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.

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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 »

What if I told you that there is a pitcher who throws 92 mph but is actually throwing 95? That’s just Bailey Falter’s niche. Despite only throwing nine major league innings in his career to date, Falter has already shot to the top of some important leaderboards: release extension and average velocity added.

Here are the top-10 fastballs in June, sorted not by average velocity, but instead by average added velocity, which is the result of simple subtraction: effective velocity minus release speed. Effective velocity estimates the “actual” pitch speed the hitter faces based on where the pitcher releases the baseball and how much time the hitter has to react. If a pitcher releases the ball closer to home plate, the batter has less time to react, effectively (there’s that word again) making the pitch come in faster. This is music to Falter’s ears:

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We’re now five years into the Statcast era, and with that has come a good base of knowledge and an understanding of what small sample events are significant or beyond noise. Alex Chamberlain recently provided a wonderful example of this type of analysis; I encourage you to read that to get a feel for what I’m going to be talking about. But where Alex and Connor Kurcon covered the values of hard-hit balls at extreme launch angles and extreme exit velocity at given pitch speeds, I want to cover foul balls and what we can — or maybe can’t — learn at the extremes.

Any quick look at the Statcast leaderboard will show you that Yermín Mercedes has a max exit velocity of 116.8 mph, good for ninth best in baseball this year. That’s an incredible feat for any player, but what criteria do we want to set when determining a max? We’re ultimately seeking to measure raw power output, so maybe we should be more inclusive to all batted ball events. If we include foul balls, Mercedes would suddenly have the sixth-highest max exit velocity in baseball at 117.7 mph.

I encourage you to listen to that clip with sound, because the play-by-play commentary is all we have as to where the ball landed.

That 0.9-mph jump might not mean much, but there’s more to it once you consider both the rarity of the batted ball and the fact that we have a number on it in the first place. There’s a wide acceptance of all stats derived solely from launch angle and exit velocity, but you should consider the importance of spray angle. In the same way that both Alex and Connor talked about abnormal exit velocities in the context of a pitch speed or launch angle, something similar should be noted when thinking about the spray of the ball.

To understand this relationship, it’s important to see the spray angle at which each player generates their max EV:

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Completing a trade before July — a real player-for-player deal that improves one’s playoff chances or prospect depth — can be exceptionally difficult. Sometimes the stars align, as they did in late May when the Rays sent Willy Adames to the Brewers in a deal that included three relievers swapping jerseys, but for the most part, things are quiet until the final weeks before the deadline.

That’s despite the fact that it makes sense for teams to address their needs early. An acquisition to help a team get into the playoffs has a much greater impact if he’s on the roster for 90 games instead of 60; you don’t need to be a quant genius to tell you that’s 50% more games. Buyers want to address their needs yesterday, and obvious sellers have players available immediately. For most, however, the waiting game just makes good business sense in terms of market dynamics. And there’s a new wrinkle to this year’s market that clubs are still figuring out how to navigate — one that will surely add to the delays in getting that stove truly hot.

Why Buyers Wait

Teams looking to make a playoff push are waiting for the market to expand. Depending on how you look at it, there are only six to eight obvious sellers right now, and many of them don’t have much of interest on the available menu. There are an equal amount of teams on the bubble in late June, and these are teams with better rosters full of plenty of players that winning clubs would like to have. The Cubs and Giants, who were seen as two of those bubble teams entering the year, are loaded with excellent players on expiring contracts, but at this point, they’re buyers.

But even with those options off the table, there are plenty of very good players who are not available today but might be two to four weeks from now. What if the Angels go cold and are suddenly willing to talk about Alex Cobb and Andrew Heaney? Are there scenarios where another losing streak for the Nationals makes (gulp) Max Scherzer available?

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Do you know the pitcher with the highest swinging-strike rate in all of baseball this year? Well, it’s Jacob deGrom, no surprises there; it’s such an obvious answer that I probably didn’t need to ask. But do you know the pitcher with the second-highest swinging-strike rate? It’s Raisel Iglesias, and the Angels’ closer has been impressive so far this season, even if his run prevention numbers don’t quite show it yet.

If I could see only one pitching statistic, I’d choose swinging-strike rate. That’s not to say that nothing else matters; that’s decidedly not the case, and there are easy examples of both pitchers who miss bats but aren’t effective and pitchers who are effective without missing bats. But as a first pass, swinging strikes are great. Everything else is contextual. Called strike? That’s because the batter didn’t swing. Foul? It’s not always worth a strike. Groundball? The batter could hit it through the defense or find a gap. A swing and miss is absolute.

You probably don’t need to hear that. Whiffs have been the premium currency of pitching for a long time, long before we had the pitch-level data to track them accurately. I merely thought I’d mention it, because wow does Iglesias miss a lot of bats.

Most closers operate with a common template. Throw a really good fastball — a really good fastball — and spot an unhittable secondary pitch off of it. It’s not always about velocity, though it often is. But it’s almost always about a fastball and one pitch spotted off of it — a guessing game for the hitter with two bad answers.

Iglesias is that pitcher, kind of. Against righties, he relies on a four-seam fastball and a devastating slider. He mixes in a smattering of two-seamers and changeups, but mostly for show; more than 80% of his pitches are fastballs or sliders. Against lefties, Iglesias also relies on two pitches: his fastball and changeup. He throws each of them roughly 40% of the time, with sinkers and sliders comprising the remainder of his offerings.
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We talk a lot about the “face” of baseball — a player who has the look, the excitement, the highlight reel, the things that make them an ideal candidate to be a poster child for the game. “Here,” we say, to would-be fans. “This is what you’re getting when you start to watch that sport.” It could be Bryce Harper with his GIF-worthy hair tosses, or Aaron Judge with his giant frame and home runs. It could be Mookie Betts or Mike Trout, whose talents defy generational lines and who we will likely be talking about for decades after they retire.

As baseball faces go, there are lots of options, even if it feels like no one can agree on them or decide who would be the best candidate to usher in a new generation of fans. Whose poster would these kids want on their walls? Whose stance would they most likely emulate in Little League games? Which superstar can surpass the limitations of team fandom to become beloved by all? It’s a tough request to fulfill, and that’s likely why there are no firm answers.

In recent months, I’ve begun to wonder if what baseball needs is a face at all. Perhaps what baseball needs instead is a voice.

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In 2018, an article by FanGraphs alum Travis Sawchik came with an ominous title: “Go See the Two-Seamer Before It’s Gone.” His instruction alluded to a still-ongoing trend within MLB, whereby numerous pitchers abandon their two-seamers and sinkers in favor of high-spin four-seamers thrown up in the zone. Its impetus boils down to a couple key developments. For one, teams and pitchers wanted to counter batters who adjusted their swing planes to elevate low pitches. They also realized that high fastballs are useful at inducing whiffs, regardless of batters’ tendencies. Furthermore, those fastballs paired well with the breaking ball shapes and locations teams began to covet around the same time.

All in all, the stage was set for a league-wide revolution. You’ve read the stories of how Gerrit Cole and Tyler Glasnow blossomed into superstars using high fastballs. Conversely, you’ve heard the story of how forcing the sinker upon Chris Archer aggravated his struggles. You might have also encountered stories connecting this trend to the recent uptick in strikeouts. The validity of these reports aside, they helped cement a narrative: the four-seamer was in, and the sinker was out.

Three years later, the league doesn’t seem to have veered away from it. Pitchers have located 20% of four-seam fastballs in the upper-third of the zone this season, the highest rate of the Pitch Tracking era (2008 onwards). Meanwhile, two-seamer/sinker usage is the lowest it’s ever been.

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On Monday, MLB umpires began (re-)enforcing Rule 3.02, the clause that bans pitchers from applying foreign substances to the baseball. While we didn’t have any ejections, umpires conducted plenty of searches and managed to do so without needlessly delaying games. Much digital ink has been spilled on this topic since MLB announced the crackdown; just last week, Ben, Jay, and I all weighed in, and comments from the players themselves have run the gamut from measured and reasonable to wildly implausible.

As we enter this new period, the obvious and immediate impulse is to try to measure the impact the rule change is having on the game. We know the teams will: Clubs have paid good coin for elite spin in recent years, and you can bet they’ll be paying close attention to who does and doesn’t lose RPMs as trade season approaches. Fans and writers will surely do the same. Whether assessing league statistics or individual performances, the temptation to compare spin rates against performance will be very powerful in the coming days.

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