Hello, and welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’ll keep the introduction short today, because I’m getting ready to travel to St. Louis for a game with my dad and uncle. There’s a Masyn Winn bobblehead ticketed for my memorabilia shelf – and a pile of enjoyable plays to recap before I can go get it. So, of course, thank you to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose NBA columns of likes and dislikes inspired this one, and let’s get started.
1. The Weekend of Wilmer
I have a soft spot for Wilmer Flores through a sheer fluke of geography. I lived in New York during his Mets tenure, and I moved to San Francisco around the same time he did. His walk-up music has been the same for the last decade: the Friends theme song. It’s a fan favorite and even comes with a good story. He’s the quintessential role player, a guy that most teams would love to have but no team needs to have. He’s been pitching in across the diamond, albeit in decreasingly difficult defensive roles, that whole time. With the exception of a down 2024, he’s been consistently valuable, but he’s never been a star – the closest thing I know to a Wilmer Flores highlight is his charming sadness when he thought he was getting traded.
For just one weekend, though, that all changed. Flores has been improbably dueling with Aaron Judge for the major league RBI lead throughout the first eight weeks of the season. RBI might not be a great predictive stat, and it might not be a great stat overall, but it definitely matters to players. Fancier versions of measuring contextual offense – WPA, RE24, and so on – all think that Flores has been a top 10 run producer this year, too. He’d fallen behind Judge by just a hair in those races – and probably has no chance at keeping up all season. I mean, have you seen Aaron Judge? But none of that mattered when the Giants played the A’s last weekend. Read the rest of this entry »
He doesn’t look like he’s riding a horse so much as he looks like he’s pretending to ride a horse. I have been thinking about it for a while now, and that is as well as I can describe the way Jacob Wilson gets ready for the pitch. He looks like he’s pretending to ride a horse. I say this with love.
Baseball is hard. The ball is small and very dense. A big, strong man stands not very far away and repeatedly throws it pretty much right at you with a great deal of force. The ball performs all sorts of twists and turns on its short journey toward almost breaking your fragile human body, and not only are you expected to not run away, you’re expected to hit it with a stick. So if the only way that you can manage to do all that is by pretending to ride a horse for a few seconds while you’re waiting for the missile to be launched, then by all means, pretend to ride a horse for a few seconds:
(I started writing this article the day after the Statcast team released all their new fancy bat tracking information, including wireframe models of every player’s average swing. Naturally, I offered MLB.com’s Mike Petriello $20 to find me a few seconds of wireframe footage of Wilson doing his bouncy pre-pitch routine. He declined like a principled jerk, even after I upped the offer to $23.) Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Rich Hill’s latest perfect game bid, whether the Tigers are as good as they’ve looked, Jared Jones’ elbow surgery and the Pirates’ offensive outage, Paul Skenes and whether lower arm slots will protect pitchers’ arms, Pete Crow-Armstrong and the players who’ve ascended to “main character” status this season, and more listener suggestions for what to call tandem home run robberies and homers that clear the fence due to defensive miscues.
After missing significant chunks of the past three seasons due to injuries — including all but 26 games last year — Trevor Story has been healthy enough to play in 48 of the Red Sox’ first 51 games. He hit well over the first few weeks of the season, but lately he’s fallen into a deep slump. With Boston struggling to climb above .500 but awash in promising young players, he may wind up fighting for his job.
The 32-year-old Story entered this season having played just 163 games since the Red Sox signed him to a six-year, $140 million deal in March 2022. He played just 94 games in 2022 due to a hairline fracture in his right wrist and a contusion on his left heel, then just 43 in ’23 after undergoing internal brace surgery to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament, and 26 last year before fracturing the glenoid rim and tearing the posterior labrum of his left shoulder. That’s not only a lot of time missed — basically two seasons out of three — but it’s also time missed at a pivotal juncture in his career. Even without catastrophic injuries, not many players are the same at 32 as they were at 28, and the version of Story capable of producing at least 20 homers and 20 steals while providing strong defense at shortstop may be gone.
Through Wednesday, Story has hit for just a 65 wRC+, the seventh-lowest mark among AL qualifiers. That’s bad enough, but his recent performance looks even even worse if we simply split his game log down the middle, with 24 games played on each side:
Yesterday, I wrote an introduction to Statcast’s latest round of bat tracking metrics. MLB.com’s Mike Petriello wrote a real primer, so I tried to build on that by analyzing how the different metrics work together using a couple common pitch types. We’re still figuring out how to use these new toys, but today I’d like to explain how my first dive into the bat tracking metrics led me to one particular player who is doing something weird, which led me to learn something small about the way swings work. After all, that’s why we’re here exploring all these strange new numbers in the first place.
In my first shot at playing with the metrics, I tried to establish something simple. I pulled the overall bat tracking data for all qualified players, and I focused on Attack Direction, which tells you the horizontal angle of the bat at the moment of contact (or, in the case of a whiff, at the moment when the bat is closest to the ball). That seemed pretty straightforward to me. As with most bat tracking metrics, it’s also a timing and location metric. You generally need to meet inside pitches further out in front of home plate. If you’re behind the pitch, your bat will be angled toward the opposite field, and you won’t pull the ball. If you’re out in front of the pitch, your bat will be angled toward the pull side, and you’ll pull it. A player’s average Attack Direction should correlate pretty well with their pull rate, and the numbers pretty much bear that out. Attack Direction and pull rate have a .60 correlation coefficient:
Most of the dots are clustered around that very clear trendline. Players who pull the ball more tend to have their bats angled toward the pull side just as you’d expect. What interested me was that green dot way at the bottom. It belongs to Leody Taveras. I guess it is Leody Taveras, if we really believe in our graphs, which we probably should at this particular website.
Taveras has a moderately low Attack Direction, four degrees to the pull side, but he’s got the third-lowest pull rate of any player on this chart. I couldn’t help wondering how exactly he was doing that. Before I dug into it too deeply, I was reminded that the fact that he’s a switch-hitter might have something to do with it. So I pulled the data again, this time separating out all players by handedness. On the chart below, switch-hitters will appear twice:
The correlation isn’t quite as strong, because switch-hitters are now broken into two different players with two smaller samples (that’s how small-sample right-handed Patrick Bailey got way down at the bottom). But there are two green dots now! And they’re both Leody Taveras! From both sides of the plate, Taveras looks like he should have a pull rate that’s a bit above average, and instead has one of the very lowest pull rates in the game. At this point, I was officially curious, so I started poking around.
First, I specifically looked at Attack Direction on balls hit to the opposite field. Since the start of bat tracking midway through the 2023 season, when Taveras hits the ball the other way, his average Attack Direction is three degrees toward the opposite field. Only four players in baseball have an average Attack Direction that’s less oriented toward the opposite field. Oddly, they’re all sluggers. Salvador Perez, Yordan Alvarez, Aaron Judge, and José Ramírez are all at two degrees toward the opposite field, and Austin Riley is tied with Taveras at three degrees. Taveras is definitely not a slugger. He could not be more different from these five guys. So not only is he doing something way different from most hitters when he goes the opposite way, but the only players out on that ledge with him have completely different swings than he does. There really is something weird about him.
Next, I tried looking specifically for balls hit to the opposite field even though the bat was angled toward the pull side at the moment. Just 21% of balls hit to the opposite field have the bat angled toward the pull side at all. I ran a Baseball Savant search, setting the minimum Attack Direction at seven degrees toward the pull side. Since bat tracking started, 5.5% of Taveras’s batted balls have fallen into this category. Among the 375 players with at least 200 BIP over that period, that’s the 11th-highest rate. Elehuris Montero is the champion at a shocking 10.5%, but no player who has put as many balls in play as Taveras has run as high a rate as he has.
At that point, I decided to look at individual balls that fell into this category: balls that go to the opposite field even though the bat is angled toward the pull side at contact. How exactly does this happen? Try to picture it in your mind. If the bat is angled toward the pull side, and it’s being swung in that direction anyway, how does the ball end up going in the opposite direction? There are two main answers. Here’s the less common way:
That’s Taveras way, way out in front of a curveball, hitting it off the very end of his bat. He cued it up so perfectly that if the end of his bat were cupped, the ball might have just gotten stuck in there. So that’s one way to do it. In fact, 21% of the balls we’re looking at, hit to the opposite field even though the Attack Direction is seven or more degrees to the pull side, are squibbers hit off the end of the bat below 80 mph. That’s one way to do it.
The other way is much more common, and it looks like this:
Of those same balls, hit to the opposite field even though the Attack Direction is seven or more degrees to the pull side, 50% are classified as popups, and 65% have a launch angle above 38 degrees. Basically, when you hit a ball in that weird manner, it’s almost always going to be either a cue shot or a popup. Leody Taveras taught me that.
This has a lot to do with Attack Angle. If your bat were perfectly parallel to the ground, but angled toward the pull side, it would be pretty much impossible to hit the ball the other way. But when you pop the ball up, you’re not hitting it flush. You’re getting under it. And regardless of the situation, your bat is almost never parallel to the ground. According to Statcast, the bat is angled downward on more than 80% of swings. If you just look at popups, that number is up above 90%. About half of popups come on four-seamers and cutters, where the batter has trouble catching up and swings just under the pitch. The rest come on softer stuff, and those pitches are usually low in the zone. I need you to do some 3D visualization in your head here, because my diagram is not very good:
On the left is a perfectly level bat, parallel with the front of the plate. Now imagine you’re angling your bat downward and you get just underneath the ball. If your bat is angled toward the opposite field or, as in the middle example, straight toward center field, you’ll likely just foul the ball off behind you or into the opposite field stands. Once you angle it toward the pull side, however, it can stay fair, bouncing up and toward the opposite field. Please imagine that the bat on the right looks so funky because it’s foreshortened, pointed out toward the first baseman. Taveras can show us what that looks like in the real world:
If his Attack Direction were zero, he would’ve fouled the ball up and into the stands down the third base line. He only kept it fair because of his Attack Direction of 18 degrees.
Look, I don’t have a big takeaway here. I just think this interesting. I think it highlights the way that the angle of the bat informs even the most mundane batted balls. If you’d asked me yesterday whether it’s possible to go the opposite way while your bat was angled toward the pull side, I would’ve had to think about it, but my first reaction would’ve been to say no. The bat and ball move through space so quickly that they can be hard to track, but the bat tracking metrics help explain why exactly Taveras pops out so very, very often, and how it’s even possible to hit a ball like that in the first place.
Everyone should have one weird player they love. If I were commissioner of baseball, this would be part of my pitch to fans. There are a million different ways to succeed in this sport we all love, and if you only like the guys who swing hard, throw fast, and run well, you’d miss the splashes of color that dot the sport. Tyler Rogers pitches upside down. Jose Altuve is small but mighty. Luis Arraez swings slowly on purpose. Then you’ve got my personal favorite, Isaac Paredes, who is among the league leaders in WAR thanks to his one weird trick.
That weird trick is incredibly valuable: pulling the ball in the air. Take a look at the distribution of his aerial contact this year:
Paredes isn’t going to wow you with barrels. His hard-hit rate is among the league’s lowest. Many of those home runs look farcical. This one would be out of only five parks:
I know, I know, this isn’t news. I’ve beenwriting about Paredes’ pull-only power for years, marveling at his ability to rack up star-level production with journeyman-level raw tools. Since the start of the 2022 season, when he first became an everyday regular, he’s been worth about as much WAR as Bryce Harper (11.9 to Harper’s 12.4) in about as many plate appearances (1,798 to Harper’s 1,818). Some of that is defense, but even if you want to compare him on the offensive end, he’s matched Carlos Correa, Anthony Santander, and Corbin Carroll at the plate. Read the rest of this entry »
Connelly Early has emerged as one of Boston’s best pitching prospects. A fifth-round pick in 2023 out of the University of Virginia — he’d spent his first two collegiate seasons at Army — the 23-year-old left-hander has a 40.4% strikeout rate, a 1.88 ERA, and a 1.73 FIP over six appearances comprising 24 innings with Double-A Portland. Moreover, he’s allowed just 12 hits, none of which have left the yard. Assigned a 35+ FV when our 2024 Red Sox Top Prospects list came out last July, he was recently added to The Board for 2025 and bumped up to a 45+.
Early began opening eyes last summer in his first full professional season. Effectively establishing himself as a sleeper within a well-stocked Red Sox system, the Midlothian, Virginia native threw 103 2/3 innings between his current level and High-A, logging a 3.99 ERA and a 3.24 FIP, as well as a 30.8% strikeout rate that ranked highest among Boston farmhands who threw at least 80 frames. Early did so with both a better understanding of his craft and a revamped repertoire.
“From college, the only same grip I have is my [four-seam] fastball,” Early told me at the onset of the current campaign. “My changeup is completely different. The curveball grip is different. The sweeper is completely new. My cutter/gyro slider is pretty much the same, but I’ve worked a lot more on it this year than I did in college.” Read the rest of this entry »
Aaron Nola is having a truly awful season: Through nine starts, he’s 1-7 with a 6.16 ERA, which is bad for any pitcher. For the putative no. 2 starter on a big-market team whose fans are getting pretty tetchy about not having won a World Series in a while, it’s disastrous. Especially when said pitcher is in year two of a seven-year, $172 million contract. In fact, you’d have to say Nola has been surpassed in the pecking order by Cristopher Sánchez at the very least, and possibly by newcomer Jesús Luzardo.
Everyone’s got their theories as to what’s gone wrong. Davy Andrews tried to figure out Nola’s deal last month. Timothy Jackson of Baseball Prospectusspeculated earlier this week that there’s something off with his fastball, and that lefty-heavy opposing lineups might be to blame. The Phillies, for their part, just put Nola on the (non-COVID) IL for the first time in almost eight years. The stated reason is an ankle injury Nola says is messing up his mechanics, but a player in a slump this bad can almost always use some time off to clear his head as well. Read the rest of this entry »
The Reds rotation has been an undeniable strength this season. The team’s starters are third in park- and league-adjusted ERA, and their collective peripherals mostly back it up; they’re 10th in park- and league-adjusted FIP. Hunter Greene has been phenomenal, Nick Lodolo has made some key command improvements, and Brady Singer has added a secret ingredient, though his ERA has ballooned to over 5.00 since Michael Baumann wrote about him last month. But the pitcher leading the team in ERA is Andrew Abbott, and before Baumann can write about his third Cincinnati starter this year, I’d like to take a stab at puzzling out what’s gone right for the 25-year-old lefty.
What if I told you that while Abbott’s fastball is coming in about a tick slower than normal and his arm slot is five degrees higher than usual, he has somehow managed to slightly improve the pitch’s Stuff+ score? You might be a bit confused, as the trend for many pitchers has been to try and lower their arm slot in an effort to flatten out their four-seamers. A flatter approach angle often leads to more swings and misses at the top of the zone and weaker contact, as batters have trouble squaring up a pitch that looks like it’s rising above their bat. Abbott has always had a high release point, but his 50 degree arm angle is now the 11th-highest arm slot among qualified left-handed pitchers.
Researchinto the relationship between a pitcher’s arm slot and the shape of their pitches has shown that as a pitcher’s arm slot rises, they’re able to generate more backspin. More backspin allows them to create more induced vertical break (IVB). Put simply, IVB is a function of arm angle. The other thing about a high arm angle is that purer backspin fastballs tend to cut less horizontally. Abbott has managed something somewhat tricky with his new arm slot:
Andrew Abbott, Fastball Characteristics
Year
Velocity
Arm Angle
Vertical Release Angle
Vertical IVB
Horizontal Break
Vertical Approach Angle Above Average
Average Vertical Location
2023
92.7
45.8°
-1.9°
16.3
7.8
+0.18°
2.79
2024
92.8
44.9°
-1.9°
16.3
8.9
+0.06°
2.80
2025
91.8
49.5°
-2.2°
16.4
8.5
-0.21°
2.67
Despite the higher release angle, Abbott hasn’t experienced a corresponding increase in the amount of carry on his heater. The other odd thing is that he’s been able to maintain the higher-than-normal horizontal break he generates with the pitch. Because he’s now throwing from a higher slot, the pitch has a much steeper approach angle, and the pitch’s cutter-esque shape provides a wider horizontal approach angle.
Abbott’s four-seamer now stands out both because it doesn’t carry as much and because it cuts more than you’d expect. A “dead zone” fastball describes a pitch with unspectacular movement traits — a fastball that moves as expected. Research has shown that a fastball’s dead zone is a function of the pitcher’s arm angle, leading to the concept of a dynamic dead zone (DDZ). Using Alex Chamberlain’s calculated DDZ deltas (based on work done by Max Bay), we can see just how much Abbott’s fastball falls outside of what the batter expects based on his arm slot:
Andrew Abbott, Fastball Dead Zone
Year
Vertical Dead Zone Delta
Horizontal Dead Zone Delta
2023
+0.2
+1.4
2024
-0.4
+1.8
2025
-0.4
+2.8
Remember, magnitude is what matters when evaluating a pitcher’s DDZ, so Abbott’s negative vertical dead zone delta isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though his +2.8 horizontal dead zone delta is very much a good thing.
The results have been positive so far. His whiff rate on the pitch has improved from just over 19% during his first two seasons to 25.2% this year. The additional swings and misses are nice, but he’s also turned his heater into a contact-suppression monster. Just look at some of these key contact metrics from Statcast:
Andrew Abbott, Fastball Contact Suppression
Year
Whiff%
xwOBAcon
Hard Hit%
Barrel%
Squared Up% / Swing
Blast% / Swing
2023
19.80%
0.447
51.0%
12.6%
24.3%
11.8%
2024
19.40%
0.395
43.2%
11.3%
25.5%
9.4%
2025
25.20%
0.297
26.7%
8.9%
16.3%
4.9%
Abbott’s expected wOBA on contact when he throws his fastball is just .297, 17th among the 248 pitchers who have thrown at least 100 four-seamers this year. The hard-hit and barrel rates against the pitch are miniscule. The most impressive aspect of his contact management comes from Statcast’s new bat tracking data. Opposing batters produce the second-highest average bat speed in baseball against Abbott’s fastball, but they “square-up” the pitch at the third-lowest rate on a per swing basis and they produce a “blast” against his heater at the fourth-lowest rate in baseball. In other words, batters really gear up when they see Abbott’s fastball because their eyes are telling them that the pitch is very hittable, but they simply cannot make solid contact against it.
To connect this all back to the pitch’s shape, I expect that this contact suppression is all linked to the amount of horizontal break Abbott generates with his fastball. With his high arm slot, a batter expects to see a straight four-seamer with tons of carry. Instead, they’re presented with a cutting fastball that doesn’t have as much carry as you’d expect. Rather than swing completely under the pitch like they might if it had a ton of carry, they’ll often put it in play, but it’s weak contact because the pitch doesn’t come in where they expect it to horizontally. So much of the contact he generates with the pitch is off the end of the bat or in on the handle, leading to weak fly balls and popups.
Of course, location matters, too. In the first table above, I included average vertical location, because location is a critical component of vertical approach angle. Abbott is locating his fastball much lower in the strike zone this year, which, along with his higher arm slot, has contributed to his steeper approach angle. He’s also been very consistent with his location on the outer half of the plate to right-handed batters:
Because the horizontal break on the pitch causes it to tail away from righties, his location is perfect for inducing weak contact off the end of the bat while avoiding the barrel if it ends up over the heart of the plate.
In case you were worried about Abbott’s dip in velocity, I’m happy to report that his heater has had a bit more zip during his last few starts:
A shoulder injury last August cut short his 2024 season, and he entered spring training a little bit behind schedule because of it. I suspect that he was still ramping up during his first few starts of the season and that his velocity will be back to normal moving forward.
Beyond his fastball and the new arm slot, there’s one key change to the rest of Abbott’s repertoire that could be contributing to his success. He’s getting about three more inches of drop on his changeup while still maintaining the pitch’s above-average horizontal break. The whiff rate on that pitch has improved by about four points, and the expected wOBA against it is just .222. More importantly, the change in shape has allowed him to differentiate the pitch from his fastball a bit more:
Please excuse the color differences from year to year in the plots above. In Abbott’s pitch plot from 2024 on the left, his changeup (the black blob) somewhat overlaps with his fastball (the blue blob). In 2025, on the right, his offspeed pitch (the green blog) is wholly distinct from his heater (the blue blob).
Abbott briefly discussed the evolution of the pitch with Charlie Goldsmith of the Dayton Daily News in late April:
It’s come a long way. I talked with Nick Martinez and a bunch of the guys about how to throw it, grips and all of that stuff. It’s finally coming around. It’s not to where I think it can be yet, but it’s gotten a lot more consistent.
He has increased his use of his changeup from 16.3% last year to 21.3% this year, and it has proven to be a potent weapon against right-handed batters.
With a new arm slot, a deceptive fastball, and an improved changeup in hand, Abbott has truly elevated his arsenal. His walk rate is a little high right now, but his strikeout rate is 30.3%, and the contact suppression improvements he’s made to his heater have almost entirely negated those additional free passes. The top-line results certainly speak for themselves: Abbott has allowed more than one run in just one of his starts this year, and that happened to be the only start in which he’s allowed more than four hits. As long as batters are unable to square up his fastball, we could be seeing a significant step forward from the young lefty.
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Give a Gift Subscription
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Spotify Feed
Facebook Group
Bluesky Account
Twitter Account
Get Our Merch!
Dan Szymborski
