The inspiration for a new pitch design can strike at any moment. Usually, it’s a coach or a teammate sharing their well-earned wisdom or tricks-of-the-trade. Sometimes a new pitch is developed during bullpen sessions as a pitcher tinkers with a new grip or finger placement. More recently, pitch design has been outsourced to technologically advanced pitching labs like Driveline, where pitchers try to harness all the data at their disposal to create the most effective pitch possible. But for Devin Williams, the design for his changeup didn’t come from any of the normal avenues. Instead, it was developed on the neighborhood fields of his childhood.

In a recent media session, he described how he had thrown a version of what is now his changeup since he was growing up:

“I started throwing like that as a kid. Like, when I played catch with my friends, just to mess with people, trying to make them miss the ball when I threw it to them. That’s what turned into my changeup. I’ve had that since I was maybe 10 years old.”

Changeups come in a variety of types and styles. There’s the classic change that relies on a high velocity differential off the fastball to create deception. The circle change adds tumbling vertical movement to further differentiate the pitch from a heater. Felix Hernandez’s cambio redefined what a modern changeup could look like without the trademark velocity differential. Williams’ changeup is an entirely different beast, making it a changeup unique in baseball — the unicorn changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

Even in a wackily truncated season like this one, the trade deadline serves as an important landmark in the playoff hunt. While players will still be released and signed, lose their jobs and get injured, the dramatic changes in team quality are largely over. For a projectionist such as myself, it also comes as a relief as I no longer have to worry about spending time crunching the numbers only to have a 14-player, three-way trade go down just after I file an article. The players teams have on their rosters now are more or less the ones they have at their disposal over the rest of the season.

Before we get to the division-by-division standings updates, let’s take a quick look at how the last few days altered teams’ playoff odds. I projected the rest of the season for each team based on both their roster prior to the deadline’s moves and their roster as it stands post-deadline. I then compared the results to see which club saw the biggest rest-of-season gains and losses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Raymond knows the West. The team he does play-by-play for, the Texas Rangers, not only competes in the American League West, their inter-league schedule this year comprises solely the National League equivalent. As a result, Raymond has been getting regular looks at two of the game’s most talent-rich divisions. In terms of powerhouse clubs and marquee players, the West is arguably baseball’s best.

How would Raymond rank the teams and players he’s seen this season? That was the crux of a conversation I had with the TV voice of the Rangers prior to last night’s game.

———

David Laurila: Which is the best team you’ve seen this year?

Dave Raymond: “I’ve been really impressed with the Padres. They looked really good against us [in mid-August]. We may have gotten them right on the way to their peak — and that might have been us headed right to the trough — but they were really impressive. They have so much great young talent. There are guys like Jake Cronenworth who are hardly even noticed in the shadow of Fernando Tatis Jr. I mean, Cronenworth has to be the top rookie-of-the-year candidate right now, and he doesn’t even stand out on that team.

“Even Manny Machado. It looked like the energy of some of the young players is lifting him a little bit. He made some plays against the Rangers that were were pretty neat. You got a glimpse again of that young Manny Machado who won a Gold Glove and was more of the all-round player.

“But here’s my thought about the Padres: if you look at that lineup, find me the homegrown guy. He’s not there. It’s made up of all these pieces that were plucked from different organizations in trades and free agent signings. In kind of a perverse way, it’s really remarkable. I don’t think anybody sets out to build a championship team almost exclusively from other teams, but that’s kind of what they’ve done. And we just saw them, at the trade deadline, going out and aggressively bringing in even more guys from other organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I say anything, take a look at this Raimel Tapia sac fly, which scored Matt Kemp in the bottom of the ninth at Coors Field last night.

It is incredible how the stakes of professional sports manage to be world-shakingly massive and completely meaningless at the very same time. At stake in any given baseball game is millions of dollars of investment, millions of hours of training, the hopes and dreams of millions of fans, the dedication of entire lifetimes. And yet, the only thing physically at stake is how, exactly, a small leather ball will travel through space: whether it will leave the stadium, or land in the catcher’s glove; whether it will be caught, or hit the grass; whether it will stay firm in the grip of a player’s hand, or slide through it, errant, to go off in some unintended direction. If these physical stakes were not so small, to fail when so much is riding on one’s ability to succeed would be, I imagine, unbearably devastating. But even the most horrible loss is reliably followed by another game — because they are, in the end, games.

That reliable continuity in the face of constant failure can be very reassuring for a normal, non-famous-athlete person. Life, to paraphrase a very unwise man, is literally all we have. And though the stakes of the average person’s everyday activities, taken in the context of the world at large, aren’t very high, they are, in another sense, everything. My small, sad everyday failures are just as small and sad and arbitrary as a ball falling from a glove onto a grass field — but because my life is composed entirely of the everyday and the insignificant, even these failures can seem insurmountable. Yet every day, I watch people who have much more to lose than I do somehow rebound from their inevitable failures to play again, and again, and again. Often, I wonder how they do it. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last 15 years, Yusmeiro Petit has cast a spell over opposing hitters. He’s never thrown hard — his highest average fastball velocity was 89.6 mph in 2017, more than a decade into his career. He’s never been an All-Star, never received award votes. He’s been sketchy at times — his rookie season for the Florida (!) Marlins produced a 9.57 ERA. He didn’t pitch in the majors in 2010 or 2011. Through it all, however, he’s kept going, showed up and provided competent innings. He’s almost 36, and it feels like he might pitch until he’s 80.

That consistency is merely an illusion, however. When Petit first made the majors, he was pretty bad against lefties. Most righties get a little bit worse against left-handed batters; they strike out roughly two percentage points fewer opponents and walk roughly two percentage points more. Petit, on the other hand, turned into a pumpkin:

That split is through the end of 2017. I’m now going to do something that I strongly urge you not to do in your investigations of platoon splits — chop them up into smaller pieces. Since the beginning of the 2018 season, Petit’s platoon splits look different:

It’s a small sample, but I’m inclined to believe it. From 2008 (the beginning of pitch tracking data) to 2017, Petit threw his changeup to lefties 22.1% of the time. Since the beginning of 2018, he’s more or less doubled it, to 41.3%. Changeups are a righty’s best friend against lefties, so the improvement makes sense. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap and analyze the trade deadline, concentrating on the Padres’ unprecedented activity, Cleveland dealing Mike Clevinger, the Blue Jays buying, the Diamondbacks selling, several other contenders retooling, and why the deadline was busier than expected, followed by banter about a second Clayton Kershaw tire commercial and an example of Honus Wagner being bush league.

Audio intro: The Avett Brothers, "A Lot of Moving"
Audio outro: Teenage Fanclub, "I Don’t Know"

Link to Ben on Preller and the Padres
Link to Craig Edwards on deadline winners and losers
Link to Eric Longenhagen on the best prospects traded
Link to Zach Kram on trading prospects
Link to Zach on reasons for teams not to trade
Link to the FanGraphs trade deadline roundup
Link to Dan Szymborski on the Clevinger trade
Link to Zack Meisel on the Clevinger trade
Link to Emma Baccellieri on trade deadline travel
Link to second Kershaw commercial
Link to Wagner clipping
Link to Bugs Bunny clip
Link to John Sterling clip
Link to John Sterling t-shirt

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Well that was busy! Over the past week, the FanGraphs staff has written 35 pieces dedicated to analyzing the 2020 trade deadline, from Jay Jaffe’s Replacement-Level Killers series, which previewed teams’ positions of need, to detailed breakdowns of deadline transactions, to Craig Edwards’ piece today on deadline winners and losers, and Eric Longenhagen’s ranking of the prospects who moved. It’s a lot to sort through, so to assist you in finding anything you may have missed during yesterday’s flurry, I’ve rounded up all of our deadline pieces in one place. You’ll find the broader preview and recap pieces listed first, followed by a team-by-team listing of those transactions pieces that involved your favorite squad, either as buyers or sellers. In instances when we dissected a transaction across multiple pieces — hello, Padres! — you’ll see them grouped together.

As always, all of the pieces linked below are free to read, but they took time, resources, and weekend work hours to produce. If you enjoyed our coverage of the trade deadline and are in a position to do so, we hope you’ll sign up for a FanGraphs ad-free Membership. It’s the best way to both support our work and experience the site. Now, on to the roundup! Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the post-trade deadline edition of my weekly chat. While I wait for the queue to fill up, a bit of housekeeping:

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Here’s Craig Edwards on trade deadline winners and losers: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-trade-deadline-winners-losers-and-a-fe…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Here’s Eric Longenhagen on the prospects traded: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/ranking-the-prospects-traded-during-the-20…

2:04

Jay Jaffe: Here’s my contribution to our coverage: A’s Add to Rotation While Rangers Get Comparatively Minor Return https://blogs.fangraphs.com/as-add-to-rotation-while-rangers-get-compa… Phillies Upgrade Battered Bullpen with Phelps https://blogs.fangraphs.com/phillies-upgrade-battered-bullpen-with-phe… Mets Add Three Players at Deadline, Though 2020 Impact Could Be Minimal https://blogs.fangraphs.com/mets-add-three-players-at-deadline-though-…

2:04	Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show…

Read the rest of this entry »

An unusual season deserves an unusual trade deadline, and that’s what we got yesterday. With one-third of the league all but assured of a playoff spot, teams at the top were reticent to push in their chips for this season. There were a fair number of teams in the middle willing to take a chance on 2020, in contrast to the last few seasons. At the bottom, there were very few teams without a chance to win this season due to the expanded playoff format, which meant there wasn’t a whole lot to choose from for teams looking to get better this year. And while we won’t know the end result of these deals for at least a month (and, in the case of some of the players exchanged, perhaps for years), it doesn’t mean we can’t evaluate teams’ moves based on the information we have today.

With that, let’s get to it.

The Winners

Toronto Blue Jays

While some teams were looking to maximize value beyond the 2020 season, Toronto saw this year’s extra playoff spots as an opportunity and struck, without sending a ton of talent away. The team added two potential starters in Taijuan Walker and Robbie Ray, as well as a starter/swingman type in Ross Stripling. They traded for a nice utility player/stopgap starter in Jonathan Villar. They added to their tower of beef in the lineup with Daniel Vogelbach. Toronto was likely to make the playoffs without adding much, given their 76% playoff odds as we head into September. But with Matt Shoemaker and Nate Pearson sidelined, the club’s depth in the rotation was thinning. Ray and Stripling have struggled this season and Walker hardly provides guaranteed production, but they don’t all have to work out to prove useful to the Blue Jays. The starters added could end up providing strength out of the bullpen or help allow others, like Pearson, to come back in a reliever role and fortify the late-innings. While a playoff berth isn’t a lock, Toronto did what was necessary to shore up a flawed roster in the hopes of playing in October without sacrificing much of the future. Read the rest of this entry »