Last Saturday in the Bronx, Max Scherzer showed off the dominant form that has earned him three Cy Young awards and seven All-Star selections. Admittedly, he wasn’t exactly facing Murderer’s Row, but against a Yankees team that had recently righted itself with a 7-1 tear, he struck out 10 out of the first 14 batters he faced, finishing with 14 strikeout in 7.1 innings, that while allowing just two hits, one walk, and one run.

The Nationals wound up losing that game in 11 innings, but nonetheless, the outing was the latest example of the 36-year-old righty in vintage form. The 14 strikeouts was the most by a visitor in the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009, and the most by any opponent in any iteration of Yankee Stadium since Pedro Martinez’s ultra-dominant one-hit performance against the defending champions in 1999:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners calling up pitching prospect Logan Gilbert, the late-inning dominance of Aroldis Chapman and (more unexpectedly) Kendall Graveman, Shohei Ohtani’s best start of the season, and the Astros providing housing for their minor leaguers, then answer listener emails about their favorite baseball seasons, how long it will take for 2020 footage of fan-free ballparks to seem surprising, MLB shifting to a six-game-a-week schedule, framing vs. flopping, pitchers protesting having to hit by striking out on purpose, ordering ballpark food from home, and the culture of intentional plunkings.

Audio intro: The Bangles, "One of Two"
Audio outro: Paul and Linda McCartney, "Eat at Home"

Link to MLB.com on Seattle’s prospect promotions
Link to The Athletic on Chapman’s splitter
Link to Pinstripe Alley on Chapman’s splitter
Link to Bronx Pinstripes on Chapman’s splitter
Link to Lookout Landing on Graveman
Link to Lookout Landing on Graveman again
Link to The Athletic on Graveman
Link to video of Ohtani’s Tuesday highlights
Link to post on Ohtani’s cutters
Link to Forman Stathead tweet
Link to report on Astros housing
Link to Jeff Long on minor league dorms
Link to Russell Carleton on minor league living
Link to story about schedule makers
Link to documentary about schedule makers
Link to video of Walker strikeout
Link to Dodgers Home Plates menu
Link to story about Dodger Dog supplier
Link to Dodger Dog ode

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These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Jarren Duran, CF, Boston Red Sox
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Worcester   Age: 24   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR, 2 K

Notes
This is the kind of thing you like to see from a guy who clearly underwent a swing change last year but wasn’t able to play in actual games to show us if it was going to have a meaningful impact. In fact, when Duran went to Puerto Rico for winter ball after spending the summer at the alt site, he failed to hit for power there as well. Now he already has three homers in 2021, which is just two shy of his single-season career high. As he’s doing this, Duran is also striking out 33% of the time, a far cry from the ultra-low rates that helped make him a prospect in the first place. It’s rare for a prospect this old to be such a high-variance player. We’re all learning about how Duran’s swing change is going to alter his output in real time. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, the Dodgers were only a Gavin Lux home run away from falling to a .500 record. A .500 record isn’t generally cause for panic, but it would definitely have been a disappointment for the reigning world champions, a team that was expected to steamroll most of the rest of baseball this season. Just to match 2020’s regular season record, the Dodgers need to add another 24 consecutive wins to Monday night’s win over the Mariners.

So how worried should the third-place Dodgers be? Not very.

The Dodgers Aren’t Actually Playing Poorly

Okay, this header isn’t true if we engage in an ultra-literal reading, but in losing 15 of the last 21 games, the Dodgers have only been outscored by a total of seven runs in the aggregate. The team’s overall Pythagorean record puts them at a 94.5 win pace, below the preseason projections, but not alarmingly so. The bullpen had a 4.48 ERA over this stretch, and while there is a relationship between bullpen performance and Pythagorean performance, the relationship is fairly loose.

I went back through history to look at the Pythagorean performances of all teams that underperformed their expected record by at least two wins after 36 games. Over the rest of the seasons, those teams fell short of their Pythagorean records by about a tenth of a run on average. In other words, the discrepancy between expected record and actual record in the early season is mostly noise, as opposed to hiding something sinister about a team’s true abilities. Read the rest of this entry »

I was unwinding on Friday after a long week of work when I got an alert from MLB that Wade Miley was throwing a no-hitter against Cleveland. I blinked my eyes a couple of times in disbelief before putting the game on, but as I was watching Miley complete his no-hitter, my alerts went off again: Sean Manaea had a perfect game in progress in Oakland. He ended up losing it when Randy Arozarena walked in the seventh and his no-hitter when Mike Brosseau led off the eighth with a double, but if your head is spinning a bit from all the alerts, you are not alone. We are barely five weeks into the 2021 season, and we’ve already seen four no-hitters (five, if you count Madison Bumgarner’s seven-inning no-no, which MLB officially doesn’t). As fun as it has been to follow the action this season, something historically anomalous is afoot.

Let’s start with the raw numbers. There are only 21 full MLB seasons with four or more no-hitters since 1901, and the only season that saw more than four no-hitters happen before May 15 is 1917, when five took place (all before May 6). That season ended with six no-hitters and a tie for the highest percentage of no-hitters per game played — until now.

The existing record of no-hitters as a percent of total games is at 0.48%, which has happened twice in MLB history, but it’s unlikely many of us were around for those 1908 and 1917 seasons. The vaunted 1968 “Year of the Pitcher” season that resulted in the mound being lowered five inches doesn’t even crack the top-10 list in terms of no-hitters as a percent of total games. Here are the top 20 seasons for no-hitters as a percent of total games, including 2021 data through May 9: Read the rest of this entry »

On February 18, the Reds signed outfielder Tyler Naquin to a minor league contract with a non-roster invitation to major league spring training. It’s not the kind of transaction that generally generates analysis here at FanGraphs. It was just a standard depth move at the time, the kind of signing every team makes multiples of every off-season. Flash forward nearly three months later, and after an impressive spring training, Naquin is among the top 15 in wRC+ in the National League and part of the best offense in the senior circuit. The Reds utilize a daily strategy of trying to outslug their opponent to make up for what has been a miserable pitching staff, and the results so far have them hovering around .500.

Hot stars happen all the time, and while one week should be readily dismissed as a small sample not worthy of any kind of real scrutiny, a month merits looking into. Where did the player come from? Has anything changed? Is this sustainable? In Naquin’s case, the answers are a bit murky.

Naquin’s background is unique. The 2012 draft was weak in terms of college position players, but Naquin was nonetheless the second one selected at 15th overall. And while there was much debate over his ability to stay in center field, as well as his ultimate power ceiling, scouts were universal in their praise for the Texas A&M product’s hit tool after he led the Big 12 conference in batting average during each of his final two years as an Aggie.

His minor league career was filled with good-but-not-great seasons as he moved up the ladder (probably more slowly than Cleveland anticipated), but he got the call in 2016 and showed unexpected power on his way to 2.1 WAR in 116 games. It’s a figure he’s yet to match, as the following years were defined by injuries and inconsistent performance that saw him waver between fourth outfielder and Quad-A status. Out of time, and out of patience, Naquin was suddenly a six-year free agent looking for work this winter. The Reds offered him the best deal in terms of the combination of money and opportunity, and he’s certainly taken advantage of it. Read the rest of this entry »

First, a bit of history:

The major league annals include just two players born in Slovakia. One of them is Elmer Valo, an outfielder for six teams from 1940-1961 who hailed from the village of Rybnik. The other is Jack Quinn (born Johannes Pajkos), a pitcher for eight teams from 1909-1933 who drew his first breaths 333 kilometers away in Štefurov. Both came to the United States at a young age, their families settling in the Pennsylvania.

Adam Macko hopes to follow in their footsteps, albeit via pathways. A native of Bratislava, Slovakia, Macko moved to Stoney Plain, Alberta, Canada when he was 12 years old — a year in Ireland bridging the Atlantic journey — and then to the southern part of the province where he spent three years at the Vauxhall Baseball Academy before being selected by Seattle in the seventh round of the 2019 draft.

Profile-wise, Macko is more finesse than power, albeit not by a wide margin. The 20-year-old called himself “a command lefty” when offering a self scouting report, but that belies a velocity jump that saw him clocked as high as 97 mph in spring training. In his first start of the season, Macko sat 92-96 with his four-seamer while hurling four scoreless innings for the Low-A Modesto Nuts. Mixing and matching effectively, the southpaw set down seven Stockton Ports batters on strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

When we last checked in on our partially crowd-run Out Of The Park Baseball team, the season wasn’t yet underway. We spent the offseason building pitching depth after a nightmarish injury season left us with a bullpen made of duct tape and late-season callups. In an effort to avoid a recurrence of that problem, we came into this season with pitching depth that could best be described as excessive.

Even after trading Eric Lauer (more on that in a second), the team went seven deep on starters: Brandon Woodruff, Kevin Gausman, Collin McHugh, Freddy Peralta, Adrian Houser, Corbin Burnes, and Brent Suter are all at least candidates for a rotation spot. Surely, I (and you) reasoned, that depth will sustain us even if injuries become a problem again.

Good news: through 42 games, injuries haven’t been a problem. Our top five starters have made all 42 starts, though virtual Adrian Houser is headed for the bullpen unless he turns things around quickly; his 10.64 ERA isn’t reflective of his true talent, but his 9.25 FIP isn’t exactly a great sign. He’s become a two-pitch pitcher in this simulation, so a swap with Suter might suit both.
Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers are always looking to chip away at the platoon advantage. Two of the most common weapons in doing so are the changeup and curveball. The former fades away from opposite-side batters and from the barrel as the bat whips through the zone. Most of a curveball’s movement, meanwhile, is vertical; no matter the handedness of the batter and corresponding bat path, the pitch can duck under the bat as the batter makes contact. Sliders, though, generally have a large platoon split, to the detriment of the pitcher, as they move more horizontally relative to vertically and toward the pitcher’s glove side. This leads the ball towards the barrel of an opposite-handed hitter, giving him more of an opportunity to make contact.

Cutters are interesting in this regard. Given the movement of the pitch, you would expect it to have significant platoon splits like a slider. The ball moves toward a pitcher’s glove side, albeit generally not as far as a slider; an opposite-handed hitter would have a better chance putting the barrel on it. But this is not the case, according to research from Max Marchi done back in 2010, as he found that cutters were in the middle of the pack with respect to pitch-type platoon splits. It still had more favorable splits when the batter had the platoon advantage, but that is the case for all pitches in general.

So why does the cutter not have much of an effect on the platoon advantage despite its break? As MLB.com explains it, the magnitude of the horizontal break is subtle enough to catch a hitter expecting a four-seamer off guard. Thus, when he swings, the movement of the pitch forces the batter to fight it off his hands and either induces weak contact or breaks the bat altogether. My thesis was that players are turning to the cutter because of these neutral platoon splits, as heavily using a pitch that works well to hitters from both sides makes you harder to predict. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Diego Padres. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in my opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on my lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.