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Earlier this week, Miguel Castro’s hard changeup caught my eye. It’s a weird, good pitch, and it’s thrown by a pitcher who might otherwise fade into the background. What’s more, he’s still bad against lefties despite a spectacular pitch for attacking them. About the only thing that made sense to me in the whole scenario was that Castro uses his changeup to attack lefties, the way right-handed pitchers are supposed to.

We’ll get to whether that’s true in a moment. First, let me introduce you to a righty pitcher who looks at this conventional wisdom — changeups to lefties, sliders to righties — and says eh, pass. Maybe not introduce you, actually, because he’s a notable pitcher on a marquee team, but at least alert you to his weirdness. Meet Tommy Kahnle, the man who throws his changeup when he shouldn’t.

As a rule, pitchers hate changeups to same-handed batters. Of all the pitches that righties threw to righties in 2019, only 7.1% were changeups or splitters (a splitter behaves almost exactly like a changeup, and pitch classification algorithms sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two, so for the remainder of this article I’ll be lumping both pitches together). On the other hand, they love them against lefties — 17.5% of right-to-left pitches were changeups. It’s pitching 101.

Kahnle surely took pitching 101; he just doesn’t seem to care. His changeup is his best offering, and he absolutely leans on it against lefties. 59.6% of his pitches to lefty batters in 2019 were changeups. It can’t even properly be called a secondary pitch; it’s just a primary pitch! Nothing to see there — a changeup-heavy pitcher throws a lot of changeups to opposite-handed batters. Where it gets interesting is when he faces righties. What does he do there, in the matchup his pitch wasn’t designed for? Why, he throws a changeup 44.2% of the time, of course.

He’s not alone in this weirdness — Héctor Neris and Tyler Clippard, just to name two, do similar things. But Kahnle interests me, because he wasn’t always this way. In 2017, he was spectacular. A 2.59 ERA, a 1.84 FIP, a Gerrit-Cole-facing-minor-leaguers 37.5% strikeout rate and a minuscule 6.6% walk rate — he was nothing short of dominant. That year, he threw a changeup to righties 14.7% of the time. Huh? Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, in the wake of nationwide anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, the Quaker Oats company announced that it would retire the name and logo of its Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mixes and other breakfast foods, acknowledging that its origins are “based upon a racial stereotype.” Other corporations quickly followed suit as the branding for products such as Uncle Ben’s rice, Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, Cream of Wheat cereal, Dixie Beer, and Eskimo Pie ice cream bars came under closer scrutiny. This remarkable, long overdue reckoning on branding and symbolism, on who we honor and how, had already spilled over into the sporting arena with NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag from its events and the Minnesota Twins’ removal of a Target Field statue of former owner Calvin Griffith over racist remarks he made in 1978, but last week it advanced on several fronts. The NFL’s Washington Redskins and MLB’s Cleveland Indians (hereafter referred to by the team’s respective city names) both announced that they would consider name changes, while the Baseball Writers Association of America has begun an internal discussion to change the names of two awards on which its members vote.

On the NFL front, in the latest turn of a decades-old battle, Washington announced that the team “will undergo a thorough review of the team’s name.” That came after FedEx, which owns the naming rights to the team’s stadium, requested it do so. Within hours, Cleveland followed suit with a statement saying that the club is “committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regards to the team name.”

pic.twitter.com/NUM5GYvlwe

— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) July 4, 2020

The statement arrived nearly a year and a half after the franchise announced a phaseout of its Chief Wahoo logo, a grotesque and demeaning caricature that in various incarnations had been in use since 1948, the same year that Cleveland won its last World Series. The logo made its last lap around the league in 2018, and did not appear on any of the team’s 2019 uniforms. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley provide a brief update on the health of co-host Sam Miller (who’s on hiatus), then preview the 2020 New York Yankees with The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, and the 2020 Detroit Tigers (46:57) with the Detroit Free Press’s Anthony Fenech.

Audio intro: Bombadil, "Binoculars"
Audio interstitial: The Sadies, "Tiger Tiger"
Audio outro: The Isley Brothers, "Hope You Feel Better Love"

Link to Lindsey on the Yankees’ revamped pitching development
Link to Lindsey’s Q&A with Matt Blake
Link to Lindsey on Happ’s reinvention
Link to article on Yankees’ overhauled training staff
Link to Lindsey’s Q&A with Tanner Swanson
Link to Lindsey on Sánchez’s new catching stance
Link to Lindsey on Sabathia paying homage to the Negro Leagues
Link to Lindsey on Gardner’s evolution
Link to Dan’s 2020 breakdown candidates
Link to photo of Lindsey’s binoculars
Link to Fabian Ardaya’s binoculars photos
Link to Fabian’s photo-taking technique
Link to Anthony on Mize striking out Cabrera
Link to Anthony’s Boras story
Link to Anthony on the Tigers’ analytics investments
Link to more recent story on the Tigers’ analytics upgrades
Link to FanGraphs’ Tigers prospect rankings

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In the third inning of ESPN’s broadcast of a tilt between the KT Wiz and the Kia Tigers on Wednesday, Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez welcomed on former 10-year major leaguer Mel Rojas. The timing worked out well — the fourth batter of the inning was his son, Mel Rojas Jr. 로하스, who stepped to the plate with runners at second and third and one out in a 1-1 game.

“He’s smart,” Mel Sr. said. “He knows he’s not getting a good pitch to hit. He’s patient.” The son proved the father right, fouling off two strikes while taking three balls. With the count full, Perez asked the elder Mel what he would throw his son in this situation, with first base open and two outs. “Split,” he responded. “… I would not throw it for a strike.”

Indeed, he got the splitter from Tigers pitcher Min-woo Lee 이민우, but the pitch hung, crossing the plate at the knees. The younger Rojas flicked his bat effortlessly through the zone, slapping a base hit to center that plated two runs. On the broadcast, his father hardly budged. Two innings later — with his father now off-screen but presumably still watching — Rojas came through with a runner in scoring position again, hitting another two-out RBI single to help push the Wiz to a 7-4 victory.

No one in the KBO is more dependable than Rojas with men on base right now, because there is simply no one hitting better in general. He’s within striking distance of the standard triple crown (third in batting average, first in RBI, first in homers), as well as the triple slash crown (fourth in OBP, first in slugging). In fact, across the board, there is no one having kind of season at the plate that Rojas is.

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Below is my latest in a series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. Previous installments of these rundowns, including potentially relevant context for discussion, can be found here:

AL East and Intro
NL East
AL Central

Chicago Cubs

Prospect List / Depth Chart

It’s likely top prospect Nico Hoerner sees a lot of time at second base and center field. The prospects ranked two through five in the system are all on the 60-man player pool. Of those, right-hander Adbert Alzolay and, to a lesser extent, catcher Miguel Amaya (who is now on the 40-man) are the two most likely to see some big league time this year. Were Willson Contreras to get hurt, I’m not sure if the club would let iffy defender Victor Caratini play every day, add veteran NRI Josh Phegley to the 40-man to share duties, or if they’d simply promote 21-year-old Amaya, who has been lauded for his maturity and advanced defense since he was 18.

I also think there’s a chance the Cubs are in the thick of it come September, consider 21-year-old lefty flamethrower Brailyn Marquez one of the org’s best dozen pitchers, and decide to bring him up as a late-inning relief piece. He’s going to be added to the 40-man this offseason regardless.

The other very young guys in the player pool are Christopher Morel and Brennen Davis, two big-framed, tooled-up developmental projects. It’s interesting that the Cubs added Morel ahead of Cole Roederer or any of their 2019 and 2020 college draftees, but the club is only at about 50 of their 60 allotted players and they clearly need more hitters in the offsite camp, so I expect several notable names to be part of the group in South Bend soon. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Greetings all! So begins another Chatxperience!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I don’t feel comfortable making those kinds of evaluations. I’m very qualified to evaluate players at playing baseball. I have no such qualifications at determing quality of a person.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: When we do the chapter BBWAA awards for the local team (Reds in my case), I always abstain from the Good Guy award.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Well, there’s a raging epidemic going on, so no matter how great a job MLB does, there’s always significant risk.

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Today’s article is about a form of baseball that doesn’t exist in real life. Let that be a disclaimer upfront — if you’re looking for an interesting middle reliever or 10 reasons why Christian Yelich is great against fastballs (number six will shock you!), this isn’t the article for you. That’s not to say those don’t exist — I wrote about Miguel Castro literally yesterday, for example. But today’s piece simply won’t be one of them.

With that out of the way, let’s set the stage. I’ve been playing a lot of Out Of The Park Baseball 21 lately. Some of that is for an article series, but some of it is because I want baseball in my life, and the game absolutely delivers. One mode in particular has been a great avenue for the analytical rabbit holes I love diving down: tournaments.

Without going into the specifics of the way the game is built, I’ll give a rough outline of the problem that first interested me. The standard tournament format is a 32-team bracket that plays best-of-seven series in each round. There’s no reseeding, no fancy gadgets; just 16 seven-game series, followed by eight, then four, then two, and then the finals.

In almost all other ways, the game approximates baseball. You field a 26-man roster, players need rest, and starters and relievers have realistic stamina. There are all kinds of fun roster choices to make — mid-career Tony Gwynn or young Pete Rose in right field, peak Ichiro or 1997 Bernie Williams in center, to name two — but for the most part, it’s a faithful simulation of baseball.

There is, however, one very specific wrinkle. In these tournaments, there are no off days. The first set of series takes place over seven consecutive days. As soon as the last series is decided, the next round begins the following day. You could, in theory, win the first round in seven games, win the second round in seven games, and end up playing on at least 18 straight days even if you sweep or get swept in the third round. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the seventh in a series of baseball-themed lessons we’re calling FanGraphs Prep. In light of so many parents suddenly having their school-aged kids learning from home, we hope is that these units offer a thoughtfully designed, baseball-themed supplement to the school work your student might already be doing. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth units can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Overview: A short unit centered on calculating rolling averages. Calculating the mean, median, and mode are fundamental concepts in math. But when we’re dealing with a dataset spread out over weeks, months, or years, simply calculating the average value for the entire dataset hides the data’s peaks and valleys. For a baseball player, those are the hot and cold streaks that everyone goes through during the season.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify and apply a rolling average.
• Explain how changing an interval affects interpretation.
• Consider the potential uses of a rolling average in baseball.

Target Grade-Level: 9-10

Daily Activities:
Day 1
Khris Davis famously hit .247 four seasons in a row from 2015–2018. If we take his total hits and total at-bats over those four seasons, it’s no surprise that his combined batting average is .247.

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