The Giants have been one of the year’s biggest surprises, leading the National League West for a large portion of the season and holding the best record in baseball since the beginning of June. Their success is due in large part to some unexpectedly resurgent seasons from their veteran core. On Friday, San Francisco rewarded one of those veterans, signing Brandon Crawford to a two-year, $32 million contract extension.

The Tigers haven’t been nearly as good as the Giants in 2021, but they’ve played some really competitive baseball after an ugly 8-19 April. A big reason for their change in fortunes has been some excellent production from Jonathan Schoop. After signing back-to-back one-year deals with Detroit the last two seasons, the team inked him to a two-year, $15 million contract extension on August 7.

Crawford, a Bay Area native, has spent his entire career with the Giants. He was selected in the fourth round of the 2008 draft and has been a fixture at shortstop since his major league debut in 2011. He’s the franchise leader in games played at at the position and was a key contributor to two World Series championships in 2012 and ’14. After the 2015 season, he signed a six-year, $75 million contract extension that would have expired at the end of this season. This new extension guarantees that Crawford remains a single-franchise player at least through his age-36 season, a feat that’s become increasingly rare in today’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

Eugenio Suárez is not a major league caliber shortstop. That’s no knock on him — pretty much no one in the entire world is, and he picked the position up out of necessity rather than because it was in his range. The Reds simply had no one to play there, and he looked like the least terrible option. The experiment didn’t last long — 32 games was enough to say that he was better suited for third base — but the team’s changed infield construction gave Jonathan India a big league shot, so it wasn’t all bad.

The hitting, on the other hand? That’s been all bad. Suárez has been restored to his natural spot at third base, and the Reds are mounting a playoff charge — but they’re doing so despite an absolutely abysmal season from the player we projected as their best before the season started. He’s hit .172/.259/.373, good for a 68 wRC+, and it’s worth asking whether this is just a blip on the radar or the beginning of the end for one of the sneakiest power hitters of recent years.

Let’s start with something that doesn’t seem to have gone wrong: Suárez is still hitting home runs at a solid clip. A full 18.3% of his fly balls have turned into homers this year, and while that’s not quite the rate he managed in 2019 or 2020, it’s still an excellent number, one that makes sense given how hard he hits the ball and the bandbox park the Reds call home. And he’s doing so despite a nagging shoulder injury that has plagued him since the start of the 2020 season.

In 471 plate appearances so far this year, Suárez has cranked 23 bombs. Plug those home run numbers in and use previous career rates to fill in the rest of his statistics, and he’d be doing just fine; he’d be hitting roughly .263/.344/.480. There’s all kinds of absurd math in there, and I’m not claiming that’s a reasonable projection for the season, but the power certainly hasn’t been the problem this year — at least at first glance. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned in June after being on hiatus last season due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features Andrew Kittredge, Matt Manning, and Tyler Wells each discussing their slider.

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Andrew Kittredge, Tampa Bay Rays

“It was after my freshman year of college, playing summer ball in Newport, Rhode Island. I actually started off calling it a cutter. It was pretty small, and it was firm. I was throwing my fastball anywhere from 90 to 94 [mph] and the cutter was around 89-91. Slowly, over time, I started getting around it a little bit more, and it got bigger and slower. By the time I got into pro ball, it was probably 83-85.

“It was a pretty good pitch for me — I had a good feel for it — and that’s kind of what I had up until 2019. Then I started throwing it harder again. I didn’t really change the grip, or my mindset, as much as I … well, the mindset was to try to stay behind it a little longer and accelerate through it at the end with hand speed. So while the velocity kind of jumped, I didn’t really plan on it doing that. The idea just was to try to tighten up the spin, and with the increased spin I added velocity. I also made it a little shorter; it’s not as big as it used to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatis Jr. is now an outfielder for the San Diego Padres. Despite his recent stint on the injured list — his third of the season, and his second related to his shoulder — he might end up collecting the NL MVP provided he can stay productive and healthy, all while moving away from the only position he’s played in professional baseball. In his return to action on Sunday, he raised his wRC+ to 172 and got his first playing time in right field. There wasn’t much to be gleaned from the four balls hit his way, however, leaving us to wonder how well he’ll handle the position going forward. Mike Petriello at MLB.com has covered the unprecedented nature of this move, but I want to take a look at what we can actually expect from Tatis defensively. I’m not the first to consider the question. Last week, Michael Ajeto highlighted Tatis’ defensive ability in an article for Baseball Prospectus and delved into the analytical precedent for shortstops who have recently made the conversion to the outfield. Today, I’ll look at what we might predict about Tatis’ outfield defense given some of the other data we have about his speed.

But let’s set the stage. The biggest flaw in Tatis’ game since his debut has been his defense. After a 2019 characterized by 18 errors and poor defensive metrics, he seemed right the ship last season. But his defense has since regressed, and while his -4.3 Def runs at shortstop this year hasn’t made him unplayable at the position, it’s certainly not ideal. Still, this move wasn’t necessitated by his play at short, but rather by Tatis’ recurrent shoulder problems and the Padres’ stated desire to shield him from further injury, though as Ajeto noted in his piece, whether that will actually work is an open question.

That’s how we ended up with Tatis in the outfield. Before getting too far ahead of ourselves, however, it’s important to know how his numbers at short are derived. His penchant for throwing errors is well documented and they do serve to drop his DRS, UZR, and Outs Above Average (OAA) considerably. We can peek at the component parts of UZR to separate the errors from Tatis’ range, but we aren’t even close to a three-year sample and thinking about UZR sample size is a Pandora’s Box that should be kept closed for today, anyhow. For our purposes, we’re not going to pay much attention to throwing errors or even Tatis’ range on grounders as a shortstop. The baseline we care about is how well he can play right field and quick twitch and speed are the parts of the shortstop skillset that seem mostly likely to translate to the outfield grass. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles have a way of making the most free-falling of teams look healthy, but even so, the Red Sox had to be heartened by their three-game sweep this past weekend, as they finally took the wraps off two key stretch-run additions. On Friday night, trade deadline acquisition Kyle Schwarber made his Red Sox debut, and on Saturday, Chris Sale made his long-awaited return from Tommy John surgery. The pair should help shore up a team whose chances at a playoff spot have taken a hit in recent weeks.

The Red Sox trounced the Orioles by scores of 8-1, 16-2, and 6-2 from Friday to Sunday, giving the team just its second winning streak of longer than two games since the All-Star break. Even with the sweep, the Sox have gone just 6-8 in August, 14-15 in the second half, and 19-20 since the start of July, squandering an AL East lead that was as large as 4 1/2 games circa July 5. At 69-51, they now trail the Rays (71-47) by three games, and their chances of winning the division have dropped from a high of 70.8% to 39.4%. Those odds can’t help but improve with the additions of Schwarber and Sale, potential impact players who can each shore up an area of need.

Sale’s return came two years and one day after his last major league outing, dating back to his missing the final six weeks of the 2019 season due to elbow inflammation. After suffering a flexor tendon strain and experiencing continued pain, he underwent Tommy John surgery on March 30, 2020, his 31st birthday. The Red Sox were resolute in not rushing him back; he made the first of his five rehab appearances on July 15, 15 1/2 months after surgery, with the final two such outings lasting 81 and 89 pitches, respectively, which is to say that he wasn’t appreciably trying to increase his pitch count so much as fine-tune his repertoire. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

After a disappointing 2020, Frankie Montas has had a nice bounce-back season. Following a breakout 2019 that saw him post strikeout and walk rates of 26.1% and 5.8%, respectively, and accumulate 2.9 WAR in just 96 innings (his season was cut short due to a PED suspension), Montas regressed heavily last year. His walk rate increased to 9.7%, while his strikeout rate dipped to 25.3%. Even while calling the Coliseum and its expansive outfield home, he posted a 1.70 HR/9 compared to just 0.75 in 2019. The end results were unseemly: he finished 2020 with a 5.60 ERA and a 4.74 FIP, an especially unimpressive figure given his home ballpark.

All the gains he made in 2019 were seemingly lost and at the start of 2021 not much appeared to be different. Montas was sitting on a 6.20 ERA at the end of April with a .369 wOBA allowed, a subpar strikeout rate (21.9%), and a walk rate (6.1%) that was only a slight improvement over the previous season. But early struggles masked a marked improvement from 2020. Much of that bloated ERA was attributable to a brutal start against the Dodgers on April 5 that lasted only 2.1 innings and included seven runs allowed (in fairness, Montas was coming off a finger injury sustained in a spring training start). He had one more disastrous start that month — an April 21 tilt versus the Twins during which he allowed six runs in four innings — but with those two stinkers in the rearview, Montas’ run suppression prowess has been on the mend. Indeed, besides those early hiccups, Montas has only had one start in which he has given up more than six runs (a June 21 start against Texas):

Through 23 starts and 131 innings, his ERA, FIP, and xFIP have all massively improved over 2020, placing at 3.98, 3.47, and 3.65, respectively. His strikeout and walk rates are back to 2019 levels (26.4% and 6.5%) as is his accumulation of WAR (2.5 as of this writing). In the last month alone, Montas has made five starts and pitched to a 2.64 ERA and 2.24 FIP, with a gaudy 35.3% strikeout rate; he’s been worth just over a win. Along with the steady performance of Chris Bassitt (be sure to check out Owen McGrattan’s excellent profile on Bassitt) and a career-best season from Sean Manaea, Montas is leading the way for the Athletics as they simultaneously try to hold onto their Wild Card spot and chase down the Astros for the AL West crown. Read the rest of this entry »

Sinkers (or two-seamers, as they’re also called), are a mixed bag. Maybe it’s just me, but they seem to produce polarizing results. They’re used by the most mediocre of control artists and the league’s best pitchers alike. They’re responsible for some of the slowest as well as the fastest, well, fastballs – just watch teammates Adam Wainwright and Jordan Hicks. When a pitcher lobs a bad sinker, hard contact seems inevitable. But when a good sinker is dangled as bait and the hitter bites, there’s no escaping that darn infield.

Extremes can work. They’re also risky, which is why the average pitcher relies on a four-seam fastball. We know what makes that pitch tick, and it slots into any arsenal. Sinkers are trickier to tame, which helps explain why pitchers have shied away from them in recent years. But as I explored earlier this year, a decline in usage does not equal a decline in relevance. If anything, the emphasis on seam-shifted wake has piqued the sabermetric community’s interest in sinkers.

When I wrote the article I referenced above, I was left with a few unanswered questions. For example:

“That being said, I’m not sure if higher sinker velocity correlates to better results, whether that be in terms of wOBA or Run Value… [a]t a glance, there’s no significant relationship between sinker velocity and xwOBA allowed (r^2 = 0.04).”

Immediately, there’s a flaw within that finding. I’d measured the relationship using pitchers who threw sinkers, not the sinkers themselves. It’s possible a pitcher possesses the makings of a good sinker but struggles with command. This time, I got down to business. I had pitch data from the 2018-19 seasons from an earlier project, so that became my sample. One caveat, though: I only included sinkers that resulted in batted balls. For the most part, the intended purpose of a sinker is to generate soft contact, and I felt including whiffs, fouls, and other results would produce murkier conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Yurchak is flying under the radar as a prospect. He’s flying high in present-season performance. Unranked on our 2021 Los Angeles Dodgers Top Prospects list, the 24-year-old first baseman boasts the highest batting average among minor-league hitters with at least 260 plate appearances. Currently with Double-A Tulsa after spending the first three months of the season with High-A Great Lakes, Yurchak has come to the plate 322 times and is slashing a stand-up-and-take-notice .365/.452/.498.

Those numbers aren’t as nearly surprising as you might think. Since entering pro ball in 2017 as a 12th-round draft pick out of SUNY-Binghamton, Yurchak has put up a sumptuous .318/.413/.468 slash line. With the exception of a pedestrian year in 2018 — a 100 wRC+ in Low-A — he’s always hit.

I asked Yurchak about that lone blemish on his otherwise stellar stat sheet.

“That year, I got off on a bad track and had a hard time figuring out what was wrong,” Yurchak told me on the final Friday of July. “There was a little bit too much movement in my lower half. Part of it was that I wasn’t gathering my legs under my body. When I was landing in my load, there was a little bit of a slide with my hips, and my bat was dragging. Had I been able to make [the needed] adjustment earlier, I think the season would have gone differently for me.” Read the rest of this entry »