We often hear about how pitchers are overmatching hitters these days, and with good reason. In the last 10 years, teams have discovered how to develop velocity at scale. After generations of going by feel and repetition, pitchers now lean on sophisticated tools and technology to burnish their arsenals and optimize their spin profile. Catchers have chipped in too, turning subtle positional and glovework adjustments into an avalanche of additional strikes on balls near the edges of the plate.

Hitters, meanwhile, spent the decade trying to play catch up. Strikeouts have climbed 5% in the past 10 years. Alongside, the league batting average has plummeted from .251 down into the .230s over that span. An industry-wide emphasis on steeper swing planes did fuel a surge in home runs, but even these gains are somewhat superficial, buoyed as they are by the juiced ball. Even with the recent crackdown on sticky substances, pitchers remain dominant.

Nobody ever stays ahead for too long in baseball though, and if you turn toward the farm, there are signs of life on the offensive side of the game. They’re not necessarily reflected in the numbers — most minor league circuits have more strikeouts and fewer dingers than the majors — but league stats bely real differences in how teams and hitters are preparing for battle against a modern pitcher’s arsenal. These gains are not spread equally across the league. Rather, the clubs that have most successfully invested time and resources into combatting high-spin fastballs at the top of the zone and a steady diet of breaking balls everywhere else have pulled ahead from the pack.

It starts in practice. The days of a coach lobbing BP from 40 feet away two hours before a game aren’t gone exactly, but progressive teams are increasingly finding better ways to develop hitters than a traditional batting practice session. The pitching machine, long out of favor among hitters at all levels of baseball, has become a vital part of a modern training regimen. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s July, which means the A’s are trading to improve their bullpen. Whether it’s Jake Diekman, Mike Minor, Jeurys Familia, or any of a seemingly unending number of other moves, they always seem to find an arm they can bring in to redo their leverage roadmap and provide a little extra playoff oomph. Last night, they acquired Andrew Chafin in exchange for Greg Deichmann, Daniel Palencia, and cash, as MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported.

Chafin has been downright spectacular this year. In 39.1 innings, he’s allowed only nine runs, good for a 2.06 ERA. He’s done so by limiting home runs; he’s only given up one all year, and while that’s unlikely to persist, he does plenty of things right that should continue to limit homers. He gets grounders, with a 50% groundball rate so far this year. He’s limited hard contact, too: opponents have barreled up only 5.1% of their batted balls and have hit only 32.3% of them 95 mph or harder.

Do those two things, and homers are harder to come by. Baseball Savant’s xHR, which is a descriptive estimate of home runs based on contact quality, thinks Chapin “should” have allowed only 1.1 dingers so far this year. That doesn’t mean it will keep happening — it’s based on the actual contact allowed, which is volatile — but it’s a good sign that he hasn’t given up 20 warning track blasts or anything of that nature.
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The July 30 trade deadline is just days away, making this week the last opportunity for teams in the middle of the postseason hunt to improve their roster. Most of the true contenders are simply looking to solidify their rosters for the playoffs but there are a handful of surprising clubs that are still on the bubble between buying and selling.

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. All of the below stats are through July 25.

The Giants have had an up-and-down start to the second half. They lost a pair of series to the Pirates and Cardinals but won three of four against their biggest rivals, the Dodgers. They still hold the best record in baseball and are the only team on pace to win more than 100 games this year. They face a stiff challenge this week as they host the Dodgers and the Astros.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles is powering through a bunch of bad injury luck. They were fortunate to face the Rockies six times in the past two weeks, with four wins against Colorado helping offset the three losses they suffered against the Giants. On Saturday, they rolled out a lineup that looked more like a spring training split squad than the team that’s scored the most runs per game in the National League — Albert Pujols was slotted in at cleanup, followed by light-hitting catcher Austin Barnes, with a handful of other depth pieces getting starts too. Gavin Lux has been sidelined since the All-Star break and Mookie Betts hit the Injured List Sunday, though Corey Seager could be making his return soon. Luckily, Chris Taylor has nearly single-handedly powered their offense, blasting five home runs last week. Read the rest of this entry »

Depending on how one frames Monday’s Yankees and Pirates swap of reliever Clay Holmes for upper-level minor leaguers Hoy Park and Diego Castillo, it can look pretty rough. Holmes, who is out of options, is walking over five per 9 IP and has an ERA just a shade under 5.00 in a middle relief role for one of the worst teams in baseball, while Park and Castillo are annihilating the upper levels of the minors and play valuable defensive positions. But even though my shoot-from-the-hip reaction to this deal was that the Yankees took a bit of a bath because I think Castillo has the most long-term upside of the players exchanged, there are indications that Holmes is better than his superficial stats and really special in a few ways. There are also minor league roster dynamics at play for New York that make parting with these two middle infielders more palatable.

But let’s start with Holmes since he’s the one most likely to play an immediate big league role in the Bronx pressure cooker. He owns the highest groundball rate in baseball at 72.8%. It’s well above Holmes’ career rates, but he’s also experienced a 3 mph uptick in velocity to his fastball, cutter and curveball. For a pitcher generating a league-leading rate of groundballs, his HR/FB rate, a whopping 18.8%, feels unusually high and seems likely to regress to his career mean or below, considering how sinkery his improved, harder fastball is playing. It’s part of why his FIP and xERA are at least a run below his ERA to this point.

Holmes has also had a shift in his pitch deployment, as his cutter/slider has taken precedent over his curve. The combination of repertoire alteration, newfound arm strength, and rust (Holmes barely threw in 2020 due to a foot fracture and a forearm strain) may be contributing to that poor control. Holmes’ walk rates (15% career, 13% this year) are troubling, though he’s slowly improved in that regard every season of his career. The Yankees are walking a tight rope here. Holmes is out of options and he had forearm trouble last year (he’s about a half decade removed from a 2014 Tommy John). He’s a little wild. He’s also superlative in a particular sense and joining a team that has been one of the best at developing pitchers in the last five years. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last month after being on hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment focuses on changeups and features a pair of big-league relievers — Connor Brogdon and Garrett Whitlock — as well as Cade Cavalli, the top pitching prospect in the Washington Nationals system.

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Connor Brogdon, Philadelphia Phillies

“A changeup was the first off-speed pitch I ever learned. It was… shoot, I was probably eight or 10 years old. When I was growing up, you weren’t taught to throw a curveball too early in your life. Mine was just a straight circle change, basically right off the grip of my four-seam fastball.

“I had the same grip all the way through Little League, and even into high school. When I got to college, I started messing around with grips to see if I could throw it for a strike more consistently. I ended up talking to one of my teammates at Lewis Clark State College, Henry McAree, and picked his brain on some things.

“I finally settled on a grip that felt comfortable to me, then took some of his tips. One was to lay on your back and flip the ball up in the air, focusing on turning your wrist. By that, I mean physically taking a baseball, laying on the ground, or on a bed, and just flipping it up into the air, seeing the rotation of the ball and focusing on pronating your wrist to get that action — kind of that side-spin action you want to get. Read the rest of this entry »

Slowly falling behind in the divisional race, the Padres shook up their roster on Sunday, acquiring second baseman Adam Frazier from the Pirates. Frazier, under team control until the end of the 2022 season, is having easily the best season of his career, hitting .324/.388/.448 for a 130 wRC+ and 2.9 WAR. Except for the slugging percentage, all of these numbers are career-bests for the 29-year-old; that WAR figure was a new personal high before the All-Star Game was even played. Heading to Pittsburgh are three players: infielder Tucupita Marcano, outfielder Jack Suwinski, and right-handed reliever Michell Miliano.

Despite the fact that they’re 5 1/2 games out and behind two teams in the NL West as of Monday morning, it would be a gross exaggeration to call the 2021 season a disappointing one for the Padres. After all, they’re on pace for 92 wins, with the fifth-best run differential in the majors. The problem is that half of the teams with better run differentials also play in the NL West. That gauntlet essentially puts the Padres, Giants, and Dodgers into an “extra” grueling round of playoffs, with two of the three teams likely to be pushed into a single-elimination game after the regular season.

As of now, the Padres are a clear underdog, with a projected divisional probability that has faded from the 43.5% in the preseason, when it was expected to be a two-team race, to 11.2% before taking into account this trade. They aren’t in even remote danger of missing the playoffs — for now — but they certainly have an obvious preference for getting a free pass to the best-of-five Divisional Series, which basically doubles their chances of collecting the franchise’s first-ever World Series championship.

With Frazier on board, the Padres’ divisional probability bumps to 16.9%. This is projected to be a photo finish, so each win is quite important! But what will that role be?

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For a brief period on Saturday night, it appeared possible that not only would the single-season record for no-hitters fall, but that two pitchers — the Angels’ Patrick Sandoval and the Astros’ Framber Valdéz — would spin no-hitters on the same day for just the third time in history. Neither was successful, but on Sunday, the Yankees’ Domingo Germán put in his own no-hit bid, one that not only fell short but turned into a debacle. While this season’s breakneck pace of no-hitters has slowed down drastically, with just one in June and none in July after six in April and May, the drop in the number of close calls hasn’t been quite as sharp, but even so, the concentration of such games from Saturday and Sunday was notable.

Valdéz had the earlier of the two no-hit bids on Saturday night. The 27-year-old lefty has generally pitched well this season, but in his first four outings of June had struggled with his mechanics and compromised his command, walking 15 in 22.1 innings, and getting tagged for 27 hits and 15 runs (13 earned). Even against a Rangers team that entered having lost 10 straight games, his command woes — which had abated somewhat in his July 18 outing against the White Sox, when he walked just two hitters in 6.1 innings — returned, but this time he was effectively wild, walking six in six innings without allowing a hit or a run; he threw just 53 strikes out of 99 pitches. Despite sandwiching two first-inning walks around a wild pitch, and walking two more in the second, he escaped both jams and kept the Rangers off the board. Only twice did he retire the side in order, but each of the other two walks he issued came with two outs.

Valdéz needed a game-high 23 pitches to get through the sixth, with the final two hitters of the frame — Nate Lowe, who walked, and Curtis Terry, who struck out looking — each battling through eight pitches. For manager Dusty Baker, it was a no-brainer to remove him even given that he hadn’t given up a hit. Via MLB.com’s Brian McTaggert, “If we’d left him out there to get the no-hitter, he’d be up to 140 pitches,” said Baker, who decades ago gained a reputation for pushing his young pitchers too far, one that’s no longer applicable. “You’ve got to think logically what’s best for him.” Read the rest of this entry »

We at FanGraphs haven’t checked in on the Rockies in a while. To put it nicely, that’s because they are performing as expected – a 43-55 record has banished them to fourth in the NL West, a place the team will probably call home for the remainder of the season. As a whole, the Rockies have a league-trailing 75 wRC+. It is not a good sign when C.J. Cron is the best hitter on your team by a wide margin.

But the pitching? After adjusting for the wackiness of Coors, the Rockies’ pitching staff has an ERA- of 100. It also has a FIP- of 101. I suppose one could do better than that, but one could also do worse, and being an average arm in Denver is an accomplishment of its own.

A major reason for this is the resurgence of Germán Márquez. After a rocky April and May, it’s safe to say the Rockies’ most reliable pitcher has settled in. What do we know about Márquez? There are his two breaking pitches, a curveball and a slider, each one a plus offering that hitters whiff at over 40% of the time. But what’s not talked about as often is his four-seam fastball. That in itself isn’t surprising, since the fastball has long been Márquez’s worst pitch. What is surprising, though, is how good it’s been in recent months. Consider the plot below:

Márquez is the point in yellow. Since June 1 (and through last Thursday’s action), his four-seamer has averaged the lowest launch angle among the 97 shown. It has averaged the lowest wOBA, too, a result of the first fact. The pitch has always induced groundballs at a healthy rate, but that quality seems to have been kicked into overdrive during this two-month stretch. Read the rest of this entry »

As of Thursday night, the Mets’ starting rotation featured Marcus Stroman, Taijuan Walker, Tylor Megill, and a sentient ball of string who showed promise in Low-A. Fine, I made up the last one, but if you told the Mets front office about this ball of string, they’d at least ask you for its Trackman data. A seemingly unending string of injuries left the team grasping for pitching — any pitching at all. Enter Rich Hill, in a trade with the Rays:

We’ve acquired left-handed pitcher Rich Hill from Tampa Bay in exchange for right-handed pitcher Tommy Hunter and minor league catcher Matt Dyer. https://t.co/P24Fo2HoYd

— New York Mets (@Mets) July 23, 2021

At a very basic level, the Mets had to make this trade. Jacob deGrom is on the shelf. David Peterson broke his foot walking around. Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard aren’t ready. Joey Lucchesi tore his UCL. Robert Stock, who was already 10th or so on the depth chart, strained his hamstring. Forget replacement level — Hill represents an upgrade from subterranean level. To some extent, any trade at all would be a win, in that it would leave them able to field a roster.

But Hill isn’t merely roster depth. He’s one of the most interesting pitchers in baseball, a curve-and-fastball machine who has spent years pumping sub-90 mph gas past hitters while bamboozling them with a dazzling array of breaking balls. Heck, earlier this year he was named the AL Pitcher of the Month (it’s not the most prestigious award, but it’s an award) in May, when he posted a 0.78 ERA over 34.2 innings.

Of course, there are other months in the year, and the rest of Hill’s 2021 hasn’t gone nearly so well. In total he sported a 3.87 ERA and 4.55 FIP with the Rays, both of which are the highest marks he’s posted since bursting back onto the scene in 2015. His 9.9% swinging strike rate is better only than his abbreviated 2020 season, and he wasn’t exactly great then either. There’s a strong chance that Hill’s 2021 season will be his last stand. Read the rest of this entry »