FanGraphs Baseball

PHILADELPHIA — Jean Segura experienced the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat all in one inning, Rob Thomson managed as if there were no tomorrow, and Ranger Suárez excelled in the biggest start of his career as the Phillies beat the Padres, 4-2, to go up two games to one in the NLCS.

The Padres and Phillies are not only closely matched, but with their great top-end starting pitching and star power at the plate, they make excellent foils for one another. This was the third consecutive tense, close-fought game between the two. After the pitchers’ duel in Game 1 and Game 2’s tilt between Sir Gawain vs. the Green Knight, Game 3 was a contest of tantalizing opportunities. Each side opened the door to the other through some, um, creative defense, but in the end, the Phillies made more of their opportunities.

The recurring theme of this game was the ball on the ground. The night’s 69 plate appearances produced 51 balls in play; of those, 30 were grounders, 18 by the Padres. And even though both teams shifted heavily throughout the game, these grounders seemed to have a habit of going where the fielders weren’t. The Padres had four infield hits, two by Brandon Drury on balls with a launch angle of -20 degrees or worse. There were three groundball double plays, and there could have been a few more.

While the fate of the game was always figuratively just within or just out of reach, an unusually large percentage of Friday was spent with infielders literally reaching for the ball. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The first six batters of the game hardly indicated what was to come. Two of Suárez’s three strikeouts came in the first two plate appearances of the game, while Joe Musgrove started the bottom of the first by surrendering the only home run and the only two walks allowed by any pitcher on the night. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley follow up on their 2022 minor league free agent draft results, banter about ALDS Game 2, teams “not making excuses,” the Rangers hiring Bruce Bochy, and other news, and answer listener emails about a suggestion for changing the number of games per playoff round, how an average person would do in the field if they knew where the ball was going to go, a 75-foot-tall batter, the most embarrassing kind of whiff, multiple “first” pitches, the phrase “a whole new ballgame,” and a ballpark named after the podcast, plus a Past Blast from 1919.

Audio intro: Sloan, “You Don’t Need Excuses to Be Good”
Audio outro: Billy Corgan, “Black Sox”

Link to 2022 draft results
Link to Raymond’s EW wiki post
Link to Boone comments
Link to Severino comments
Link to data on Bregman HR
Link to data on Judge flyout
Link to FG post on ALDS G2
Link to postseason ZiPS
Link to story on McCullers/champagne
Link to Jay on postseason SP
Link to Bochy news
Link to Dusty report
Link to Profar’s swing
Link to story on Veeck’s “giant”
Link to EW emails database
Link to 1919 story source
Link to SABR’s Eight Myths Out
Link to SABR on the Black Sox scandal
Link to SABR on Speaker’s columns
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to Patreon/Discord instructions

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Framber Valdez threw a spectacular game last night. For seven innings, he bewitched, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled the Yankee offense. As Alex Eisert noted, he notched a career high in swinging strikes en route to a whopping nine strikeouts.

How did he manage it? As best as I can tell, he made one key adjustment: he used his wipeout curveball to start at-bats and ended up with 16 first-pitch strikes out of 27 batters faced, plus a weak grounder that turned into slapstick comedy:

It’s particularly impressive when you consider the beginning of his outing: he started six of his first eight batters faced with a ball and looked like he might struggle to find the zone. But he stuck to his plan, and the Yankees, who had taken the first eight pitches they saw, started swinging aggressively the rest of the night. Read the rest of this entry »

2:09	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks!

2:09	Jay Jaffe: Apologies for the delay, I had a typo in my chat code

2:10	Jay Jaffe: Welcome to the my first solo chat of the 2022 postseason

2:14	Jay Jaffe: Bear with me for a moment while I get back on track. Today I’ve got a piece about the rebound of starting pitcher usage in the regular season and postseason https://blogs.fangraphs.com/postseason-starting-pitching-is-back-baby/

2:14	Jay Jaffe: Earlier this week I previewed the ALCS https://blogs.fangraphs.com/al-championship-series-preview-houston-ast… which required a quicker turnaround from ALDS Game 5 than I would have liked.

2:15	Jay Jaffe: And wrote about the Dodgers’ early exit and the increasing disconnect between the regular season and the postseason https://blogs.fangraphs.com/ousted-dodgers-drive-home-disconnect-betwe…

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, when I wrote about some of the league’s strongest throwers, I ended up exclusively featuring outfielders. The nature of the position is more suited to making full capacity throws than in the infield, and as a result, only outfielders ended up on the list. Because of that, I feel obligated to acknowledge and highlight some of the strongest throwers in the infield. On average, these throws won’t be quite as fast. The footwork and time required to throw the ball is one reason for that, and that will be the focus of this piece.

Similar to last time, we’ll have to sort through some qualifications on how I came up with this short list of names. The first is at least 100 throws in the infield. One thing I ran into when sorting through the leaderboard was that several players near the top were utility players, rather than just strictly infielders. That led me to using the 2B/SS/3B filter and sorting the list by the overall throws at those positions only. See the full leaderboard here.

After working that out, I wanted to select plays where a player needed their plus arm strength to get an out. For example, a shortstop and/or third baseman needs to fire a rocket when moving multiple steps to use their backhand. A second baseman needs to have the correct footwork to fire a ball when ranging up the middle or quickly spinning a double play. Those are the types of plays I’m looking for, but they were harder to find than you would expect, given how so many plays in the infield are routine. I started with about 15 players from the top 20 on the list and worked my way down to a representative sample of five. Now, let’s get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros took a two-games-to-none lead over the Yankees in the American League Championship Series on Thursday night, as Alex Bregman’s three-run homer backed seven strong innings by Framber Valdez, whose two runs allowed counted as unearned due to his two-error play on a Giancarlo Stanton chopper. It was the second night in a row that an Astros starter stifled the Yankees, as Justin Verlander held them to one run over six innings while striking out 11.

The Yankees had Verlander on the ropes, forcing the 39-year-old righty to throw 66 pitches in the first three innings, during which he allowed six baserunners including a solo homer by Harrison Bader. Verlander got the strikeouts he needed to escape those big jams, however, and soon he went on a roll, striking out six straight hitters (tying a postseason record he already shared) and nine of his final 11 — reclaiming the all-time postseason strikeout lead along the way — before yielding to the bullpen, which continued to dominate Yankees hitters in a 4-2 victory in the ALCS opener.

Even given that he got knocked around for six runs and 10 hits in four innings by the Mariners in his Division Series start, Verlander probably had a longer leash than most due to his Hall of Fame resumé and manager Dusty Baker’s trust in him. He also had the wind at his back, so to speak. On the heels of a regular season in which per-game scoring fell 5.5% (from 4.53 runs per game to 4.28), in which the league-wide OPS decreased for the third straight season (from .758 in 2019 to .740 in ’20, .728 in ’21, and .706 this year), and in which starting pitcher usage increased for the second year in a row, starters are working deeper into games in the postseason than at any time since 2015. Read the rest of this entry »

After striking out 17 times Wednesday night, the Yankees ran that number up to 30 for the Championship Series, taking another tough loss in Game 2, this time 3-2. This time, Framber Valdez, the second half of Houston’s two-headed ace monster, was responsible; he struck out nine across seven strong innings. Typically known for his groundball prowess, Valdez racked up a career-high 25 whiffs Thursday night, with 16 of them coming via a nasty curveball. Those curveball whiffs, another career-best and a playoff record since the pitch-tracking era began in 2008, exceeded the next-highest mark from this season (including the playoffs) by three. (For context, three was also the gap between the outings with the second- and 12th-most curveball whiffs this year.)

But Valdez didn’t look all that sharp out of the gate. While his velocity was up 1.3 mph on the sinker, his primary offering, three of the first four and four of the first six hitters he faced went up in the count 2-0. In addition to possibly causing command issues, that extra zip may have led to higher exit velocities for the Yankees: their first three hitters each put 100-mph screamers in play. Luckily for Valdez, they were all hit pretty close to fielders, but with two down in the second, he wasn’t as fortunate; Josh Donaldson hit a perfectly placed 92.1-mph liner — the Yankees’ softest-hit ball to that point — into short right field for a double. But Valdez registered his first strikeout of the game when the next batter, Kyle Higashioka, went down after five straight curveballs, whiffing on the last:

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 997

With four teams remaining in the postseason, this week we put our fan hats on before meeting a talented new FanGraphs contributor.

• In the first segment, resident Phillies fan Michael Baumann is joined by site Padres fan Jason Martinez to discuss the NLCS. Jason was at the first two games in San Diego, while Michael will be at each of the next three in Philly; neither expected their team to get this far. We hear about Jason working as a field timing coordinator, Michael being more scared of Manny Machado than Juan Soto, the experience of facing (and watching) Blake Snell, their shared adoration for Jorge Alfaro and Jake Cronenworth, and Jason almost having to help Ralph Sampson to break up a stadium fight. [2:56]
• After that, Dan Szymborski welcomes Davy Andrews for his podcast debut. Davy recently joined the site as a contributor. We hear how he found himself at FanGraphs before learning more about his musical projects. The duo also discuss Jose Altuve’s recent struggles and future Hall of Fame chances, the playoffs being a bit of a crapshoot, what the Dodgers should do in the offseason, being fun uncles, and their strong opinions about baking and cookies. [45:07]

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You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 72 minute play time.)

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley review the results of the 2022 minor league free agent draft, discuss Gold Glove finalists and a study about the lack of special ways to win in the postseason, recap the first few Championship Series games (and banter about José Alvarado and same-named athletes in multiple sports), and answer listener emails about the name of the Division Series, on-screen strike zone graphics, and spotting higher-seeded teams a game before the start of a postseason series, plus a Past Blast from 1918, concluding banter about Shohei Ohtani’s comments about the Angels’ season and José Ramírez’s post-postseason surgery, and a postscript.

Audio intro: Nada Surf, “What is Your Secret”
Audio outro: Andrew Weiss and Friends, “Everybody Loves a Comeback”

Link to 2022 draft results
Link to Raymond’s EW wiki post
Link to Gold Glove finalists
Link to FiveThirtyEight on Gold Gloves
Link to 2021 story on Soto’s defense
Link to Dan S.’s playoffs study
Link to Russell’s playoffs study
Link to Russell on playoff homer-hitting
Link to Rosenthal on the playoff format
Link to ZiPS playoff odds
Link to study on playoff randomness
Link to FG post on NLCS G1
Link to FG post on NLCS G2
Link to MLB.com on Snell
Link to MLB.com on Padres’ rally
Link to MLB.com on Alvarado
Link to FG post on ALCS G1
Link to MLB.com on ALCS G1
Link to BP ALCS game preview
Link to Reddit on the best-of-9 WS
Link to ALCS G1 ump scorecard
Link to Division Series wiki
Link to BP K-Zone plea
Link to FG post on KBO playoffs
Link to EW emails database
Link to 1918 story source
Link to 1918 Ruth box score
Link to MLB.com on Ruth’s lost homer
Link to Reddit on Ruth’s homers
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to Ruth homers book
Link to Ohtani Angels story
Link to Ohtani WBC story
Link to Ramírez surgery news
Link to Japan athletes poll
Link to U.S. athletes poll
Link to Patreon/Discord instructions

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 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

With a massive first-pitch home run off Aaron Nola on Wednesday afternoon, Josh Bell broke an 0-for-14 slump. He went 3-for-4 in Game 2 of the NLCS, adding an RBI single in the fourth and another base hit in the seventh to go along with his second-inning home run. It was a major improvement over his performance in the first game of the series, when he went hitless in four at-bats and struck out swinging with two runners on to end the ballgame.

When Bell is hot, he can be a terrific offensive performer, and a lineup built around him, Juan Soto and Manny Machado has the potential to be one of the most powerful in baseball. That’s exactly what A.J. Preller was counting on when he pulled off the biggest summer blockbuster in recent memory. When Bell goes cold, however, he’s dead weight in the middle of the lineup.

Just take a look at his wRC+ by month:

More of his success came with the Nationals, but Bell did have a couple of strong stretches in San Diego. From August 20 to September 10, he hit for a 152 wRC+, and did so again from October 1 through the end of the season. The Padres went 14–9 during those two stretches, and Bell led the squad with 0.84 Win Probability Added. In the rest of their games post-deadline, the team went 17–18, and Bell’s -1.55 WPA ranked dead last. When their DH was hitting, the Friars had a more complete offense, and when he wasn’t, he dragged the team down with him. That trend has continued into the postseason; in Padres wins, he is batting .294/.294/.647 with three runs and four RBI (17 PA), and in losses, he’s hitting .100/.182/.100 with no runs or runs batted in (11 PA). Read the rest of this entry »