To begin, I want you to take a look at this screenshot from Saturday’s game between the Mets and Marlins at Citi Field. What do you think happened? What might have been the outcome?

First things first: That’s Jacob deGrom on the mound. He’s the best pitcher on Earth, as well as other inhabited worlds we have yet to discover. And as expected, he’s been mowing down the Marlins. In the first inning, he dismantled Corey Dickerson on four fastballs that went 99.9, 99.8, 100.4, and 100.1 mph. Next, he struck out Starling Marte with two fastballs, both above 99 mph, and a wicked slider. Could Jesús Aguilar, the next batter, save face for his team? Nope; unable to keep up with deGrom’s heater, Aguilar popped out to Pete Alonso in foul territory.

After deGrom retired two more Marlins — both on strikeouts — we’re back to the moment in the screenshot. In the batter’s box is Jazz Chisholm, one of Miami’s many promising young players. Today, in addition to manning second base, he’s tasked with facing a pitcher who has been dominant thus far. It won’t be easy.

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This week’s docket has several marquee matchups, but we respect your intelligence enough not to explain why Shane Bieber vs. Lucas Giolito or Yu Darvish vs. Dustin May is worth watching. Instead, turn your attention to three games where the visiting pitcher will return to their old stomping grounds, and don’t gloss over Tuesday night’s game in Atlanta either.

Wednesday, April 14, 6:35 PM ET: Joe Musgrove vs. Tyler Anderson

Joe Musgrove is baseball’s hottest pitcher at the moment, and after becoming the first Padres pitcher to throw no-hitter, he’ll try to become the latest ex-Pirates pitcher to make Pittsburgh look silly for having traded him. Musgrove, who Pittsburgh traded to San Diego in January, is looking to join Gerrit Cole and Tyler Glasnow as the latest pitcher to take another leap forward ditching his black and gold threads, and his early-season showing has been superlative. Still only 28, Musgrove was deemed unlikely to help the next good Pirates team (he’s a free agent after the 2022 season), and was traded for prospects. Over his three-year stay in Pittsburgh, during which the team had the majors’ seventh-lowest winning percentage, Musgrove was the Pirates’ best pitcher by nearly two wins. Now, he’s part of a San Diego team built to win a championship, which would already be the second of Musgrove’s underrated career. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sixth inning of Saturday night’s Diamondbacks-Reds game, Tim Locastro took off for second base. Acknowledging the blazing speed of the runner, Reds catcher Tucker Barnhart rushed to get into his throwing motion before even securing the baseball. Thus, Carson Fulmer’s pitch nicked off his glove and skipped to the Chase Field backstop. Locastro made it to second without a throw.

Not once in Locastro’s career has he been caught stealing, with Saturday’s stolen base representing his 28th consecutive successful attempt, a new major league record. It broke the mark set by Tim Raines, who went 27-for-27 to begin his career from 1979 to 1981 (stolen base attempts have been recorded since 1951). To mark the achievement, Locastro’s cleats were swiped (pun fully intended) by Cooperstown, where they will be displayed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Locastro is something of a baseball enigma, one popularized by baseball YouTuber Foolish Baseball, whose video “Why Tim Locastro Should Be Your Favorite Weird Player” now has 1.1 million views. Locastro is elite — boasting a 99th percentile ability in two very niche skills: running fast and getting hit by pitches. This allows him to frequently get on base even despite a subpar 6.6% career walk rate, and immediately wreck complete havoc on the basepaths. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that Tyler Glasnow was once a Pirate? Yes, like every other baseball writer in existence, I’m contractually obligated to point that out in any article I write about him. Good news, though — I promise that’s the last time I’ll mention them in this article, because I want to talk about something that Glasnow has done this year to add a much-needed wrinkle to his game.

The Glasnow of the past few years was a two-trick pony, if such a thing exists. Trick one: a fastball that sits around 97 mph and touches 101 when he needs it. It doesn’t stand out for exceptional rise or transverse spin efficiency, but it doesn’t need to. Glasnow’s velocity and extension make for a flat-planed, dynamic pitch that both misses bats and induces weak contact.

You already knew that, because you can’t watch a Glasnow appearance without marveling at the graceful explosion of the pitch, seemingly catapulted by his smooth delivery. Here, watch him overpower J.D. Martinez:

Ah, what a joy to watch. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Musgrove came into the season viewed by many as a breakout candidate, and it’s easy to see why. The 28-year-old Pirate-turned-Padre possesses plus stuff, and the change of scenery — from Pittsburgh to his hometown of San Diego, no less — portends more success…. particularly in the won-loss column. Musgrove went a paltry 1-5 with the N.L. Central cellar-dwellers in 2020, while his new club is poised to win, per our projections, 94 games in the current campaign.

By and large, the breakout has already happened, and not solely because the 6-foot-5, 235-pound right-hander hurled the year’s first no-hitter on Friday night. His 2020 peripherals were those of a pitcher who’d turned the corner. With the caveat that it was a pandemic-shortened season, Mugrove set career-bests in ERA, FIP, and strikeout rate, and more importantly, he did so with improved pitch profiles. Per StatCast, the spin and movement of his offerings were better than they’d ever been.

I asked the righty about that in a spring-training Zoom session.

“I’m not really a big analytical guy; I’m not big on the Rapsodo numbers,” responded Musgrove. “I look at that information more as a benchmark. When I have real strong outings, or I have real poor outings, I look at the numbers to see where they’re at when I’m good, or when I’m poor. But by no means am I going home and saying, ‘I need to get 200 more RPM on my curveball,’ or ‘I need to change the spin axis on this pitch.’ I kind of just let our analytical guys coach me up a little bit on that, and offer suggestions where they can.” Read the rest of this entry »

After a phenomenal debut in 2019, Chris Paddack took a significant step back in his sophomore campaign. Much of those struggles could be linked to the performance of his four-seam fastball. In 2019, opposing batters hit just .204 against his four-seamer with a .275 wOBA. Those marks jumped to .308 and .413, respectively, in 2020. Likewise, Paddack went from a whiff rate on his heater of 23.2% his rookie year to 20.9% last season, a mark just barely over league average for a four-seamer. With that pitch and a plus changeup making up the majority of his pitch mix, the ineffectiveness of his fastball had a much larger impact on his results, as he simply didn’t have anything else in his repertoire.

This spring, Paddack decided to start looking at the analytics behind his fastball. In a mid-March media session, he spoke at length about what he learned about how its shape affects his results:

“Last year I was east to west. I was pulling off. My spin direction was outside of one, for y’all that know the baseball term of that. The axis of the baseball… I was getting two-seam run on my four-seam fastball.”

Here’s a look at the physical characteristics of Paddack’s fastball and its percentile ranks when compared within each pitch type:

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We’re now about 10 days into the season, which means it’s time for a round of “Who’s looking good out of the gate?” Today, I want to focus on three post-hype starters who piqued my interest in the last week: Carlos Rodón, Jeff Hoffman, and Justin Dunn. Obviously, these three have teased before, and given their track records, there’s good reason to be skeptical of them going forward. All three have good arms though, and I’m a sucker for a spring breakout. With that in mind, I’ve donned my yellow zigzagged shirt, taken a running start, and am ready to blast this metaphorical football.

I trust that a small sample warning isn’t really necessary here. We all know that we’re working with extremely limited data at this point in the year, and that the following content comes with an extra-large SSS warning label. I trust you to recognize the intent of this article, which is simply to highlight interesting starts from a few talented but oft-frustrating arms. I’m not declaring that they’re suddenly budding All-Stars; I’m not even arguing they belong on your fantasy team. If someone reads this and comments “Uh, it was one start,” I will, well, I won’t do anything, but someone else will down-vote you in the comments, and that will be embarrassing. Don’t do that.

With that out of the way:

Carlos Rodón

Rodón’s run of bad luck in recent years is well-documented. He missed a couple of months in 2018 with a shoulder injury, then had to go under the knife for Tommy John early the following year. He returned to the mound last season, but only for a handful of innings, and he was unceremoniously non-tendered this past winter. Chicago invited him to camp anyway, and while he had a strong spring and won a job in the rotation, he didn’t have a ton of buzz heading into the season. Read the rest of this entry »

2:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first official chat of the 2021 regular season.

2:02

Jay Jaffe: I’m pleased to report that I’m freshly vaccinated with my second shot, but I have to admit that while I wasn’t feeling any negative effects when I set this chat in motion about 90 minutes ago, the mere act of going to pick up my lunch seems to have set off some wobbly legs and general fatigue. Gonna try to power through this for as long as I can, but you might want to have the bullpen ready.

2:03

Jay Jaffe: I was up late playing beat-the-clock to finish this piece on Fernando Valenzuela and the 40th anniversary of Fernandomania before my symptoms kicked in https://blogs.fangraphs.com/remembering-fernandomania-40-years-later/. Remarkably, in 20 years of writing about baseball, I had never written more than a few hundred words at a time on one of my all-time favorite players.

2:03	Jay Jaffe: anyway, on with the show

2:04	Jay Jaffe: Mike Petriello @mike_petriello Me: Man, I wonder if Mike Trout’s 288 wRC+ in the first week is notable for him, that number is insane! Mike Trout: ha, you fool, you stupid infantile fool fangraphs.com/leaders/splits… 9 Apr 2021

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I guess it wouldn’t be baseball in these trying times without a debate about the state of the ball. This year’s rendition started in February when Eno Sarris and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported that they obtained an internal memo Major League Baseball had sent outlining changes to the baseball that would “reduce offense slightly in the 2021 season.” Specifically, Rawlings loosened the tension of the ball’s first wool winding, reducing the weight and bounciness of the ball as measured by COR, or the coefficient of restitution.

How would the new ball affect the league’s offensive environment? At that point, we could only speculate. Included in Sarris and Rosenthal’s article is a cautionary tale from the Korean Baseball Organization, which experienced a crash in league-wide offense after minor reductions to the ball’s COR. But the article also cited Dr. Meredith Willis, who believed that because MLB intended to reduce the ball’s COR along with its weight – the KBO actually increased the weight of its ball by one gram – the effects would be less severe. As for MLB, its memo included an independent lab that found minor decreases in fly ball distance with the new ball.

Then came spring training, and along with it the first uses of the new baseball. As March closed out, Rob Arthur and Ben Lindbergh published an article for The Ringer entitled “The New Baseball Still Seems Juiced.” Using data from spring training games, they made two key observations: (1) home run per contact rate had increased, not decreased, from last spring, and (2) the new ball seemed to have a high drag coefficient. “Higher drag should translate to less carry and fewer home runs,” Arthur and Lindbergh wrote. “Yet the higher-drag balls also have a higher home run rate on contact, because they have a substantially higher exit speed.” If the ball’s COR was really reduced, they added, the opposite phenomenon should occur. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Sara’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. She has been writing about baseball on and off since her byline first appeared in her local paper at age 13. Her work has appeared at Baseball Prospectus, where she contributed to Short Relief, and as a lead voice covering the Chicago Cubs for SBNation’s Bleed Cubbie Blue, where she also co-hosts their podcast, Cuppa Cubbie Blue. She’s a fan of advanced metrics, keeping score by hand, and bat flips. Sara is a meticulous researcher who applies that talent to all parts of baseball, from big issues like labor relations to idiosyncratic issues like Javier Báez and his uncanny ability to deliver on an 0-2 count in 2019. She looks forward to bringing her research skills to FanGraphs, which has long been her first stop for data to support her writing.

Most of the talk around Nick Castellanos to start the 2021 season has focused on his two-game suspension for his role in the events preceding the benches clearing between the Reds and the Cardinals during their second game of the season:

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