FanGraphs Baseball

Zack Gelof doesn’t profile as a boom-or-bust prospect. Coming off of a season that saw him reach Triple-A at age 22, the University of Virginia product is a near lock to perform on the big stage — not as a headliner, but rather as a solid contributor to a lineup that is currently patched together with Band-Aids. The low-budget Oakland Athletics need all the help they can get, so getting Gelof — ditto the higher-ceilinged Tyler Soderstrom — to the big leagues is an organizational priority.

Drafted 60th overall in 2021, Gelof slashed .270/.352/.463 with 18 home runs this past season, with the bulk of his action coming with Double-A Midland. The right-handed-hitting infielder added three more homers in the Arizona Fall League, and it is his power potential that most stands out for our lead prospect analyst. When I asked Eric Longenhagen for a snapshot scouting report on Gelof, he told me that “it is definitely a power-over-hit profile at this point,” adding that while his 70% contact rate wasn’t great, his “peak power and barrel rates were very encouraging.”

When I asked Gelof for a self-scouting report, he chose not to cite specific strengths, but rather his all-around skillset and desire to get better.

“I’d say I’m a really athletic infielder who likes to compete,” the Delaware native told me during his stint in the AFL. “But I try not to think about who I am and what people scout me to be. I just worry about working on basically every area that I can. I want to perform on the field and be the best player that I can be.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, what felt like months of Pablo López trade rumors finally came to fruition, as he was sent to Minnesota (along with two prospects) for reigning batting champion Luis Arraez. (For an in-depth breakdown of the trade, check out Ben Clemens’ summary here.) In theory, the trade should help both rosters: the Twins needed pitching depth, and the Marlins needed offensive help. For this piece, I’m going to focus on how López can recover the best version of himself that we saw in 2021 before he missed much of that season’s second half.

López established himself as an above-average starting pitcher in the shortened 2020 season, when he threw 57.1 innings with a 3.61 ERA and 3.09 FIP. The main reason for his success: he bought into the idea of throwing your best pitches more often, throwing his four-seamer and changeup over 60% of the time for the first time in his career. That success carried over into 2021, when he threw 102.2 innings with a 3.07 ERA and 3.29 FIP, followed by a hot start to 2022. But from the middle of June through the rest of the season, he kept tossing up clunkers.

The short story is that hitters stopped whiffing at López’s changeup. He had a slight recovery in the final month, but as you can see in that pitch’s whiff rate and his strikeout rate, that wasn’t him at his best. His repertoire hinges on both righties and lefties swinging at and whiffing on changeups. It’s the key to his success, and it will need to be the focus if he hopes to return to his 2021 form.

So why did hitters swing and miss less at López’s changeup as the season went on, and is it directly related to the pitch itself?

To answer that, it’s worth considering first what a changeup is: a deception. And in order to deceive, you have to make the hitter believe something else is coming. To do that, you must throw your complimentary pitch regularly and in an ideal location. In the case of the changeup, you usually pair it with a four-seamer or sinker; for López, it’s the four-seamer. The success of those pitches goes hand in hand; if one is off, then the performance of the other could be in jeopardy. To go into more detail: if the shape of one changes and no longer tunnels as well with the other, then the combination isn’t as deceptive.

That seems to have been the case with López. Below is a table of his four-seamer/changeup metrics from the last few seasons:

The difference is jarring. López didn’t have pure backspin on his four-seamer to begin with, but a change in shape from the low-80s in Active% (also known as spin efficiency) to 66.2% completely alters a pitch’s shape and, as a result, its effectiveness. Even though his changeup metrics were relatively the same from 2021, the change in the fastball negatively impacted the entire arsenal. If a hitter can distinguish between those two pitches because of shape and/or location, they are less likely to be fooled by either one.

This negative development for López can be traced directly to an injury suffered when he took a liner right off the right wrist on June 10. After that, his performance was sporadic, and more importantly, his release point and pitch location changed:

During his rough patch in July and August, his release point moved down and closer to third base. This slight change perfectly tracks with a loss in active spin. By getting further around the ball, your finger and seam orientation at release are less on top of the ball and more on the side. To get more backspin, you ideally release the ball closer to the top of your fingertips. A change in grip strength that could be the result of a wrist contusion would have a direct impact on these components and cause compensations that take time to realize and adjust to. And while López felt healthy enough to throw 180 innings last year, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t compensating.

When combing through the video, it’s easier to see the change in release. Below are four total clips; the first two are from April, and the two after are from July and August.

There are a few things I want to address. First, López’s altered release point can be traced back in his delivery to a slight change in the use of his glove side. Comparing his throws in the spring to those in the summer, you can see that he’s altered the way he turns his glove over at peak lead arm extension. Early in the year, he only had a slight quarter turn in his glove; in the second half, he progressed into a full turnover.

That subtle difference creates two different reciprocal movements. A reciprocal movement is one that is a direct result of another; if you throw a ball up, it must come down. The same principle works for the body. A change in direction of the glove turn affects the direction of torso rotation, which then affects the angle or position of the throwing arm at release. (The kinetic chain!) That’s an area where he and his coaches can look at when discussing how he can make the proper mechanical adjustments to recover his fastball shape.

It’s important, too, to note how important that recovery will be for López’s tertiary pitches as well. When you lose one of your primaries, hitters can more easily sit on the pitches that aren’t as effective in the arsenal. For López, that pitch was his cutter. After two seasons with a wOBA under .325, the pitch was wrecked in 2022: a .447 wOBA and .321 batting average against. Its downfall can also be traced to his four-seamer, as the pitch went from the mid-50s in spin efficiency to the mid-30s. He may only throw it 10% of the time, but it was still a huge liability. Hopefully whatever mechanical adjustments López makes to recover his four-seamer can filter down to that pitch as well.

Injuries in general can be tough to overcome in the middle of a season. For a pitcher, that difficulty increases with anything related to their arm. A contusion may not be a long-term health concern, but López’s second half shows how something that looks insignificant can lead to detrimental short-term compensations. Luckily for him, this is the type of thing that shouldn’t take any drastic adjustments to fix, and he already has a blueprint for success from his 2020 and ’21 campaigns. With the help of a new coaching staff in 2023, his two-pitch combo should give him and the Twins an above-average starter for the next couple of seasons.

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

The Giants are a good team. They certainly didn’t feel like one for much of the middle portion of last season, but after a disappointing home sweep by the rival Dodgers in mid-September, they mopped up the Rockies and Diamondbacks and banked enough wins to get back to the .500 mark. Bringing in Michael Conforto as a decent starter/reclamation project meaningfully upgrades the outfield, and the Mitch Haniger signing was practically a bargain for a player who could be a top-tier designated hitter again if healthy. There’s a real solidity to the roster; no one on the infield has an impressive projection, but they have a lot of those guys on hand. Without even being aggressive, there are six or seven players on the team who could take one of the non-first base infield jobs and be at least passably adequate in the role. The problem here and in the outfield, however, is that the Giants can’t combine their 1.5-to-2.5 WAR guys together into three-to-four WAR players like piles of Legos. You could go full horror movie and try to sew David Villar to Wilmer Flores, but you won’t get an All-Star in the mix, just a couple of very angry players, an arbitration case, and a visit from the local constabulary. Platoons don’t really count here, either, as you can’t get a thousand plate appearances from a single platoon!

It’s not that Giants didn’t try. They were, after all, very close to inking Aaron Judge to a monster deal, talked seriously with pretty much every big free agent hitter out there, and were even the prospective employer of Carlos Correa before all of the drama that ended with the star shortstop returning to the Twins. So unlike a team with a need that it simply didn’t address, the Giants were cognizant of the weak part of their team — the lack of a big star to build around offensively — and tried very hard to correct that situation. The problem is that when the season starts, there’s no credit given for attempted WAR. Whether you fail to land a star after giving it the ol’ college try or because you’re the Cincinnati Reds, the result is the same: that player wearing someone else’s uniform. Read the rest of this entry »

Insofar as I’ve given thought to who my favorite manager of all time is, my favorite manager of all time is Earl Weaver. He exemplified the ideal shouting, dirt-kicking, umpire-haranguing baseball boss; every image and video of a red-faced Weaver screaming up at an umpire a foot taller than him is a blessing upon our society. But the man was legitimately a tactical mastermind; if baseball could be influenced by coaches the way other sports can, we’d talk about Weaver the way soccer people talk about Rinus Michels.

A lot of “great managers” really just manage a lot. Weaver, despite his hyperactive and combative personality, knew to keep his hands off his offense and let the multiple future Hall of Famers on his roster cook. Weaver’s overall recipe for success usually gets cited as “pitching, defense, and three-run homers” or something similar.

Take it from the man himself, in a (mock) radio interview for a Manager’s Corner segment with Tom Marr in 1982:

Marr: Bill Whitehouse…from Frederick, Maryland, wants to know why you and the Orioles don’t go out and get some more team speed.

Weaver: Team speed! For Christ’s sake, you get [expletive] [expletive] little fleas on the [expletive] bases gettin’ picked off, tryin’ to steal, gettin’ thrown out, takin’ runs away from you. Get them big [expletive] who can hit the [expletive] ball out the ballpark and you can’t make any [expletive] mistakes.

Marr: Well, certainly this show is gonna go down in history, Earl!

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

There’s joy in Cooperstown after all. Amid considerable pessimism heading into Tuesday regarding the prospect of any candidate receiving at least 75% from the writers on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, Scott Rolen gained entry after all. The top returning candidate on this year’s ballot received 76.2% of the vote from the writers, thus completing one of the greatest comebacks in modern electoral history. When he debuted on the 2018 ballot, Rolen received just 10.2% of the vote; no other post-1966 candidate has rallied from such meager beginnings to cross the 75% threshold via the BBWAA voters.

A masterful, athletic defender with the physical dimensions of a tight end (he was listed at 6-foot-4, 245 pounds), Rolen excelled on both sides of the ball. The 1997 NL Rookie of the Year went on to make seven All-Star teams, earn eight Gold Gloves, and star for two pennant-wining Cardinals teams, with a World Series performance that helped the Redbirds win it all in 2006. He ranks third among third basemen in Baseball Reference’s version of fielding runs, and by most measures he also ranks among the position’s top 15 or 20 hitters. Even given that injuries significantly curtailed several of his seasons, and that he played his final game at age 37, that offense/defense combination is enough to place him 10th among third basemen in both career WAR (70.1) and JAWS (56.9). Read the rest of this entry »

With only a few hours to go before the results of the BBWAA’s 2023 Hall of Fame balloting are announced, the widespread assumption is that the voters will pitch their second shutout in three years and their fifth since voters returned to annual balloting in 1966. Not only is there no slam-dunk candidate with the milestones and squeaky-clean reputation that portends a first-ballot election, or a returning candidate who’s the equivalent of a gimme putt away from 75%, but the highest share of the vote from among the 201 ballots published (just over half of the expected total) shows no candidate receiving more than 80.1%. Given that voters who don’t publish their ballots ahead of the announcements tend to be more conservative when filling them out, at best we’ve got a nail-biter ahead of us for the top two candidates. As of Monday evening, Jason Sardell, the top prognosticator for election results for three years running, forecast only about a 13% chance of a candidate being elected. He hasn’t updated the odds in the 21 hours since, which has added just 18 ballots to the pile, but I believe these will suffice:

Just over 24 hours to go until the Baseball Hall of Fame reveal, and here's where we are with 183 ballots in @NotMrTibbs's tracker. Today has been a bad day for Scott Rolen, but Todd Helton continues to slowly climb. pic.twitter.com/xRpCjZR3BL

— Jason Sardell (@sarsdell) January 23, 2023

If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope for Scott Rolen and Todd Helton, I do have one. Here’s a table showing all of the candidates who have received at least 70% via the pre-announcement ballots since 2014 (“The Tracker Era”):

As I noted in my election day preview, of the 14 candidates who received 75% to 85% via ballots published prior to the results, the average differential between those shares and their final results was a drop of 5.6% overall, and 4.4% once you exclude Bonds/Clemens/Schilling, whose baggage created a resistance to their candidacies that doesn’t apply to any of the others here.

While on the one hand just two out of 10 instances in which a candidate received less than 80% resulted in his election that year, the data has been consistent, in that everybody receiving 78.2% or higher has in fact ended up across the finish line. Sardell’s forecasting, which groups voters based upon the number of candidates they include and their electoral stance on PED users, is certainly more sophisticated than this quick-and-dirty table. But as we count down to the announcement, we at least know that there’s something to be said about the possibility of Fred McGriff having company in Cooperstown on July 23.

Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of Twins Trade Talk. I’m your host, Ben Clemens, ostensibly a writer at FanGraphs but now an exclusive chronicler of Twin City swaps. Last week, Minnesota traded AL batting champion Luis Arraez in a deal I absolutely loved. If that’s the main course, Monday’s move was dessert:

The Twins are acquiring OF Michael A. Taylor from the Royals for LHP Evan Sisk and RHP Steven Cruz, per source.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) January 23, 2023

Let’s start here: I love this trade for both sides. Michael A. Taylor has been a quality contributor when healthy for much of his career, and his last two seasons in Kansas City encapsulate his career well. In a sentence: very good outfield defense is valuable. Taylor hit a paltry .249/.304/.357 in blue and gold, but he was still worth 3.5 WAR (by our calculation, 5.7 per Baseball Reference) over roughly 1,000 plate appearances because he’s one of the best outfield defenders around. Depending on which defensive metric you’re most fond of, he’s either first (DRS), first (UZR), or second by one run (OAA) among all outfielders over the past two years. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something Joey Votto said while serving as a guest commentator in the Cincinnati broadcast booth in August: “The best in the game are matching the style of the game. The style of the game changes.” He was talking about hitting, but his point lined up with one of my favorite baseball metaphors. I often think of the game as an ecosystem. The players who thrive are the ones who are either built for or can adapt to the current game; changes to the style or the rules will always favor some players at the expense of others.

Changes will also favor some plays over others. As the infield shift rose to prominence, routine groundouts to shallow right field were fruitful and multiplied. Now that the shift has been outlawed, they’ll likely be pushed to the brink of extinction, and they’re taking one of baseball’s most exciting plays with them.

FanGraphs loves bunt doubles. This is a brief history of the bunt double by Jake Mailhot. This is a how-to manual for bunt doubles by the sainted Jeff Sullivan. In fact, he wrote about bunt doubles kind of a lot. As the shifting ecosystem means that bunt doubles are likely going the way of the dodo, it’s time to write the final chapter of their story. Read the rest of this entry »

I think I might be on to something. While fiddling around with some 2022 batted ball data in an attempt to improve my programming skills, I created a list of players whose 95th-percentile exit velocity most outstripped their average exit velocity. If you want that in plain English, that’s players who hit the snot out of the ball when they connect, but whose average exit velocity is weighed down by a pile of mishits. Second on this list among players with at least 200 batted balls? Oneil Cruz, a poster child for cartoonish maximums and frequent contact issues.

With Cruz coming in near the top of this list, I thought I might have a bead on something cool. Jo Adell (only 162 batted balls, but still), Michael Harris II, and Pete Alonso are all high up there, and they’re the kind of players I would expect to see. They’re also interesting players from a breakout perspective; if something clicks and they start making more consistent contact, they could turn into monster hitters overnight.

That’s unfair to Alonso, who is already a monster hitter, but there’s even some instructive value there. Alonso and Mookie Betts had strikingly similar lines in 2022 by strikeout rate, walk rate, isolated power, BABIP, and wRC+:

One category where they weren’t similar? Alonso’s top end exit velocity is far superior to Betts’s. I mean, obviously. Have you seen Mookie Betts? Have you seen Pete Alonso? If Alonso were getting to his power as often as Betts gets to his, he’d be putting up Yordan Alvarez numbers. Indeed, Alvarez and Alonso have nearly identical 95th-percentile exit velocities, but Alvarez hits the ball 5.5 mph harder on average. He’s consistently hitting the ball on the screws, in other words. No wonder, then, that he posted an isolated power 60 points higher than Alonso. Read the rest of this entry »

Player Valuation Analyst

The Pirates Why

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a storied franchise in Major League Baseball who are reinventing themselves on every level. Boldly and relentlessly pursuing excellence by:

• purposefully developing a player and people-centered culture;
• deeply connecting with our fans, partners, and colleagues;
• passionately creating lifetime memories for generations of families and friends; and
• meaningfully impacting our communities and the game of baseball.

At the Pirates, we believe in the power of a diverse workforce and strive to create an inclusive culture centered in Passion, Innovation, Respect, Accountability, Teamwork, Empathy, and Service.

Job Summary

The Pittsburgh Pirates are currently seeking a full-time Analyst to join their Professional Player Valuation team. The Professional Player Valuation team is responsible for producing internal valuations of players and for communicating the insights from their research to others within Baseball Operations. In this role, you will have the ability to influence roster construction and to see the impact of your work on the field. This role will provide candidates with opportunities for growth and the ability to learn from others throughout the organization.

When you submit your application, please include an original piece of research, or a project you have worked on, that you feel is relevant to this position. There is no expectation that this research/project is baseball specific. While not essential for consideration, priority will be given to applicants who submit a sample of their work.

Primary Role Responsibilities:

• Serve as the primary analyst for a subset of the professional player population
• Collaborate with other areas of Baseball Operations on the assessment of professional players
• Assist in the building of models and tools to aid in player skill assessment discussions
• Prepare tools, visualizations, and reports to aid in disseminating information throughout Baseball Operations
• Answer research questions that you think will add value to the organization, as well as those requested by department leadership and other within Baseball Operations

Involvement In:

• Trade deadline meetings.
• Off-season strategy meetings.
• Roster management discussions.

Required:

1. Authorized to work lawfully in the United States.
2. Expertise with R, Python, or Stan
3. Ability to generate insights with testable predictions from complex data sets
4. Experience with programming data visualizations (Rshiny, Ggplot, or equivalent)
5. Demonstrated ability to explain complex models and ideas clearly and succinctly
6. Proficiency in SQL to perform data manipulation with an understanding or relational database structures
7. An understanding of skill-acquisition and development concepts and their applications

Desired:

1. Strong interpersonal skills to communicate effectively with a wide range of individuals throughout the Baseball Operations department
2. Passion for learning, especially in areas outside of individual expertise
3. Ability to apply insights from external fields to baseball. Examples include, but are not limited to, computer science, kinesiology, machine-learning, physics, or psychology
4. Initiative to seek out and perform research on topics of personal interest

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Pittsburgh Pirates.