On hiatus since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, FanGraphs’ Learning and Developing a Pitch series returns with three pitchers — Michael King, Lucas Luetge, and Jordan Romano — telling the stories behind their sliders.

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Michael King, New York Yankees

“I’ve been developing a slider since my freshman year of college. I was always bigger curveball, and then I had like seven different grips in college. I could never get consistent with anything — not consistent movement, not consistent location — and it just never felt comfortable. So I always used to say that I was a sinker/slider guy that didn’t have a slider.

“Once I got drafted in 2016, I said, ‘I don’t care what it does, I’m sticking with this grip so I can at least locate it.’ In 2018 is when I finally felt like I was consistent with the shape and the location. Then we got a new pitching director, Sam Briend, and he said, ‘Your slider is terrible. It’s located well, but it doesn’t have a good movement profile. Let’s fix it.’

“In 2019, I got hurt, and then it was the whole process of trying to change the movement profile. I wanted it to be more horizontal, more sweepy, like [Corey] Kluber’s, rather than the slider I had, which just had a little bit of depth. This year I’m finally figuring it out. Having Kluber on my team, I could talk to him about his grip, what his mentality is, what he’s trying to do at release.

“A big thing for me was, because I wanted to get that sweep and horizontal, I would get really rotational with my body to try to pull it sideways. [Kluber] said that’s the opposite of what you want to do. He said to just let the grip do the work. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s borderline excessive consumption of Angels games and the latest, greatest exploits of Shohei Ohtani, who and what is to blame for the Yankees’ ongoing struggles, Gerrit Cole’s performance post-sticky stuff, Hector Santiago becoming the first pitcher ejected for alleged foreign substance use, a Triple-A umpire’s broken-belt ejection, Zach McKinstry keeping his eye on the ball, the Tigers’ recent respectability, and more.

Audio intro: Frank Sinatra, "Bewitched"
Audio outro: Bombadil, "Leather Belt"

Link to Ohtani homer on Friday
Link to Ohtani homer on Sunday
Link to Ben’s article on Ohtani
Link to Ohtani Twitter stan account
Link to Ohtani WAR pace graphic
Link to Santiago article
Link to second Santiago article
Link to article on Ottavino trade
Link to Lindsey on the Yankees’ offense
Link to Lindsey on LeMahieu
Link to belt/ejection video
Link to belt/ejection blog post
Link to Matsuda article
Link to McKinstry quote
Link to batter ball-tracking research

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Jimmy Nelson has had a rough few years, facing the most harrowing tribulation of a professional pitcher: persistent injuries. In 2015 and 2016, Nelson tossed 177.1 and 179.1 innings, respectively, with a cumulative ERA of 4.37 and 2.5 WAR. That WAR total over 356.2 innings put him on about a 1.56 WAR per 180 innings pace, about what we might expect from a back-end starter. Given how many innings he was able to shoulder, he was a valuable contributor. The following season, Nelson broke out. He added almost a tick to his fastball and increased the usage of his two breaking balls with great results. He posted a 3.49 ERA in 2017. His strikeout rate increased from 18.5% in his prior two seasons to 27.3% and he trimmed his walk rate by about 33% while maintaining an above average groundball rate of 50.3%. These improvements added up to an astounding 4.8 WAR in 175.1 innings, a massive leap that placed him eighth in baseball among starters.

But the end of the 2017 season marked the start of a string of injuries that kept Nelson off the mound for much of the past three seasons. The first came in September of his superlative 2017. Running the bases following a single against the Cubs, Nelson took a hard turn around first and was forced to dive back to the bag after inducing a throw from the defense. Upon extending his arm to the base, he tore the labrum and rotator cuff in his right arm, comprising his shoulder capsule and incurring nerve damage; the injury kept Nelson out for all of 2018. He returned to the Brewers on June 5, 2019, made four appearances (three of them starts) and suffered an elbow injury that forced him off the mound until September of that same year when he then made six more appearances. In just 22 innings of work, he had a less-than-stellar 6.95 ERA and walked over 16% of the batters he faced. Milwaukee did not tender him a contract that offseason.

The Dodgers signed Nelson that winter, with the intent of rehabilitating someone who was among the most effective pitchers in the majors. But Nelson suffered a back injury in spring training prior to the COVID-19 shutdown, forcing him to have surgery on his back. That injury, according to Nelson himself, was the result of “mechanical compensations that developed over time going back from the shoulder.” He missed all of 2020 but the Dodgers brought him back on a minor-league contract, hoping he could rediscover some of his prior form and fortify a bullpen that lost its second, fifth, and ninth most-used arms, including Jake McGee, who was the team’s most valuable reliever by WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Nolan Jones, 3B, Cleveland
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Columbus Age: 23 Org Rank: 2 (66 over) FV: 50
Line: 2-for-4, HR, SB

Notes
Jones got off to a poor start and his overall line hasn’t yet recovered (he’s slugging just .405 on the season, the lowest since his first pro summer back in 2016), but he’s hit .253/.374/.495 over the last month, which is enough to quell overall concerns about him right now. He is a three true outcomes type of player and there may be long stretches where his average is hovering close to the Mendoza line but he’s going to walk a ton and hit for power while playing poor defense at several positions. Jones can be beaten with well-located fastballs at the top of the zone and he’s swung through a lot of them this year, but his swing decisions are typically very good. Per Synergy Sports, he has just a 19% O-Swing% so far this year, which would put him in the top five of qualified big leaguers. There’s real, elite plate discipline here and 70-grade power, but also a clearly exploitable hole in the swing at the top of the strike zone. How those things will interact at the big league level I truly don’t know, though it feels like that hole in the swing is a load-bearing Jenga block against big league pitchers who throw hard and often work at the top of the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 3, 2020, J.D. Davis hit a hard grounder between second and first, fielded cleanly by Freddie Freeman for a simple force out of the runner heading to second. This routine play might have been forgotten if not for the fact that Mike Soroka, the Braves’ consensus ace after a sterling rookie campaign in 2019, took an awkward step while trying to cover first base and limped out of the game. Nearly a year later, Soroka has not returned to a pitcher’s mound, and now, it’ll likely be at least another year until he can do so again, as a torn Achilles tendon — a repeat of the injury that knocked him out last season — will shelve him for the rest of ’21 and probably into ’22.

Last August, Soroka was immediately sent off for an MRI, which revealed that he had torn his right Achilles tendon. You know an injury is serious when a team’s rivals are offering their condolences nearly instantly.

“It kind of makes you sick, honestly,” Mets outfielder Michael Conforto said. “I can tell you a lot of us felt that way, just the way he went down and what we were hearing it was. … We heard it was the Achilles. He’s a bright young star, and we know he’ll come back and be the same guy.”

This wasn’t Soroka’s first major injury setback. After debuting in early 2018, shoulder inflammation shut him down quickly, costing him the rest of that season. He showed few signs of that malady in 2019, throwing 174 2/3 innings with a 2.68 ERA and 4.03 FIP for an even 4 WAR — good enough of a year to rank him highly among other young pitchers in Braves history.

I was an NL Rookie of the Year award voter in 2019, and though I gave my first-place vote to Pete Alonso, I wasn’t too far from giving it to the young Braves hurler instead. As you might expect, ZiPS was also a huge fan of Soroka going into the COVID year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve now reached the true halfway point of the season and the best teams in both leagues have continued to pull away from the pack. It’s looking like the Wild Card teams in both leagues will need to win around 95 games to ensure their playoff spot. That’s a lot of ground to make up for the squads that are well off that pace and the group of teams on the bubble has started to shrink as teams start to drop out of contention.

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.

The top tier grew after the Padres, Rays, and Astros had really strong weeks. The six teams that make up this tier each have a run differential of at least +77 and hold a commanding grip on a playoff spot.

After holding the best record in baseball for the last few weeks, the Giants finally moved into the top spot in these rankings. They swept the Angels in a two-game series early last week and won their series against their Bay Area rivals over the weekend. They’ve won 10 of their last 12 games and have scored 6.9 runs per game during this hot stretch. With a Rays-esque roster that’s incredibly flexible and a fantastic rotation led by Kevin Gausman and Anthony DeSclafani, they’ve proven their success this year is no fluke. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, Trevor Bauer had a rough start. In six innings, he struck out 10 Padres, but that’s where the highlights ended. He walked four and gave up three home runs, pushing his season total to 17 homers allowed. They were all solo shots, which limited the damage, but still: three home runs isn’t a good day’s work. After the game, Bauer was understandably defensive:

"I have the worst home run luck in the league. Every time I make a little mistake it leaves the yard." — Trevor Bauer on his 3 solo shots allowed tonight. #Dodgers

— Michael J. Duarte (@michaeljduarte) June 24, 2021

Now, “little mistakes” are hard to measure. Consider this titanic Manny Machado blast, for example:

Mistake? Maybe. But how do you define a mistake pitch? That was an 82.6 mph slider, roughly two ticks faster than Bauer’s average for the pitch. Per Statcast, it had 16 inches of total break (against spin-less movement), roughly 1.5 inches less than his average slider breaks. He left it over the plate, but not excessively so; five inches above the bottom of the zone. He doesn’t locate sliders there often, but the previous three had resulted in two swinging strikes and a pop out.

So was this a sublime effort by Machado or a bad pitch by Bauer? I’d lean towards the former — though Bauer would have a better argument on his pitch to Victor Caratini later in the game. But that’s hardly a scientific way of looking at it, and I wanted to do at least slightly better. Otherwise, how will we evaluate Bauer’s claim that he’s the unluckiest man on the planet, at least when it comes to home runs? Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani’s amazing season aside, not too much has gone the Angels’ way thus far. Mike Trout is injured, Anthony Rendon has struggled, Albert Pujols has been productive — but only after being cut by the Angels and picked up by the Dodgers — and the team’s defense has been dreadful enough to undo a rotation that appeared to be solid coming into the year. Justin Upton contributed to their miseries by playing quite badly on both sides of the ball in the early going, but after a torrid month, he’s landed on the Injured List with a lower back strain.

The 33-year-old Upton exited Tuesday night’s game against the Giants after two plate appearances due to lower back tightness. He didn’t play on Wednesday, and when he wasn’t included in the lineup on Friday, manager Joe Maddon said that he anticipated Upton returning this past weekend. When he arrived at the ballpark and underwent testing, however, trainers determined that he would need more time to heal, and so the Angels placed him on the IL, backdating his stint so that he will be eligible to return on July 3.

Upton is hitting .247/.336/.480 with 14 homers overall; his 125 wRC+ is his best mark since 2017, and fourth among Angels regulars behind Trout (193), Ohtani (174), and Jared Walsh (143). That’s quite a turnaround given his descent into replacement territory in the previous two seasons and the first part of this one:

Read the rest of this entry »