Since he was drafted in the second round in 2015, Tigers left-hander Tyler Alexander barely needs two hands to count the number of times he’s struck out nine batters in a game. There was the first time, on April 23, 2016, when he was in High-A. There were two other nine-strikeout performances in 2017, and two more in the minors in 2019, along with one occasion in the majors in just his third big league appearance. That’s six instances of at least nine strikeouts in 126 career appearances as a pro, each one coming in a game he started.

On Sunday, Alexander struck out nine batters in a row. Not over the course of six or seven innings — just one right after another. Entering as a reliever in the third inning of the first game of Detroit’s doubleheader against the Reds, Alexander set the record for consecutive strikeouts in a relief appearance, and tied the American League record for consecutive strikeouts by any pitcher. And a two-strike fastball that drilled Mike Moustakas on his left arm is all that stopped Alexander from tying Tom Seaver for MLB’s all-time record. Actually, because he struck out Eugenio Suárez immediately after plunking Moustakas, that stray heater is all that stopped Alexander from having the longest strikeout streak in baseball history.

By any definition, it will go down as one of the most dominant relief appearances of the season. Of the 55 pitches Alexander threw on Sunday, 16 were called strikes, while 22 induced swings. Of those 22 swings, 11 were whiffs, and none resulted in a ball put in play. For 3.2 innings, Alexander was untouchable. That’s unquestionably a great day for him, and to a lesser extent, it’s also a good day for every other pitcher in baseball, because Alexander’s performance shows this is probably something any pitcher in baseball could achieve.

This isn’t to take anything away from Alexander. Every pitcher on earth would love to simply strike out every hitter he faces without ever allowing the ball to be put in play — that doesn’t mean anyone ever actually accomplishes it. It’s one thing to try to strike out nine guys in a row, and another to actually do it. In order to close that gap, one would think a pitcher would need to be working with some truly elite, lights-out stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs, it would not be surprising if you describe your feelings about Tyler Chatwood as some kind of frustrated exasperation. Able to survive in the mile-high environment of Coors Field despite occasionally spotty control and an inability to punch out batters, the Cubs expected that Chatwood would do even better in the friendly confines of Wrigley; the days when the wind is blowing out in Chicago weren’t supposed to be much of a problem for a pitcher who largely avoided giving up big home run totals in Colorado. On that assumption, the Cubs signed Chatwood to a three-year, $38 million contract before the 2018 season.

Suffice it to say, 2018 did not go as anyone predicted or hoped, except maybe Cardinals fans. Chatwood’s season started deceptively well, with a 2.83 ERA in April, but 22 walks in 28 2/3 innings suggested trouble. After throwing seven shutout innings against the Brewers on April 29 of that year, he went three months without a single quality start and walked at least two batters in every game. The team’s acquisition of Cole Hamels resulted in Chatwood’s exile to the bullpen, where he was little-used until injuring his hip in an emergency start as a replacement for Mike Montgomery. A non-factor in the pennant race that September, Chatwood’s 103 2/3 innings of work for the season was still enough time to amass a league-leading 95 walks.

2019 went better, but Chatwood’s role was mostly that of a fill-in starter and low-leverage reliever and mop-up guy. His 4.28 FIP in relief didn’t send a tingle down anyone’s spine, and his decision to largely abandon his secondary stuff didn’t seem like a likely ticket back to the rotation. However in the second half, he did tinker with his cutter’s grip after recognizing an issue with the pitch, which he had largely moved away from in 2019:

https://twitter.com/MLBastian/status/1289773139409297408

Read the rest of this entry »

Don Cooper’s playing career wasn’t anyhing to write home about. The longtime Chicago White Sox pitching coach made 44 appearances, and threw 85-and-a-third innings, for the Twins, Blue Jays, and Yankees from 1981-1985. His won-lost record was an undistinguished 1-6, his ERA an untenable 5.27. The bulk of his time was spent down on the farm.

He did have a good Uncle Charlie.

“Coop had one of the best curveballs I ever saw,” said Showalter, who was Cooper’s teammate for a pair of Double-A seasons. “He had one of those curveballs you could hear coming out of the hand. We used to call it ‘the bowel locker’ — it would lock your bowels up. He’d sit in the dugout between outings, and all he’d do is flip a ball; he was always trying to get the right spin on it. You could hear it snap. Man, could he spin a curveball. Holy [crap]. It was tight.”

Showalter chose not to compare Cooper’s curveball to that of any particular pitchers, but he did throw out some names when I asked who else stood out for the quality of his hook.

“Scott Sanderson had a great curveball,” said Showalter. “Dwight Gooden had a great curveball; you could hear that one coming. Jimmy Key had a great curveball, although his was bigger. Mike Mussina used to invent pitches. One common thing about all those pitchers is that they had a great hand. If you said that to a scout, he’d know exactly what you were talking about. Mariano Rivera had a great hand. He could manipulate the ball. David Cone had a great hand. Curt Schilling. Kevin Millwood is another. He could do things with a baseball; his hands were huge.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the coronavirus spreading to the NL Central, the difficulties MLB faces compared to other sports leagues, the dramatic changes that the pandemic has imposed on the sport, why robot umps aren’t part of the pandemic makeover, the jarring visuals of virtual fans, the promotion of Nick Madrigal and the overlap of good and bad baseball news, the latest vexing comments by Astros owner Jim Crane, the power of pitcher deception and the potential to quantify it, and reports that the season could soon cease if conditions don’t improve, plus a follow-up addendum about why the automatic-runner rule shortens games.

Audio intro: John Lennon, "Borrowed Time"
Audio outro: Dr. Feelgood, "One Weekend"

Link to Jay Jaffe on the latest positive tests
Link to Ben Clemens on a baseball bubble
Link to GIF of Nelson Cruz and virtual fans
Link to Jim Crane article
Link to Josh Flowerman on reliever sequencing
Link to Hareeb al-Saq on reliever sequencing
Link to Ben on the knuckleball hangover effect
Link to Ben on perceived velocity
Link to Jon Anderson on quantifying pitcher deception
Link to Jeff Long on pitcher deception
Link to Eno Sarris on pitcher deception
Link to Eno on Yusmeiro Petit’s invisiball
Link to Johnny Cueto Statcast wireframe shimmy
Link to Passan report
Link to Ben Clemens on Passan’s report
Link to Ben on Nick Madrigal

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In case it wasn’t clear from the fact that six different teams, a full 20% of the league, have already faced cancelations due to positive COVID-19 tests on the Marlins, Phillies, and Cardinals, Rob Manfred put it in plain terms today:

BREAKING: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told MLBPA executive director Tony Clark on Friday that if the sport doesn’t do a better job of managing the coronavirus, it could shut down for the season, sources tell ESPN.

Story at ESPN: https://t.co/o0OL7JzowN

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 31, 2020

While the specifics of his call with Clark haven’t been made public, the broad strokes are known. If positive tests jump, and particularly if there is another Marlins-like outbreak, the season will likely end. Given that the second round of Cardinals’ testing hasn’t come back, that could happen as soon as Monday.

There’s no sugar coating it: everyone has to do better. Public health officials have confronted the league about players ignoring its own protocols. Watch a game, and you’ll see a hodgepodge of masked and unmasked players, plenty of finger-licking, and about as much spitting as you would see in the pre-pandemic world. It’s fair to say that players also haven’t taken social distancing and self-enforced isolation as seriously as many hoped when the plan for the season went ahead. Passan quotes one high-ranking official as saying, “There are some bad decisions being made.” Meanwhile, Bleacher Report’s Scott Miller reported that Marlins players went out and visited the hotel bar while in Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a glance at the early season position player WAR leaders and you’ll find Mike Yastrzemski leading all of MLB, making his grandfather proud. Next you’ll find José Ramirez on his quest to show that last year’s struggles were just a blip. The player with the third-highest WAR in this young campaign is Mariners center fielder Kyle Lewis, who was leading the category yesterday. After a sparkling debut last September, Lewis is proving that his hot start wasn’t a fluke.

With another two yesterday, Lewis has now collected hits in all seven games this season and has strung together five multi-hit performances in a row. All told, he’s hit .448/.500/.655 this year and owns a .320/.355/.610 line in his young career. His historic September included blasting home runs in his first three major league games, becoming just the second player in history to accomplish the feat. He would go on to hit three more through the first 10 games of his career.

But that success came with some glaring red flags. He posted a 38.7% strikeout rate last year, and it is only a touch lower so far this season. His tendency to swing and miss often only confirmed the skepticism some had about his hit tool. His swinging strike rate is a bit lower this year (from 17.7% to 15.2%), and his underlying plate discipline stats look a little better — a lower overall swing rate, particularly on pitches out of the zone — but his high strikeout rate will likely follow him throughout his career. Thriving in the majors with such a high swinging strike rate is difficult but not impossible. Bryce Harper ran a 15.3% swinging strike rate last season while posting a 125 wRC+. The difference for Lewis is that many of those whiffs are coming with two strikes, driving up his strikeout rate. Harper can survive with such a high swinging strike rate because he’s aggressive early in the count but adjusts his approach with two strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

The impact of the Marlins’ outbreak of coronavirus and Sunday’s ill-fated decision to allow the team to play the Phillies continues to resonate throughout major league baseball. Both teams have now reported more positive tests within their organizations, and more games have been postponed, causing a ripple effect within the schedule. Meanwhile, the league is reportedly upgrading its protocols, has launched an investigation into the outbreak, and has reached an agreement with the Major League Baseball Players Association to reduce doubleheader games to seven innings apiece, just as the necessity for such twin bills appears to be increasing by the day as the postponements mount.

How necessary? On Friday morning, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that the night’s game between the Cardinals and Brewers — neither of which team has crossed paths with the Marlins or Phillies — has been postponed as well due to multiple positive tests on the Cardinals. Sportsgrid’s Craig Mish followed up with a report that it’s two players infected. The team has been instructed to self-isolate. In other words, a new front in MLB’s battle to forge ahead has opened up.

Folks, it’s going great.

Since publishing my latest update on the subject on Wednesday morning, three additional Marlins players, all as yet unidentified, have tested positive, bringing the team’s total to 18 players and two coaches. The majority of those players are unidentified, but among those reported to be infected are catcher Jorge Alfaro, first baseman Garrett Cooper, shortstop Miguel Rojas, right fielder Harold Ramirez, and starters Sandy Alcantara and José Ureña. ESPN’s Jesse Rogers reports that the infected players and other personnel will be driven back to Miami on sleeper buses, while the rest will continue on their road trip. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part Two of a wide-ranging interview — the conversation took place on July 26 — with Seattle Mariners farm director Andy McKay. Part One can be found here.

——

David Laurila: Given your background, do your player-development philosophies differ from most people in your role?

Andy McKay: “I don’t know, because I don’t spend a ton of time evaluating the others. I just know that my background as a teacher, and a mental-skills coach, is something that kind of sits in the middle of our department. Everything is important. What I mean by that is, you can make or break a player in the weight room, the training room, the batting cage, in a bullpen. You can make or break them with nutrition. All of those things are critical, and the mental skills component is what allows them to actually surface during competition. The fact that my background is heavy in mental skills, we probably prioritize that a little differently than most.”

Laurila: How does that mesh with your reliance on data?

McKay: “It’s a need for clarity. Mental skills should completely embrace tech. Why would we want to coach players with opinions when we can do it with evidence? What will better allow a player to be more confident, my opinion or evidence — you know, clarity or wishy-washy verbiage? So the two have melded very well together. Ultimately, we want to be the best in baseball at telling the truth. We want that to be our competitive advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This research was completed while Charles Young was still a student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

It’s hard to imagine that an obscure property of the baseball known as the “drag coefficient,” a quantity well known to physicists but hardly to baseball people, would become part of the baseball vernacular. But it has, thanks in no small part to the rapid increase in home runs in major league baseball over the past several years and the conclusion of many people that that increase is due to changes in this otherwise elusive drag coefficient (C_D). In fact, the committee of scientists and engineers commissioned by MLB to determine the causes for the recent surge in home runs found that the principal reason was a reduction in drag coefficients between 2015 and 2017. In a follow-up report, the committee found that the decrease in home runs in 2018 and the increase in 2019 were due, in part, to changes to C_D.

One remarkable finding was that a change in the average C_D value of a baseball by as little as 0.01 (about 3%) would change the distance of a fly ball on a typical home run trajectory by four to five feet, leading to an increase in home run probability of about 10-12%. Equally interesting was the finding that the ball-to-ball variation in C_D within a given season was large compared to the small shift in mean value needed to explain the home run surge.

While the primary focus of recent research has been on the evolution of mean values of drag coefficients, we are aware of no serious studies of how the ball-to-ball variation in C_D has evolved over the years, the focus of the present article. We start with a simple discussion of drag and what it depends on in Section II. Next, in Section III, we discuss several caveats related to the method used to determine C_D values from publicly available pitch-tracking data. Then in Section IV, we get to the heart of the analysis before getting to the principal results in Section V. A summary is given at the end.

II. What is the Drag Coefficient?

When a baseball travels through the air, it collides with air molecules, in effect pushing them out of the way. With each collision, the ball loses a tiny bit of speed, though not nearly enough to result in any measurable difference to the speed of ball. But there are many such collisions, with the net effect being that the baseball slows down significantly. For example, a pitched baseball loses about 9-10% of its speed over the roughly 55-foot distance between release and home plate, so that a ball released at, say, 95 mph is only moving at 86 mph as it crosses home plate. The effect on a fly ball is even greater, since the path length is longer and the ball experiences many more collisions with air molecules, resulting in a huge loss of distance. In fact, a typical 400-foot fly ball in the presence of air would travel over 700 foot in a vacuum if otherwise hit identically. That’s a huge effect. The larger the drag force, the more the ball slows down and the less it carries. Conversely, the smaller the drag force, the more it carries. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday evening, Beau Taylor hurt his hand. That is, of course, an occupational hazard of catching; pretty much everything a catcher does hurts their hands. Johnny Bench might be able to hold seven hamburgers in his hand, but have you seen that paw? Yikes!

In any case, Taylor didn’t hurt his hand in any of the more normal ways that catchers do. He didn’t jam it into the ground trying to smother a ball in the dirt, or take a foul tip ricochet off the base of his palm. No, he caught Edwin Encarnación’s bat with the tip of his glove, and though he tried to play it off, this has to have stung:

That will smart for a few days, and the situation was a tough one as well. It’s painful (see what I did there?) to advance a runner to third with only one out, particularly in a one run game in the ninth inning. The difference between needing one and two runs to tie is a big deal; it roughly halves your chances of a comeback. That isn’t to say that Taylor’s catcher’s interference cost Cleveland the game — they didn’t score in the bottom of the frame, so it hardly mattered. But it was a bit of foreshadowing of what was to come. Read the rest of this entry »