At the beginning of last season, my colleague Ben Clemens examined Milwaukee Brewers right-hander Corbin Burnes in something of a study into what pitchers can control, and which skills can be demonstrated fastest. Burnes had made just one start at the time, striking out 12 batters against one walk in five innings, while also allowing six hits including three homers. More illustrative than those results, however, were Burnes’ elite spin rates. Spin doesn’t take several outings to stabilize, and it isn’t something a pitcher flukes in and out of. Like velocity or foot speed, it is something one either possesses or doesn’t. Burnes has it. Ben’s a smart guy, so he hypothesized that it was likely those spin rates would help keep Burnes’ strikeout numbers high in future appearances, while his home run rates should taper off. Because really, who has that kind of stuff and still gives up three homers a game?

Well, in Burnes’ next start after that piece ran, he gave up three home runs again. In the start after that, he gave up another three. And in the start after that, he gave up two more. Then he moved to the bullpen, where he was fine for a couple of weeks — until Atlanta hammered three dingers off of him in just two-thirds of an inning. Burnes finished the season with 12.86 strikeouts per nine, and 3.12 homers allowed per nine. When opponents hit fly balls against him, 38.6% left the yard — the highest single-season HR/FB rate on record for anyone with at least 40 innings pitched. When he kept the ball in play, he was also historically unlucky; his opponents’ .414 BABIP was the fourth-highest on record. Burnes can say more about himself with a single pitch than just about anyone else, and yet his entire 2019 season only served as an example of all that can happen that’s outside a pitcher’s control.

Somehow, Burnes is having that kind of season again in 2020 — just in the opposite direction. Last year, he allowed 70 hits and 17 home runs in 49 innings. This year, he’s thrown 45.1 innings, and has allowed 22 hits and one home run. His 2.9% HR/FB rate is the second-lowest of any qualified starter, and his .233 BABIP is seventh-lowest. In a single year, he has transformed from, statistically speaking, possibly the unluckiest pitcher we’ve ever seen into the one of the luckiest of this season. What does that mean for Burnes, and for the way we talk about luck in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

Not all rebuilds are the same. One approach, taken by teams such as the Houston Astros or Chicago Cubs, is a complete dynamiting of the creaky foundation, accumulating talent over a period of usually several years. Another approach is to take the less invasive route, keeping the best part of the team’s core mostly intact while also adding talent and hopefully returning to relevance more quickly than a team in a full teardown might. There are other approaches (trade for a bunch of veterans, stand around and do nothing, etc), but these are arguably the most popular and successful methods. For the past few years, Texas has mostly taken the second approach, entering a clear rebuilding phase but keeping the players they see as main contributors in the future. Unfortunately for the Rangers, 2020 represents a serious setback to these goals, and I’m increasingly unsure this strategy is viable for the team.

I’ve been referring to the Rangers as undergoing a “skinny rebuild” for some time. I don’t think I coined the term, but the idea is simple: retain your key contributors, seek some value in free agent signings, and look for a major addition if the opportunity arises. Teams rarely bluntly present the master plan with the vigor and certainty of a Bond villain, but I think it’s clear the Rangers, knowing that they were moving into a new park, were hopeful about returning to competitiveness in 2019 or 2020 in this manner (or at least close enough that they could patch the remaining gaps with their healthy revenue stream). You could see a bit of this when they signed three-year deals with Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson before the 2019 and 2020 seasons, respectively.

I don’t think this plan was ill-conceived, and in fact last year it looked like it just might work out. The pitchers the Rangers added more than met the expectations of the franchise, Joey Gallo was in his prime, and the team hadn’t publicly backed off the idea of splashing some major cash when the time was right. Read the rest of this entry »

Lou Brock was a catalyst, not only for the Cardinals — whom he invigorated upon being traded from the Cubs in 1964, in one of the most infamously lopsided deals in major league history — but for all of baseball. Along with the Dodgers’ Maury Wills and the White Sox’s Luis Aparicio, Brock helped restore the stolen base to prominence as an offensive weapon, one that was particularly valuable during a low-scoring era. A cerebral, intensely competitive, and electrifying speedster who was ahead of his time in using film to study pitchers, Brock sparked the Cardinals, who hadn’t won a pennant in 18 years, to three in a five-year span and carved himself a niche in October while helping the team win two World Series. In his 19-year career (1961-79), he went on to set the single-season and career records for stolen bases, surpass the 3,000 hit milestone, have his uniform number (20) retired by the Cardinals, and earn first-ballot entry into the Hall of Fame.

Brock died on Sunday, September 6, having battled multiple health issues for several years. He had his lower left leg amputated in 2015 due to complications related to Type 2 diabetes, underwent treatment for multiple myeloma in ’17, and suffered a stroke the following year.

A six-time All-Star, Brock finished his career with a .293/.343/.410 (109 OPS+) line and 3,023 hits, a total that ranks 28th all-time; he also hit 149 homers. He hit .391/.424/.655 with four homers and a record 14 steals in 92 plate appearances spread over three World Series. He led the NL in stolen bases eight times, finished second an additional three times, and ran up impressive records. His 118 steals in 1974, when he was 35 years old, broke Wills’ modern record of 104, set in ’62. He surpassed Ty Cobb‘s modern record of 892 steals in 1977 and then 19th century star Slidin’ Billy Hamilton’s total (believed to be 937 at the time) two years later, finishing with 938. Rickey Henderson eventually surpassed Brock’s single-season and career marks, swiping 130 bases in 1982 and blazing past Brock on May 1, 1991, en route to a whopping total of 1,406 steals.

“The numbers can hardly tell the full story of Louis Clark Brock,” wrote New York Daily News reporter Phil Pepe on August 9, 1979, as Brock closed in on 3,000 hits. “They cannot tell you of the enthusiasm he possessed, the zest for the game, the excitement he generated, the joy of watching him. If you have not seen him play, you have missed one of the great joys of sport.”

“Watching Lou Brock taking a lead off first base is the best fun in baseball,” wrote Roger Angell in The New Yorker in 1974. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Later today, Jay Jaffe will give Lou Brock the longer look his career and place in history deserve, but I felt it was worth delving into a subject that comes up from time to time when baseball analysts discuss the St. Louis stalwart’s accomplishments. Since his passing on Sunday, I’m sure many a modern fan has looked up Brock’s stats page, found his 43.2 career WAR, and opted to either discount WAR as a stat or Brock as a player, along with the writers who voted him into the Hall of Fame on the first try. I would caution against either approach.

Wins Above Replacement is an incredibly useful framework for comparing players to their peers and across eras. It’s also impossible to quantify every aspect of a player’s game, and it gets harder the further we get from the present. Brock presents a rather unique case, one I’ve written about in the past. The outfielder was an above-average batter for a very long time (only 23 batters in the last 70 years have more than Brock’s 11,238 plate appearances and 109 wRC+). He wasn’t just a singles hitter either, as his power was roughly average during the run-starved 1960s, but he’s obviously more well-known for what he did with his legs. Metrics available at the time Brock played serve to diminish his WAR in a manner that left most of his peers unaffected.

To wit, of Brock’s 187 offensive runs above average, 75 were due to stolen bases. Unfortunately, this misses all of the other runs Brock created advancing on batted balls, which would likely give him somewhere between five to 10 wins above his current WAR. His peers have fewer potential issues in this regard because the majority of their runs come from hitting, meaning WAR misses little of their career production, while Brock gets uniquely penalized. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I came up with a simple idea: estimate home runs based on exit velocity. That sounds pretty straightforward, and it mostly is. For example, here are your odds of hitting a home run at various exit velocities when you put the ball in the air in 2020:

Of course, some caveats apply. I’m only looking at batted balls between 15 and 45 degrees, and the sample size is still small. But for the most part, and excluding the vagaries of that small sample, the conclusion makes sense. Hit the ball harder, and you’ll find more home runs.

Of course, real life is notoriously fickle. Sometimes you mash the ball and it’s a degree too low, or you hit it to the wrong part of the ballpark, or a gust of wind takes it. Sometimes you play in Yankee Stadium and get a cheapie, or smoke a line drive that leaves a dent in the Green Monster. Sometimes you make perfect contact, and it’s at 15 degrees instead of 25 so it’s a smashed single to right instead of a bat flip highlight.

Wait — hit it at the wrong angle? That seems like something in a batter’s control. It partially is, but I’ve chosen to exclude it for two reasons. First, I’ll point again to this excellent Alex Chamberlain article. You should really read it, but the conclusion is basically this: batters control exit velocity and pitchers control launch angle. That’s not exclusively true, and there are obviously fly ball and groundball hitters, but if you start giving batters credit for the exact angle of their batted balls instead of just generally saying “in the air” or “not,” you might be going too far.

Second, this way is simpler! Simplicity has value. Overspecify a model, and you can get very precise results that are also hard to interpret, or that depend heavily on small fluctuations in initial conditions. That’s not to say that such a model is a bad idea — merely that it’s not strictly upside to add more and more gadgets and whizbangs to it. You also risk losing the signal you’re looking for, which in this case is the ability to absolutely hit the snot out of the ball, sending it skyward at stupid speeds. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I wrote an article about the ugly state of Atlanta’s current rotation. Last night, their run of rough starting pitching continued when Tommy Milone gave up eight runs in just 3.1 innings. While that outing might make my piece seem timely, and almost prescient, Milone’s start proved to be immaterial because the Braves scored 11 runs in the second inning and averaged three runs per inning over next six frames. In that same piece on Atlanta’s rotation, I noted that the team has scored at least seven runs in six of its last 10 games. Yesterday, the Braves’ offense met that mark four times over, beating the Marlins 29-9. And Atlanta wasn’t alone in its offensive explosion yesterday, as earlier in the day, the Brewers beat the Tigers 19-0.

To get a sense of what the Braves and Brewers did, let’s take a quick look at the team-by-team offensive numbers produced yesterday:

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12:02

Dan Szymborski: Let’s get this party* started!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Disclaimer: There may not be an actual party

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I’m optimistic. Dude’s 22!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Especially amazing given where he was after the first week

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It was the second game of the Twins-Cardinals doubleheader on Tuesday. The Cardinals had lost the first game, but were now already ahead 5-2 in the bottom of the third. The bases were loaded, and Caleb Thielbar, newly into the game, was facing catcher Matt Wieters with two out.

Thielbar quickly got ahead of Wieters, who had been hit by a pitch in his first plate appearance: a 90 mph fastball in the middle of the zone, a 68 mph curveball on the outside corner that Wieters just barely managed to foul off, and it was 0-2, advantage Thielbar. The 0-2 pitch, another fastball in the middle of the zone, was again fouled off by Wieters, sailing off into the right-field stands. No matter. Throw him a better one this time, right? Wieters took a little stroll, adjusting his gloves — maybe taking a breath, maybe pondering what Thielbar might have in store for him on the next pitch. He walked back into the box, cocked the bat, stared out to the mound. Almost the exact same pitch — almost the exact same result. This, it seemed, would be a battle. Another stroll for Wieters: inhale, exhale, the bat held out in front of his face.

This time, Thielbar changed things up — a curveball at the knees. Again, Wieters fouled it off, and again, he stepped away, out of the box, and took a breath. He was, with each pitch, just trying to stay alive, and to stay alive took all of his effort. He had to steal the breaths when he could. Because with each pitch that he fouled off, every successful attempt at fending off the onslaught, Wieters was prolonging the time he would have to spend fighting. The price of staying alive was that the struggle would not end.

And as the plate appearance continued, the struggle became more and more visible. Thielbar only threw three pitches outside the strike zone, all of them within the first nine pitches of what would end up being a 19-pitch at-bat. The rest Wieters had to foul off, the effort showing in his ever more laborious swings and grimaces, the length of his walks outside the zone, the depth of his deep breaths, and the tension in his stance as he returned to await, once again, a pitch that he would have to fight off. Read the rest of this entry »