Earlier this week, I threw some numbers together on the value of productive outs. I focused on Corbin Carroll, and rightly so: His electric skill set is a perfect entry point for explaining how hitters can add (or subtract) value relative to average even when making an out. Putting the ball in play? We love it. Avoiding double plays? We love that too. The Diamondbacks are a team full of speedsters, and Carroll’s productive outs gave their baserunners a chance to show off their wheels.
A quick refresher: I calculated the difference in run scoring expectation between the average out and a specific type of out (strikeout, air out, non-GIDP groundout, double play) for each base/out state. Then I had a computer program tag each out made in 2024 with that difference. For example, the average out made with a runner on second and no outs cost teams 0.35 runs of scoring expectation in 2024. Groundouts in that situation only cost 0.25 runs, a difference of 0.1 runs.
Thus, on every groundout that occurred with a runner on second and no out, I had the computer note ‘plus 0.1’ for the “productive out” value. A strikeout in that situation, on the other hand, lowered scoring expectancy by 0.43 runs, a difference from average of -.09 runs. So the computer noted ‘minus 0.09’ for every strikeout with a runner on second and no out. Do this for every combination of base/out state and out type, add it all up, and you can work out the total value of a player’s productive outs. Read the rest of this entry »
Good swing decisions are vital to a hitter’s success. Having a finely tuned stroke is important — swing mechanics are diligently honed for a reason — but the ability to consistently attack the right pitches is every bit as valuable. Avoiding chasing while keying in on offerings you can drive greatly enhances your chances of squaring up a baseball.
Dillon Lawson, the new assistant hitting coach of the Boston Red Sox, is a huge proponent of a disciplined approach. The Louisville, Kentucky native views the optimization of swing decisions as an integral part of his job — one that now includes working alongside co-assistant hitting coach Ben Rosenthal and lead hitting coach Peter Fatse.
Prior to joining the Red Sox organization last year as its minor league hitting coordinator, the 39-year-old Lawson spent parts of five seasons with the New York Yankees, first as their minor league hitting coordinator from 2019-2021 and then as their major league hitting coach from 2022 until July 2023. He also tutored minor leaguer hitters for two seasons in the Houston Astros organization, in 2016 and 2018.
Lawson sat down to talk hitting at Fenway Park last weekend.
———
David Laurila: There are swing coaches and there are more traditional hitting coaches. Where do you fit into that dynamic?
Dillon Lawson: “Whether it’s what I feel is right, or it’s just a sense of pride, I think we’re all trying to be the best hitting coaches we could possibly be. That means you’re able to help players in whatever way they need to be helped. Sometimes that’s with an approach. Sometimes it’s with confidence. Sometimes it’s a swing change, whether that’s with the load or the path. Some people need more power. Other people need more contact.
“In the minor leagues, with the whole department… let’s say you’ve got 10 hitting coaches all pushing the same direction, trying to help a large group of hitters. Then, here with Boston — same with the Yankees — a group of three [at the big league level] is nice, because the better the player is, the more difficult it is to get them just a half a percent better. Sometimes you have to get creative. Sometimes you have to dig deep into your toolkit. When you have the group all working together, working well together, you can help players more quickly.”
After a fairly brisk start, the pace of free agency has bogged down in the new year. The clog in the pipeline is Pete Alonso, the burly first baseman late of the New York Mets. Alonso’s free agent case fascinates me, as he represents a possibly rare intersection of fame and scarcity of skill, making him especially difficult to put a value on.
Given Alonso’s popularity in New York, the shortness of the Mets’ lineup even after signing Juan Soto, and the fact that owner Steve Cohen is so rich the Sumerians might not have invented currency if they’d known he was going to come along, a reunion makes a certain amount of sense. Read the rest of this entry »
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
2025 BBWAA Candidate: Curtis Granderson
Player
Pos
Career WAR
Peak WAR
JAWS
H
HR
SB
AVG/OBP/SLG
OPS+
Curtis Granderson
CF
47.2
34.7
40.9
1800
344
153
.249/.337/.465
113
SOURCE: Baseball-Reference
Like Sara Lee, nobody doesn’t like Curtis Granderson. A power-hitting center fielder who reached the 20-homer plateau 10 times, with a high of 43, he was a threat to steal a base during the first decade of his major league career as well. He made three All-Star teams and had a knack for turning up on winners, starting (and starring) for six teams that made the playoffs, including two that reached the World Series, while reaching the postseason twice as a reserve acquired for the stretch run. His penchant for strikeouts made him a somewhat streaky performer, but he earned a reputation within the game for being even-keeled, thoughtful, hard working, and generous — a clubhouse leader and a favorite of teammates, fans, and media. At a time when African-American participation in baseball was (and still is) on the wane, he wore his socks high every day as a tribute to Negro Leagues players, and channeled his charitable efforts towards increasing Black participation in the sport, an effort that has carried over into his retirement. Read the rest of this entry »
On September 3, 2024, Tommy Edman swung through an 0-2 fastball to end the top of the ninth inning of a game against the Angels. Witness, please.
Back when I was a kid, all anyone talked about was fastball velocity. Mark Wohlers could hit 100, and that was a big deal. Never mind that while velocity is important, it’s arguably the third-most significant tool in a pitcher’s tackle box, after location and movement. But even in the days of fuzzy over-the-air TV and print media, you could quantify velocity and share it simply. It was possible to describe the exquisite movement on Greg Maddux’s low-90s two-seamer, but it was hard and took up a lot of time. I think that’s got something to do with George Will being the way he is. But I digress. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Cleveland Guardians.
Batters
It’s weird doing the Twins and Guardians back to back, as ZiPS sees a lot of similarities between the two teams. It sees both clubs as having one mid-career future Hall of Famer, a really good outfielder, a bunch of slightly below-average players elsewhere in the lineup, a sneaky good rotation with one starter the system likes quite a bit more than the others, and an ultra-elite bullpen that should compete to be the best in baseball in 2025.
Overall, ZiPS sees the Guardians similarly to how Steamer does, though the shape of the projection is a bit different; ZiPS likes the hitting a good deal less than Steamer does, but is more optimistic than its cyber-rival when it comes to the pitching. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been publishing projections in some form or other since 2019, making painstaking improvements to my process along the way. To borrow an expression from Dan Szymborski, my projections have now reached a level of “non-craptitude” such that I am content — though no projector is ever truly content — to share them with you here at FanGraphs. This article introduces OOPSY, your friendly neighborhood projection system.
OOPSY aims to summarize all of the information you see on a player page — a whole slew of component statistics from different years, leagues, levels, and teams, compiled at different ages — in an attempt to make it easier to evaluate players. I have always found it difficult to account for all of this information in my head without the help of a projection system, and now I have one.
Like many popular projection systems, OOPSY takes MARCEL as a starting point, adding methodological innovations to account for additional complexity (MARCEL projects all rookies to be league average, for example). OOPSY uses its own approach to account for all of the usual factors captured by popular projection systems: league scoring environments, aging effects, major league equivalencies (with inspiration from Clay Davenport) to account for (minor and major) leagues and levels that boast differing quality of competition, park effects (both minor and major league), historical performance weighted by recency and, perhaps most importantly, regression to the mean, with statistics subject to more random variance regressed more heavily. Instead of regressing every player to the same mean as MARCEL does, OOPSY regresses players to different means based on their probability of making the majors, which is assumed to be a function of their age relative to level (based on historical data), with complex-level players regressed to a worse mean than Triple-A players, for example. Read the rest of this entry »
It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. After a sensational contract year — striking out 30% of hitters, posting the lowest walk rate of his career, bedazzling his jewelry cabinet with a World Series ring — Jack Flaherty looked like he was set to make a boatload of money. Days after his 29th birthday, we here at FanGraphs ranked Flaherty eighth among our Top 50 Free Agents, one spot behind his former high school teammate, Max Fried.
Not all of them, it turns out. As the calendar creeps uncomfortably close to the start of spring training, the youngest available starting pitcher in free agency finds himself without an employer. Every couple weeks, a sparsely sourced rumor about Flaherty bubbles up on MLB Trade Rumors — there’s “mutual interest” with the Orioles, the Tigers have “some interest” in a reunion — but for a large part of the offseason, it’s been silence on the Flaherty beat.
The most substantial of these rumors flowed from the estimable pen of Ken Rosenthal over the weekend. Rosenthal and Will Sammon reported in The Athletic that Flaherty was “open to considering” a “short-term deal” with a “high average annual value.” The hot market for starters and the comparatively cool market for Flaherty suggest that, unlike the rest of the nominal “front-end” starting pitchers at the top of the market, something about him scares teams. All of this leads me to ask: What’s the matter with Jack Flaherty?
One obvious answer is the track record. On some level, teams are going to be somewhat hesitant to commit serious resources to anyone whose last healthy and effective season before 2024 came prior to the pandemic. Rosenthal and Sammon wrote in their report that “teams perhaps want to see Flaherty put together two consecutive seasons of elite performance.” And there are the shoulder issues in 2021 and 2022 that limited him to just 114 1/3 innings over that two-year span.
But I don’t think the track record tells the full story. I think the weak Flaherty market comes down to concerns about his 2024 season itself. Specifically, I think teams are worried about his fastball.
They get there in different ways, but the three pitchers who received $200 million (or thereabouts) contracts this winter all have plus fastballs. Snell throws the prototypical ace four-seamer, averaging 96 mph with 19 inches of induced vertical break. Corbin Burnes’ cutter is one of the signature pitches in baseball, capable of missing bats and neutralizing contact quality against hitters on both sides of the plate. Fried is a bit of a different case — his fastball averaged just 93.9 mph last season — but the shape is totally bizarre relative to his arm angle, resembling Burnes’ cutter from the left side. Fried also throws five other pitches, minimizing the importance of his four-seamer.
Free Agent Fastballs
Pitcher
Arm Angle
Fastball
Velocity (mph)
Induced Vertical Break (in.)
Horizontal Break (in.)
Blake Snell
59°
Four-Seamer
95.9
18.7
5.8 (Arm Side)
Corbin Burnes
44°
Cutter
95.3
12.5
2.4 (Glove Side)
Max Fried
48°
Four-Seamer
93.9
11.0
0.1 (Glove Side)
Jack Flaherty
28°
Four-Seamer
93.3
15.4
4.2 (Arm Side)
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Flaherty’s fastball was the slowest of these four primary offerings, averaging 93.3 mph. In September, that dropped all the way to 92.6 mph. At below-average velocities, even a half-tick of heat loss can be brutal. And while the shape of the fastball is unusual — Flaherty throws from a low slot and gets just four inches of horizontal movement, meaning the pitch unexpectedly cuts in a funky fashion — it doesn’t have the sink that allows Fried’s and Burnes’ fastballs to burrow beneath barrels. Also unlike Fried, Flaherty in effect throws just three pitches: his four-seam fastball and the two breaking balls. (He also flashes a changeup and sinker, but last season he used each of those pitches less than 3% of the time.)
Given the mediocrity of his fastball, Flaherty must aim for fine locations. His success can vary. (I want to caveat the following with the fact that the Dodgers have a strong organizational preference for where their pitchers locate their fastballs, which may or may not be the way Flaherty will pitch with a new team.)
I’ll start with his matchups against left-handed hitters, because these were the majority of hitters that Flaherty faced in 2024. After his trade to the Dodgers in late July, the target for his fastball was almost exclusively set up in one location: Low and away.
A handful of times per start, Flaherty tried to climb the ladder, aiming for swinging strikes at the top of the zone. But in the three starts I watched in full, he almost always targeted his fastballs low and away when facing lefties.
Now, as the plot below of his fastball location to lefties shows, his execution wasn’t perfect. Aiming a baseball is really hard. But I’d venture to say that it was pretty good — he hardly yanked any of his fastballs to the glove side, and most of his misses drifted harmlessly off the plate. In any case, the plot tells a clear story: Flaherty was looking to paint with his fastball rather than challenge hitters over the plate.
This sort of nibbling quality with the fastball is perhaps not what teams want to see from their high-paid free agent starter. Snell, Burnes, and even Fried to some extent can throw fastballs with a large margin for error. Flaherty’s margins are thinner.
This is especially true against right-handed hitters, where his glove-side command is not as good. Against righties, Flaherty also frequently targeted low and away. But as the plot below of fastballs to righties shows, Flaherty doesn’t have the same level of command to the outer edge of this side of the plate. Note the lack of dots in that low-away corner compared to the yanked misses off the plate:
To lefties, Flaherty has the luxury of his misses generally drifting off the plate for balls. When he misses his target to righties, however, the miss tends to drift middle-middle. And when you’re missing middle-middle with 93-mph four-seamers, it’s generally not going to turn out well for you. (This might explain part of Flaherty’s reverse splits last season.)
When executed well, the low-and-away target serves an important function — it sets up his two nasty breaking balls, a harder gyro slider at 85 mph and a loopier knuckle-curve at 78 mph. As this pitch plot shows, these two pitches blend together in a deceptive manner, forcing hitters to guess which one is coming:
Flaherty is at his best when he’s mixing in the low fastballs with the two breakers right below the zone. Check out this two-pitch sequence to Ryan O’Hearn. He nails his 0-0 target to get ahead:
On 0-1 — the perfectly executed fastball fresh in O’Hearn’s head — Flaherty buries a curveball right below the previous location, getting O’Hearn to swing way over the pitch:
After a couple of breaking balls in the dirt, Flaherty punches O’Hearn out on a high fastball. With hitters laser-focused on the bottom of the strike zone, that occasional late-count high heater leads to a ton of whiffs. It’s a pretty combo when it works.
But if Flaherty falls behind, there just isn’t a great option to induce weak contact. When the early-count fastball execution is less than perfect, he tends to back himself into a corner. And when he’s forced to come over to the plate with the heater, he can be vulnerable to the long ball. Just ask O’Hearn:
If Flaherty’s fastball velocity remains in that 92-93 range, it will likely be a tradeoff between giving up a few too many walks due to nibbling (as he did early in his career) or risking extra-base damage by coming over the plate.
So, yes, there are reasons to be concerned about Flaherty. But overly fixating on his fastball risks ignoring his upside.
That two-breaking-ball attack works against both righties and lefties; when he gets ahead in the count, there’s almost nobody better. That strikeout rate is no illusion. So the question becomes: How can Flaherty reliably get ahead of hitters?
One option is pitching backwards. Flaherty’s fastball usage in 0-0 counts is roughly 50%. (On the plot below, red represents the four-seamer, gold represents the slider, and blue represents the curveball.) Given the frequency of his slider usage in 3-1 and 3-2 counts (50% and 44.8%, respectively) it follows that he has the confidence to throw it for a strike when he needs it. Mixing in more breaking balls in early counts could take some pressure off the four-seamer.
Credit: Baseball Savant
Flaherty could also use his sinker more often. If his problem at present is mostly with right-handed hitters, the sinker could give him a weak-contact option and a pitch that he feels comfortable throwing on the inner-half of the plate. Notably, the sinker grades out fine by stuff models — PitchingBot, for example, gives it a 56 on the 20-80 scale.
It’s also not impossible that some of his velocity could return. Maybe he no longer can regularly dial up 95-96 mph as he did in his early 20s, but it’s also possible that his late-season swoon can be chalked up to his posting his highest innings total in five years. In the range of velocity that he sat in the later months of the season, every half-tick is crucial, but if he can consistently live at 93-94 mph with the ability to touch 96, that softens many of the concerns.
Concluding this article definitively is challenging. On the one hand, the skittishness of the clubs is perfectly understandable. But plenty of contending teams need starting pitching, and an industry-wide fear of Flaherty’s weaknesses could cost clubs their chance to add someone who just performed like one of the best hurlers in the game.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a new escalation in “breakout” creep, the Blue Jays signing Jeff Hoffman, risk tolerance in transactions, alternate spellings of names, Roki Sasaki’s effect on the market for international amateur free agents, another example of a team offering a higher salary in arbitration than a player requested, Mets owner Steve Cohen’s financial returns, Nick Castellanos on MVP Jose Iglesias, and a 19th-century curved-bat idea (1:08:44), plus (1:22:40) a Stat Blast on the players who’ve appeared in the most distinct team matchups.
Dan Szymborski: Umm, it seems to have started already, so I’ll be back here in 16 minutes.
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