Cole Winn has been on a roll. Pitching for the Double-A Frisco Rough Riders, the 21-year-old right-hander is coming off consecutive scoreless starts where he’s allowed just one hit and fanned 13 batters in 12 innings of near-spotless work. The earlier of those outings was notable for more than just his dominance. As the 2018 first-rounder stood on the mound, a fox darted across the field, traversed the warning track, and finally escaped, untouched by human hands.

Winn — No. 3 on our Texas Rangers Top Prospects list and with a 1.63 ERA on the season — talked pitching (and fox-delays) prior to last Thursday’s game.

———

David Laurila: Before we get to pitching, I need to ask you about the fox…

Cole Winn: “I didn’t see it until after I threw the pitch. It was kind of a blur that ran right in front of me. And it was a little bit frustrating that it took so long to get it off the field, because I felt like I was in a good groove. I was on a roll, and that kind of slowed me up for a pitch or two before I got back into it. But honestly, it’s one of the strangest things that’s ever had happened to me — or that I’ve ever witnessed — on a baseball field.”

Laurila: Where was the fox when you first noticed it?

Winn: “When I first saw it, it was right in front of me. Like, it ran between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. I have no clue where it came from. I asked around, and no one else knew where it came from. So it was strange. It was really strange.”

Laurila: The video I saw ended with the fox still running along the warning track. How did it get off the field? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a quiet evening along the water—until a glowing set of eyes peers at you over the river bank. You convince yourself it’s just a pair of fireflies. But then there’s more of them. And more.

And more.

Then there’s the quiet, seamless grind of their gears as they pull themselves onto dry land and bound toward you with the same sleekness they have in the water: The effortless instinct of nature, programmed into a machine.

It’s far too late to run. And the only final thoughts you can muster are: Otter-bots? But… why…?

Why, indeed. Fortunately, when the Otterbots descended upon Danville, Virginia this past winter, they did so as a new summer collegiate wood-bat franchise in the Appalachian League, not a horde of semiaquatic cuddle-bugs converted into killing machines.

So if it’s not “terrorizing the waterfront,” then what are Otterbots doing in Danville? This summer, the burgeoning Virginia STEM hub is going to find out. And fortunately, no one has to die.

***

Like a theoretical horde of river-dwelling killbots, the future is in a constant state of arrival. It can be jarring, damaging, and confusing at times. But with the right education, even an Otterbot can make a little more sense.

We are now living in a future that top minds foresaw decades ago. In 1994, in a coastal Virginia town four hours east of Danville called Poquoson, William L. Sellers III stated that the next generation needed nothing more than it would need science, technology, engineering, and math. Sellers had a masters degree and worked as a research engineer in fluid dynamics with NASA, as well as being a member of the local school board. Science had served him well, but as he explained, the whole point was for science to serve us all. Read the rest of this entry »

Jharel Cotton is trying to revive his career in the Texas Rangers organization. Three years removed from Tommy John surgery — and four years after making 24 starts for the Oakland A’s — the 29-year-old native of the Virgin Islands is taking the mound for the Triple-A Round Rock Express. Progress has been slower than ideal. In eight appearances comprising 17-and-two-thirds innings, Cotton has a 4.58 ERA and, more importantly, less feel for his deliveries that he did pre-injury.

He believes it’s only a matter of time.

“I didn’t play in 2018, I barely played in 2019, and 2020 was a scratch because of the pandemic,” Cotton explained earlier this week. “Now 1 have a full year, and within a full year I’ll be back to myself. I just have to keep putting in the work and trusting the process — going through the process of getting my arm to feel normal again. A lot of guys get back quickly and other guys get back not as quick. Everything will work out in its own time.”

Cotton’s velocity is slowly coming back — his fastball has been ranging between 92-96 mph — although his command has lagged a little behind. Ditto the crispness of his cutter, curveball, and changeup. But again, he’s not overly concerned. As he put it, “I lost a lot of those things, but I feel I’m putting the pieces back together.”

Cotton’s comeback isn’t the only reason I wanted to talk to him for today’s column. I also wanted to revisit a story I’d read about him back when he was still pitching for the A’s.

Originally in the Los Angeles Dodgers system, Cotton went to Oakland in August 2016 as part of a five-player deal involving Rich Hill. A few years earlier, he was a minor-leaguer making ends meet during the offseason. That’s when he learned to love shoveling snow. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri banter about Ryan Yarbrough throwing a rare Rays complete game, then share their thoughts on the recent debate about media access in sports sparked by tennis star Naomi Osaka, touching on how access to athletes compares across sports, the dubious value of press conferences, athletes’ obligations and mental health, how media coverage can help players, reporters, and the public, the ongoing efforts to restore MLB clubhouse access, and whether it makes sense for baseball teams (and Joe Girardi) to dissemble and withhold information about tactics and player availability. Then they examine recent research that suggests that defensive positioning (but not the infield shift!) may be responsible for much of MLB’s offensive outage, and discuss Emma’s recent deep dives into newspaper archives to see what contemporary writers, players, and baseball officials said about the 1968 Year of the Pitcher and the 1917 spree of no-hitters, reflecting on the value of historical research, how baseball history (and coverage) repeats itself, how the 1968 discourse mirrored and differed from today’s, whether we’ve gotten better at diagnosing baseball’s problems, putting pitchers in holes, and much more.

Audio intro: The Rolling Stones, "Yesterday’s Papers"
Audio outro: Split Enz, "History Never Repeats"

Link to Joe Posnanski on Osaka
Link to Bryan Curtis on Osaka
Link to Curtis on NBA press conferences
Link to Ken Davidoff on Girardi
Link to Devan Fink on Harper
Link to Rob Arthur on defensive positioning
Link to Rob on fielders playing deeper
Link to Rob on outfield shifts
Link to Russell Carleton on four-man outfields
Link to study on optimizing outfield positioning
Link to story on Fowler in 2016
Link to story on Jones in 2017
Link to Emma on baseball dying
Link to story on the 1963 strike zone expansion
Link to Emma on 1968
Link to Rob Mains on 1968
Link to Emma on 1917

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It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that 2021 hasn’t gone exactly according to the plans of the Minnesota Twins. In the American League Central standings, the club currently ranks dead last, looking up at the hindquarters of even the Detroit Tigers. Only the Orioles and Rangers have worse records in the AL this season, and neither of those teams was expected to be even remotely relevant come October. This isn’t a case of a team starting off 0-3 and the standings looking funny; clubs are passing the one-third mark of the season this week. Like most good teams that are struggling, the problem is a multifaceted one and not easily repaired. But at 12 games behind the White Sox in a weak division, urgent measures are required if the Twins aren’t ready to go 2022 calendar shopping.

Twins diehards would tell you that injuries share a lot of the blame, and they definitely have a point here. If you take a peek at our Injury Report, you’ll find 10 players currently on the Injured List; the team has had 22 total IL stints this season. By contrast, the Royals have had only 10 players on the IL at any point this season, with the Tigers at 12, the White Sox at 13, and Cleveland at a minuscule five. At some point or another this season, the majority of the team’s desired starting lineup has been on the shelf with an injury. Opening Day was the only game where Twins managed to have a starting lineup consisting entirely of the players initially expected to get the majority of the playing time at each position. The Twins have been decimated by injuries, and that is naturally going to have a significant effect on the bottom line.

Case solved, case closed? Hold on there, take those books out of your backpack; we’re not done here. The injuries have affected the team, but they only explain part of the win shortfall. To get a rough idea of this, I went back to what the ZiPS-projected record for each team at this point would be after the games of June 3, then re-did the projection with the preseason projections for players while reflecting the actual distribution of playing time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Though the 13-game losing streak that left them with the NL’s worst record came to an end on Sunday, the Diamondbacks’ season has taken another turn for the worse, with Madison Bumgarner leaving Wednesday’s start against the Mets after just two innings due to discomfort in his left shoulder. Fortunately, an MRI revealed nothing more than inflammation, though he landed on the injured list anyway, joining three other members of the team’s starting five. That’s hardly the only issue holding down the rebuilding Diamondbacks, who at 20–38 are on pace to lose 106 games.

Even before he took the mound on Wednesday at Chase Field, Bumgarner’s performance this season had veered all over the map. He allowed 17 runs in 13.2 innings over his first three starts, then went on a five-start run during which he allowed just three runs in 30 innings. On April 25, he spun a seven-inning no-hitter — a feat not officially recognized by Major League Baseball, but the high point of the 31-year-old southpaw’s season — in the nightcap of a doubleheader against the Braves. Bumgarner’s performance has deteriorated since then, however, with 16 runs and eight walks in 14 innings over three starts from May 17 to 28.

Even that couldn’t have prepared anyone for what took place on Wednesday. Facing a makeshift Mets lineup that included James McCann in the third spot and just two regulars (leadoff hitter Jonathan Villar and cleanup hitter Pete Alonso) who entered the game with a wRC+ of 100 or better, Bumgarner began by allowing six straight hits, including a three-run homer by McCann, and four runs. The Diamondbacks countered by piling up five runs against Mets starter David Peterson and reliever Robert Gsellman, with Bumgarner’s own two-out RBI single giving his team a 5–4 lead. But he couldn’t hold it in the second inning, yielding a one-out single to Villar and then a two-out RBI double to McCann.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Ben Clemens investigated Francisco Lindor’s struggles as a New York Met. The answer was complicated, as in most cases, though he did treat us to a series of tables and graphs. Inspired by the endeavor, I wanted to take a crack at a different NL East superstar: Braves’ first baseman Freddie Freeman.

To be fair, his predicament is hardly as lamentable as Lindor’s. As of writing, Freddie Freeman has a 115 wRC+. There have been stretches where he put up similar levels of production. Nothing seems out of the ordinary – just a good hitter in a dry spell. It’s not like he was going to replicate his abbreviated MVP campaign, anyways.

What is uncharacteristic, however, is his .224 BABIP. It surprised me, considering that he’d sustained a BABIP of .341 from 2010-20, a feat that required a decade of hard-hit line drives and an above-average contact rate. Gary Sánchez, he usually is not. But it’s been an odd year for the first baseman so far, which we can see for ourselves. Below is his 50-game rolling BABIP, stretching back to a few years ago:

At first, the explanation for this seems simple. Freeman currently carries a line drive rate of 24.5%, his lowest since 2011. His groundball rate, in contrast, is the highest since then. Fewer line drives and more grounders is a terrible combo for a hitter’s BABIP – the former land for a hit over half the time; the latter are snagged by infielders. But this raises a question. If Freeman’s current batted ball distribution resembles his in 2011, how did he achieve a .339 BABIP that year? Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout baseball history, starters have thrown fewer pitches and innings than the generation of pitchers who preceded them. The trend dates to at least the early 20th century and has continued almost unabated ever since. Individual throwbacks will occasionally buck league trends — remember when James Shields tossed 11 complete games in 2011? — but history steadily marches on.

While the trend is clear, the curve isn’t linear. Throughout the game’s history, there have been a few accelerating events that have reduced workloads usage much faster than normal. The addition of the designated hitter and new definition of the save rule sent innings per start tumbling in the early 70s, for example.

It’s too early to tell definitively, but we may be on the precipice of another acceleration. We’re only two months into the major league season, and the pandemic and its related fallout are relevant and difficult variables to account for. But while major league starters are approximating the workloads they carried two years ago, minor league starters are not. On any given day in the minor leagues, someone might throw 100 pitches — but probably only one or two pitchers, and they almost certainly don’t reach 110. Remember when 100 pitches was a sort of threshold point for starters? This season, 85 is the new 100.

I went back and looked at every minor league game from May 19 to 24 (these days weren’t cherry picked; it, uh, took me a while to finish this article). In those five days, only four starters — all of whom were Triple-A vets — reached the 100 pitch mark. In that time, there were 12 entire organizations that didn’t have a single pitcher reach even 90 pitches. For the Astros, an organization that won’t let minor leaguers crest 30 pitches in an inning, the high-water mark was 79. For the Phillies, it was 67. In fact, Philadelphia has only had a minor leaguer top 80 pitches once all season.

The pandemic is to blame for some of what we’re seeing. At best, minor league hurlers had a jittery 2020, with intermittent bullpen work and perhaps a bit of summer ball at the alt site, but otherwise nothing between spring training and instructs. After such a weird season, teams are being understandably cautious with their personnel as they ramp back up. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur looked at the rise of advanced defensive positioning since 2015. It turns out that every position has started playing deeper, but — perhaps unsurprisingly — first basemen have moved the least of all. As Arthur writes, “First basemen have barely budged, which makes sense since they are more anchored to the bag.” But this lack of movement feels like a concession that doesn’t necessarily need to be made. The base is fixed, and the defender has to reach it, but a quicker first baseman would be able to stray farther from the anchor. If the lack of an anchor is allowing these other positions to play in more optimal locations, then some of the range that has always been a prerequisite for playing those positions is potentially going to waste. Let’s get some of those more rangy players over to first base, which doesn’t allow for the defender to be so perfectly placed.

The Right-Handed Shift

One of the reasons I’m interested in the positioning of first basemen is how it relates to the current conundrum involving the right-handed shift, about which folks like Tom Tango, Russell Carlton and Ben Lindbergh have written countless words. The short recap is that the publicly available data suggests that the right-handed shift doesn’t really work. And yet, some of the most data-driven teams are the ones that employ the shift the most.

There are a few things that make the right-handed shift different than the more prevalent left-handed one, but what I’m focused on is first base and the existence of that “anchor” that was mentioned earlier. First basemen can only stray off the bag as far as allows them to return safely in time for the throw. Turns out, that isn’t nearly far enough to cover the tendencies of the hitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Montgomery put together a solid outing on Wednesday night. In 6.1 innings of work, he struck out six Rays and walked only two. He did get tagged for five hits, but avoided allowing any home runs, which made the whole package work admirably. He gave up three runs, but with a little defensive prowess, things could have gone even better; two of those three were unearned.

That kind of game happens all the time these days. On the other hand, that particular game has never happened before. That exact box score line — 6.1 innings pitched, six strikeouts, two walks, five hits, no homers, one earned run and three total runs — had never occurred in the more than 380,000 starts since 1913, the first year where earned runs were recorded, as James Smyth pointed out:

? Unique Box Score Line Alert ?

Jordan Montgomery 6.1 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 6 K

A first out of more than 1.1 million MLB pitching lines in the regular season or postseason since 1901 (thanks @baseball_ref @Stathead)

— James Smyth (@JamesSmyth621) June 3, 2021

I’ll level with you: I had a hard time believing Smyth at first. That line is so middle-of-the-road. Everything about it feels like a common enough occurrence. There are no truly strange parts in that score, nothing that stands out as an obviously rare feat. An easy example: Carlos Martínez also recorded a unique line on Wednesday. His was altogether stranger: 0.2 innings pitched, one strikeout, four walks, and 10 earned runs without a homer or an unearned run. That just sounds like an unprecedented start. Read the rest of this entry »