“When you’re pitched away, take the ball to the opposite field.” It’s a training mantra that seemingly exists everywhere. I heard it in Little League. I hear it on major league broadcasts to this day. The data show that hitters do it, and it’s just a natural swing. I can think of few hitting sayings I believe more than this one.

Of course, just because you can hit the ball the other way doesn’t mean you have to. Over the last two years, the list of righty hitters who have pulled the ball most when they swing at away pitches (from right-handed pitchers, just to standardize the sample) probably matches your intuition:

You basically understand the kinds of hitters on here. The guys ranked sixth and seventh are similar types: Salvador Perez and Mike Zunino. It’s big boppers who try to lift and pull the ball no matter where they’re pitched, as well as guys like Marcus Semien who sell out to pull in an attempt to juice their power. If you do the most damage on the pull side and accrue most of your offensive value through power, it’s a natural approach. You think anyone’s coming to the ballpark to see Patrick Wisdom slap a well-placed cutter the other way? They want dingers!

The list of the hitters who pull the ball least often when pitched away is mostly who you’d expect, and also not who you’d expect at all. Feast your eyes on the top five:

The top four are contact-oriented hitters with elevated groundball rates… and the fifth might be the most powerful baseball player in history. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals are only second in the NL Central right now, but they’ve been having some fun lately. On back-to-back Sundays, they sent elder statesmen (and likely future Hall of Famers) to the mound to close out lopsided games — first Albert Pujols against the Giants and then Yadier Molina against the Pirates. What’s more, the Cardinals were on top in both of those games by double-digit scores, placing the pair in a rare subset within the annals of position players pitching.

That’s not the only interesting recent development when it comes to those accidental moundsmen. But as it’s been awhile since I last delved into the topic, it’s a good place to start.

So let’s set the wayback machine to May 15, the night that the Cardinals faced the Giants in St. Louis for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast. With lefty Carlos Rodón on the mound for San Francisco, the 42-year-old Pujols, who returned to the nest this spring after a decade-long run with the Angels and, briefly, the Dodgers, was in the lineup. Though righties are still a problem, he’s ably served as a platoon designated hitter against southpaws; to date he’s hit .227/.329/.439 (125 wRC+). On this night, Pujols and company went to town on Rodón, scoring nine runs over the first four frames, with eight of them charged to the starter, and the veteran slugger collecting a double and an RBI single within that onslaught. The Cardinals kept scoring, adding two runs apiece in the fifth, sixth, and seventh; by the end of the eighth, they led 15–2. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I talked about a few young players who teams should be itching to sign to long-term contracts. Due to public demand, another set of projections is on the way, but I’ll admit I intentionally omitted one pitcher, Pablo López, from the first look because I wanted more space to talk about him.

Unlike a lot of pitchers the Marlins have accumulated during their various fire sales, López wasn’t a highly touted arm in the minors. Prior to 2017 — the season during which he and three other players were traded by the Mariners to the Marlins for reliever David Phelps — he was basically a non-entity among prospect-watchers. He didn’t receive an official ZiPS projection that year, but if he had, it would have been similar to the projection he received before the 2018 season, which essentially saw him as a below-average innings-eater at his peak. At no time did he rank on a ZiPS Top 100 prospect list.

His first couple of campaigns with the Marlins featured decidedly mixed results. While López was essentially a league-average pitcher thanks to exit velocities that ranked towards the top of the league (the good kind of top of the league), he lacked the ability to finish off batters. From 2018-19, he basically threw four pitches: a relatively straight fastball, a sinker, a curve, and a changeup. None them were whiff-makers, and none of them had even a 20% put-away rate, resulting in a mediocre 7.5 K/9 combined over those two seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

This season, Eric and Tess Taruskin will each have a minor league roundup post that runs during the week, with the earlier post recapping some of the weekend’s action. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

Alec Burleson, RF, St. Louis Cardinals
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Memphis Age: 23 Org Rank: TBD FV: 40+
Weekend Line: 9-for-13, 3 2B, HR

Notes
As the Cardinals are apt to do with their prospects, they pushed Burleson, a former two-way player, to the upper levels very quickly, having him spend most of his first full season at Double-A before a late-season promotion to Memphis, where he began 2022. He has had virtually no issues, slashing .282/.337/.486 so far as a pro, with a whopping .321/.367/.591 line at Triple-A this year. Burleson has above-average raw power and is hitting the ball hard despite utilizing a simple swing, one that becomes even simpler when he has two strikes. He is adept at hitting up-and-in fastballs, though he sometimes strangely inside-outs them to left field, and he also tends to take pitches down and away from him the opposite way, with enough strength to do extra-base damage in that direction.

Burleson is a pretty aggressive hitter whose chase rates have historically been in the 37-40% range, which would put him among the top 25 or so swing-happiest qualified big league hitters. It’s a somewhat scary underlying data point for a guy who doesn’t bring a lot to the table on defense, as Burleson is a tentative corner outfielder with a surprisingly average arm for a former college pitcher. Burleson has absolutely put himself in the short-term big league conversation with his upper-level performance, but there’s still bust risk here and he’s likely a corner platoon bat who’ll compete with Lars Nootbaar (who has better plate discipline, but a swing less optimized for power) for plate appearances against righties once Corey Dickerson’s one-year deal is up. Read the rest of this entry »

Summarizing the life’s work of Roger Angell — who lived for 101 years and covered baseball for 56 of them, doing it better than anyone has — was such a daunting task that I knew even before I started writing my tribute that I would need a little help from my friends. So I asked a small handful writers and editors within easy reach to share a few of their favorite Angell pieces with me and our readers.

Some of these pieces were cited within my tribute and mentioned multiple times within my informal polling, so as the responses came in, I nudged others for some deeper cuts, and limited myself to those as well. Many if not most of these pieces are behind the New Yorker’s paywall, but you could do worse than subscribe. Nearly all of them are collected in the seminal volumes that introduced so many of us to Angell’s work, namely The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), and Season Ticket (1988), with a few collected within the anthologies Once More Around the Park (1991) and Game Time (2003), and his final book, This Old Man: All in Pieces (2015).

The roster of contributors, alphabetically (with links to some additional Angell-related content): Lindsey Adler, staff writer for The Athletic; Alex Belth, founder of Bronx Banter and The Stacks Reader; Joe Bonomo, author of No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing; Jason Fry, blogger at Faith and Fear in Flushing; Ben Lindbergh, senior editor at The Ringer and Effectively Wild co-host; Meg Rowley, FanGraphs managing editor and Effectively Wild co-host; Susan Slusser, San Francisco Chronicle Giants beat writer and past BBWAA president; Emma Span, enterprise editor at The Athletic; and John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball. Thank you to all of these folks for their timely submissions. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees had the third-best bullpen in baseball last year, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that had changed this year. Last season’s two best relievers, Jonathan Loáisiga and Chad Green, have combined for 0 WAR and an ERA above 5.00, and Green will miss the rest of the season due to injury. Their highest-paid reliever, Aroldis Chapman, has lost more velocity and is recording strikeouts at a below-average clip. Their big speculative offseason addition, Miguel Castro, is below replacement level.

Naturally, they have the second-best bullpen in baseball in 2022. Michael King, who I recently wrote about, is the headliner so far this year, but he’s hardly alone. Clarke Schmidt, who profiles as a starter long-term, has looked good. Wandy Peralta is a competent lefty specialist. And that brings us to King’s running mate, the other best reliever on the Yankees: Clay Holmes.

Holmes is hardly new to the majors. He toiled in obscurity with the Pirates for years, walking too many to take advantage of his grounder-inducing sinker. Then the Yankees got their hands on him, and he turned that sinker into an entire identity, filling the zone and letting the chips fall where they may. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve hit the quarter-mark for the season and some of the early-season disappointments are finally turning things around. Not much has changed at the top of the rankings, however.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

There’s no love lost between the Yankees and White Sox these days. After tensions rose during a four-game set two weekends ago, they tipped past the breaking point after Josh Donaldson’s racially charged comments to Tim Anderson on Saturday. That storyline understandably dominated the headlines, overshadowing a week in which the Yankees went 5-3 to maintain the best record in baseball. Aaron Judge is currently locked in and blasting everything in sight. He launched his league-leading 15th home run during the day game on Sunday; it was the third long ball he hit last week. Read the rest of this entry »

Judging by the tributes that poured forth on the occasion of his death at the grand age of 101 years old on Friday, there’s a solid chance that Roger Angell — a man who bore first-hand witness to Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, and Mike Trout — was your favorite baseball writer’s favorite baseball writer, even though he was never a full-time baseball scribe at all. Unburdened by the daily deadlines of the beat reporter, the competition for scoops among the national writers, or (to use his term) the weight of objectivity, Angell instead mused at length in the pages of the New Yorker in a capacity that served as a sidelight to his longtime role as a fiction writer and editor. Though his frame of reference stretched so far back that he spotted Ruth walking around Manhattan as a child, and spoke of Napoleon Lajoie with his father, he didn’t take up writing about baseball until age 40. He reported, but with a twist: “I’m reporting about myself, as a fan as well as a baseball writer,” as he told Salon’s Steve Kettman in 2000.

With the luxuries of looser deadlines, greater space, and the ability to depart from sportswriting conventions, Angell filed eloquent and erudite essays a handful of times every season, writing about the year’s winners and losers, its superstars and promising newcomers, its sunsetting old-timers, and its zeitgeist as experienced from his vantage as a privileged outsider. Over the course of six decades that took him from man-in-the-seats dispatches to deep explorations of the game’s intricacies with its master craftsmen, he assembled a body of work — primarily collected in The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988), and Game Time (2003) but continuing as late as his 2015 collection, This Old Man: All in Pieces — that is unrivaled, revered, and beloved.

“I wanted to concentrate not just on the events down on the field but on their reception and results,” wrote Angell in the introduction to The Summer Game. “I wanted to pick up the feel of the game as it happened to the people around me. Right from the start, I was terribly lucky, because my first year or two in the seats behind first or third coincided with the birth and grotesque early sufferings of the Mets, which turned out to be the greatest fan story of all.” Read the rest of this entry »