain as well, though, ranking as a top-10 unit since the trade deadline, improving its ERA by just over half a run and posting the sixth-best strikeout and walk rates during that timeframe.

Much of this success can be attributed to Max Fried. Since the deadline, he ranks third in WAR among qualified pitchers, buoyed by a minuscule walk rate (1.6%, best in the majors) and a massive ground-ball rate (57.5%, fifth in the majors). That’s a recipe for elite performance even with a middling strikeout rate. It’s also a more exaggerated version of the profile he has shown since he became a full-time starter for the Braves two seasons ago; from 2019 to ’20, he ran a 53.5% ground-ball rate, a 24.1% strikeout rate, and a mere 7.1% walk rate.

Fried’s season has not always been this smooth. After his first three starts, capped off by an eight-run, four-inning outing on April 13, his ERA sat at a grizzly 11.45. Worse yet, in that last game, he strained his hamstring running the bases, was placed on the injured list, and did not return until May 5 against the Nationals, allowing one run over five innings with six strikeouts and one walk. Besides missing a turn in the rotation due to a blister on his left index finger back in late June, he has effectively put his April woes behind him and pitched more like the version of himself we saw in the prior two seasons, with a 2.77 ERA and 23.9% strikeout rate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bobby Dalbec is a bona fide music nerd. The son of a longtime Atlantic Records executive, the 26-year-old Boston Red Sox rookie not only plays piano and guitar, he’s an ardent fan of multiple genres. Growing up around the business influenced that. His father, Tim Dalbec, has worked with a diverse group of artists that include — to name just a few — Bruno Mars, Robert Plant, Smash Mouth, and the Zac Brown Band.

While he listens to everything from rap, to house, to Neo soul —“If it sounds good in my ear is all that matters” — guitar-based rock is clearly in his wheelhouse. Talking to the young power-hitter prior to a recent game at Fenway Park, I learned that he enjoys Jimi Hendrix, John Mayer — “a lot of people think he’s a pop guy, but his his guitar playing is pretty top-tier” — and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Another favorite is Goose, a jam-band out of Connecticut.

Somewhat surprisingly, Dalbec only recently began playing the guitar.

“My dad never pushed me toward music,” said Dalbec, whom the Red Sox selected in the fourth round of the 2016 draft out of the University of Arizona. “He was a drummer growing up, but I never learned drums. The first instrument I learned was actually piano, and that was three or four off-seasons ago. I was self-taught. Piano was kind of a gateway into learning guitar, which I really dove into after the first COVID outbreak.”

Why piano before guitar? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh talks to The Ringer’s Zach Kram about how the red-hot Yankees have salvaged their season, mounted their longest winning streak in 60 years, and put themselves in playoff position. Then (27:33) Ben brings on John Poff, former major leaguer and Stat Blast star, to discuss his brief big league career, walking away from the game, being a bookworm in baseball, playing before big salaries, the evolution of coaching, failure fueling art, his peripatetic post-baseball life, his career as a writer and poet, the racism he observed in the sport, bringing baseball to Native American reservations, and more (plus a postscript about Charlie Watts the drummer and Charlie Watts the infielder, and Vin Scully on catcher framing).

Audio intro: The Rolling Stones, "Sway"
Audio interstitial: The Rolling Stones, "Dancing With Mr. D"
Audio outro: The Rolling Stones, "The Lantern"

Link to Zach’s Yankees article
Link to AL East playoff odds graph
Link to longest Yankees winning streaks
Link to Lindsey Adler on the Yankees
Link to Jay Jaffe on the Yankees
Link to Ringer MLB Show WS draft
Link to Poff’s SABR bio
Link to Poff’s piece on Donnie Moore
Link to Stat Blast about Poff
Link to Poff’s game against Sutter
Link to Fernando Perez episode
Link to Poff’s fundraiser
Link to later Poff fundraiser
Link to piece on salaries and ticket prices
Link to Roger Angell on player salaries
Link to Angell on player salaries and fans
Link to Scully clip
Link to Rob Harvilla on Watts
Link to story on Watts visiting the NLBM
Link to 1925 Watts photo
Link to Watts’ B-Ref page

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