On Sunday, the Red Sox announced that they had extended righty reliever Matt Barnes on a two-year contract. The deal, which starts next season, will pay him a $1.75 million signing bonus along with salaries of $7.25 million in 2022 and $7.5 million in ’23. It also includes a club option for the 2024 season, valued at $8 million with a $2.25 million buyout. All told, Barnes is guaranteed $18.75 million over the term of the contract, but could earn as much as $24 million if he hits all the escalators and Boston exercises the option.

In short summary of his career, Barnes has been an effective arm since his 2014 debut. Since ’14 and through last season, Barnes was solid though not otherworldly, pitching to a 4.08 ERA, 29.9% strikeout rate, and 10.9% walk rate over 337.1 innings pitched. As with most relievers, he had his personal volatility. His best season was in 2018, when he posted a 2.71 FIP in 61.2 frames, as well as a 1.04 ERA in 10 postseason appearances en route to the Red Sox’s World Series title. On the flip side of that coin, Barnes had a comparatively tough year in 2020. He still posted good strikeout numbers but faced a bit of unluckiness with the longball, as his 1.57 HR/9 and 23.5% home run-per-fly ball rate were both career-worsts, making last season was the first time since 2015 that Barnes found himself on the wrong side of replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »

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 three right-handers — Scott Barlow, Aaron Nola, and Nick Sandlin — talking about their curveballs and sliders.

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Scott Barlow, Kansas City Royals

“I have both a slider and a curveball. I’ve started to integrate the curve a lot more, whereas in the past it was a lot of sliders. It still kind of is. But they kind of work hand-in-hand, and because I’ve thrown the slider so much in the past, my curveball is probably the better story. It’s been a big learning curve as far as when to throw it.

“I messed around with a curveball a lot when I was a starter, but then as a reliever… it was kind of weird, because a lot of relievers typically have two pitches, maybe three. Coming out of the bullpen it was kind of ‘When should I throw that third pitch?’ I think the more opportunities you get, and the more hitters you face, the more you understand when to throw that pitch.

“I threw a lot of sliders and curveballs in high school, but the breaks were a lot different because the arm speed was different. But with the curveball, I had an idea of the grip I liked and I stuck with it. It just really came down to committing to it, rather than having it being ‘poppy,’ having the same arm speed as the fastball, and then kind of adjusting. When you first learn to throw it hard, you tend to spike it a lot, throw in the dirt. You kind of understand how to adjust your sight lines — where to start that fastball arm action point — so you can get it in the right location. Read the rest of this entry »

For all of the anticipation and hype that surrounded the long-awaited participation of two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani as well as distance king Joey Gallo in their first Home Run Derbies — and at mile-high Coors Field, no less — it was easy to overlook the one contestant in the field who’d done this before. Because there was no Derby last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2019 winner Pete Alonso entered Monday night as the reigning champion, and he defended his title successfully and emphatically.

Indeed, the Mets’ 6-foot-3, 245-pound slugger seemed built for this competition, and he practically toyed with his opponents. After hitting a contest-high 35 homers in the quarterfinals, Alonso didn’t need his full allotment of time to win either of his final two rounds, capping his run by beating Trey Mancini in the finals, 23-22. In victory, he became the fourth player to win multiple Home Run Derbies, after Ken Griffey Jr. (1994, ’98-99), Prince Fielder (2009, ’12) and Yoenis Céspedes (2013-14). Mancini, who missed the 2020 season while undergoing chemotherapy for stage three colon cancer, put forth a valiant effort with a quick compact stroke that contrasted with Alonso’s long swing, but ultimately, he was outhit and outdistanced.

Alonso and Mancini were both part of the wave of upsets that characterized the night. In the quarterfinal round, all four lower seeds advanced, knocking out the Vegas-favored heavyweights, Ohtani and Gallo. While Ohtani’s loss to eighth-seeded Juan Soto rated as something of a disappointment given his headliner status, their battle was epic, requiring two rounds of tiebreakers. It’s worth noting that Coors Field favors right-handed hitters when it comes to homers, and three of the four lower seeds that advanced — the fifth-seeded Alonso, sixth-seeded Mancini, and seventh-seeded Trevor Story — swing righty. The seedings, by the way, were based upon the participants’ home run totals as of July 7; it wasn’t as though any Derby- or Statcast-related science went into the matchups. Read the rest of this entry »

Who’s the best catcher in the NL Central? Before the season, this was a good way to start an argument between Cardinals and Cubs fans. Was it Willson Contreras, the cannon-armed, cannon-batted Chicago backstop who has worked hard to improve his framing of late? Was it Yadier Molina, the stalwart St. Louis lifer with legendary defense who continued to hit long past when most thought he’d fade?

Neither! The best catcher in the NL Central this year is Omar Narváez, and it hasn’t been particularly close. By WAR, his 3.0 mark is nearly double Contreras, and that undersells it; he’s played in nine fewer games and has 64 fewer plate appearances. His 137 wRC+ is the second-best among catchers, trailing only Buster Posey’s incandescent season. He’s sixth in baseball in framing runs and third in total defensive value for catchers. A year after his worst offensive season, he’s turned it all around, and the Brewers are reaping the rewards.

Narváez came to Milwaukee with a reputation as a defensive butcher who could hit. He popped 22 homers in 2019 in only 482 plate appearances, his lone season in Seattle. Not only that, but he also struck out only 19.1% of the time — with a walk rate of nearly 10%. More walks than average, fewer strikeouts than average, plus power … he sounded like a match made in heaven.
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Politics aside, the biggest upside to Major League Baseball’s decision to move this year’s All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver is that for the first time in 23 years, the Home Run Derby will be held at Coors Field, where baseballs fly further than any other major league venue due to the mile-high altitude. If you have any sustained interest in the event, this is the bucket list location for a Derby, and if that’s not enough to juice this competition, MLB has made clear the balls themselves won’t be stored in the humidor prior to the festivities, theoretically resulting in drives of even greater distance. Short story longer: MORE DINGERS!

If there’s a downside to the pending fireworks show, it’s that the new baseball MLB introduced this year isn’t carrying quite as far as years past. The average distance of a hard-hit fly ball — that is, one hit with an exit velocity of 95 mph or greater — is 366 feet, which is up five feet from the shortened 2020 season but down nine feet relative to ’19, the year those distances peaked.

That decreased distance is despite this year’s hard-hit fly balls having the highest average exit velocity of the Statcast era at 101.2 mph; they averaged 101 mph in 2019, the year that home runs peaked with an average of 1.39 per team per game. That was deemed Too Many Homers, and after dropping by 8% from 2019 to ’20, per-game home run rates have fallen another 7.85% this year, to 1.18 per team per game. The good news is that at Coors Field, that downturn won’t matter; via Statcast, this year’s hard-hit fly balls are averaging 393 feet — 7.3% further — and that’s with the humidor. Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the great batting lines of the first half was Yasmani Grandal’s .189/.388/.436 slash. Unfortunately, as has been the case for many a hitter on the White Sox, his return to action in ‘21 is in doubt after he underwent surgery to repair a knee ligament. I won’t wax poetic on Grandal; Devan Fink did a great job covering his early-season batting line. But it’s becoming more common to see a hitter with an average that starts with a “1” these days. The common reference to a batting average under .200 is the “Mendoza Line,” which our Ashley MacLennon made a strong case for ditching as a reference earlier this season. I, on the other hand, am going to make the case for why it’s become irrelevant.

Batting average, the prevailing measure of a hitter’s success for most of baseball’s existence, has faded into the background, yet the rate at which a hitter successfully reaches base via a hit is still usually the first statistic reported. Grandal’s batting average is not good, but the selection of .200 as a cutoff point is arbitrary; after all, a batting average of .214 is also not good. What most baseball fans understand now is that because all base hits are not equal in value, batting average is limited in what it says about a hitter. But there is a stigma attached to a poor batting average, which is probably why the Mendoza Line has stuck.

Let’s rewind to last year’s shortened campaign. There was a lot of speculation going into a 60-game season as to whether or not a player would be able to hit .400. That didn’t happen, though Charlie Blackmon was hitting .500 after a couple weeks. We did end up with a handful of qualified hitters with an average below .200 — seven such, to be exact:

This is by far the highest number of qualified hitters with a batting average below .200 for a single season. It is totally a product of the short season, though. None of the hitters on the list above are contact hitters, but their true bat-to-ball skills are probably better than what they showed in ‘20. When the sample is small, there is a greater chance that you get some outliers in your results.

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With the first half of the season in the books, the first round of the MLB Draft wrapped, and All-Star festivities underway, now is the moment teams can take a breath and start evaluating their strategy for the stretch run. There’s been some significant movement in these rankings since I last posted them, with a handful of teams moving into and out of the bubble during the last two weeks. That should make for a very exciting trade deadline that’s just a few weeks away.

One note: from here on out, these rankings will appear every other week. With most teams sorted into their tiers, there probably won’t be as much week-to-week movement in the rankings as we’ve seen earlier in the season.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (50%/50% FIP- and RA9-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking. Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves had justifiably high hopes coming into the 2021 season. Despite the early loss of Rookie of the Year runner-up Mike Soroka, the 2020 Braves won their third straight division title. If the postseason had been four innings shorter for Atlanta, they would have made their first World Series of the 21st century, 21 years after getting swept by the Yankees. Almost all of the key players returning fueled preseason optimism, but rather than tangling with the NL’s best teams, the Braves are in a grueling brawl to finish above the .500 line. The disappointment was already in full force before the team took their biggest hit yet: the sight of outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. being carted off the field after an attempt to make a leaping catch.

As with any injury, the initial beleaguered hope was that Acuña would rub some sweat or dirt or spit onto the painful area, walk it off, and be ready to jump back into the lineup. Everyone dodged a bullet — well, maybe not opposing pitchers — earlier this season when Acuña injured his abdomen after diving on a pickoff play but quickly returned to the lineup. Before the night was out, however, an MRI confirmed that this was a serious injury, a torn right ACL that will end Acuña’s season.

Acuña already looked like a special player before the season started, but he somehow looked even better this year, still just his age-23 season. Hitting .283/.394/.596 with 24 home runs, a 161 wRC+, and 4.0 WAR, he had already crammed a whole season’s worth of awesome into a half-season bag. The ZiPS projections had Acuña finishing with 44 homers and 7.2 WAR, the latter number one the best for all position players, vanquishing his competition in the Battle of the Legacies (Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr.), though falling to best Shohei Ohtani when pitching contributions are included. Read the rest of this entry »