I’ll admit it: I think about Corbin Burnes way more often than is healthy. Not in a Swimfan way, or anything; his blowup 2019 and standout ’20 are just my favorite example of a pitcher adjusting his pitch mix to match his natural talents, and Burnes has no shortage of talent. His fastball sits in the mid-90s with a naturally robust spin rate, and his slider turns batters into pretzels. He also posted a 6.09 FIP in 2019, driven by allowing 17 home runs in only 49 innings.

What was Burnes’ problem? While his fastball has a lot of spin, it’s not the same kind of spin as your average fastball. His fastball is heavy on gyroscopic spin — the football spin that gives sliders and cutters their signature “dot” — and light on transverse (or “active”) spin, which imparts movement. Of the 601 pitchers who threw at least 250 fastballs in 2019, Burnes’ active spin percentage ranked 585th.

That’s not a death knell for pitchers. The bottom of the list is dotted with sinker-ballers (the two types of fastballs are grouped together), and sinkers are unlike four-seamers in two ways. First, they have less transverse spin in general. Second, they don’t need as much transverse spin, because the effect they produce is a pitch that rises less than a batter expects. As they’re still thrown with backspin, less movement means less rise. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Marcus Stroman accepting the qualifying offer and tweeting about Tony La Russa, what the AL Cy Young voting says about the Dodgers, and the singular greatness of the 2014-15 Royals, then answer listener emails about Noodles Hahn and how quickly former star players get forgotten, whether there should be three winners of each award in 2020, and proposed rules that could distinguish the AL from the NL in the post-pitcher hitting era (and whether it’s desirable to differentiate the leagues), plus a Stat Blast about a quirk in the MLB rulebook concerning rule 6.07 (the one about batting out of order).

Audio intro: Sloan, "Marcus Said"
Audio outro: John Lee Hooker, "I’m Leaving"

Link to Stroman’s comments on La Russa
Link to Sam’s ranking of NLCS team trades
Link to FiveThirtyEight on the 2014-15 Royals
Link to The Athletic article on the Hosmer play
Link to video of Hosmer play
Link to Ben on combining the Orioles and Royals
Link to Bill Hands interview episode
Link to Noodles Hahn book passage
Link to story about Bellinger and Seinfeld
Link to Conan O’Brien interview

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics.

Batters

Marcus Semien’s BABIP-aided regression to the mean was unwelcome, but Oakland received surprising production elsewhere from sources such as Robbie Grossman. That being said, the loss of Semien to free agency does create a bit of a vacuum, as a fair amount of the team’s depth at shortstop from the last few years (Franklin Barreto, Jorge Mateo, Jurickson Profar theoretically) has moved on to other organizations. Chad Pinder is likely the de facto shortstop if the season started today, but there’s a good chance that Oakland’s starter in 2021 is not in this set of projections, unless Semien returns. Normally I’d think a player of his caliber would be loath to sign a one-year deal, but given the circumstances of baseball in 2020, who knows if a multi-year deal is in his future. Suffice it to say, it would have been highly useful for the minor leagues to exist last season so that the A’s could have seen more of Vimael Machín or Nick Allen.

Oakland’s offense will go as far as their current Big Three — Matt Chapman, Ramón Laureano, and Matt Olson — take them. Second base and right field do show up as weaknesses in the projections, and this is another place where the lack of a minor league season hurts the A’s; they don’t sign free agents to big contracts, so getting to look at some of that Quadruple-A talent is a valuable exercise. ZiPS is sort of optimistic about Khris Davis, but after a second down season, the ceiling has been lowered farther than that early scene in the Wonka factory. Oakland’s top-level talent still keeps it in the high-80s in wins without a single move, but I’m quite uneasy about the team’s overall depth. Read the rest of this entry »

Devin Williams won the NL Rookie of the Year Award with 27 innings of pitching. They were 27 historically great innings, but 27 innings all the same — 22 appearances out of the bullpen, the equivalent of five or so starts if he were placed in the rotation. You could fit all of Williams’ 2020 inside one month if you wanted to; the only reason that wasn’t considered a more serious demerit is that the actual regular season only lasted two months. This year was about accomplishing as much as possible in a very short amount of time. With that in mind, let’s talk about Ke’Bryan Hayes.

Hayes, the Pirates’ 23-year-old third baseman, finished sixth in Rookie of the Year voting, trailing the three finalists as well as Dodgers right-handers Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May. You just saw a lot of Gonsolin and May, but there’s a good chance you still haven’t watched Hayes at all. He didn’t debut for the Pirates until September, after the team was already well on its way to securing the No. 1 pick with the worst record in baseball. No one sought this team out on MLB.TV, and two thirds of all teams didn’t even have Pittsburgh on its schedule. In case you haven’t updated yourself on Hayes outside of his annual prominence on top prospect lists, here’s what he did in his first game:

The very next inning, Kris Bryant decided to test out Hayes’ arm at third by charging home on a ground ball. It was a mistake: Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, I wrote about the National League’s current state of limbo regarding the continued use of the designated hitter. The Senior Circuit’s adoption of the DH was one of several rules changes included as part of MLB’s 2020-specific health and safety protocols, though both the league’s operations manual and commissioner Rob Manfred made clear that all of those changes would be undone once the season ended unless the players’ union agreed otherwise. While rules-related proposals are usually in place in time to be voted upon at the annual November owners meetings, this year’s assembly was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, and with MLB hoping the players will agree to some kind of expanded playoff format in exchange, it could be awhile before we get a resolution.

In writing Tuesday’s piece, I thought it would be interesting to take a page from the Jeff Sullivan playbook and invite FanGraphs’ readership to weigh in regarding not only the universal DH, but also the other rules that were adopted for 2020 but could revert back to their previous state. Several of these rules, or variations of them, had been kicked around in proposals for years, but few of us dreamed they would be put into action given their relatively radical nature. The shortened season created conditions that allowed some of them to audition on the big stage, and while many purists were mortified, a significant share of players, fans, and media found that even some of the more radical ones weren’t so bad after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the honest truth about baseball analysis: Most of the ideas I look into don’t work. That’s mostly hidden under the surface, because it’s not very interesting to read an article about absence of evidence. Hey, did you know that batters who hit very long home runs see no meaningful effect on the rest of their performance that day? I did, because I looked into that at one point, but imagine an article about that and you can kind of see the problem. Read a whole thing looking for a conclusion and find none, and you might be more than a little irritated.

Now that I’ve told you how bad of an idea it is to write about failed ideas, I’d like to introduce you to an article series about ideas that didn’t pan out. I know, I know: I was bemoaning the difficulty of writing such an article just sentences ago. Some failures, however, are more interesting than others, and I’d like to think that I know how to tell the difference. In this intermittent and haphazardly scheduled series, I’ll write about busted ideas that taught me something interesting in their failure, or that simply examine parts of the game that might otherwise escape notice.

In September of this year, I came up with an idea that spent the next month worming its way into my brain. We think of pitch movement as relative to zero, but that’s obviously not true. Sinkers rise more than a spin-less pitch thrown on the same trajectory would; they’re “risers”, in fact. Don’t tell a player that, though, because they’re not comparing these pitches to some meaningless theoretical pitch that no one throws. They’re comparing them to other fastballs, four-seamers to be specific, and if your brain is used to seeing four-seamers, sinkers do indeed sink. Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the first edition of my weekly chat since the end of the regular season! While the queue fills, I’ve got a bit of housekeeping….

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Here’s today’s dispatch, on the status of the universal DH and how a number of aging hitters are caught in limbo http://blogs.fangraphs.com/checking-in-on-the-status-of-the-universal-…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Here’s yesterday’s piece on the Indians’ plans to trade Francisco Lindor and how they’re complicated by the presence of so many other alternatives on this year’s market and next http://blogs.fangraphs.com/francisco-lindor-and-the-crowd-of-available…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: And, since he’s giving his re-introductory press conference right now, here’s last Friday’s piece on the Red Sox’s rehiring of Alex Cora http://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-inevitable-return-of-alex-cora-to-bosto…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: OK. As we tell our 4-year-old daughter, the question store is open….

Read the rest of this entry »

As if this winter’s free agent market needed anything else to slow it down, the fate of the universal designated hitter has yet to be settled. Like seven-inning doubleheader games and the extra innings runner-on-second rule, usage of the DH in NL games was considered to be part of MLB’s 2020-specific health and safety protocols rather than a permanent change, and so the subject must be revisited in talks between the players’ union and owners. Given the need for Senior Circuit teams to adapt their rosters accordingly, and for a number of free agents to generate competitive bidding and decide their destinations, it’s a decision that should be made as soon as possible, but… it’s complicated.

The possibility of using the DH in the NL for the 2020 season didn’t arise until mid-May, about two months after the coronavirus pandemic forced teams to shut down spring training. Not until late June, when the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed to return for a 60-game season, was the decision finalized; at that point a number of revised rules were shoehorned into the 2020 Operations Manual, whether or not they were directly related to player health and safety. Those rules, which “shall apply during the 2020 championship season and postseason only,” included:

• The universal DH.
• The extra-innings rule that begins each half-inning after the ninth with a runner on second base.
• An override of the previously introduced rule limiting the usage of position players as pitchers to extra innings or depending upon the score deficit
• The three-batter minimum rule for pitchers.
• The continuation of suspended games shorter than five innings.
• The allowance for pitchers to carry a wet rag in their back pocket for the purpose of providing moisture as a substitute for licking fingers.

Read the rest of this entry »