The Padres already had to endure life without Fernando Tatis Jr. for one stretch this season due to his left shoulder subluxation, and now they’re without him again. On Tuesday, the 22-year-old shortstop tested positive for COVID-19 and landed on the Injured List. He quickly gained company when right fielder Wil Myers also tested positive, while three other Padres — first baseman Eric Hosmer, outfielder Jorge Mateo, and superutilityman Jurickson Profar — were sidelined via MLB’s contact tracing protocols. The absences have left San Diego significantly shorthanded and highlighted the potential competitive disadvantage that a team can face while dealing with an outbreak.

The Padres aren’t the only team in the midst of a COVID-19 cluster, either. On Tuesday, about an hour before Tatis’ positive test became public, news of an outbreak among the Yankees’ coaching staff broke as well. While Padres manager Jayce Tingler declined to say whether any of his sidelined players have been vaccinated, their status will become apparent depending upon how quickly they’re allowed to return (more on which below). Meanwhile, the Yankees’ group — now up to eight, including third base coach Phil Nevin, first base coach Reggie Willits, pitching coach Matt Blake, and shortstop Gleyber Torres, plus four unnamed members of the team’s traveling staff — are known to have been fully vaccinated. In fact, the Yankees were among the majors’ first teams to reach the 85% vaccination threshold that allowed them to relax certain health and safety protocols. But less than a week after MLB announced that more than 83% of all Tier 1 individuals (players, managers, coaches, athletic trainers and support personnel) had been partially or fully vaccinated, and that it had gone a week without a single positive test from its major league camps (and just one positive from a staffer at an alternate site), the Padres and Yankees offered rude reminders of COVID-19’s lingering presence.

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Join me and Kevin Goldstein on Twitch at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET for a unique Friday stream that takes you inside our process. We won’t be breaking down video this time; instead, we will be breaking down The Board. Sure a few players might move here and there, but for the most part, this will be a public broadcast of one of our many internal calls as we discuss the current state of Draft section of The Board and our plans for getting the information we need to make smart changes to it.

Join us on the FanGraphs homepage or the FanGraphs Live Twitch channel. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2021 Detroit Tigers are terrible.

I don’t say this out of cruelty or to beat a dead horse, but to continue on with this piece, it’s important to understand that the team is very, very bad. It took them five weeks to notch their 10th win of the year. Future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera is hitting a mere .160/.259/.253. The incredible hot starts of Akil Baddoo and Wilson Ramos have cooled, and with the sole exception of Matthew Boyd, the team’s pitching staff seems to be struggling mightily against all comers.

For fans, it’s feels like a familiar story told year after year, only it seems to be getting worse over time. And it’s becoming a story that’s getting a lot harder to listen to without a mounting sense of frustration, because in terms of a rebuild, the Tigers appear to have been abandoned by their contractor with only a rough hewn foundation to show for it.

To truly get a sense of where the Tigers find themselves now, we must first understand just how bad this team is in a historical context. To do so, we have to compare the first months of 2021 to the Tigers’ two worst seasons historically: 2003 and 2019. In 2003, the Tigers came close to making history as the worst team in the modern era. They lost 119 games versus just 43 wins, coming within one loss of tying the 1962 Mets for most single season losses. For the franchise, it marked a turning point and a trend towards improvement. By 2006 they made it to the World Series, had a Rookie of the Year winner in pitcher Justin Verlander, and won 95 games. Read the rest of this entry »

Cole Irvin has epitomized the term “crafty lefty” in his first season with the Oakland Athletics. In seven starts covering 41 innings, the 27-year-old former Philadelphia Phillies pitcher has a 3.29 ERA and a 3.54 FIP, and he’s fanned 37 while walking just six. A StatCast darling he’s not. Irvin’s four-seamer averages a pedestrian 91.2 mph, and his fastball and curveball spin rates rank among the lowest in the majors. No matter. Much to the consternation of opposing hitters, the erstwhile Oregon Duck is gobbling up outs with a combination of command, moxie, and guile.

Irvin — acquired by the A’s from the Phillies for cash considerations over the offseason — discussed his cerebral approach to the art of pitching prior to last night’s game.

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David Laurila: You’re enjoying a level of success that in many ways belies your pitching metrics. How are you doing it?

Cole Irvin: “When I first learned pitching, I was reading about Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux. There was a book that came out from the Atlanta Braves pitching coach [Leo Mazzone] when the Atlanta Braves rotation was as good as it gets back in the ‘90s. And then, when I really started pitching, I was watching Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee, and Roy Halladay. I’ve just always been taught to be a pitcher.

“The first thing I was taught when I got to high school was to have a good changeup. In California, the baseball crop is very good. I don’t think I hit 90 [mph] until my senior year, so the ability to pitch was obviously something I needed to have. In my league, we had Austin Hedges, Gerrit Cole, Trayce Thompson … a bunch of guys everyone knew would be big-leaguers. The ability to pitch was something I had to pick up pretty quickly.

“I was never told to throw harder. It was about repeating my delivery and thinking through the game, as opposed to really getting it up there. Now, in the past I have been able to throw hard. I’ve hit 98 in the big leagues. It was versus Cleveland, and I remember it distinctly. Maybe that’s the reason my old team — the [Phillies] coaching staff — wanted me to be fastball/slider: I had 98 in my pocket and could throw a slider off of it. But I lost the ability to pitch because of that. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 922

This week on the show, we talk about superstars, unknown stars, and no-hitters. Lots of no-hitters.

• To begin the program, David Laurila welcomes Joon Lee, writer for ESPN, and Jeff Levering, broadcaster for the Milwaukee Brewers. David, Joon, and Jeff discuss how we react to stars from different media markets and how today’s baseball icons are not quite the same as those from the past. The trio also covers the concept of ties, how to reach different age groups of fans, all the recent no-hitters, and how Shohei Ohtani should be an even bigger name. [2:37]
• Following that, Tony Wolfe and Sara Sanchez dive deeper into the early season’s wave of no-nos. Sara recently wrote about the historical significance of these performances, while Tony covered Wade Miley’s effort for the Reds. The pair contemplate a number of factors that could be contributing to this phenomenon, the possibility that the 2021 season sets a new record for no-hitters, and the concept of baseball suffering from too much of a good thing. [29:26]

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Pierce Johnson wasn’t the highest-profile addition the Padres made before the 2020 season. Johnson, a right-handed pitcher who began his career in the Cubs minor league system as a starter, transitioned to relieving and then transitioned to Hanshin in the NPB, where he delivered a standout 2019 season. Along with fellow offseason acquisitions Drew Pomeranz and Emilio Pagán, he was part of a reworked bullpen for a newly-aggressive contender.

Johnson’s 2020 went fairly well, aside from the whole global-pandemic-changing-the-entire-world part. He started throwing harder during his sojourn to Japan, and held that new velocity upon his return. His blend of roughly 50/50 fastballs and curves played quite well; he put up a 33.8% strikeout rate en route to 20 innings of 2.70 ERA, 3.14 FIP relief.

In truth, Johnson’s fastball was just a palate cleanser for his devastating curve. He used it early in counts and when he got behind, but threw nearly 75% curveballs in key spots — 1-0, 0-1, and 1-1 counts, as well as when he reached two strikes. It’s easy to see why when you look at the curveball’s merits. Among pitchers who threw at least 150 curves last year, it was one of the best in the game:

That’s excellent company, to state the obvious. It’s not as though the pitch is a wipeout breaker that only excels when he bounces it, either. In obvious strike-throwing counts (2-0, 2-1, 3-0, and 3-1) since returning from Japan, Johnson has hit the strike zone with his curveball 58.6% of the time. That’s higher than his fastball zone rate in the same counts (42.1%) and higher than the overall league zone rate for all pitches in those counts (56.9%).
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Chin Music returns, whether you like it or not. The traveling co-host chair finally leaves New York and arrives in Tempe, Arizona. And with the great Eric Longenhagen becoming the first repeat co-host of the show, most of the discussion revolves around baseball below the big league level. We begin by trying to set realistic expectations for Seattle’s rookie crop before delving into what is becoming a very complicated 2021 amateur draft. Then we are joined by special guest Alex Coffey of The Athletic, who explains what is actually going on with the Oakland Athletics’ ballpark situation, and boy is it complicated. Then it’s emails on TV broadcasts, housing for minor league players, and some cultural moments before we depart. As always, we hope you enjoy, and thank you for listening.

Music by Couch Flambeau.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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When Robbie Ray walked Freddie Freeman in the first inning of his start on Tuesday evening, it was the first time he had walked a batter since April 18, ending a 20.2-inning stretch without allowing a free pass. That’s quite an accomplishment for someone who has always been known for his elite strikeout abilities and a serious lack of control. Ray’s career walk rate sits at 10.9%, a touch above league average, but over the last four years, it’s ballooned to 12.3% and reached a career worst 17.9% last year. But across six starts this season, his walk rate has fallen to 7.2%, easily a career best.

As you’d expect with such a drastic change in his control, Ray has started pounding the zone this year.

In 2020, he was tied with Shane Bieber for the lowest Zone% among all pitchers with at least 50 innings pitches at 42.6%. This season, he’s among the league leaders in Zone%, at 56.7%. During the pitch tracking era, that’s the largest increase in Zone% from one season to the next by a wide margin.

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“Houser (3-3) picked up the win on Saturday, allowing two runs on five hits over six innings in a 6-2 victory over the Marlins,“ RotoWire News reported. “He struck out ten without walking a batter.”

That’s a straightforward blurb. Nothing really stands out, so I understand if you forgot about it. Adrian Houser himself isn’t a very notable pitcher – his repertoire, which consists primarily of a sinker and an assorted mix of other pitches, doesn’t scream Pitching Ninja material. Against the Marlins a week ago, however, Houser entered uncharted territory in the realm of pitching. Not all outliers are worth mentioning, but this one is:

The graph is messy, but you can still see what happened. Ten strikeouts tied a career-high for Houser, which he reached on August 10, 2019. This time around, though, the journey there was markedly different. For the first time in his career, Houser threw his sinker over 70% of the time. He’d been high-strikeout in some games, high-sinker in others, but the two attributes had never converged so clearly until now. It’s not as if those sinkers were setting up a different pitch, either. Of the 10 strikeouts Houser collected, eight came from the sinker, while the remaining two came from the changeup and the curveball. For the most part, one pitch bookended each plate appearance.

This is remarkable if you know at least a smidgen of pitching. For one, the sinker isn’t a strikeout pitch! Its intended purpose is to induce grounders from hitters, not collect whiffs. Second, unless you’re a reliever, who throws a sinker or any one pitch that often? You’d imagine that hitters would catch on at some point. Yet Houser emerged relatively unscathed. The home run, double, and single that led to two earned runs weren’t even recorded off his sinker. Read the rest of this entry »