FanGraphs Baseball

The draft is in five days, which means that teams are beginning to gather in their respective war rooms to prepare. It’s an exceptionally busy and hectic time. Many clubs have already had smaller, regional meetings as well as private workouts for players, both en masse and of the individual variety. The magnets are all printed out and ready to go. It’s just time to line them up.

Small or Large?

Teams organize their war rooms in highly divergent ways, but the biggest current split revolves around just how big the room is in terms of attendance. Some teams only have crosscheckers and those with more senior titles attend meetings, while others bring in their entire scouting staff. During my time with the Astros, the team always conducted full-staff meetings, and the benefits were numerous and glaringly clear. Area scouts know these players better than anyone and have seen them more than anyone. They’ve talked to the player, and quite possibly the player’s family. They might have followed a college player since their high school days. They know their coaches and summer league managers. They’ve run into the player’s representative multiple times during the spring and had a few chit-chats with them. Even if theirs is not the most important pure talent evaluation (though it often is), the things area scouts bring to the table are immensely valuable. And beyond their considerable assistance throughout the entire draft process, there’s also the simple morale component. Area scouts have sacrificed their lives for six months. They’ve missed birthdays, anniversaries and little league games, recitals and parent-teacher conferences, and now they’re not allowed in the room? It never made any sense to me, and it feels like more and more teams are moving to an all-scout meeting, as they should. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

Let’s start with the American League standings.

I was making a “do not panic” argument on behalf of the Yankees back when they were 5–10 and some people were digging for their doomsday preparedness kits, and while it might not be time to find where you left those water purification tablets, the situation is bleaker now than it was three months ago. Not that the team is actually worse; New York has been on an 88-win pace in the games since that reference point. But an 88-win pace isn’t nearly enough to get out of an early-season hole in a division where there are three other teams with more than detectable pulses. Even projected to play solid baseball the rest of the season, the Yankees have gone from the favorite to the projected fourth-place team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Connor Kurcon created dynamic hard-hit rate (DHH%) to add dimension to our typical understanding of Statcast’s hard-hit rate (HardHit%). Whereas HardHit% uses a fixed minimum exit velocity (EV) threshold of 95 mph to determine a hard hit, DHH% uses a — you guessed it — dynamic threshold that changes according to launch angle of the batted ball event (BBE). Kurcon found this orientation of hard-hit rate to be more powerful than its original in terms of describing same-year contact quality (per weighted on-base average on contact, or wOBAcon), predicting next-year contact quality, and predicting itself (year-over-year “stickiness”).

Inspired by a Yermín Mercedes home run off a Willians Astudillo eephus, I borrowed the premise of DHH% and applied it to pitch velocity — that is, the dynamic threshold was based on pitch speed rather than launch angle. Although not as powerful as the original, Pitch DHH% also proved itself superior to HardHit%.

Ever since Kurcon unveiled DHH% in 2020, though, I’ve been thinking about how the premise might apply to spray angle (horizontal angle, lateral angle, whatever you want to call it). It seemed intuitive to me that a hitter would generate more power to his pull side and less to the opposite field. I suspect if you were prompted to guess, you might have said the same. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an interesting quote from Greg Maddux about the relative merits (or, if you’re Maddux, demerits) of “wasting” a pitch in a 0-2 count versus continuing to attack the hitter. Throwing a pitch outside of the zone and hoping for a hopeless swing in an 0-2 count is a baseball convention that’s ingrained in pitchers from the time they are adolescents. The idea is to not give the batter the chance to put the ball in play when the pitcher is in a supremely advantageous position. Maddux eschewed this notion. He said, “The hitter is most vulnerable when you get him in an 0-2 bind. My goal is to take him out immediately. I’m going right after him, not fooling around with wasting a pitch up high or throwing one in the dirt.”

Maddux’s impetus for questioning convention was twofold. First, a waste pitch is (wait for it) a waste. It is a waste of a pitcher’s time and energy and gets him out of rhythm. If you believe that on any given day a pitcher has a finite number of effective pitches in him, then throwing a pitch without the singular purpose of using that pitch to get the batter out is foolhardy. Maddux’s second gripe is that batters have the lowest batting average in 0-2 counts, so why would you fear throwing the ball in or around the strike zone? He also mentions the pitch is usually so far away from the strike zone that the hitter will lay off by default, giving the opposition the opportunity to see one more pitch out of the pitcher’s hand. Maddux is seemingly inferring that seeing this extra pitch assists the batter in timing up a pitcher’s motion, allowing them to gain a small edge in being able to better pick up the ball coming out of the hand.

The merits of a 0-2 waste pitch has been explored in the past. Earlier this yeah, Jim Albert used the same Maddux quote as a jumping off point for evaluating 0-2 pitches at his blog Exploring Baseball Data with R (as an aside, Jim is one of the coauthors of a must-have book if you are interested in getting into baseball analysis). Jim noted that pitchers don’t tend to use fastballs as waste pitches; when pitchers do waste pitches, they are more likely to bury breaking balls below the strike zone. He did note that 0-2 fastballs were located higher than fastballs in other counts, but they still were often in and around the strike zone, and thus were not waste pitches. Back in 2011, John Dewan at Bill James Online found that, in terms of the average plate appearance outcome, there was only a 10th of a run difference in favor of the pitcher between throwing in the strike zone versus outside of it, so there was no clear dominant strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Aroldis Chapman set off some fireworks at Yankee Stadium on July 4, though Mets fans almost certainly enjoyed them more than Yankees fans. For the seventh time in his last 14 outings, Chapman was scored upon, and for the second outing in a row, he served up a game-tying home run that led to a crushing defeat. The 33-year-old fireballer is in the midst of an ill-timed career-worst stretch, one that has dealt the Yankees’ playoff hopes a significant blow.

In the opener of a Subway Series doubleheader necessitated by Friday night’s rainout, Chapman entered in the seventh inning to protect a 5-4 lead. Under normal circumstances, that would have been a no-brainer move, but the decision raised some eyebrows not only given the closer’s recent struggles but the fact that setup man Chad Green had thrown just two pitches to retire Dominic Smith, the only batter he faced, to end the sixth.

Chapman got ahead of Alonso 1-2 via a three-fastball sequence: a 96.7 mph called strike on the outside edge of the plate, a 98.4 mph ball even further outside, and then a 96.9 mph swinging strike above the zone. When he switched to a slider (a pitch that Alonso has feasted upon this year, slugging .681 when he connects) and hung it in the lower middle of the zone (where Alonso has a .796 xSLG), the slugger crushed it, launching it 406 feet into the visitors’ bullpen:

Read the rest of this entry »

“We gave Pham up for Renfroe and a damn slapdick prospect?” Blake Snell bemoaned live on Twitch. He was reacting to a trade between the Rays and the Padres that took place during the 2019-20 offseason. Snell’s annoyance caused a bit of controversy – he ended up reaching out to said prospect, Xavier Edwards, to smooth things over – but it also popularized the term, to the point that it’s now part of our baseball lexicon.

What does it mean exactly, though? Urban Dictionary informs us that a “slapdick” is more or less an incompetent person (to put it nicely), but that doesn’t feel quite right in a baseball context. For me and presumably others, a slapdick hitter is someone who doesn’t hit for power and earns his keep by spraying the ball around – someone like Nick Madrigal. Although the Rays currently do not roster Madrigal, they do have this: As of this writing, their hitters collectively have the highest BABIP (.264) and wRC+ (57) on groundballs. A slapdick hitting team.

If your sabermetric senses are tingling, I understand. Due to the fickle nature of BABIP, continued success on grounders is a tenuous endeavor. It’s entirely possible the Rays have gotten lucky over the past few months. But in the spirit of FanGraphs, I began to wonder if there’s an extra dimension to this. The numbers, in fact, do posit an interesting idea – that the Rays have set themselves up for success on grounders, more so than most teams this season. Read the rest of this entry »

On hiatus since the onset of the COVID pandemic, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last week with three pitchers telling the stories behind their sliders. Today, in the second of this year’s installments, we hear from Jake Brentz, Brooks Kriske, and Hirokazu Sawamura on their changeups and splitters.

——

Jake Brentz, Kansas City Royals

“I never had a changeup in the minor leagues. I was fastball slider/breaking ball, but I always mixed around my breaking ball. I didn’t really find a breaking ball that worked for me until probably a year and a half, two years ago — not until I got to Triple-A.

“Paul Gibson is our pitching coordinator here with the Royals, and last year at the alternate site he told me, ‘Hey, I would like you to develop a changeup; I think it would be a very valuable pitch for you.’ So I really focused on developing one, throwing it as many times as I could during an outing. We were just playing each other — nothing really mattered — so it was just developing and whatnot. I’d throw it back to back to back, and messed around with grips. I found one that really worked for me, and then worked on it more over the offseason. In spring training I wasn’t throwing it a lot at first, but Mike [Matheny] came to me said, ‘I think your changeup can be a devastating pitch, so we’re going to throw that a lot.’ Over time, I’ve continuing to throw it. Read the rest of this entry »

With the first round set to kick off on Sunday, we present our second mock draft. Full scouting reports can be found over on The Board.

1. Pittsburgh Pirates
Pick: Marcelo Mayer, SS, Eastlake HS (CA)

This pick is still not a lock, though there are people in the industry who feel like it should be based on their opinion of Mayer’s talent. The Pirates themselves have been tight-lipped about their intentions and haven’t begun engaging advisors in an illuminating way, at least not such that we’ve been able to ascertain either by engaging with those reps ourselves or by triangulating information by talking to the teams behind Pittsburgh. Right now Mayer is here in our mock because we think he’s the best player, and teams tend to think Pittsburgh will take a hitter and that Mayer is in that mix. Ben Cherington’s modus operandi in previous positions of power has been to take a college player, but he’s never picked first before. Whoever Pittsburgh takes up here (even Mayer) will sign for less than the slot value ($8.4 million). In Pittsburgh’s mind, is there a gap between Mayer and the rest of the pack? How big is that gap, and is there a player in the second tier of talent willing to take a deal far enough under slot to tempt the Pirates into moving off Mayer? That may only become evident as things crystallize behind Pittsburgh in the next several days.

2. Texas Rangers
Pick: Jack Leiter, RHP, Vanderbilt

If Mayer doesn’t go first, then he’s the favorite to go here and the general sense around baseball is that the other high school shortstops — Jordan Lawlar and Khalil Watson — are likely in the mix, too. Watson doesn’t fit with the org’s recent patterns of acquisition, so we’re skeptical of that one. Scouts with other teams speculated to us that Leiter better fits Texas’ self-perceived competitive timeline, and that they have the bonus pool flex to get a deal done even if Leiter’s camp sees this market as sub-optimal. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball Systems Operator – Tracking Technology

Location: Atlanta, GA
Contract: Hourly, Casual
Salary: $25
Start Date: Immediate

About the Role
This is an exciting opportunity to work at the forefront of sports technology by joining Hawk-Eye’s team working with MLB. You will be based in the company’s US Head Office in Atlanta, GA and will be responsible for delivering the company’s services in baseball. You will liaise with on-site staff pre-game to ensure that Hawk-Eye technology is set up correctly and ready for the game; then you will monitor those systems throughout the game, providing assistance to colleagues and clients. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about their long weekends, birthday boy (and two-way All-Star) Shohei Ohtani, MLB’s perplexing timing when it comes to announcing awards and All-Star honors and scheduling special events such as the Futures Game and the amateur draft, the Yankees’ continuing troubles, pitchers who’ve struggled since the sticky stuff crackdown began, and Kyle Schwarber falling prey to the hamstring-injury epidemic. Then (35:34) they “Meet a Major Leaguer” up close by bringing on Mickey Jannis, right-handed knuckleball pitcher for the Triple-A Norfolk Tides, who discusses making his major league debut for the Baltimore Orioles last month, his journey from the 44th round to indy ball to the O’s, how he learned the knuckleball, how high-speed video has helped him refine his unusual pitch, being inspected for sticky stuff, the future of the knuckler, and more.

Audio intro: The Decemberists, "Down on the Knuckle"
Audio outro: Hinds, "Finally Floating"

Link to story about all-Star Ohtani
Link to video of Ohtani steal/walkoff
Link to video of Walsh/Ohtani hug
Link to video of Ohtani whiff
Link to story about the Yankees and analytics
Link to Lindsey Adler on Cole and Chapman
Link to video on Cortes
Link to video of Cortes vs. Ohtani
Link to Devan Fink on Richards
Link to BP article on hamstring strains
Link to Derek’s hamstring injury visualization
Link to Ben on Jannis and the knuckleball
Link to Jannis’ Twitter account
Link to Jannis’ first MLB out (and K)
Link to Jannis’ spring training knuckler
Link to Jannis’ knuckler grip
Link to Jannis’ knuckler on high-speed video
Link to story on Jannis’ “perfect” loss
Link to Ben on the Castellanos meme
Link to new Castellanos clip

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