The Blue Jays started a short road trip off in style on Monday night with an 8–0 shellacking of the Royals. It was a feel-good kind of an evening — at least if you’re not a resident of Kansas City — in that the Jays got homers from two young players falling short of lofty expectations (Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette) and that a recently struggling bullpen (4.70 FIP, -0.5 WAR over the last 30 days) one-hit the Royals over four innings in closing out the rout. It was one of the 10 games in which the Jays play teams at the bottom of the American League before heading to New York to square off against the first-place Yankees.

One of the questions I was asked on one of my radio hits yesterday, this one with Blake Murphy of Sportsnet 590 in Toronto, was if the next two weeks were especially important for the Jays, coming against the weakest teams and with a seven-game divisional deficit. I believed it was, but it did make me curious just how important it was. And since I can’t run a ZiPS projection in my own head but need a computer, here we are! Just how important are the next two weeks for Toronto?

It would be hard to characterize the Blue Jays as a struggling team. While they were hovering just above the .500 mark in mid-May, they’ve been on a bit of a tear lately, winning 14 of 19 games. A 32–22 record stands at a 96-win pace, comfortably above the 88-win median that ZiPS projected for each of the top four AL East teams back in April. The problem is that the Yankees have been even better at 39–15, or a 117-win pace.

Still, Toronto’s record is impressive, and even more so when you consider how tough a schedule it’s had. The team’s average opponent this year has had a .544 winning percentage, which translates into an 88–74 record. In other words, a typical game for the Jays has seen them face off against a team projected by ZiPS to be as strong as the average non-Orioles AL East team. From a projection standpoint, ZiPS believes that they have had the toughest schedule in baseball so far.

A seven-game deficit is a significant one. Even if you thought the Jays were as solid as the Yankees at the start of the season, winning one more game over 162 games is an easier task than winning eight more over 108. Even if New York plays just .500 ball the rest of the season, Toronto has to maintain its pace (62–46, .574) in order to finish with a one-game lead (avoiding a tiebreaker now that MLB has killed off game 163).

Opening up ZiPS, I ran some experiments on the team’s fate over the next two weeks. Let’s start with the current projections. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Bregman has a reputation for being a studious hitter. Moreover, he has a well-earned reputation for being a productive hitter. The 28-year-old Houston Astros third baseman boasts a .371 wOBA and a 139 wRC+ in just over 3,000 career plate appearances. At his best, he’s been a beast; in 2019, he slugged 41 home runs and slashed a robust .296/.423/.592.

Recent seasons have seen Bregman perform below his pre-pandemic standards, but even with the downturn he’s been putting up solid numbers. His wRC+ since the start of the 2020 season is equal to this year’s 117. Still in his prime from an age standpoint, he remains a feared hitter in the middle of the Houston lineup.

Bregman talked hitting when the Astros visited Fenway Park in mid-May.

——-

David Laurila: How would you describe your approach to hitting?

Alex Bregman: “The most important thing is knowing what kind of hitter you are [and] knowing what’s going to make you successful. I think that swinging at pitches you can do damage with is extremely important. I think that taking pitches that you can’t do damage with is extremely important. In my best years, I’ve swung the least, while in my worst years I’ve swung the most. I’ve put balls in play that I shouldn’t be putting in play, because they weren’t pitches that I can do damage on.”

Laurila: How can a hitter go about controlling that? A swing decision is something that happens in a blink of an eye.

Bregman: “Good hitters can recognize when pitches are coming into that zone. They can do that early and be able to make a decision, ‘yes or no,’ pretty quickly.”

Laurila: Does a hitter’s hot zone ever change? Read the rest of this entry »

With six straight wins and a 39–15 record, the Yankees are the best team in baseball right now. One-third of the way through the season, they have the best record of any team since the 2001 Mariners (42–12) and are just two games off the pace of the 1998 Yankees (41–13). While an offense that leads the majors in homers (80) and wRC+ (117) and is second in the AL in scoring (4.78 runs per game) has been a big part of that success, lately they’ve been dominating opponents thanks to incredible starting pitching.

Even at a time when starter usage is on the rebound from its pandemic-driven trends, what the Yankees have done lately particularly stands out. Consider what the starters have accomplished during this winning streak:

That’s a 0.85 ERA, 1.92 FIP, and 27.2% strikeout rate for those starters while holding opposing hitters to a .134/.163/.190 line. The run includes back-to-back perfect game bids by Taillon and Cole, the first time that has happened since at least 1961, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

Taillon retired the first 21 Angels he faced on Thursday before Jared Walsh hit a 95.3 mph grounder up the middle that deflected off the glove of a sliding Isiah Kiner-Falefa as he ranged across second base.

Taillon got the next two outs, then allowed an RBI single by Kurt Suzuki before escaping the frame, but even so, it was his second eight-inning, two-hit start in a row.

The next night, Cole came within one out of matching Taillon’s bid before Jonathan Schoop ripped a 108-mph single past DJ LeMahieu.

The day after that, Severino allowed only a second-inning single by Miguel Cabrera, after which he joked to reporters, “I mean, I’m afraid of getting traded if I don’t get to six or seven [innings]. Not good enough.”

No joking: six or seven innings has become standard for Yankees starters lately. Over their past 15 games — a span that began with a May 22 doubleheader against the White Sox — New York starters have thrown at least six innings in 14 out of 15 games, the exception being a scoreless five-inning spot start by call-up JP Sears, the first start of his career. Four times in that span, Yankees starters have gone eight innings, and six other times they’ve gone at least seven. Over that stretch, the starters have a 1.15 ERA, 2.43 FIP, and a 25.4% strikeout rate and have held opposing hitters to a .158/.200/.234 line. That’ll work. Read the rest of this entry »

With two months of the season in the books, the various tiers of teams have mostly sorted themselves out. Anything can happen over these next four months, but it does seem like the best teams have separated themselves from the pack.

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.

The Yankees are back on top after winning six straight last week, sweeping the Angels and Tigers at home. Aaron Judge has continued to mash baseballs on a nearly daily basis, adding three more home runs to his league leading total last week; the big bet he placed on himself when he turned down the Yankees’ preseason extension offer seems to have paid off. New York also welcomed Giancarlo Stanton and Josh Donaldson back from the Injured List last week, bringing their lineup back to full strength. The pitching staff has been even more impressive. Over their last 11 games, the Yanks have allowed a total of 16 runs, and they held the Angels and Tigers to just seven runs in those six victories.

Don’t look now, but the Astros have opened up a huge 8.5-game lead in the AL West. Some of that is due to the Angels’ free fall, but Houston has also played some excellent baseball since the calendar turned over to May; they’ve gone 24–9 since then, tied for the best mark in baseball with the Yankees. They also signed their slugging superstar Yordan Alvarez to a huge six-year extension last week.

A week after reclaiming the top spot in these rankings, the Dodgers had another week to forget and tumbled to the back of this tier, getting swept at home for the first time since August 2018 by the scrappy Pirates and then splitting a four-game series against the Mets over the weekend. The continuing struggles of Walker Buehler are a concern, as he couldn’t get out of the third inning in his last start against the Mets on Saturday. Luckily, Tyler Anderson has picked up a lot of the slack, and Los Angeles should be getting Clayton Kershaw back from the IL this week. Read the rest of this entry »

Owen White opened a lot of eyes last year, and he did so by consistently shutting down the opposition. Pitching primarily with the Low-A Down East Wood Ducks, the 22-year-old right-hander punched out 56 batters in 35.1 innings and posted a 3.06 ERA. He then put the finishing touches on a stellar first professional season by dominating the Arizona Fall League, winning all five of his decisions, logging a 1.91 ERA, and again fanning over a batter per inning. Buoyed by those performances, the 2018 second-round pick — Tommy John surgery and the pandemic delayed the start of his career — came into the current campaign No.84 on our 2022 Top 100 Prospects list.

His second professional season has been more of the up-and-down variety. In nine starts with the High-A Hickory Crawdads, the hard-throwing China Grove, North Carolina native has a middling 4.73 ERA, albeit with 61 strikeouts in 45.2 innings. Displaying plus stuff as he develops, White continues to miss bats.

White, who was ranked No. 5 on our newly released Texas Rangers Top Prospects list, discussed his repertoire and approach to pitching at the tail end of the Arizona Fall League season.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with who you are as a pitcher. Give me a self scouting report.

Owen White: “I think what separates me right now is the difference between my four- and my two-seam. I’ve gotten a lot more ground balls here in the Fall League. I’m able to elevate the four-seam, then follow that with a two-seam to produce ground balls and double plays. In the long run, that saves me pitches. Those two pitches have definitely benefited me the most.”

Laurila: How long have you been throwing both a two- and a four-seam?

White: “When I got drafted, I was mainly two-seam. After I had TJ [in 2019], I started throwing only four-seams. Then this year I started working on a sinker. It really kicked in this summer.”

Laurila: Your sinker is a two-seam. Read the rest of this entry »

I have something of an annual tradition here at FanGraphs. Once a year, give or take, I write about how Yordan Alvarez is underrated. I can’t help it; he continues to be one of the very few best hitters in baseball, and he continues to get less credit than he deserves. Now, though, he doesn’t need credit, because he has cash — $115 million worth, to be precise — as he and the Astros agreed to a contract extension that will keep him in Houston through 2028:

Slugger Yordan Álvarez and the Houston Astros are in agreement on a six-year, $115 million contract extension, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Contract kicks in next season. Biggest contract ever for a DH and $26M/year for 3 FA years. And Astros lock up a great hitter.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 3, 2022

Even though I just mentioned what an excellent hitter Alvarez is, it bears repeating. This year, he’s hitting a scorching .295/.391/.624, good for a 192 wRC+, second in baseball. He’s doing it without a ludicrous BABIP; in fact, his .280 mark looks likely to increase as the season goes on. That makes his offensive production all the more remarkable; it’s easy to post a hot batting line if you’re BABIP’ing .400, but Alvarez does it the old-fashioned way, with walks and extra-base hits.

How does Alvarez get to that massive production? By obliterating the baseball consistently. He’s barreled up a whopping 19.1% of his batted balls this year. That’s Stantonian power, or even a bit better; Stanton checks in at 17.2% since the start of the 2015 season, for example. Since Alvarez came up in 2019, he’s sixth in baseball in barrel rate (among hitters with at least one season qualifying for the batting title), and the guys in front of him are a who’s who of enormous power hitters:

This list does a good job of explaining the possible highs and lows of Alvarez’s production, but it leaves something out. One way to rack up barrels is to be powerful and almost exclusively hit fly balls. Sanó, Gallo, and Sánchez get to theirs that way. So, too, does Trout. He’s become increasingly fly ball-heavy in recent years in an attempt to tap into his power.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a major league pitcher right now, there’s a good chance life is pretty smooth. You’ve realized that you can throw more and more sliders without repercussions; it might even be an ideal strategy. You’ve also learned that by using a two-seam grip, you can upgrade a regular slider into a “sweeper,” which is shockingly effective for a pitch that’s so easy to learn. You’ve probably gained a much better understanding of how and why certain pitches do or don’t move. Knowledge is power, especially in baseball, and the modern pitcher is possibly the most educated athlete around.

Meanwhile, there are formerly innovative approaches that you don’t think twice about nowadays – they’ve become the norm. A great example is the high fastball. Back in the days of yore, a perfect fastball meant one located at the knees, down and away. But as pitch data became widely available, teams started to realize that throwing the fastball up would maximize swings and misses and minimize damage on contact. Regular high cheese also served to counteract the so-called fly ball revolution; an uppercut swing made golfing pitches at the bottom of the zone easier but left a hole at the top. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Mike Yastrzemski trying the “KK play,” the distinctive smell of rat urine, Buck Showalter making a mid-PA pitching change, Dave Roberts running afoul of a position-player-pitcher rule, the wording of the zombie-runner rule, Nick Pivetta’s near-miraculous mechanical adjustment, and Mike Trout’s slump, plus a baseball-history fact from 1859. Then (38:54) they talk to former Phillies front-office executive Lewie Pollis about how working for an MLB team became his dream job and why, several years after fulfilling that dream, he decided to walk away from it by changing careers—a choice with wide-ranging lessons to offer about work-life balance in baseball and beyond (plus a postscript).

Audio intro: The Walkmen, “This Job is Killing Me”
Audio interstitial: Ramones, “The Job That Ate My Brain”
Audio outro: Dan Bern, “Burned Out Case”

Link to Yaz play video
Link to play in full game highlights
Link to story about the “KK play”
Link to video of the “KK play”
Link to posts about unwritten rules of deking
Link to “rat urine” report
Link to Ben on mid-PA pitching changes
Link to Showalter pitching-change video
Link to article about the pitching change
Link to Mookie quote
Link to article on Girardi’s “Strategy”
Link to 2020 zombie-runner rule
Link to article about Roberts’ confusion
Link to 4/17 story on Pivetta’s mechanics
Link to 4/20 story on Pivetta’s mechanics
Link to other 4/20 story on Pivetta
Link to story on Pivetta’s turnaround
Link to EW episode about Trout going hitless
Link to story about the Angels’ losing streak
Link to Richard Hershberger’s Strike Four
Link to 1859 story source
Link to Lewie’s 2014 story on front-office pay
Link to Lewie’s Baseball Prospectus archive
Link to Lewie’s newsletter
Link to Lewie on leaving his dream job
Link to Lewie on the response to his essay
Link to “Great Resignation” wiki
Link to R.J. Anderson on MLB brain drain

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
Subscribe to Stathead (Code: WILD20)
 Facebook Group
 Twitter Account
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Ryan Fuller taught high school English in Higganum, Connecticut for four years before becoming the hitting coach of the Baltimore Orioles. An infielder at the University of Connecticut before spending a year in the Arizona Diamondbacks system, the 32-year-old Fuller went on to earn a Master’s degree in Education from the University of New Haven. Books, and the lessons they provide, remain a big part of his life.

Asked about his favorites to teach, Fuller began with Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“That was a big one for me in 10th-grade honors,” said Fuller, who has tutored hitters at different levels for over a decade. “From a morality standpoint, there are so many things that I connect with. Kids love reading the book and being able to tie it in with what it means to be a good person. They think about other people — about walking in their shoes, as Atticus put it —and the values and morals are still the same today.”

Fuller cited Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” and Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” as other books he’s seen impact specific age groups in particular ways. The lessons are analogous to his current job.

“It’s kind of the same thing we’re doing with our hitters,” explained Fuller, who is well-schooled in hitting analytics. “We’re taking sometimes complex, abstract things that maybe the hitters aren’t really grasping, and turning them into something tangible. They’ll say, ‘Oh, man, that makes sense.” That’s what I enjoy most about being a teacher.” Read the rest of this entry »