Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about family members not attending big league debuts and how teams and broadcasts could make better use of empty ballparks, audible profanity on the field, the rapid change in public opinion of the extra-innings automatic-runner rule, why the rule works as well as it does, the magnitude and causes of the pitcher injury spike through the first week of the season, the desirability of TV cameras mounted on drones, the difficulty of walking straight while blindfolded, and more, plus a Stat Blast about expectant parent Mike Trout’s reputed penchant for leading the league in a variety of statistical categories.

Audio intro: The Rolling Stones, "This Place is Empty"
Audio outro: The White Stripes, "Expecting"

Link to report about new sign-stealing punishments
Link to Zach Buchanan on debuts without family or fans
Link to Marc Carig on baseball broadcast profanity
Link to clip of Reddick cursing
Link to Astros-Dodgers dust-up video
Link to Sam on the automatic-runner rule
Link to Anthony Castrovince on the automatic-runner rule
Link to the new rule’s actual game-shortening results
Link to the new rule’s theoretical game-shortening results
Link to Theodor Bierhoff’s second Stat Blast song cover
Link to Ben on Trout’s bold ink

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The nerves were easy to see in the eyes of Nate Pearson during the third batter of Wednesday’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Washington Nationals. It was the 23-year-old right-hander’s major league debut, and he had just allowed the first baserunner of his career on a four-pitch walk to Adam Eaton. With the camera aimed at first base, viewers saw Eaton get a big lead, then take another step, then another. Pearson never looked his way. His eyes were straight ahead, beads of sweat already forming under his cap, as he concentrated like the only thing he could think about was making sure his next offering was a strike. It didn’t work. He bounced a slider in the dirt, then turned to see Eaton standing on second base without a throw.

By the time he finished his first career outing, those nerves appeared to be gone. Pearson showed there was no need for nervousness. He ended up throwing five shutout innings, allowing just two hits and two walks while striking out five. The Nationals ultimately won the game anyway, 4-0, thanks to stellar pitching by their own starter — some guy named Max Scherzer — but even in a shortened season in which every game is crucial to a Toronto team on the fringes of a playoff hunt, it’s difficult to think of a reason for a Blue Jays fan to feel anything other than pure excitement over Wednesday’s game.

Pearson’s journey to a big-league mound was a bumpy one. He had a screw put in his throwing elbow in high school, and he was used mainly as a reliever at Central Florida Junior College, albeit an extremely good one. Toronto drafted him 28th overall in 2017 with the intention of stretching him out to be a starter, and he started at Advanced-A in 2018. A couple of injuries, however — an intercostal strain and a fractured arm caused by a line drive back to the mound — limited him to just 1.2 innings for the whole season.

When he finally returned in 2019, the Blue Jays challenged him, asking him to pitch across three levels of the minors. And despite only throwing 21.2 pro innings in the 22 months since he’d been drafted, he responded well, totaling 101.2 frames and allowing just 26 runs on 63 hits with 27 walks and 109 strikeouts. As he began throwing in Blue Jays camp this spring, it was obvious he had the stuff to make the Opening Day rotation, but there were quickly rumblings of the team keeping him in the minors to start the season for just long enough to delay his free agency by a year. Wednesday, as it happens, was the first day the Blue Jays could add Pearson to the roster without him getting a full year of service time in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The downtime produced by shelter-in-place orders and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic has inspired many people to take up new hobbies or polish previously dormant skills. The Jaffe-Span household, for example, has created a windowsill garden with herbs and vegetables, and every person on social media can name a friend or five who has tracked their recent forays into breadmaking. Ji-Man Choi apparently used his time to rediscover the advantages of switch-hitting. On Sunday, in the first major league game in which he batted right-handed, the Rays’ 29-year-old first baseman clubbed a home run off Blue Jays lefty Anthony Kay.

It wasn’t a cheapie, either. Choi hit a 429-foot shot that came off the bat at 109.9 mph — the second hardest-hit homer of his five-season career:

Ji-Man Choi hadn’t ever had a hit as a righty

Ji-Man Choi now has a home run as a righty pic.twitter.com/zo6YSsoWZX

— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) July 26, 2020

The South Korea native, who began his stateside professional career in the Mariners’ organization in 2010, and who does throw right-handed despite regularly batting left-handed, isn’t a complete newcomer to switch-hitting. In 2015, after breaking his right fibula during spring training, he spent time learning to switch-hit under the tutelage of Mariners Triple-A hitting coach Howard Johnson, who spent 14 seasons switch-hitting in the majors, primarily with the Mets and Tigers. Upon returning to action in August, first with the team’s Arizona League affiliate and then with the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers, Choi went 6-for-14 with a double and a walk while batting righty against left-handed pitchers, and 0-for-2 with two walks while batting righty against righties.

“I did it, and it worked well, so I kept doing it” Choi told MLB.com’s Alden Gonzalez (through an interpreter) the following spring. Gonzalez noted at the time that Choi’s leg kick was more pronounced from the right side of the plate. “But I don’t worry about the form,” Choi said, “I just concentrate on hitting the ball. See the ball, hit the ball.”

That conversation took place in the context of Choi having joined the Angels via the Rule 5 draft. Less than three weeks later, however, the team asked him to abandon switch-hitting, with manager Mike Scioscia saying that the Angels felt Choi’s left-handed swing was better, and that they planned to use him more in that capacity. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Greetings and hello!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: July.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: More seriously, he’s been a lot of fun so far, but the threshold for me greatly changing my view of a player in a positive direction is quite high when just the season before, they struggled against Double-A pitchers. At least relative to how prospects typically fare.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: It’s tricky. We do try to assign framing credit to the pitcher and hitter. And there’s stuff like passed balls, errors, stolen bases, etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ted Williams isn’t the typical beneficiary of a trip in the ZiPS time machine. After all, anyone who has the slightest interest in baseball — and many who don’t — know his name, even if they aren’t familiar with every last one of his accomplishments. Williams typified the cerebral, scientific hitter in the same way that Babe Ruth created the archetype of the larger-than-life slugger. The mercurial Ruth likely would have had considerably more trouble adapting to today’s game, but I’m of the opinion that the Splendid Splinter would actually thrive in a world where offense is looked at more as science than myth made true. Perhaps the best modern comparison for Williams is Joey Votto if the latter somehow got a hold of a genie’s lamp.

The list of Williams’ accomplishments is far too lengthy to run down in complete fashion, so we’ll settle for a sampling. He’s first all-time in on-base percentage and second in slugging percentage. He’s the most recent player to hit .400, and a two-time Triple Crown winnner. Ted finished with a .344 batting average, 521 homers, 2,654 hits, and enough black ink in his stats that he could have started his own newspaper.

But Williams’ career was also marked by long absences from the game. He was drafted after Pearl Harbor, initially receiving a deferment because he was his mother’s sole support. He played through the 1942 season, but enlisted in the Navy reserve after its conclusion and served for the next three years.

In terms of baseball, those were prime seasons of his career lost. The 1943-1945 stretch represented his age-24 through age-26 seasons, years when a lot of Hall of Famers turn in some of their most eye-popping campaigns. Taking a look at the list of Hall of Fame hitters through those ages sorted by WAR, there are some truly gigantic numbers involved:

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday night, Michael Wacha made a cathartic first start with the Mets. Over five solid innings, he struck out four while allowing only one run on a Mitch Moreland solo shot. He walked away with the win, his first in more than a year, and gave Mets fans hope that they might cheat the injury gods and assemble an acceptable rotation. But wait! Michael Wacha was last seen being terrible. It’s time to do some digging. The game is afoot!

We start this investigation, like so many others of sudden pitching competence, with the fastball. But alas, there’s nothing to be gleaned from it. Wacha averaged 94.3 mph on the pitch, a hair higher than last year’s season-long average but only a hair higher than last July’s mark. Allowing for the fact that the switch to Hawkeye might come with some calibration errors, we can rule out a newly lively fastball accounting for the fact that the Red Sox looked flummoxed.

Or can we? Why not spiral deeper, hunt further for fastball clues? His spin rate is up by nearly 150 rpm. Mayhap that’s the culprit. Mayhap indeed — but in my opinion, it’s not likely. Spin is one of the things to be most skeptical about in the new system. Perhaps skeptical is the wrong word; maybe we should be skeptical of the old measurements. The Hawkeye system measures spin directly with high-speed cameras, while the old radar-based system imputed spin from other factors. The point is, spin is going to be a tricky thing to tackle for a good while. Read the rest of this entry »

Andy McKay oversees one of the best farm systems in the game. Seattle’s Director of Player Development does so with a sports-psychology background — McKay has an MBA in Organizational Behavior Studies — as well as a deep appreciation for data and technology. The former college coach is anything but old school when it comes to developing young talent. Case in point: Mariners prospects have their regularly-revisited player plans put together not by coaches, but by analysts.

In Part One of a wide-ranging interview, McKay addresses several of his philosophies, as well as how the Mariners are approaching development without a minor league season.

———

David Laurila: We’re talking on July 26, 2020. What is the state of the Mariners farm system right now?

Andy McKay: “We’re really excited about where we’re at, both in terms of our department — the people we’re employing, and the process we’ve created — and the players we have in our system. Those things are moving along at a really good clip. We’re continuing to move the needle forward, even through COVID-19.”

Laurila: How exactly are you moving forward with no minor league season?

McKay: “We made the decision to turn our taxi squad into a very heavy prospect-based camp. If you look at who is down in Tacoma right now… not to mention we had, I think, four players make their major league debuts yesterday. We’re the youngest team in the big leagues. So we have the 10-week program going on, like all the other clubs, and then we’ve got things going on individually, all over the country with our players. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting the season after a long layoff and an abbreviated training camp was bound to put players in different positions of readiness in the season’s early going. When a season starts in late March or early April, teams enjoy a full spring training but weather can have an effect on hitters. Better weather means better offensive production, so it seemed possible that a late-July start might help hitters skip some of the early-season struggles we typically see; the universal designated hitter also seemed likely to help move things along. So far, it has been a bit of a mixed bag.

Through yesterday’s action, teams are scoring 4.5 runs per game, which is down from last year’s 4.8 full-season mark despite the addition of the designated hitter in the National League. Of course, the first week of the 2019 season saw teams score an average of 4.3 runs per game, so there are more runs than the beginning of last season. Runs alone probably aren’t going to tell us if pitchers have a bigger advantage than they normally do, though, particularly when changes to the ball over the last few seasons have had a pretty dramatic effect on scoring. To get a sense of the last few seasons, here are some end-of-season numbers since 2017 (excluding pitchers hitting), along with the start of this season:

Home runs are certainly down from last season, but compared to the last three seasons, the dip isn’t huge. We have seen an increase in the rate of infield fly balls, walks, and strikeouts. The power numbers are down some, but the big drop from previous seasons’ numbers concerns BABIP. The increase in walks isn’t enough to offset the greater number of strikeouts, the lack of power resulting in weaker contact, and considerably worse overall offensive numbers. Before we compare these numbers to typical early-season numbers, let’s add in some plate discipline stats as well:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m biased, but I think summer in Vancouver can be one of the most beautiful seasons anywhere in the world. The rainforest, having spent the autumn, winter, and spring growing lush under the cover of clouds and rain, shines rich green under the sun, illuminated by the light coming off the ocean. It’s hot, but not overwhelmingly so. On some days, you can look out over the water and see the spout of a humpback whale or the dark, swift-moving fins of a transient orca pod. And at sunset, the bright place where the sky and the ocean meet seem to go on forever.

In the summer of 2017, fires engulfed the Pacific Northwest. There was record heat; record time passed between rainfalls. I spent that summer working in a basement shop, bitter and sad, and when I emerged from the top of the staircase at the end of every day, I would often see a sky choked thick with ash and smoke, the sun swollen and red. Everything that was normally so vibrant was cast over with a dull haze. It was sometimes difficult to breathe. I thought, at the time, that it seemed apocalyptic: the reality of climate change clearly visible above me, around me, hanging in the air itself.

That was the summer Nate Pearson came to town.

***

The Vancouver Canadians are the Blue Jays’ short-season affiliate, playing in the Northwest League. Baseball has a long, diverse history in Vancouver, though the city isn’t exactly baseball-crazy. Back when the Canadians were a Triple-A franchise, affiliated most recently with the A’s, there were some pretty lean years in terms of attendance and interest. But a renovation of their ballpark, the 68-year-old Nat Bailey Stadium, and affiliation with the recently-successful Blue Jays has made the franchise one of the healthiest and most well-attended in the minor leagues. The banners around the stadium show some of the Canadians alumni who are currently successful major leaguers — Kevin Pillar, Marcus Stroman, and Noah Syndergaard, to name a few.

They show, too, the legends who visited and played in Vancouver in days long gone: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who came north on barnstorming trips. Though thoroughly renovated for the demands of a 21st-century baseball team, the Nat is deliberate in making you feel its history. A little museum is tucked into the concourse under the grandstand; the tall wooden scoreboard is a replica of the original, salvaged from the remains of Sick’s Stadium in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »