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 »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Field of Dreams Game, “playing catch” vs. “having a catch,” scouting baseball movies, and a quibble with baseball in Twilight, answer listener emails about extending the Field of Dreams Game concept to other settings (and other baseball movies), the aesthetics of no-doubt dingers and wall-scrapers, saving the ball from a fluky first hit, and the difficulty of comparing per-game stats and statistical qualifiers across seasons with and without COVID-related rules, plus Stat Blasts on the players who’ve been called up and sent down most often in a single season and the longest streaks of matching results for two teams (and additional thoughts on Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, Jo Adell, Jacob deGrom, the Dodgers’ division odds, trading catchers, and links on the show page).

Audio intro: Cub Scout Bowling Pins, "Heaven Beats Iowa"
Audio outro: The Ladybug Transistor, "Broken Links"

Link to Field of Dreams Game highlights
Link to Field of Dreams Game ratings
Link to Field of Dreams EW episode
Link to potential future settings for games
Link to Take Me In to the Ballgame podcast
Link to Twilight EW episode
Link to Tom & Jerry baseball scene
Link to expected home runs leaderboard
Link to video of Burger’s first hit
Link to Sam on ERA qualifiers
Link to FanGraphs Playoff Odds
Link to Craig Goldstein on Adell
Link to most optioned/recalled players
Link to Gerald Schifman on options use
Link to Eric Stephen on often-optioned players
Link to EW episode with Oliver Drake
Link to list of longest matching W-L streaks
Link to data on trade rates by position
Link to Ohtani on his pitching potential
Link to Ohtani WPA tweet

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I’m back from vacation and so is co-host Ben Clemens, so let’s podcast again, shall we? We begin by talking about the good and the bad from the Field Of Dreams game, some silly comments from Mets management about player injuries, and why MLB (and everyone else for that matter) should avoid partnering with Barstool Sports. Then we are joined by special guest Susan Slusser of The San Francisco Chronicle, who helps explain how and why the Giants are the most interesting team in baseball. From there it’s your emails, vacation talk, and the rare triple-dose of culture.

As always, we hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

Music by Laura Stevenson.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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When Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert both went down with serious injuries earlier this season, the White Sox had to scramble to cover for two of their best outfielders. Andrew Vaughn, a corner infielder by trade, was thrown into the fire as their Opening Day left fielder, and when Robert went down a month later, the options were even thinner. To make matters even more complicated, the other member of their projected preseason outfield trio, Adam Eaton, was released by the club right before the All-Star break. Despite all this turnover and turmoil, White Sox outfielders have been worth a cumulative 7.1 WAR this year, the fifth highest mark in the majors. With both Jiménez and Robert back from the injured list much earlier than expected, Chicago suddenly has outfield options to spare.

Amazingly enough, Jiménez has already accounted for 0.8 WAR in just 13 games since being activated a few weeks ago. He’s been used as the designated hitter seven times, with three of his appearances in left field coming during an interleague series against the Cubs. With Robert taking his place as the everyday center fielder, the White Sox have four or five different options to deploy in their outfield corners. When Jiménez lines up in the field, Vaughn has been used as the designated hitter or shifted over to right field. Considering the difficult circumstances Vaughn was thrown into at the start of the season, his 2021 has to be seen as a huge success. The other day, Luke Hooper broke down the swing adjustment he made in late June that has led to a surge in production over the last month and a half. Even though he hasn’t contributed very much in the field, his bat is clearly good enough to stick in the lineup as the everyday starter in left. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, Justin Choi took a look at the Blue Jays’ offense, observing that Toronto is succeeding by attacking in-zone pitches early in the count. It’s a strategy that has proven successful before: As Justin noted, you don’t want to give away a get-me-over strike. Falling behind 0–1 is too high of a price to pay if the first pitch is in the strike zone. No one exemplified this strategy more than George Springer, who had the majors’ highest differential between Z-Swing% and O-Swing% on the first pitch in 2020. Maybe that is why Springer was the Jays’ big free-agent splash last offseason: Not only is he a great player, but he also fits with that organizational philosophy that Justin outlined.

There’s more to be said about the impact that Springer has had on the Jays, however. It did take some time for him to settle into his new home, as he missed the beginning of the season due to an oblique strain, returned on April 28 to play four games as the team’s DH, then strained his right quad and found himself back on the IL until June 22. After the second return, though, he has been a mainstay in the lineup, and he’s quickly making a case as the most impactful-free agent acquisition of the 2020–21 offseason, even in spite of the comparatively lower volume.

Through Wednesday, Springer is hitting .285/.371/.645 with 16 home runs and a 170 wRC+ in 198 plate appearances across 46 games. The batting average and on-base percentage are roughly in line with his career marks, at 15 and 10 points above his career-average performance in each stat, respectively. It’s the .645 slugging percentage that sticks out like a sore thumb. Springer has never been a .300 ISO player, let alone a .360 ISO player. It’s been four years since Springer had an ISO this high in any 46-game stretch:

Springer has been the beneficiary of some good luck, but his barrel rate is a career-high, and it’s not even close. His average exit velocity, meanwhile, has ticked up by 2 mph year-over-year, getting above 90 mph for the first time in his career, and his sweet-spot rate — the percentage of batted balls between 8–32 degrees — is also at new heights. This has led to the best expected wOBAcon of Springer’s career, at .469. Other underlying numbers, like xwOBA, have been less favorable to his performance. (This is due at least in part to the highest strikeout rate of his career.) But the top line production is currently there, and even if regression does come, he’ll still be the George Springer the Jays were looking for when they signed him. Read the rest of this entry »

Whit Merrifield has long been one of the best base stealers in the game, but he has seemingly reached a new level of thievery this season, with 33 steals on only 35 attempts. That 94% success rate is the highest of his career and leads the majors among players with at least 20 attempts (Bo Bichette is an impressive 17 for 17). Our base running metric pegs him as the most valuable runner in the game, and he’s on pace to set a new career high in steals (he swiped 45 in 2018) with a chance to become the first player to reach 50 steals since 2017 — and all at the age of 32.

What’s particularly interesting is that, despite a 90th percentile Sprint Speed of 28.7 feet per second, which is about a half a foot per second off of his peak, Merrifield is far from elite when it comes to his short distance split times, which is a good way to gauge a player’s acceleration. His 90-foot split has gone from a peak of 3.89 seconds in 2018 to 3.97 this season, or from the 79th percentile to the 68th. Other elite thieves like Trea Turner, Byron Buxton and Tim Locastro have splits in the 99th percentile. Even Starling Marte, a fellow high success-rate stealer in his early 30s, is in the 81st percentile.

Base stealing is much more than a runner going top speed, though; it’s a mental and physical duel between the base runner and the pitcher. (That’s not to make light of the catcher’s role, but they are often left holding a baton, and the blame, for a race long lost.) What makes Merrifield the best base stealer in the game at a time when he’s far from the fastest player in the game is that he’s a master of this duel.

Exhibit A:

Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

A month after the draft, here are some early looks at a few members of the 2021 draft class as they launch their professional careers.

Ryan Cusick, RHP, Atlanta Braves
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Augusta Age: 21 Org Rank: 7 FV: 45
Line: 3 IP, 0 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 7 K

Notes
Cusick’s started his professional career with two consecutive 98 mph strikes, setting the tone for what would be an impressive minor league debut. The 24th overall pick of the 2021 draft struck out seven of the nine of the batters he retired, and was one scorching liner off his third baseman’s glove away from perfection over his three innings of work. His success was due largely and unsurprisingly to his fastball, a high-90s offering delivered from a high arm slot (Cusick is an imposing 6-foot-6) that proved too much for the struggling Kannapolis offense.

In addition to the four-seamer, Cusick sprinkled in a few slurvy breaking balls, most of which missed the zone, though some missed bats as well. His arsenal also includes a changeup that he rarely threw during his time at Wake Forest, but which was a major developmental focus during last year’s shutdown; it did not make an appearance in his pro debut. Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox have built a commanding lead in the American League Central. They’re now 10 1/2 games ahead of second-place Cleveland and have a 99.9% chance of going to the playoffs according to our Playoff Odds. They were heavily favored to win the division going into the season, but the club has had to overcome some significant adversity (most notably early season injuries to Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert) en route to the secure position they currently hold. And even beyond injuries, the roster was not without its questions, with one big one being how Dylan Cease would perform in his first full season in the rotation.

Cease’s 2020 campaign produced mixed results. On the surface, his 4.01 ERA, 5-4 record, and 44 strikeouts across 58.1 IP was decent. But he drastically outperformed his expected statistics, and it was hard to imagine he could maintain that ERA given his elevated walk rate (13.3%) and home run rate (1.85 HR/9), not to mention his 6.36 FIP. Cease has always had great stuff. As a prospect, his fastball graded as a plus to plus-plus pitch, with his breaking ball sniffing 60-grade territory; the question was how well he could control and command his repertoire. And while his 2020 peripherals suggested his performance this season would regress, there was a lot of optimism surrounding Cease prior to the start of the season. In spring training, Yasmani Grandal stated, “I feel like if we get him to where we see him going, this guy could be a Cy Young finalist — he could possibly be a Cy Young winner.” Read the rest of this entry »