The bullpen can be a weird place. While lineups and rotations across the big leagues have some degree of stability (albeit one threatened by recent spikes in injury rates), the amount of roster turnover in bullpens varies greatly. It’s a place where former failed starters and pitchers trying to get one last chance at the big leagues often find a home. Tyler Matzek and Daniel Bard were the latest reclamation projects turned into high-leverage relief pitchers when they returned to form last season. For Bard, it had been a full seven seasons since his last appearances in a big league game (2013 with the Red Sox). His performance earned him 2020 Comeback Player of the Year honors in the National League and a $2.9 million one-year deal to return in 2021 as the Rockies’ closer.

Is this unusual? Bard’s story certainly is, but it’s pretty typical for teams to pan for gold via non-roster invitees to spring training. Spring training rosters are limited to 75 players; teams will almost always fill this with the entirety of their 40-man roster supplemented by minor league players close to big league action and a handful of NRIs competing for a spot on the roster. Most NRIs don’t pan out and are either released or end up in the minor leagues, but occasionally they suit up for Opening Day.

Rex Brothers falls into this category. Now in his third attempt to recapture his form as the Rockies’ setup man and closer from 2011-15, Brothers looks like he’s figured some things out with the Cubs. Heading into yesterday, he’d made 28 appearances for a total of 24.1 innings (all stats are as of June 23). Those figures are the highest totals for Brothers since the 2014 season. In those innings he’s struck out 40 batters, leading to a career-best 38.5 K% and K-BB% of 25%. That K-BB% is good for 31st out of 200 relievers with at least 20 innings pitched. So far it certainly reads like a success story for the Cubs.

Brothers is no spring chicken (2021 is his age-33 season) but he has logged relatively few innings (293.2 total at the major league level and only 51.1 over the last five seasons), which may inspire some optimism that he has more left in the tank than his age would suggest. But the question remains as to whether he has staying power in the Cubs’ bullpen. I made mention of Bard and Matzek earlier. Matzek reappeared last season as a reliever for the Braves after a brief stint as a starting pitcher for the Rockies (the team that drafted him) back in 2014-15. His performance has regressed from his resurgent 2020, but Matzek has managed to keep his successful run going with an ERA of 3.33 and a FIP of 2.98 in ‘21. Bard has similarly maintained form. Matzek and Bard represent the high point for these kinds of reclamation projects. While unlikely, it’s far from unprecedented.

But let’s get back to Brothers. A reliever his whole career, he has relied primarily on a two-pitch mix of a four-seam fastball and a slider. His best pitch is his four-seamer, which he uses about two-thirds of the time; it tops out around 97. According to Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic, Brothers played through shoulder pain in Colorado, which he admits was a mistake. The shoulder ailment eventually led to surgery following his 2016 release from the Cubs, who had acquired him from the Rockies in ‘15. His road back to the majors has taken time. As is the case for many pitchers who go through injuries, his mechanics took a turn for the worse as his body compensated for the weak throwing shoulder. His first crack at a comeback was granted by the Atlanta Braves where he bounced back and forth between the majors and the Braves’ Double- and Triple-A affiliates. Never a strength for Brothers, his lack of control was at the heart of his struggles to get back to baseball’s highest level. He put it together briefly in 2017 when he pitched 23.2 innings for a 3.66 FIP but an awful 7.23 ERA. In 2018, however, Brothers walked 44 batters in 40.2 innings, including a whopping 17 wild pitches during that span. He faced a mere two batters at the major league level and walked both of them.

Another opportunity in 2019 with the Yankees followed by time with the Cubs in ‘20 yielded similar results: Brothers could not throw strikes consistently enough. He credits time working on his mechanics at the alternate site last season for his improved control. Look at the following GIFs. The first one is from 2020 and the second from ‘21. Notice how last season he was reaching his throwing arm down below his waist; this season his arm action is much shorter and more compact in comparison.

In his interview with The Athletic, Brothers expressed the impact his arm action also had on his lower half, stating, “My knee started caving towards home plate, which was forcing me down the mound way too soon. It was an inconsistent release point, and I was just feeling bad.”

Statcast captures pitcher release points with every pitch. Looking at Brothers’ pitch data from the last two seasons, there’s evidence that the improvements in his delivery have helped him find consistency in his release point. The chart below shows pitch release locations for the 2020 and ‘21 seasons.

The release point distribution is quite different for the two seasons. The standard deviation for release point of his pitches in 2020 was 0.266 feet in the X direction and 0.103 feet in the Z direction; in ‘21, the standard deviation decreased significantly to .186 and .076. This holds true for both fastballs and sliders. He’s thrown over five times as many pitches this season, but even taking a random sample of data of the same size (74 pitches) as his data from 2020 the improvement in consistency is still evident.

Let’s be clear, Brothers still carries a BB/9 rate in excess of 5.00, but his propensity for strikeouts makes that number more palatable. Improving his release point seems to have allowed him to regain enough control to effectively leverage his strikeout ability. Brothers has thrown 36.6% of his pitches in the strike zone this season, tied for 12th lowest among relievers with at least 20 innings pitched. During his most effective seasons in Colorado (2011-13), he threw 44.9% of his pitches in the strike zone. He’s also allowing way more fly balls now (46.8% this season) than his days in Colorado (average of 32.6% from 2011-13), which has been detrimental to his home run rate (1.11 HR/9 allowed this season) although he’s right around league average. This season’s version of Brothers is a tad less effective than his younger self, but his 3.57 FIP makes him an above average reliever and a reliable left-handed option for the Cubs.

The Cubs have the fourth best bullpen in the majors by WAR at 3.2. Outside of Craig Kimbrel, who is also having a resurgent season, their relievers are not hyped prospects or big name free agent signings. It seems that the front office and coaching staff have found the ability to make the most of the pieces they have. Working with Brothers to rekindle some of the success he had early in his career is just an example of how many of the Cubs’ relievers are churning out career-best performances.

Episode 928

This week on the podcast, Eric Longenhagen and Dan Szymborski go the distance to discuss the wild state of affairs in baseball.

The pair begin by touching on the latest sticky substance drama, including some frisky business now that on-field checks have begun. Max Scherzer and Sergio Romo were most visibly unhappy, and Eric and Dan agree that the way things have been handled has resulted in a not-great look for baseball.

Following that, they dive into the wonderful world of Wander Franco’s long-anticipated debut. The game’s top prospect likely has a solid career ahead of him, but where does he compare to other former No. 1s who have recently debuted? Eric and Dan also go into how Willy Adames is doing just fine in Milwaukee while Keston Hiura is not.

Finally, the duo talks about continuing issues across the minor leagues before considering some doomsday scenarios for the Mets.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Triston Casas and Grant Williams are teammates with distinctly different profiles. Boston’s first-round pick in the 2018 draft, the 21-year-old Casas is a 6-foot-4, 250-pound first baseman who is No. 2 on our Red Sox Top Prospects list, and No. 42 on our updated Top 100 Prospects list. Williams is unranked. A 25-year-old middle infielder who lasted until the 310th pick of the 2018 draft, he hit in the nine-hole when the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs hosted the Somerset Patriots on Wednesday night. Befitting his stature, Casas batted third.

Prior to the game, I spoke to both players about their respective hitting approaches.

———

Casas possesses plus power, but he doesn’t present as a pure slugger. Patience is a big part of his M.O., as is a willingness to choke up on the bat when contact is at a premium. The lefty swinger cited Joey Votto as his role model when he was featured in a January 2020 Sunday Notes column, and as he acknowledged on Wednesday, that remains the case.

I asked Casas if he’s changed as a hitter since entering pro ball three years ago.

“I’d like to think I haven’t, but I have a lot,” responded the Plantation, Florida product. “I kind of battle that. I fight every single day to make adjustments and become the best hitter that I can, but to also apply what I’ve been doing my whole life. So I like to say that I haven’t changed too much, but at the same time, I have.”

I asked the up-and-coming youngster if he could elaborate. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, let’s podcast again. Chin Music returns with special co-host Grant Brisbee of The Athletic, who joins me as we talk about baseball and finally don’t devote an entire episode to the sticky stuff. Ok, we talk about it a little bit but also discuss the arrival of Wander Franco and the remarkable fun that is the National League West so far this season. We lost our scheduled special guest due to travel issues, but Spin Rate host Drew Fairservice joins us on short notice from The Great White North to discuss the Toronto Blue Jays and the state of the pandemic in Canada. Then it’s your emails, some time figuring out how Grant got to where he is, documentaries from Singapore, podcasts on hip-hop, and the worst Jeff Goldblum impression ever recorded.

As always, we hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

Music by Citric Dummies.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB’s much-maligned All-Star Game uniforms and a pair of odd games, discuss the highs and lows of the first few days of MLB’s enforced foreign-substance ban (with special attention to Max Scherzer, Joe Girardi, and Sergio Romo), review Wander Franco’s debut and note the less-hyped arrivals of Lars Nootbaar and knuckleballer Mickey Jannis, relate a Jesse Winker home-run prediction, and close by exploring the ways in which the first-place Houston Astros, to the dismay of many Astros haters, are still very good.

Audio intro: Slothrust, "New Red Pants"
Audio outro: The Donnas, "Hot Pants"

Link to ASG uniforms
Link to Angels game story
Link to Nats-Phillies game story
Link to Manfred on sticky-stuff enforcement
Link to Rizzo on Girardi
Link to video of Scherzer and Romo
Link to video of Ohtani inspection
Link to Simpsons scene
Link to Ben on Jannis and the knuckleball
Link to Javier’s headshot
Link to Zach Kram on the Astros

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The first time I saw a triple play, I was keeping score for one of my brother’s All-Star games. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but for some reason 14 sounds about right, so let’s go with that. My exact age at the time is less important than the fact that I was old enough to have scored hundreds of baseball games. I had spent countless afternoons at practices with my dad and my brother. I had seen a lot of baseball and I knew enough to be momentarily confused by what had just happened.

The thing about a triple play is that even if you are paying complete attention to the game, there is a really good chance you are going to miss something. Maybe you catch one or two of the outs, but the play develops so quickly that if you are even remotely distracted when the ball is hit, it’s probably going to take a second for your brain to register that an ideal scoring situation for one team has been erased in mere seconds by the other.

You can spend your whole life watching your favorite team and never see them turn a triple play. I’ve been a Cubs fan for over 30 years, and in that time, the Cubs have turned just four triple plays. The only one I caught live was this disputed triple play from 2020, which many people rightly pointed out would have been overturned if the Reds had been able to review it. It was the first triple play the Cubs had turned in 23 years. It’s the only triple play I’ve ever seen them turn in real time and even though it’s on the record books, it didn’t really happen. There is a very real chance I could spend another decade or two waiting to cross “saw the Cubs turn a triple play” off my list. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets got a rare bit of good injury news on Wednesday. Marcus Stroman was pulled in the second inning on Tuesday after three pitches due to soreness in his left hip. Given the season the Mets are having in the injury department — there are 13 players on an Injured List as I type this — and really, the seemingly cursed history of the Mets and pitcher injuries, Stroman’s departure caused a lot of worries. But his MRI revealed no damage to the hip that would have resulted in a 14th name on the shelf.

That’s not to say the Mets are out of danger. The same day Stroman tweaked his hip, the team announced that Joey Lucchesi would undergo Tommy John surgery, ending his 2021 (and likely most of his 2022) season, and that Michael Conforto‘s return from the IL would be delayed. Given the team’s dissipating rotation depth, losing two pitchers instead of just one would have been a significant blow. Carlos Carrasco has yet to make his 2021 debut, Noah Syndergaard’s return date was pushed back due to elbow inflammation, and all-galaxy ace Jacob deGrom has had multiple injury scares already this season.

Now, the exercise here isn’t to depth-shame the Mets. In past years, the team had a bad habit of entering the season with interesting five-man rotations and highly worrisome Plans B, C, and D, generally consisting of converting relievers back to starters or leaning on whatever random Quad-A starting pitcher was playing decent ball for Syracuse. The additions of Carrasco, Lucchesi, Taijuan Walker, Jordan Yamamoto, Jerad Eickhoff, and Sam McWilliams provided the team a lot of fallback options on the pitching staff. That’s a notable improvement from a shrug-emoji-or-possibly-Walker-Lockett strategy.

Every team has a point at which they run out of good options. Even teams like the Rays, Dodgers, and Padres would be in dire straits if five starting pitchers suddenly decided to retire and sail around the world or sign with NASA to train full-time for a mission to Mars. The Mets were well-designed to support a number of significant losses, but the limits still exist. And they might have already come up against those limits — players like Johneshwy Fargas, Brandon Drury, and Mason Williams ought to be quite far down the depth charts — if not for the fact that no other team in the division has seized the opportunity. Despite all the injury losses, the rotation exceeding expectations and the division disappointing have been enough for the Mets to only be a single win off from where the preseason ZiPS projections saw them at this point.

ZiPS still projects the Mets as a .563 team going forward, just about where it pegged the club three months ago, and that’s with playing time assumptions in many cases far worse than they were in March. But a four-game lead in the division is not an unassailable position, and outside of not regressing toward the bleak history of Met injury management, there’s not much they can do to prevent a new rash of nasty surprises on that front.

So the question that comes to mind is just how much bad news can the Mets absorb before their postseason positioning proves perilous? Let’s start with updated ZiPS standings as of Thursday morning.

The combination of a poor start to the season and both Wild Cards likely being from the NL West (ZiPS sees 2.8 average playoff spots from that division) has probably rendered the Marlins a lost cause for the 2021 season. However, the other three teams remain threats even if the Mets are the deserving favorites at this point. To get an idea of how much margin for error the Mets have, I ran the 2021 rest-of-season simulation repeatedly, with different assumptions for the Mets roster.

When looking at these two graphs (DanGraphs?), the first thing I notice is the direct effect the Giants are having on the playoff race. If the Mets struggle and don’t win the division, they usually fall behind the Giants or Padres. And when the Mets are good enough to win a Wild Card, they usually win the division anyway.

The Mets’ roster is currently about three wins ahead of the highest-leverage point in their win curve. They don’t really start seeing diminishing returns until one or two additional wins on the roster, making a strong case for the team continuing to be aggressive despite their relatively strong position in the division.

Relative to the rest of the league, third base and catcher feature on our depth charts as the team’s weakest spots, making those positions arguably the best places to add wins. That seems unlikely behind the plate; I was never much of a fan of a four-year contract for James McCann, but it doesn’t seem likely the team would make an upgrade here. The rotation is hardly a source of weakness, but I still think that given Syndergaard and Stroman’s status as free-agent-to-be status and deGrom’s injury risk, adding a starting pitcher would be helpful. The Mets should not be panicking at this point, but continuing last winter’s aggression at the trade deadline would be a welcome sight.

The 2020 draft was instructive to many teams, as it taught them how to scout off data and video since multiple in-person looks were made impossible by the pandemic. And while scouts are back on the road, data and video remain important tools, with some teams giving them the same weight as in-person reports. With access to many of the tools that teams lean on come draft season, I am able to view data and video from nearly every pitch thrown by Division I college arms. So in that spirit, I decided to write up some potential first rounders.

While a great deal of draft coverage when it comes to pitching has focused on Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker, the two much-lauded Vanderbilt arms, there are somewhere between five and seven college pitchers who could also end up first-round picks and demand some attention. I start today with three of them — two who began the year highly regarded by the industry, and a third who has jumped up on boards considerably this spring.

Ty Madden, RHP, Texas

Statistics: 107.2 IP, 71 H, 7 HR, 41 BB, 129 K

2021 Year in Review: Madden came out strong but had some hiccups in late April and early May as he struggled with his command. He finished the year on a high note, including a 7-4-2-2-2-10 line against Mississippi State in Omaha.

Physical Description: 6-foot-3, 215 pounds. To use the scouting cliché, this is what they look like.

Delivery: Utilizes power frame well. Big kick, good hip tilt and leg drive with on-line landing. Finishes a bit wild with very high back leg coming around and creating big spin to the first base side. Leans into a high (12:30) arm angle that produces very good fastball shape. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: CHAT BEING NOW

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I don’t have a real basis for saying which team will benefit from this really. It’s all an unknown right now

12:04

Dan Szymborski: But the Giants have enough wins bagged that they probably just need to go .500 the rest of the way to make the playoffs

12:05

Dan Szymborski: He’s been lousy enough that you *should* think a little worse of him. But not *that* much.

Read the rest of this entry »

While Yu Darvish carved up the Dodgers on Monday night at Petco Park, Mookie Betts accounted for the team’s only notable gasp of offense, clubbing a third-inning solo homer that accounted for Los Angeles’ only run in six innings against the Padres’ righty, and one of their two hits. The Dodgers trailed 4-0 at the time, and were down 6-1 when Betts had another chance to make an impact. Batting with two outs and the bases loaded in the seventh against Austin Adams, Betts swung at a 2-0 slider high in the zone but managed just a routine fly ball for the third out; the Dodgers went on to lose, 6-2.

It’s been that kind of season for Betts, who has certainly had his moments here and there — his leadoff homer and double play against the Pirates on June 10, for example — but has generally been unable to sustain the type of magic that he generated in his first year as a Dodger. Acquired from the Red Sox in February 2020 and subsequently signed to a 12-year, $356 million deal, Betts helped spur the team to its first championship in 32 years with his offensive, defensive and baserunning contributions; indeed, his postseason work was a tour de force. This year, the 28-year-old right fielder has battled minor injuries and has yet to go on any kind of sustained hot streak. Read the rest of this entry »