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 »

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 »