The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last month after being on hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features a southpaw, Damon Jones, and a pair of right-handers, Zach McCambley and Josh Staumont, on their curveballs and sliders.

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Damon Jones, Philadelphia Phillies prospect

“My slider is kind of seam-shifted. I get a lot of horizontal — something like 23 inches, which is pretty crazy — and I kind of picked it up off a Pitching Ninja video. It was Trevor Bauer’s grip, but I changed it up a little bit. It was more my thumb. I left the fingers how he had them, but he touches his thumb and I kind of hook it on the bottom part of the horseshoe. I think that helps the ball come out of my hand a little bit later. Watching the video, he wanted to get it out early and let it spin. I want it to be more of a late, back-foot pitch. The more I can make it look like a fastball the better, and it’s been pretty similar for me in terms of release point, release height, and all that.

“This was in 2019 — I made the jump from High-A to Triple-A that year — and it was shortly after spring training. After my first or second start in High-A, I was toying with stuff, saw the grip, and started throwing it. The guy on the Rapsodo was like, ‘Can you repeat that pitch? Can you do it again?’

“Then, when I got to Double-A, Tommy Hunter was rehabbing with us. He told me, ‘It’s like an Andrew Miller type of slider, it’s just wipeout.’ I was like, ‘Well, he’s got a lot of showtime and has seen a lot of guys with good sliders, and he’s comparing me to the guy Andrew Miller was when he was in his prime.’ I was like, ‘I’ll take that.’ Read the rest of this entry »

As is the annual tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the week after the All-Star Game to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value in anticipation of next week’s trade deadline. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at those players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2022-2026, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2026, if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons. Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2020 post. One note on the rankings: particularly at the bottom of the list, there’s not a lot of room between players. The ordinal rankings clearly matter, and we put players where they are for a reason, but there’s not much room between, say, 35 and 60. The magnitude of the differences in this part of the list is quite small. Several talent evaluators we talked to might prefer a player in the Honorable Mentions section to one on the back end of the list, or vice versa. We think the broad strokes are correct — but with so many players carrying roughly equivalent value, disagreements abounded. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his help in creating the tables in these posts. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all the players who have been ranked up to this point.

And now, to the next group of players. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Aaron Bummer? It’s an odd question I know. For many, the answer might not be a whole lot besides the fact that he has an amusing name. He is a reliever, after all; given his role, he’s not the most recognizable player. For the initiated, however, the first quality that comes to mind at the mere mention of Bummer is likely his supreme ability to generate groundballs. Bummer’s has been in the majors since 2017; in five seasons, he has posted groundball rates of 54.4%, 61.2%, 72.1%, 68.4% (I will note he only threw 9.1 innings in 2020), and 73.7%. Over that time frame, he ranks fourth in groundball rate among all pitchers who have tossed at least 50 innings.

The leading culprit behind his prolific groundball rates is his sinker. Sinkers have sharp downward movement that fade away from a pitcher’s glove-side. The downward movement, coupled with the pitch generally being lower in the zone, prevents hitters from squaring up the ball, instead impacting the upper-half, driving the ball into the dirt. This season, the average groundball rate for a sinker sits at 56.4% compared to 41.7% for all other pitch types. And Bummer has a great sinker, one that inspired a post from Devan Fink on these very pages last February. Devan demonstrated with a tidy model that Bummer’s sinker is an elite blend of velocity and arm-side and vertical movement, the perfect recipe for inducing piles of groundballs from the opposition. And Bummer’s sinker has remained excellent; in 2021, the pitch has a laughable 82.4% groundball rate. The pitch is so effective that it inspired its own profile from The Athletic’s James Fegan, which included an amusing story of Bummer picking up the pitch after watching Zack Britton pitch while the former dined at an Applebee’s.

Overall, Bummer has been an excellent reliever throughout his major league career. The White Sox signed him to a five-year contract prior to the 2020 season, with two club options tacked on to the end that can keep him on the South Side until 2026. Given the volatility of relievers, that’s quite the endorsement of Bummer’s skills and I find it difficult to fault Chicago for doing so. He has a career 3.23 ERA, a figure 26% better than league average when you consider the difficult confines of his home park. The park-adjusted FIP is just as impressive, sitting at 23% better than league average over 161.2 career innings. Read the rest of this entry »

A surprisingly deep group of free-agent pitchers this winter became a little less so over the weekend, as Lance Lynn agreed to a two-year extension with the White Sox. The deal guarantees at least $38 million for the veteran hurler through the 2023 season and will pay him $18.5 million in each of ’22 and ’23, with the Sox holding an option for ’24 worth $18 million and a $1 million buyout.

If you happened to surf over to our in-house depth charts, you would find the White Sox only looking up at the Mets when it comes to pitching, and given that six of the 10 Mets listed are currently out with injuries, I’d prefer to have Chicago’s starting five if I’m the benevolent dictator of a contending team. The rotation is currently projected to finish with 19.3 WAR, topping the majors and enough to give the Sox one of the top 20 rotations since we survived the Y2K bug. That’s an impressive accomplishment considering that they’re currently projected to finish right around 900 innings, about a hundred short of the rest of that top 20. And as there are good reasons to think the contending years are just starting, Chicago has an obvious interest in keeping such a high-performing group together for years to come; Carlos Rodón is now the team’s only significant free agent this offseason.

It’s been an impressive reversal of fortune for Lynn, who didn’t attract a ton of interest in his first two go-arounds in free agency. After posting a 4.82 FIP in 2017 upon returning from Tommy John surgery, he only fetched a one-year contract with the Twins, but despite seeing his walks and ERA balloon to career-worsts in ’18, he closed a three-year pact with the Rangers, albeit with a pay cut. Ranking fifth in the AL in pitching WAR this season and only 1 2/3 innings shy of qualifying for the AL ERA title, he looks like a good bet to pick up Cy Young votes for his third consecutive season.

Could Lynn have made more in free agency? It’s a more complicated question than you think. It’s also one that he had little interest in testing.

“When you start getting older in this game, you realize that where you want to play and where you want to be and what kind of organization you want to be a part of weighs a lot,” he said Saturday. “Over the first half of the season, just being able to see how everybody goes about their business here, the group that’s here and the group that’s going to be here for the next couple of years, it seemed like a pretty easy fit.

It’s not surprising to see Lynn go for stability over uncertainty. By all accounts, Chicago has been a terrific fit for him, and he’s become a favorite of the fanbase. The White Sox would have been quite content to start Dane Dunning; last December’s swap was about them wanting Lynn rather than not wanting Dunning.

The ZiPS projections liked Lynn to have a gentle decline through his 30s, but not one that was likely to merit a gigantic payday. The aging curve for pitchers tends to be more attrition-based than for hitters, but a long-term deal for Lynn would start to get him into his late 30s, where you do start seeing a significant dropoff in skills along with the playing time. ZiPS would have given him a longer-term deal — four years, $84 million — but the $45.5 million projection for the next two years is not a galaxy apart from his $38 million guarantee.

Recent free-agent classes have been relatively shallow when it comes to pitching talent, but this autumn’s harvest looks far more bountiful. ZiPS projects eight pending free-agent pitchers —  Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Kevin Gausman, Zack Greinke, Eduardo Rodriguez, Robbie Ray, and Marcus Stroman — to be worth at least three wins in the first years of their new deals, more than the seven it did for the previous two offseasons combined. There are some big names in that group, including several veterans also looking for two-or-three year deals. That also doesn’t include Noah Syndergaard, a pitcher who retains dizzying upside, and some interesting injury gambles in Corey Kluber and James Paxton. Given some of the name brand stars available, there was at least some risk Lynn ended up once again being a team’s consolation signing.

The league’s finances have to be considered as well. While the bottom line is certainly better than the Dickensian pauper status the owners usually suggest, it’s not at all clear that there are going to be a lot of teams hungry to spend this go-around. The vast majority of teams now appear to consider baseball’s de facto soft salary cap as if it were a harder one. On top of that, the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the MLBPA expires on December 1, and unless the negotiations go shockingly smoothly, those talks will cast a shadow over baseball that’s likely to discourage teams from spending.

Whether or not he left money on the table, Lynn got a reasonable offer to stay on the team he wants to play for. The White Sox can now turn to the short-term need of picking up another bat and/or a second baseman for the season’s concluding chapters.

As is the annual tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the week after the All-Star Game to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value in anticipation of next week’s trade deadline. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at those players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2022-2026, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2026, if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons. Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2020 post. One note on the rankings after seeing some of your comments: particularly at the bottom of the list, there’s not a lot of room between players. The ordinal rankings clearly matter, and we put them there for a reason, but there’s not much room between, say, 35 and 60. The magnitude of differences in this part of the list is quite small. Several talent evaluators we talked to might prefer a player in the honorable mentions section to one on the back end of the list, or vice versa. We think the broad strokes are correct — but with so many players carrying roughly equivalent value, disagreements abounded. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his help in creating the tables in these posts. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all the players who have been ranked up to this point.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the first batch of players. Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. Yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets and have presented it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.

When it comes to defining replacement level play, we needn’t be slaves to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 0.6 WAR from a position to this point — prorating to 1.0 over a full season — might be considered fair game. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which may depend upon which metric one uses) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. Sometimes a team may be well ahead of replacement level but has lost a key contributor due to injury; sometimes the reverse is true, but the team hasn’t yet climbed above that first-cut threshold. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it.

For this series, I’ll go around the diamond, pointing out the most egregious examples of potential Killers at each position among contenders, which I’ll define as teams who are above .500 or have playoff odds of at least 10.0%. That definition covers 17 teams (sorry Braves, Cubs, Cardinals, and Nationals, but you’ll have to do this without my help). If one of the aforementioned fringe teams gets their record or odds above the threshold this week, I’ll do an additional Very Special installment at the end. And while I may mention potential trade targets, I’m less focused on these teams’ solutions than I am the problems, because hey, human nature.

This first installment will cover first basemen. All statistics within this piece are through Saturday, July 17. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year since time immemorial (fine, for just over a decade), FanGraphs has produced a trade value series with one goal: rank the top 50 players in baseball by their value in a potential trade. To the surprise of no one, we’re doing that again this year. Over the coming days, we’ll release our list, taking performance, age, and contract into account.

That’s right — we, not I. In past years, the list has been compiled by a single FanGraphs writer — Dave Cameron, Kiley McDaniel, or Craig Edwards. This year, for the first time, it’s a two-person job. We (Ben Clemens and Kevin Goldstein) worked together to construct this list. That was useful for several reasons. First, it led to fewer obvious omissions as we started compiling the top 50. Those likely would have been smoothed out over time, but having two pairs of eyes was incredibly useful at getting an initial list together. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani is a unicorn in terms of two-way talent, but he’s not the only player who has shown an ability to provide value on both sides of the ball. And you don’t need to go back as far as Babe Ruth or Negro Leagues legend Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe to find examples. It’s not that long ago that Mike Hampton was putting up healthy offensive numbers in the DH-less National League, and Michael Lorenzen was pinch-hitting and playing the outfield for the Reds just two years ago. There is also Brendan McKay — he of the repaired labrum — who would presumably welcome a return to two-way play if the Rays were to give him that opportunity.

Cade Cavalli could conceivably handle his own as an Ohtani-lite. The top pitching prospect in the Washington Nationals system performed solely on the mound in his junior year at the University of Oklahoma, but he was both a pitcher and a corner infielder in the two years prior. And he raked. Cavalli’s sophomore numbers with the Sooners included a .319/.393/.611 slash line with five doubles, a pair of triples, and four home runs in 88 plate appearances. Including his freshman output, the Tulsa native went deep 10 times as a collegian.

I asked Cavalli for his thoughts on two-way players in MLB this past Friday.

“It takes a special person to be able to do that,” said Cavalli, who pitched in the Futures Game and is currently with the Double-A Harrisburg Senators. “There’s a lot that goes on; it’s not just playing in the game every single day. There’s early work, hitting, you’ve got your conditioning as a pitcher, you’ve got position work. It can take a toll on someone’s body. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the conditions David Fletcher has faced during his hitting streak compared to those Joe DiMaggio faced, follow up on a discussion of baseball in a multiverse scenario, discuss the difficulty of extending (or trading) Byron Buxton, mention a quest to collect Willians Astudillo cards, puzzle over the stagnation of former top prospect Nomar Mazara, and marvel at Padres rookie reliever Daniel Camarena’s improbable grand slam. Then (32:53) they talk to Jake Mintz of Cespedes Family BBQ about his All-Star week experience, his upcoming baseball bike ride from New York City to Chicago, the teams he’ll see along the way, his fateful bet about the White Sox not hiring Tony La Russa, how La Russa has handled the job in Chicago, the challenge of gauging how effective any manager is, Jake’s friendship with Jordan Shusterman, and more.

Audio intro: Billy Bragg & Wilco, "Joe DiMaggio Done it Again"
Audio interstitial: 2nd Grade, "My Bike"
Audio outro: The Dukes of Stratosphear, "Bike Ride to the Moon"

Link to Stats about DiMaggio’s streak
Link to story about official scorers and DiMaggio
Link to list of pitchers Fletcher faced
Link to Larry Niven story
Link to Buxton extension story
Link to Astudillo card collector
Link to Wallach card blog
Link to Sam on the Wallach card collector
Link to one million Cubs cards account
Link to 2019 Mazara moonshot
Link to Camarena homer
Link to Camarena backstory
Link to Camarena high-school stats
Link to story about Duggleby
Link to Andy McCullough on La Russa
Link to 2014 Cespedes BBQ road trip
Link to Jake’s 2021 trip website
Link to Lost Boyz Inc.

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