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Zack Littell was stellar out of the Minnesota Twins bullpen in 2019. In his first big-league season as a full-time reliever, the 24-year-old right-hander went an unblemished 6-0 with a 2.68 ERA in 29 outings covering 37 innings. His slider was a big reason for his success. Make that his pair of sliders.

“They’re two different pitches,” Littell told me late in the campaign. “When I got moved to the pen and got rid of the curveball — a pitch I’d had my whole career — they said, ‘We’re going to go predominantly slider-fastball, and mix in a few changeups.’ I kind of got used to that, throwing a lot of sliders.”

That would be an understatement. The North Carolina native threw the pitch… er, the two pitches, a full 49.6% of the time last year. He threw his four-seam fastball 48.6% of the time.

Littell, who we first wrote about in 2016 when he was a 19-year-old unranked prospect in the Seattle Mariners system, originally developed a slider in 2017 after being traded to the New York Yankees. At the time, “it was more lateral than downward,” and while the righty called it a slider, it was “pretty much a big cutter.” Read the rest of this entry »

In lieu of real accountability, this season, Houston Astros players will face opposing fans making an ‘oooooo’ sound at them whenever they step on the field. Grating on the nerves, perhaps, or simply just annoying on the ears; but in either case, they’ll likely learn to tune out the noise and focus on playing baseball, a sport that requires a little more focus when you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next.

When they aren’t tuning it out, though, the Astros would probably like to respond. They will have to pick their spots, as there is little winning to be done from a public relations standpoint. But these are young, competitive, professional athletes whose reputations have been irreversibly tarnished. They might know that they’re the bad guys in this story, but they don’t want to be booed. They want to be celebrated. They want to be championed. They want to shut their critics up by hitting something really hard, and since that something can’t be one of their critics, they’ll have to settle for a baseball.

George Springer walked out of the Astros dugout yesterday to the predictable sea of boos. In addition to the jeers, seven Astros hitters have been hit by pitches this spring, something that has been noted with delight by those waiting for drama to spill out onto the field. Springer hasn’t been one of them yet, but there was a moment during his at-bat against the Mets on Wednesday in which we seem to witness him attempt to send a message to the crowd.

Springer, while being booed, is not able to turn around and yell at the audience to shut the hell up. He has to act like he can’t hear them, even though he might really, really want to acknowledge them somehow. He might want to scream some kind of counterargument about how the Astros aren’t the only team that has cheated, or about how it wasn’t his fault, or how the cheating that happened was actually good for baseball, you see, presenting a detailed powerpoint entitled “Cheating = Good?” all while still screaming, of course.

But Springer can’t do that. Anything an Astros player says in regards to cheating or other people’s reactions to cheating will be an ill-conceived defense and received poorly. We’ve learned throughout this whole thing that while some Astros are better at apologizing than others, it’s difficult to believe any of them are sorry at all. Read the rest of this entry »

While it was understandably overshadowed by Gerrit Cole’s pinstriped premiere, Gary Sánchez made his Grapefruit League debut on Monday. In doing so, he showed off a new stance behind the plate, one that’s intended to shore up the defensive inconsistencies that have cut into his value while making him the brunt of so much criticism during his tenure with the Yankees.

The game wasn’t televised, and the only video I could find was rather rough, shot from the press box and thus showing the catcher’s back, but here you can see what’s going on:

Sánchez now sets up in his crouch with his right knee on the ground, a stance whose purpose the New York Post’s George King III explained succinctly earlier this month:

The lower setup is designed to improve Sánchez’s ability to frame borderline pitches in the bottom of the strike zone but not interfere with his improved blocking skills or take anything away from an above-average throwing arm. It also may reduce the stress on Sánchez’s legs, which have suffered muscle injuries the past two seasons that landed him on the injured list a combined four times.

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I wanted to pass along scouting notes from spring training games, especially ones that will shape the coming org lists and concern players who are outside the scope of my work but are relevant to the public interest. I’m going to start with observations from big league games and then move into notes from my amateur looks. One important caveat, especially where the big league looks are concerned, is the possibility of players still being rusty. Read the rest of this entry »

Television money draws a lot of attention when it comes to MLB’s finances, in part because the national revenues are easily identifiable. But the big driver of baseball revenue since the strike hasn’t been national television. Instead, local television deals and brand new stadiums with capacity for significantly more fans (and many highly priced tickets) have helped MLB revenues soar. Baseball’s national television deals have certainly gotten bigger, but getting fans to the ballpark has been more important to the bottom line over the last few decades. Baseball’s increasingly diverse streams of revenue have even reached to land deals surrounding ballparks, and helped create a financially strong industry in which one bad television deal won’t topple the sport and lead to a strike and lockout, as it did in 1994 (covered in Part I). However, MLB must be careful not to head back in that direction, and current trends are less than promising. In the second part of this series, we’ll look at how MLB has grown into an industry that generates nearly $11 billion per year in revenue, with a valuation above $50 billion.

While the 60s, 70s, or 80s (or whichever era you grew up in) were probably the halcyon days of the sport, you wouldn’t know by looking at attendance figures. In the 1980s, average attendance was roughly 22,000 fans per game and tickets were about six bucks a piece (around $14 after inflation). In today’s dollars, that’s roughly $25 million per team per year. Over the last decade, attendance is up to 30,000 per game, one-third more what it was in the 80s (a topic that is often overlooked when examining the health of the sport), and ticket prices have averaged around $29 per ticket in that time. For an average team, that’s $70 million per year, an 180% increase over the 1980s even after accounting for inflation. Even with that increase, gate receipts account for somewhere between 20% and 45% of revenue, depending on the team. Helping to fuel those increases, almost every major league team has received a brand new, publicly funded stadium to bring more fans to games at considerably higher prices. In the last 30 years, national television money has doubled after inflation, but gate money has grown nearly twice as fast.

Local television revenue has grown just as fast as gate revenues and provided teams with a windfall of cash over the past 20 years, necessitating revenue sharing as the disparity between the biggest and smallest baseball markets have grown. The massive cable television deals, coupled with notable failures in Houston and Los Angeles, have caused speculation about a cable bubble as carriers lose subscribers and become reticent to pay big per subscriber fees for niche channels. Read the rest of this entry »

When you think of Anthony Rendon, you probably think of consistency. He’s good every year, in roughly similar ways: he doesn’t strike out much, walks a good deal, hits his fair share of homers and doubles, and plays good defense. He’s been worth more than 4 WAR in every one of his full seasons. He’s a line drive hitter, a batting average machine. If anything, he’s become more consistent over time: in each of the last three years, he’s been worth between 6 and 7 WAR and struck out between 13% and 14% of the time.

I don’t buy it, though. Rendon might seem consistent on the surface, but under the hood, he’s completely revamped his game to unlock progressively more offensive potential. In fact, I can retell the Anthony Rendon story as a progressive improvement over time. Let’s try that now.

In 2015, the first year for which we have Statcast data, Rendon was hurt. He sprained his MCL in spring training, sprained his oblique while rehabbing the MCL, and somehow got forced off of third base — a year after a 6 WAR season — by Yunel Escobar. He played the majority of the season at second and scuffled.

That’s a low baseline, which makes any tale of improvement easier to tell. But let’s start there anyway. Rendon didn’t hit the ball with much authority that year — oblique strains aren’t good for power. When he put the ball in play, he generated a .343 wOBA, significantly below the league average of .361. Those numbers don’t really mean much out of context, so think of it this way: in 2019, Luis Arraez and Kolten Wong were below league average by roughly that amount. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Milwaukee Brewers needed a torrid run over the last month of their season in order to sneak into the playoffs, it was the pitching staff that stepped up and made it happen. During that stretch, perhaps nobody in the organization pitched better than Freddy Peralta. He threw 9.2 innings in relief during that month and allowed just two runs while striking out 20 batters and walking two. That works out to an ERA of 1.86 and a FIP of -0.30 — yes, a negative FIP. He made one dominant appearance after another, like when he struck out five in two shutout innings against the Cubs, or when he struck out four over two shutout innings against San Diego.

In September, he was one of the most overpowering relievers in baseball. In August? He got shelled so badly in six games that he was demoted to the minors for two weeks. This is the Freddy Peralta conundrum. And the Brewers are betting they can solve it.

According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the Brewers are expected to sign Peralta, 23, to a five-year contract extension, which would buy out his arbitration years and give the team a pair of club options on the back end. Read the rest of this entry »