Julio Urías is only 24, but it feels like he’s been in the big leagues for a decade. Called to the majors at only 19 in the 2016 season, he’s been a part of the Dodgers’ future and present for a half-decade. When you start that young, much of your development happens at the major league level. In Urías’ case, that means all kinds of changes. Today, though, I want to focus on one: a curveball that has shape-shifted over time before arriving at a tremendously interesting final form.

When Urías came up, he threw a curve with two-plane break, something between a curve and a slurve. As you can see on our handy Pitch Type Splits, it featured 7.4 inches of horizontal break and only 2.9 inches of drop. In his next three seasons, all injury-affected, he turned the pitch into more of a classic curve — more drop than horizontal movement. 2020 saw a return to his original curveball shape. 2021? Well, it’s weird:

Is it a return to his old form? Is it an acceleration of his old form? Is it something else entirely? Let’s delve too deeply into some gifs and math and find out. Read the rest of this entry »

Even after baseball returned in 2020, a walk around Wrigleyville was anything but normal. The sounds of the Lowery organ, the players’ walkup music, and the fake crowd noise pumping out of the empty ballpark made the streets felt haunted. There were a handful of ballhawks at the corner of Kenmore and Waveland, and a few adventurous souls watched the games from the limited capacity rooftops across the street. But vendors were nowhere to be seen, and most of the nearby pubs and taverns were shuttered. A neighborhood that welcomes more than three million fans annually to the majors’ second oldest park felt like a ghost town.

Ten and a half months later, baseball and fans have returned to Wrigley Field, and so did I. Though I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as I joined the 25% capacity crowd during the Cubs’ first home stand, I braced myself for that same feeling I experienced so many times walking through the neighborhood in 2020. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised that the sense of desertion had been replaced by one of cautious renewal. Pandemic baseball isn’t the same as the standing-room-only crowds I remember from 2019, but it isn’t the shell we saw last season, either.

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When the Marlins beat the Mets on April 10th, most of the post-game focus was on Jacob deGrom. The Mets’ ace had pitched a gem: eight innings, five hits, 14 strikeouts, and no walks, with the only run coming on a towering Jazz Chisholm homer in the second inning. And while the indignation on deGrom’s behalf was not unwarranted, it ironically created a smaller, secondary injustice in its wake, obscuring from view the other stellar pitching performance of the day.

Miami’s starter that afternoon was Trevor Rogers, making his second start of the 2021 season. In his outing, he allowed three hits, walked two, and struck out 10 batters over the course of six scoreless innings – a pitching line that undoubtedly would have been the headline story from the game, were it not for deGrom’s dominant, yet unsupported performance.

But being overlooked is nothing new for Rogers. Skepticism has been a running theme in his career since even before he was drafted, when he was an old-for-his-class high schooler (he graduated at 19) in New Mexico, an area of the country that doesn’t always get the same robust coverage of other parts of the Four Corners region. Could scouts really trust the dominant numbers of a player who was so much older than anyone else on the field?

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It is still early in the season, but one of the aspects of hitting that stabilizes relatively quickly is changes to approach. Swings are a more common occurrence, so the sample for these statistics grows faster than those that rely on an accumulation of plate appearances. So who seems to have made some changes in the early going?

To get an idea, I took all players who accumulated 250 plate appearances combined in the 2019 and ’20 seasons (I chose to group these seasons together because of the brevity of the pandemic-shortened campaign), then filtered by those who meet the qualified criteria in 2021. This leaves a sample of 159 hitters; each table includes the top and bottom ten players for each metric.

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The Yankees hit bottom this past weekend, not once but multiple times. Projected to be the AL’s best team, they’re instead the worst thus far, with a 5–10 record and a five-game losing streak. On Friday, they played so badly against the Rays that Yankee Stadium fans started hurling baseballs back onto the field, and afterwards, manager Aaron Boone dressed his players down in a closed-door meeting. In terms of outcomes, the stern lecture didn’t help, as the Yankees lost again on Saturday and Sunday, making it the first time they’ve been swept this year.

Friday night’s game saw the Yankees fall behind almost immediately, as opener Nick Nelson surrendered hits to the first three Rays he faced, capped by a two-run double by Brandon Lowe. He escaped without further damage, and Michael King entered to throw three shutout innings, but the Yankees managed just one hit in six innings against Rays starter Michael Wacha. When King departed, errors by Gio Urshela and Rougned Odor helped the Rays roll up four runs against Luis Cessa and then two against Lucas Luetge to pull ahead 8–0. The Yankees finally got on the board via a seventh-inning two-run homer by Giancarlo Stanton, but by the eighth, fans were disgusted enough to throw maybe a dozen baseballs on the field in the general vicinity of the Rays’ outfielders, halting play for a couple of minutes:

Play stoppage because of an excess of baseballs… No really, Yankees fans started throwing baseballs on the field.

We don't get it either!

Watch @RaysBaseball on Bally Sports Sun & stream it here: https://t.co/Mk8FfLbJty #RaysUp pic.twitter.com/fHHy7FIZs8

— Bally Sports Sun: Rays (@BallyRays) April 17, 2021

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Welcome to the first week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings. Nearly every major sports site has some form of power rankings; It’s a fun way to think about all 30 teams in baseball and stack them up against each other outside of the rigid structures of leagues and divisions. But where most sites use a panel of experts to build their power rankings — experts who may or may not be simply using their gut feeling to rank teams — I wanted to build an approach to power rankings that was a little more data driven.

My approach basically boils down to taking the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — and weighting and adjusting to create an overall team quality metric. I played around with trying to include defense in some form, but adding UZR or DRS or defensive efficiency never really made the team quality metric any more accurate. To test my comprehensive team metric, I used 2020 data to see how it correlated with each team’s win percentage at the halfway mark and their final record. The correlation coefficient at the middle of the season was .68 with an r-squared of .47, and at the end of the season, those marks improved to .80 and .63, respectively.

The final piece of the puzzle was to add in a factor for recent performance while also adjusting for “luck.” Teams with good records should be rewarded, but if they came by those wins in an unsustainable fashion, they shouldn’t receive the full weight of them. Likewise for teams who lost games they might have been expected to win. Put this overall team quality metric together with a team’s adjusted win percentage and you get a solid power ranking formula. And unlike most other sites, I’ll present these power rankings in tiers because the differences between many of these teams, particularly in the middle, isn’t that big. Read the rest of this entry »

When Jay Bruce debuted with the Reds, he was the top prospect in baseball. Our very own Kevin Goldstein projected him as a perennial All-Star, writing that he could be a “true superstar in the mold of Larry Walker.” He debuted as a 21-year-old and went 3-3 with two walks in his first game. Three days later, he had four hits and scored the winning run. He topped that off with a walk-off homer, his first dinger in the big leagues, the following night. Over the next two days he went 4-7 with two more homers, lowering his batting average to .577. As Bruce’s heroics mounted and his legend grew, you had to wonder how anyone could possibly live up to this kind of start.

Bruce didn’t, of course. His bat cooled considerably over the summer and he ended the year with 0.8 WAR and a fifth-place finish in Rookie of the Year voting, a few slots behind Joey Votto. But while Bruce’s numbers fell a bit short of his prospect league billing, he still blossomed into a very good major-league player. Over 14 seasons, Bruce hit 319 homers, won two Silver Sluggers, made three All-Star appearances, and accrued exactly 20 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

With another full week of baseball on the horizon, let’s set our sights on three intriguing faceoffs. One is riddled with questions about each starter’s ability to become a true ace, another connects two former teammates who have each proven themselves as aces, and the final is between two fellas who haven’t proven much of anything yet this year.

Tuesday, April 20, 6:40 PM ET: Zac Gallen vs. Luis Castillo

For years, Gallen has embodied promise. He was, and in many ways still is, the physical form of “could be.” The Cardinals took him in the third round of the 2016 draft, and his 1.62 ERA and 2.17 FIP at High-A in 2017 showed quick returns on the their investment. Gallen made it all the way up to Triple-A by the end of the year, then was traded to Miami in December 2017 along with Sandy Alcantara and two other players in exchange for Marcell Ozuna. Read the rest of this entry »

If you take a quick glance at Aaron Civale’s 2021 numbers, nothing looks out of the ordinary. Yes, the 2.18 ERA signals a stellar start, but with strikeout and walk rates relatively in line with his career numbers, you wouldn’t suspect that Civale has undergone a host of changes to both his repertoire and his delivery. But look beyond the numbers to the guy on the field, and it’s clear that he’s undergone a rather obvious change in his process and approach, one that merits further analysis.

Coming into the season, Civale was mainly a sinkerballer, though that requires a rather liberal definition of the word “mainly.” Civale threw his sinker, cutter, and curveball to batters of both handedness, and supplemented those main offerings with a side of slider to righties and a side of changeups to lefties. That mix of speeds and movements put him in an interesting class of pitcher:

As you can see, Civale was one of 13 pitchers to throw five different pitches at least 100 times last season. This isn’t a group of particularly good or bad pitchers. In fact, combined, these 13 had a FIP- of exactly 100. And though Civale had a solid 2020 season, it’s not as if his 4.74 ERA, 4.03 FIP, and 22% strikeout rate scream ace.

What is interesting about Civale is that he has changed so dramatically year-over-year. Though he threw five different pitches fairly frequently, it is Civale’s sixth pitch — his four-seam fastball — that is in the spotlight so far this season. After throwing just 58 total four-seamers out of a total of 2,064 pitches over his first two seasons in the majors, Civale has already thrown 83 in his three starts this April. Still, that’s not the only change he has made (pun fully intended). Civale has ditched his traditional changeup in favor of a split-change and has all but stopped throwing his sinker. His yearly pitch type chart is extraordinary:

That’s not all. Civale also completely revamped his delivery, adopting a shorter arm action. It’s the same mechanical change Lucas Giolito made going into the 2019 season, greatly contributing to his development into a frontline starter. In a similar move, Civale went from being a long-windup, over-the-top pitcher last season to one who is now a side-stepping short-armer.

“That will be my windup for the year,” Civale told reporters, including Mandy Bell of MLB.com, this spring. “I did a lot of my work out of the stretch in the offseason. Changing my arm path, I didn’t want to add any rotation into my delivery that could alter that. Just decided to keep it simple. I didn’t do too much work on that windup, it’s just a little stutter-step. Not really shifting too much weight. A lot of the work I did to transition to the new arm path was out of the stretch. Less movement is less chance for error.”

Here’s 2020:

And now 2021:

Given how much Civale changed, the title of this article may actually be an understatement. One could argue that he is a completely different pitcher now. It’s hard to know exactly what results those changes will bring, and considering how different he has become, it’s interesting that his numbers are almost identical to last year’s thus far.

Still, it’s worth examining the early returns on an individual pitch level — even if the samples are minuscule — and comparing those to previous seasons. First, let’s look at the exchange of the sinker for the four-seam fastball, a rather common move by pitchers over the last few seasons as sinkers across the league continue to get crushed.

Admittedly, the number of both pitches he’s thrown is small. But, at least so far, what is interesting is that the pitches have generated rather similar quality of contact results. While Civale’s four-seamer has performed better from a wOBA standpoint, the two pitches have almost identical xwOBAs. Also striking is that Civale’s CSW% from his 2021 four-seam is lower than on his 2020 sinker, despite generating a whiff almost three times as often. Indeed, Civale already has 14 whiffs on his fastball this season, out of 44 total swings; last year, his sinker generated just 15 whiffs on 133 swings. That is a marketed improvement.

Additionally, while neither Civale’s fastball nor sinker will blow by hitters in the low-90s, the four-seamer’s movement profile is noteworthy. Kevin Goldstein recently wrote about the importance of fastball shape, and indeed, Civale’s pitch looks not-too-dissimilar from the 2016 Marco Estrada example he was highlighted. 2021 Civale is on the left, and 2016 Estrada is on the right:

Of course, Civale doesn’t quite match Estada in the vertical movement department. But there’s clearly a similarity between the two in terms of raw, non-velocity-adjusted rise. Even after adjusting for velocity, however, Civale still generates about 5% more rise on his fastball than average, which definitely represents better pure stuff than his sinker, which generated 8% less sink than average. Indeed, as we would expect, there are signs that hitters will be popping him up. Civale is currently in the 75th percentile in average launch angle off of the four-seam fastball and has also been a big proponent of the lazy fly ball, ranking 16th in average exit velocity allowed on all air contact.

Then there’s the changeup, which — as Civale noted himself — is now a split-change. With the adjustment, it might have become his best pitch, or at least gives him a second strong offering in addition to the cutter. By our pitch values, Civale’s 2020 changeup was worth 1.6 runs above-average per 100 pitches. So far in 2021, his “split” has been worth 4.3 runs per 100. While we are again dealing with small sample caveats, here is what the quality of contact numbers look like year-over-year:

Again, we can’t yet draw firm conclusions from the wOBA and xwOBA data, though in the early going, it seems as if Civale has made what was a good pitch even better. Similar to the fastball/sinker chart, though, Civale is struggling in the CSW% department, with his former pitch performing much better than his new one so far. It very well could be noise, or it could still be him getting used to the new delivery; it’s worth noting that his overall CSW% is down six points from 2020 to ’21 as well. Nonetheless, to the naked eye, it definitely looks like he is getting more bite on the change; it’s dropping by about four more inches this year on average.

Here’s Civale’s 2020 change:

And here’s his 2021 split-change:

What do we make of all of this? It’s hard to know. There are so many moving parts, and it’s still early in the season, after all. But if you like pitcher reboots, you should definitely be paying attention to what Civale has done. I am not sure I have ever seen a pitcher change so much in just one offseason. I’m curious to see how it works out for him, and, really, I’m fascinated by his willingness to overhaul everything in an attempt to become a more effective player.