Playoff baseball has become something of an expectation on the North Side of Chicago since 2015, but there are good reasons why the Cubs have been somewhat derisively known as the “lovable losers” since the term was first applied to them 1977. For most of their 145 year history, the Cubs have not been worried about their record in October. In fact between 1945 and 1984, they didn’t appear in the postseason at all. Which is why it’s such a remarkable statement to say that the 2021 Cubs got off to one of the worst offensive starts in franchise history. It’s even more perplexing because this season’s offense is mostly made up of the same core of players that won the World Series in 2016 and brought playoff baseball to Wrigley Field in five of the last six seasons.

Twelve games into the season, there was no shortage of pieces about the Cubs’ broken offense. However, those concerns were briefly allayed when the team went on a torrid run, scoring 55 runs in six games. Some fans may have breathed a sigh of relief as the bats came to life, but close observers noticed a pattern. Sahadev Sharma at The Athletic speculated that the Cubs offense was neither historically broken nor magically fixed. He argued the team is trapped in the same boom and bust cycle that allowed the Brewers to chase them down and force a game-163 in 2018. That offensive outage lead then-president of baseball operations Theo Epstein to declare that “our offense broke somewhere along the lines.” It’s the same cycle that saw them get off to a red hot, 13-3 start in the pandemic-shortened season, only to be unable to score against an upstart Marlins squad in the Wild Card Series. So let’s explore what’s changed with this offense since 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday evening, Texas’ Hyeon-Jong Yang made his first career start. While a low pitch count and a fourth-inning jam limited him to 3.1 innings, the southpaw still managed to impress: He struck out eight and walked only one while missing 15 bats on 37 swings. This was just a spot start in place of injured Kohei Arihara, but it was almost certainly good enough to warrant another look sooner rather than later.

Yang didn’t arrive with the same fanfare as fellow KBO transplant Ha-seong Kim. The 33-year-old had to settle for a minor league deal; he didn’t even make the Rangers’ Opening Day roster. Still, he’s a legend back home in South Korea. With two KBO Series titles, an MVP trophy on the mantle, and numerous international accolades there was little left for him to prove in Gwangju, and he understandably wanted to test his mettle at the highest level while he’s still near the peak of his powers.

I watched several of Yang’s starts last season. His overall numbers weren’t particularly impressive, but he looked much better once he shook off some early-season rust and got his best fastball back. As a command-reliant starter with a low-90s heater, above-average fading change, and functional slider, he seemed like a big leaguer, if not an impact one.

Across his first three games in Texas, Yang’s results have been pretty good. In 12 innings, he’s struck out 13 hitters while allowing only two walks and 10 hits. But while his start against the Twins was mostly encouraging, it also revealed some limitations in his skillset and highlighted the difference in competition between the KBO and the major leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

I guess if you’re a hitter, there are some pitchers you just see well. Maybe you aren’t fooled by their signature breaking ball or their arm slot is one you happen to be comfortable with. In the case of Austin Meadows, maybe he was able to homer twice in as many at-bats against Angels reliever Ben Rowen on Tuesday because he just likes facing submarine-tossing right handers. Then again, maybe it’s just because Rowen threw him two pitches that looked like this:

A couple of pitches like those can turn a hitter’s night around quickly; for Meadows, it turned an 0-for-3 evening entering the seventh inning into his best game of the year. Even before those two at-bats, though, he had already been having a sneaky-good season. His .208/.323/.462 batting line through 127 plate appearances amounts to a 127 wRC+; he has seven home runs. If you look at his Statcast metrics, he’s been even better. Meadows is in the 86th percentile in xwOBA, despite clocking in at just the 69th percentile in wOBA.

Considering the way Meadows performed last year, seeing those numbers has to be a huge relief for Tampa Bay. After breaking out in his first full season with the Rays to the tune of a 143 wRC+ and 4.1 WAR in 2019, Meadows was below replacement level last year, hitting just .205/.296/.371 with four homers, for a wRC+ of 87 in 152 plate appearances. And while there were inherent sample size issues for everyone in 2020, nothing really suggested he was simply getting unlucky. His strikeout rate climbed more than 10 points over the previous season, his ISO dropped by more than 100 points, and he plummeted into single-digit percentile rankings in xwOBA, xBA and xSLG. There were several possible explanations for his struggles — lingering effects from his bout with COVID-19, an oblique injury that ended his season prematurely, the general upheaval to daily routines caused by the pandemic — but there was still uncertainty surrounding what he might contribute in 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Brandon Valenzuela, C, San Diego Padres
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Lake Elsinore   Age: 20   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 40
Line: 2-for-3, 2 BB

Notes
Valenzuela was in the honorable mentions section of last year’s Padres list as a notable teenage follow due to his athleticism and physique, both of which are uncommon for a catcher. He’s off to a strong start at Low-A Lake Elsinore with three hits (one a homer), four walks and no strikeouts in his first two games. Valenzuela switch-hits, he tracks pitches well, and the bat-to-ball and strike zone feel pieces were both in place already throughout 2019, but he’s swinging with a little more explosion now. Well-built players with a foundation of skills rather than tools are often a threat to breakout as those more overt physical tools come with maturity, and we may be seeing the early stages of that here.

Jose Salvador, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Inland Empire  Age: 21   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 35+
Line: 4.1 IP (relief), 1 H, 1 BB, 1 R, 12 K Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: He’s certainly *played* like a star the last 80ish games now. I’m not convinced that he’s quite that good, but he’s certainly proving me wrong.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I should note they have a 20-12 pythag record, which equates to a 101-win schedule. And that’s going to be far more predictive than their current record is

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t looked at injury rate compared to previous Aprils, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the weird 2020 made things riskier.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no one way to hit well, but there is one constant in hitting: batters swing too often. The intuition behind that fact isn’t hard to get to: if you swing at a pitch outside the zone, you’re taking a ball and turning it into weak contact (it’s hard to hit pitches outside the zone with authority) or a strike — that’s bad! If you swing at a pitch in the zone, you’re turning a strike into either a strike (if you miss) or contact. Swinging is so bad outside of the zone that it overwhelms the advantages of hacking in it.

I don’t mean to imply that this should extend to logical extremes — you can’t literally never swing — but the numbers are clear. In 2020, batters were worth 3,030 runs below average when swinging. They added the same amount when they didn’t swing. This isn’t a fluke: batters have already added 1,350 runs relative to average by taking pitches this year — you guessed it, they’ve cost themselves as much by swinging. In every full season since the advent of pitch tracking in 2008, swings have cost offenses at least 6,000 runs. It’s just a fact — hitters swing too frequently.

José Iglesias has probably never heard this advice. He’s in the midst of one of the swing-happiest seasons of recent memory, and he’s doing it in exactly the way that worries you — a mountain of chases. There’s just one twist — it hasn’t sunk him just yet, despite everything I said up above, and it’s fascinating seeing him survive.

The top of the chase rate leaderboard is filled with powerful hitters. Salvador Perez leads the way so far, with a 49.1% swing rate on pitches outside the zone. Luis Robert is in second. Javier Báez is in the top 10, as is Nick Castellanos. I don’t mean to say that you can’t be a good hitter when you get fooled that often — all of the batters I named are having good years. They’re producing in a particular way, though: plenty of misses, but loud contact when they do connect. Read the rest of this entry »

2021 must be the year for bizarro no-hitters. First, Joe Musgrove threw the first no-no in Padres history and was just a hit batsmen away from a perfect game. Likewise with Carlos Rodón’s no-hitter — one Roberto Pérez-sized foot away from perfection. Madison Bumgarner threw a seven-inning no-hitter that wasn’t officially a no-hitter. On Wednesday afternoon, John Means became the third pitcher to throw an official no-hitter this year, facing just 27 Mariners and coming oh so close to perfection.

A fan unfamiliar with the minutiae of the baseball rule book might wonder why Means’s dominant start wasn’t considered a perfect game. After all, he faced the minimum number of batters without allowing a walk, hit-by-pitch, or an error. For Means, his dalliance with perfection was thwarted by a wild pitch on a third strike, allowing Sam Haggerty to reach base. He was the 12th pitcher to face 27 batters in a no-hitter without throwing a perfect game. It was the first no-hitter in Major League history where the only baserunner reached on a dropped third strike.

Rule 5.05(a)(2) is an oddity that has lived on in the baseball rulebook for centuries. It’s a relic of a time when strikeout and walks didn’t exist and the batter simply had three attempts to hit the ball. After their third try, the ball was considered in play and the batter could attempt to run to first base to avoid the out. As the game evolved over time, and strikeouts were introduced, this archaic rule lived on, one that, in this author’s opinion, doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of the modern game.

That dropped third strike rule was the only thing separating Means from the first perfect game since Félix Hernández threw his in 2012. That it happened in the third inning made it completely innocuous during the run of play. Haggerty was thrown out attempting to steal second a few pitches later and the game moved on. Except Means retired the next 19 batters in a row and that seemingly benign event became the only blemish on his otherwise perfect afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

What a month it has been for pitchers. We witnessed no-hitters by Joe Musgrove, Carlos Rodón and, just yesterday, John Means. Corbin Burnes threw a major-league record number of strikeouts without issuing a walk (49 punch outs and counting, though Burnes is currently sidelined). And Shane Bieber has pitched a multitude of double-digit strikeout games by. Oh, and Jacob deGrom and Gerrit Cole are just toying with hitters. On the flip side, it’s been a dismal start at the plate for most of the game’s hitters, though there are a few exceptions (here’s looking at you, Mike Trout and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.). Last week, Brendan Gawlowski covered April’s .232 league-wide batting average, an historic low. A combination of the highest strikeout rate on record and a below-average BABIP made the first month of the season one to forget for fans of offense and batted balls.

According to an anonymous GM recently quoted in The Athletic, the root of the league’s hitting woes is simple: “Pitching is too good.” The league-wide strikeout rate has been on the rise for several years now, but to see the rate jump like it has in the season’s first month is alarming and worth investigating. Are pitchers just getting better? Are hitters selling out for the long ball? It’s probably a combination of both. To dissect the strikeout problem, let’s look at how batters are striking out and what it reveals about how they are being pitched.

Not all strikeouts are created equal. To start, there are three ways a pitcher can earn a strike: a called strike, a swinging strike, and a foul ball (to keep it simple, I’m considering bunt attempts swings here). Going back to the 2015 season, a clear trend has set in.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Orioles ace John Means pitching a no-hitter and the dropped-third-strike rule that prevented him from having a perfect game, Tony La Russa’s latest managerial miscues, an umpire admitting he guessed at a call, the Yankees turning their season around after a slow start and the perils of small-sample team performance, heckling the Astros, Dylan Cease, Huascar Ynoa, and good and bad arguments for and against the DH, whether the zombie-runner rule leads to more or fewer balls being put in play, the Twins’ struggles in Manfredball games, and whether fans are being cheated by seven-inning games, plus a Meet a Major Leaguer on Angels utility man Jose Rojas and Brewers pitcher Alec Bettinger (and, indirectly, 19th-century Milwaukee catcher Alamazoo Jennings).

Audio intro: Sloan, "She Says What She Means"
Audio outro: Badfinger, "Perfection"

Link to video of Means no-hitter
Link to video of dropped third strike
Link to Sam on dropped third strikes
Link to MLB.com on dropped third strikes
Link to SABR on dropped third strikes
Link to James Fegan on La Russa
Link to Angel Hernandez play/quote
Link to story about Astros taunts
Link to Cease highlights video
Link to video of Ynoa’s grand slam
Link to Ben on the DH
Link to Ben on player talent over time
Link to story on Rojas
Link to BP on Bettinger
Link to MLB.com on Bettinger
Link to story on Alamazoo Jennings

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