Sandy Alcantara has taken the next step. Already one of baseball’s better groundball-inducers, Alcantara has added the strikeout to his game in the second half of this season. In the process, he’s transformed from an above-average starter into one who is knocking on the door of ace status.

Over the last three years, Alcantara has been worth 7.2 WAR, a figure that ranks 27th among starting pitchers in that time. It has been volume-heavy value: his 3.94 FIP since 2019 grades out as just slightly above-average (93 FIP-), while his 434 innings pitched ranks ninth among all pitchers. His 21% strikeout rate and 8% walk rate scream nothing special, though his near-49% groundball rate kept the homers off the board.

Up until this season — and really up until its second half — that was Alcantara’s story. He was a very good pitcher, but there was still tantalizing potential he was seemingly leaving on the table. Even from 2019-20, when he struck out less than 19% of the hitters he faced, Alcantara’s average fastball velocity ranked near the top of the majors. Throwing both a four-seamer and a sinker, he averaged 95.7 mph with his fastballs, an 88th percentile mark. He also featured a slider and a changeup that both offered above-average called-strike-plus-whiff rates, suggesting Alcantara could better optimize those pitches for more strikeouts. If he could just strike out more hitters while maintaining his groundball rate, he had the potential to become an elite starter. And over his 12 starts since the All-Star break, that is exactly what has happened:

In the second half, Alcantara has struck out 28% of the batters he’s faced and walked fewer than 5%, all while keeping more than 50% of his batted balls on the ground. He has a 3.12 FIP over 78 innings, making him the 14th-most valuable pitcher in the game since the break. He’s been even better since August 1: with a 2.61 ERA and 2.80 FIP over 69 innings, Alcantara moves all the way up to eighth on the WAR leaderboard in that span. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ll start with some screen shots.

The author of that trickery is Ryan Weathers, a 21-year-old rookie for the San Diego Padres who leads all of baseball in pickoffs this season with nine. Runners have only stolen two bases off of him and he hasn’t been called for a balk yet. His pickoff proficiency has been historic, as he has retired those nine runners in only 89.2 innings, or 127 baserunners allowed. On a per baserunner basis, Weathers is having one of the best pickoff seasons of all time:

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With the last full week of the regular season around the corner, it’s another episode ofChin Music. This week, the wonderful Chris Crawford of NBC Sports Edge joins me from the Pacific Northwest as we discuss all things baseball and plenty of other things, too. We begin with a look at the Wild Card races, including the surging Cardinals and the constantly shifting American League East standings, with a quick tangent on city-specific pizzas. Then we get into CardGate, before discussing the future of the San Diego Padres now that their season looks like it will soon be history.

We’re then joined by special guest Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com for an enlightening discussion on the past, present and future of international scouting. Then it’s your emails on R&D departments, umpire grading, DFA mechanics and guilty musical pleasures. We finish by catching up with Chris and offering a couple of film recommendations that fall on the intense side of things.

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

Music by Guerilla Ghost.

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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Episode 941

On this edition of the podcast, David Laurila offers a pair of interviews with some insightful pitching minds.

• In the podcast’s first segment, David is joined by Collin McHugh. The Rays right-hander (and occasional podcast host) talks about what it is like to be a major league veteran in a game that is getting younger, how he feels about converting to relief, and the best season of his career. McHugh also shares his thoughts on pitcher wins, striking out the side, and the extra-innings runner, before he tells David about getting his first hit off of Clayton Kershaw and trying to strike out Prince Fielder. [2:39]
• After that, David welcomes Kyle Boddy, founder and owner of Driveline Baseball. Kyle talks about his recent departure from the Reds, as well as the great progress he and his team were able to make while working there. Kyle also shares his thoughts on a number of exciting Cincinnati prospects, including Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo, Stevie Branche, Lyon Richardson, and Graham Ashcraft. [29:33]

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The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned this summer after being on hiatus last year due to the pandemic. Each week, we’re hearing from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features DJ Herz, Aaron Loup, and Trevor Williams on their changeups.

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DJ Herz, Chicago Cubs prospect

“It was 2020 spring training and I was in the pitch lab. [Cubs pitching coordinator] Casey Jacobson was with me. I threw my regular four… I never had a changeup going into pro ball. So, I threw it off my four-seam grip, and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. It was too firm, only about four miles off my fastball. Casey had me try another grip, and again it was just all right. Then, the second grip we tried was kind of Vulcan-ish.

“I put it deep into the wedge between the middle and ring finger. I‘ve got the middle finger off the two-seam grip, so I can just rip down on it. I mean, the first pitch I threw like that, it was like, ‘All right, let’s stick with that one; that’s the pitch right there.’

“I went back home and just kept throwing it. I’ve always been told that the changeup is one of the hardest pitches to learn. I was determined. I said, ‘Man, I want to learn this pitch so much.’ I’d hear these interviews with guys saying that having a good fastball and a good changeup is an awesome combo, so I would throw that pitch every single day. I’d long-toss with it sometimes. I kept working on it, and it’s paid off, man. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m on record as being against intentional walks in most situations. That’s hardly some bold claim — over the last 15 years, they’re on a steady downward path as front offices and managers come to grips with the ills of extra baserunners. That’s not to say there’s never a good situation for a free pass, but those situations are few and far between.

Why pinpoint the last 15 years as the timeframe for this drop-off? In 1955, the first year where we have intentional walk totals, teams issued roughly 7.5 intentional walks per 1,000 plate appearances. In 2002, they issued 7.8 intentional walks per 1,000 PAs. Sure, there were peaks and valleys in between, but the data hardly indicated a trend. Take a look at the number of intentional walks issued per 1,000 plate appearances each year since 1955:

One note: I’ve excluded 2020 because of the universal DH, which created a meaningfully different backdrop for intentional walks — walking a decent hitter to face a pitcher is one of the best uses of the tactic.

I could end this article right there. That’s a convincing chart — the year with the least frequent intentional walks is 2021, and the year with the second-least is 2019. They’re roughly equivalent — four walks per 1,000 in 2019, 3.8 in ’21 — but even so, the writing is on the wall. Give the game 20 years, and we’ll surely see even fewer. Read the rest of this entry »

Batting average may have rightfully lost its sex appeal in player evaluation, but not everything that’s fun needs to be a measure of a player’s overall value. We’ve been treated to eight new members of the 3,000 hit club over the last 20 years; that’s a quarter of the 3,000-hitsmen in baseball history, with a few more just outside that arbitrary endpoint. Miguel Cabrera almost certainly won’t get the 21 hits he needs to reach the milestone over Detroit’s nine remaining games this season, but he should get there sometime in early 2022. After he does, however, baseball won’t have to print any more membership cards for a while.

By definition, players who end up with 3,000 career hits necessarily must have had 2,000 hits at some point. In 2021, we have fewer active 2,000-hit hitters than at any other “normal” time in baseball history:

There was only a single batter with 2,000 career hits after the 1952 season: Stan Musial, who had 2,023. But that bottleneck is hardly surprising given that many of baseball’s stars missed multiple seasons due to service in World War II. There were 10 active 1,500-hit hitters that year and six of them (Musial, Johnny Mize, Enos Slaughter, Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, and Mickey Vernon) went to war. Baseball set a record for the most active players with 2,000 hits fairly recently, with 27 after the 2004 season. Right now, there are only five: Cabrera, Robinson Canó, Yadier Molina, Albert Pujols, and Joey Votto. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies’ rotation hasn’t been a total disaster this season. Zack Wheeler is a top Cy Young candidate, and Aaron Nola has held his own as one of the league’s best starters, with the two combining for 10.8 WAR. But the rest? Zach Eflin went down in mid-July with a knee injury before getting surgery earlier this month. Vince Velasquez spent nearly two months on the injured list with a blister and was recently DFA’d; he now wears a Padres uniform. Spencer Howard had his own sophomore struggles before being traded to the Rangers at the deadline. Enter 26-year-old left-hander Ranger Suárez, who, after picking up the slack in the bullpen and briefly filling in as the team’s closer, was called upon to step into the rotation.

Suárez has been remarkably consistent since being stretched out as a starter, going at least five innings and allowing two earned runs or fewer in each of his last six starts:

During that stretch, he has only given up one home run. He’s been prolific in that regard all season, having allowed just four homers total and boasting a minuscule 0.26 HR/9 rate over those last six starts. If we extend that to the beginning of August, when he first took the mound as a starter, that becomes an even more impressive 0.18 HR/9 over 49.2 innings pitched. Not only does he seem to have the home run thing figured out, but he also doesn’t give out many free passes either: He’s issued no more than two walks in each of his last six games, good for a 5.6 BB%.

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On a hot afternoon in St. Louis on August 8, in a game that felt meaningless at the time, the Cardinals rallied for three runs in the eighth inning to tie their game with the Royals at 5–5. In the next half inning, a Paul Goldschmidt throwing error and a go-ahead single by Nicky Lopez dropped St. Louis to 55–56, mired in third place in the National League Central. The team was 10.5 games behind Milwaukee for the division lead, 8.5 games behind the Padres for the second wild card spot, and, per our Playoff Odds, had a 1.4% chance of reaching the postseason.

But following that ugly loss, back-to-back sweeps of road series in Pittsburgh and Kansas City put the Cardinals back over the .500 mark for good, and a 10-game winning streak entering Wednesday’s game in Milwaukee has them with a commanding lead for that second Wild Card spot, and the overwhelming favorites to stay that way. Since that loss to the Royals, St. Louis has gone 26–13, but those hot streaks show just how, well, streaky the team has been; those 16 wins wrap around a 10–13 run.

Still, whether the wins come in bunches or not, the Cardinals have been one of the stories of September, and that story feels largely ignored, mostly due to the five-team dogfight that is the AL Wild Card and the back-and-forth NL West battle between the Dodgers and Giants. On last week’s episode of Chin Music, Joe Sheehan and I wondered why everyone was talking about the Blue Jays and not the Cardinals in the battle of surging birds. Our take: the team is boring. The Blue Jays have swag, infectious energy and cool jackets for when somebody hits home runs. The Cardinals, meanwhile, are relative automatons, getting overshadowed by a Toronto club that is just more fun to watch.

That’s not to take anything away from St. Louis. Entertainment value be damned, this is suddenly looking like a postseason team planning to line up a surprising ace for the coin-flip game. Here are five key factors as to how the Cardinals went from under .500 six weeks ago to being in the driver’s seat for that final playoff slot.

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The Cardinals’ 10-game winning streak has given them control of the race for the second NL Wild Card spot, as they’ve built a four-game lead over the Reds, reduced their magic number to clinch a spot to eight, and threatened to cut my Team Entropy workload way down. Monday’s victory over the Brewers, their ninth win in that streak, marked the 200th career win for Jon Lester, thereby increasing the count of active hurlers who have achieved that milestone from two to three, as the 37-year-old southpaw — who was acquired from the Nationals at the July 30 deadline — joined Justin Verlander (226) and Zack Greinke (219).

Before you ask: no, I don’t think this does much for Lester’s Hall of Fame case, not with a 39.5 JAWS, which ranks 156th among starting pitchers, below the likes of Cliff Lee, Jamie Moyer, Carlos Zambrano, Brad Radke, Bartolo Colon and current teammate Adam Wainwright — and more than 20 points behind Verlander, Greinke, and Clayton Kershaw, all of whom are around the Hall of Fame standard (61.7). Two-hundred wins, five All-Star appearances, three World Series rings, and three top-five Cy Young award finishes is a nice set of credentials, but let’s not go overboard.

Anyway, Lester pitched badly with the Nationals, and he wasn’t so hot over his final two-plus seasons with the Cubs, either, as his diminished strikeout rate caught up with him. His tenure with the Cardinals — who were just 51-51 with 2.1% Playoff Odds when they traded outfielder Lane Thomas to the Nationals in exchange for him — began in similarly dismal fashion. Yet over his last six turns, he’s delivered a 2.27 ERA in 35.2 innings, allowing no more than two earned runs in any of those outings, which have come against the Tigers, Reds (twice), Brewers (twice), and Mets. Then again, a peek at Lester’s FIP during that six-start stretch (5.68) — driven by a gaudy 2.02 homers per nine — suggests that not all that much has changed for him, so the question is, what’s underlying those better results? Read the rest of this entry »