A lot went wrong for Pittsburgh last season. Josh Bell tanked his trade value with a career-worst season. Gregory Polanco showed rather conclusively that he can’t hit. The team finished last in the NL Central for a second year in a row and has spent the last few winters demonstrating a disinterest in climbing out of the cellar anytime soon. There are enough problems with the Pirates that a sudden decline by young outfielder Bryan Reynolds was more or less reduced to a footnote.

Reynolds, a former second-round pick who was acquired from San Francisco in the Andrew McCutchen trade and finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2019, hit an abysmal .189/.257/.357 (72 wRC+) in 55 games last year. That line allowed him to blend in with pretty much everyone else in the lineup not named Ke’Bryan Hayes, but it was still an unwelcome development. While Hayes is clearly the player Pittsburgh wants to build its next good team around, having a second foundational player in the lineup is always going to make things a little easier down the line. Reynolds seemed like that player after his rookie season. Fortunately for the Pirates, he now looks like that player again.

Through 44 games, Reynolds is hitting .298/.389/.472 with four home runs, good for a 139 wRC+ and a team-high 1.4 WAR. He’s been on a particular tear in the month of May, hitting .324/.400/.549 with 10 doubles in just 19 games. Last Thursday, he took Drew Smyly deep with a game-tying homer to center in a game the Pirates would go on to win in extras.

Reynolds’ start to 2021 looks awfully similar to the performance he gave in 2019, when he hit .314/.377/.503 with 16 homers, a 130 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR, and he’s having success for a lot of the same reasons. He hits lots of line drives, picks up extra bases by putting balls in the gaps, and provides modest over-the-fence power. The consistency of his numbers in 2019 and ’21, though, brings up one question: What the heck happened last year?

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Last week, I laid out some broad categorizations of what makes a slider effective, when viewed in the aggregate. As a quick recap: The most important single characteristic is hitting the corners of the strike zone. If you have a slider with plus horizontal movement, it’s also okay to miss over the middle of the plate. The middle of the plate is a great location early, but a poor location late in counts. There’s more, but those were the key findings.

That analysis left some additional factors out, because there are only so many tables you can fit into an article before it all starts to look the same. Additionally, some of those factors are beyond the scope of this analysis. Sequencing and tunneling, for example, are too complex to reduce to a two-dimensional grid. Deception might be even more confusing; I’d struggle to quantify it at all, let alone simplify it into a few buckets for analysis.

Today, I’d like to look at the rest of the factors I found easy to quantify and analyze. First, let’s talk about pitch movement. Last week, I looked at horizontal movement, because that’s the classic action we associate with a slider. It’s not the only type that pitchers throw, however. Sliders are such a broad category of pitch that they encompass pitches that mostly break sideways, mostly break down (at least, relative to a fastball), or have some mixture of the two.
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Adam Frazier has an admirable goal, one that few of his contemporaries would even contemplate trying to attain. At a time when hitters are going down by way of the K more frequently than at any time in history, the Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman aspires to walk more than he strikes out.

He might actually do it. With Memorial Day right around the corner, Frazier has a 9.6 K% — fourth-best among qualified hitters — and 16 free passes to go with 19 strikeouts. Moreover, he’s been putting barrels on baseballs. To scant acclaim — par for the course when you play in Pittsburgh — Frazier is slashing an eye-opening .337/.399/.466.

Asked about his stated goal, the 29-year-old Mississippi State University product admitted that it won’t be easy.

“Guys today throw harder and harder, with nastier stuff,” said Frazier. “[Hitting] continues to get more difficult. I’ve always felt I have a pretty good eye, it’s just a matter of being able to put the bat on the ball.”

Frazier has fanned twice in a game three times this season, on each occasion punching out against a starter and a reliever. There are no walks in the park in today’s game. From first inning to last, power arms are everywhere you turn.

Whom has he faced that stands out as being especially nasty? Read the rest of this entry »

Since before the start of the season, the Rays have telegraphed their willingness to move Willy Adames. It wasn’t so much in what they said — in that they didn’t say much of anything — but two factors made it a nearly foregone conclusion. First, the Rays are *loaded* at shortstop in the upper minors. Second, the Rays don’t compete by letting surplus talent rot on the vine. Adames will be eligible for arbitration after this year, so his presence on the major league roster blocked those cheaper minor leaguers.

It was just a matter of getting past the Super-Two deadline and some team meeting their asking price. On Friday, both of those factors lined up: the Rays have traded Adames and Trevor Richards to the Brewers in exchange for Drew Rasmussen and J.P. Feyereisen, as MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported.
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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Shohei Ohtani stalker cam on Japanese telecasts of Angels games, the Low-A Palm Beach Cardinals facing Jacob deGrom, why this season’s no-hitters have all been so dominant, and why it doesn’t make sense to hold hitters responsible for strikeouts and low batting averages. Then they do a Meet a Major Leaguer segment on the Cubs’ Tommy Nance and P.J. Higgins and close by discussing the exciting NL West race, the Cubs’ lackluster rotation, some clubs failing to reach the 85 percent vaccination threshold, and whether MLB’s COVID-testing protocols should be changed for vaccinated players.

Audio intro: The Pillows, "Stalker"
Audio outro: Yusuf / Cat Stevens, "Don’t Blame Them"

Link to thread about the Ohtani cam
Link to story about deGrom’s rehab start
Link to Ben on no-hitters
Link to McClung’s video
Link to 2008-21 plate discipline stats
Link to story about foreign substances
Link to story about Nance
Link to Bleacher Nation on Nance
Link to Eric Longenhagen on Nance
Link to story on the Cubs and seam-shifted wake
Link to Hoyer on vaccinations
Link to Scherzer’s comments
Link to story on perfect game losses
Link to listener email question database

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These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments here.

CJ Van Eyk, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays
Level & Affiliate: Hi-A Vancouver Age: 22 Org Rank: 10  FV: 40+
Line: 6 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 9 K
Notes
Van Eyk’s minor league season got off to a rocky start. His first outing with the Vancouver Canadians was only 0.2 innings long, but that was enough time for the 2020 draftee to allow four runs on three hits, two walks and two wild pitches. His second start was more reassuring: Van Eyk again allowed three hits and two walks, but this time over 4.2 innings, and accompanied by seven strikeouts and only one run (a homer in the fourth). The third start of his minor league career, though, was his best, with Van Eyk fanning nine batters over six dominant innings, allowing only one run, and walking one.

On a handful of his pitches, his balance in his lower half faltered, which resulted in a somewhat inconsistent landing spot for his left foot. In a few instances, his foot landed an inch or two too far over toward third base, causing Van Eyk to have to throw across his body, lower his head, and tumble toward first base after delivery. Here’s a comparison of two back-to-back pitches in the bottom of the third, demonstrating the difference between his balanced delivery (left), and what happens when his foot lands too far toward third (right):

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Harrison Bader is legitimately one of the best defensive outfielders in baseball. By whichever advanced defensive metric you prefer, he ranks in the top 10 among all outfielders since his debut in 2017. But while his elite ability with the glove is clear, the value of his bat has been a bigger question mark. Entering this season, in just over 1,000 career plate appearances, he had posted a league- and park-adjusted offensive line five percent below league average, which isn’t too bad considering his reputation as a glove-first center fielder. This year, though, his wRC+ is up to 108 in 70 plate appearances, and his approach at the plate is completely different.

Bader had shown some promise with the bat in the minors and in his previous four seasons in the majors, peaking as the No. 8 prospect in the Cardinals’ organization back in 2018 with a tantalizing power/speed profile. But the concern for him, as he quickly worked through the minor leagues, was a propensity to swing and miss that led to high strikeout rates. That inability to make consistent contact didn’t get resolved once he got to the majors: Prior to this year, his career strikeout rate was 29.1%, and last year, he struck out a career-high 32.0% of the time.

Bader missed all of April after suffering a forearm injury during spring training. But since getting back on the field at the beginning of this month, he’s provided some surprising production for the Cardinals as their everyday centerfielder, already matching his home run total from last year in almost half the plate appearances. The biggest change has come in his approach at the plate. His strikeout rate has tumbled from that career-worst 32.0% last year all the way down to 12.9%; among batters with at least 100 plate appearances in 2020 and at least 70 plate appearances in ’21, his huge decrease in strikeout rate is by far the largest in baseball. He’s also struck out in exactly as many plate appearances as he’s drawn a walk so far this season.

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Not everyone is interested in projecting the future, but one common thread in much of modern analytics in this regard is the attempt to describe a volatile thing, such as a play in baseball, using something less volatile, such as an underlying ability. This era arguably began with Voros McCracken’s DIPS research that he released 20 years ago to a wider audience than just us usenet dorks. Voros’ thesis has been modified with new information, and people tend to say (mistakenly) that he was arguing that pitchers had no control over balls in play, but DIPS and BABIP changed how we looked at pitcher/defense interaction more than any peripheral-type of number preceding it.

One of the things I want to try to project is what types of performance lead to the so-called Three True Outcomes (home run, walk, strikeout) rather than just tallying those outcomes. For example, what type of performances lead to strikeouts? I’m not just talking about velocity and stuff, but the batter-pitcher interactions at the plate — things like a pitcher’s contact percentage, which for pitchers with 100 batters faced in consecutive years from 2002 has a similar or greater r^2 to itself (0.53) than either walk rate (0.26) or strikeout rate (0.51) does. Contact rate alone has an r^2 of 0.37 when comparing it to the future strikeout rate.

As it turns out, you can explain actual strikeout rate from this synthetic estimate quite accurately, with an r^2 in the low 0.8 range.

Statcast era data works slightly better; the version of zSO which has that data is at 0.84, and the one that predates Statcast data is at 0.80. Cross-validating using repeated random subsampling (our data is limited, as there’s no “other” MLB to compare it to) yields the same results.

Like the various x measures in Statcast, these numbers shouldn’t be taken as projections in themselves. While zSO projects future strikeout rate slightly more accurately than the actual rate itself does, a mixture of both gets a better r^2 (0.59 for the sample outlined above) than either does on its own. Looking at zSO alone as a useful leading indicator, however, gives us an idea of which players may be outperforming or underperforming their strikeout rates so far this season. All numbers are through Wednesday night.

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In the war for the NL Central, the Cardinals are leading the charge. Their robust 25-18 record is no stroke of luck – per our BaseRuns standings, they’ve outperformed their theoretical win total by just one. Breaking this down further, the pitching has done most of the heavy lifting. Jack Flaherty has become that ace who’s going to ace, Kwang Hyun Kim has upped his strikeout rate thanks to a refined slider, and John Gant (!) has a 2.08 ERA in 39.2 innings. Gant is also leading major league baseball with 28 walks, but hey, the Cardinals will take it.

The offense isn’t bad – it has managed 4.29 runs per game, which is about the league average. It might have been worse, however, if not for Yadier Molina. The legendary catcher somehow has a 138 wRC+, the second-highest amongst Cardinals hitters with at least 50 plate appearances. His defense is no longer an asset, but he’s more than made up for lost value by swinging a hot bat.

But sure, this isn’t the first time Molina has gone on an offensive tear. Looking at 25-game stretches of wOBA dating back to 2018, we can see the many peaks and valleys that have shaped his production: Read the rest of this entry »