Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Matt Bowman, Chaz Roe, and Justus Sheffield — on how they learned and developed their sliders and cutters.

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Matt Bowman, Cincinnati Reds

“With the unfortunate news of Roy Halladay [in November 2017] came the story of Mariano Rivera teaching him the cutter. I watched the interviews they did about how they threw it, and what their cues are. Halladay had that ball where he drew the outline of where his fingers should be. I literally gripped it the same way.

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Today we’re celebrating a first for FanGraphs: a live video stream!

Things have changed since FanGraphs’ founding 15 years ago. Nowadays, there are entire streaming platforms dedicated to communities of people who watch other people play games.

As an experiment (and to help fill the time until baseball comes back), we’re hosting a virtual Opening Day game, with the Mets and Nationals opener livecast by Paul Sporer, Ben Clemens, and Dan Szymborski using MLB The Show 20 on Playstation 4. So come hang out with us and watch the closest thing to a real game available!

To watch the game and listen to our live chat, you need nothing but your browser and our website. If you have a Twitch.tv account (free), you’ll also be able to join in the chat, just like in the ones we hold weekly.

Let us know what you think, and which other games you’d like to see streamed live!

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Last week, I asked our readers to answer a few questions about what they think this season of baseball might look like. While none of us actually know when or even if the season will be played, your answers provide a window into your expectations and also show how optimistic (or pessimistic) you are about there being more live baseball in 2020 as COVID-19 continues to affect all of our lives.

We received more than 1,000 responses for every question with the first one being the most basic:

A pretty clear majority believes there will be some from of major league baseball this season, though more than a quarter of readers thought the season would simply be wiped out.

Next, I asked how many regular season games would be played this year:

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It’s becoming clear that leaving your jacket behind was a mistake.

The sun has been giving this mid-March day a Fourth of July tint all afternoon, and you’ve been waiting all winter to brave the outdoors free from layers. That sun was still out when you got to the ballpark just before 5 pm, and the air felt mild, so you left your jacket in the car. You should have known better. The high school baseball game you’re watching probably wasn’t going to end until 7:30, when the sun was nearly gone — along with whatever lies it promised you about warmth.

Now, that 7:30 final out is beginning to feel wildly optimistic. One of the starting pitchers had trouble throwing strikes in the first inning, needing 33 pitches to get through it, according to your count. The second inning is shaping up to be even worse. The same pitcher hit the first batter, and has walked three more to force home a run.

Really, it isn’t his fault. He isn’t going to pitch in the majors, or even in college. He isn’t a baseball player at all, really. He’s just playing the part, like so many other kids you’ve seen, happy for any chance to be outside with his friends.

And it isn’t going well. One of the few strikes he’s thrown this inning got laced to left field for a base hit, scoring two more runs. Now the coach is going to the mound, but his options are limited. He doesn’t have many pitchers on this year’s small roster, and tomorrow his team has a doubleheader scheduled. He really needed tonight’s starter to go deep into the game. But he’s already thrown 55 pitches, and made only three outs. The coach attempts to level with the 16-year-old standing in front of him, pats him on the shoulder, and returns to the dugout. Read the rest of this entry »

Pinch hitting is hard. Baseball is a rhythm game, and pinch hitters are denied any semblance of routine. They’re on the bench, swinging a bat back and forth to get the blood pumping in their arms, and then just like that, they’re in the game. They might have been daydreaming about what they plan on ordering from room service, and here’s Jacob deGrom throwing 92 mph sliders. Good luck!

That’s the classical conception of a pinch hitter, and it explains why Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin found a significant pinch hitting penalty in The Book. They found a 24-point wOBA penalty for pinch hitters, which is a large cost. That’s roughly equivalent to the platoon advantage a lefty gets when facing a right-handed pitcher.

That’s a pretty striking difference. When your team gets a lefty batter up against a righty pitcher in a big spot, it feels great. Imagine that pitcher being replaced by a left-hander. Feels pretty awful, right? That’s the same swing in effectiveness you get when a batter pinch hits rather than batting regularly.

You don’t always hear about this effect on broadcasts, because there are other decisions that go into pinch hitting. You’re getting a diminished version of whichever hitter you select, but other advantages can still tip the scales in a batter’s favor. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley begin by discussing the financial impact that the pandemic and the postponement of the baseball season have had on FanGraphs and requesting reader/listener assistance. Then Ben and Sam review some of the worst mistakes managers made in World Series games of the 1980s and mull over why managerial mistakes are so frustrating, how teams’ tactical decisions have improved over time, and how much managers of earlier eras cost their teams.

Audio intro: Gillian Welch, "Hard Times"
Audio outro: The Tragically Hip, "Membership"

Link to FanGraphs announcement
Link to FanGraphs membership page
Link to Ringer article about FanGraphs
Link to post on socially distanced baseball
Link to Ben on bad dugout decisions
Link to Ben on second-guessing managers
Link to order The MVP Machine

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This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

As more and more Americans find themselves under COVID-19-related stay at home orders, we’ve now settled into an odd pattern of bracing for daily bad news while we wait for the curve to flatten, hopefully sometime in the next two to three weeks. When my colleague Jake Mailhot gave this update on Friday, there were around 82,000 confirmed cases in the United States. As of late Sunday, that number was closing in on 150,000, and may have surpassed that bleak number by the time you read this.

With the MLBPA and MLB having come to an agreement late last week on the basic framework needed to resume baseball (or deal with the fallout of a lost season), the intersection of baseball news and the novel coronavirus will likely shift to stories of individual people in baseball, at least for a while. Until we have a better idea of when the pandemic’s numbers will peak and decline, and when baseball will resume, all we can do is wait.

FanGraphs Needs Your Help!

The sports ecosystem supports a lot of small businesses and one of those small businesses is this very site. Our founder David Appelman’s crazy notion to start a baseball stat site has done much to advance baseball knowledge over the last 15 years, but FanGraphs is not immune to the economic consequences of baseball’s shutdown. We’ve had to make the tough decision to suspend The Hardball Times for the time being and let many of our terrific contributors go; those of us who remain are tightening our belts. If you’ve enjoyed our work over the years and are able to support us in these lean times, we would greatly appreciate it if you would consider a Membership. We’re nowhere without your support, and we want to make sure the site is firing on all cylinders and providing you with great stuff when baseball returns. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday on Effectively Wild, Meg and Ben (Not me! Curse you, Lindbergh, for your recognizable Ben-ness!) answered a question that several readers had asked. How, the readers wondered, might baseball exist if everyone involved in the game were required to remain at least six feet apart at all times?

It’s a silly question, really; they’re not going to play baseball with social distancing. But a question being silly has never stopped me even when there was baseball to write about, so let’s brainstorm. To figure out what would need to change if baseball wanted to be compliant with the new COVID-19 world we’re living in, I decided to choose a game from last year and watch for what we’d need to change. I picked a random date — June 11, 2019 — and selected the first game available, the first game of a Mets-Yankees doubleheader.

As a recap, Meg and Ben took their best shot at figuring out what might happen. They considered ghost runners or Statcast-estimated speed splits to each base. They considered eliminating the running game entirely. They noted that an automatic strike zone would likely be necessary to remove the umpire from his current position. Additionally, they covered some easier spacing dilemmas — only one reliever up in the bullpen at a time, a mostly-empty dugout with players remaining in the locker room until needed, and automatic reviews that would allow an umpire to stay further from the action.

With those ideas in mind, I started watching my random game. Some of the personal contact would be easy to fix. For example:

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12:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to today’s chat, where I plan to talk about baseball in at least some shape and form. I hope you’re doing all right; the Jaffe-Span household is trying to keep it together in downtown Brooklyn, where we’ve got a reasonable stockpile of supplies and are taking plenty of precautions when we do need to walk our dog (Sandy) and get our daughter some outdoor exercise.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Some housekeeping: Please read this message from David Appelman. Like just about everyone else in the world of sports, we’re facing some lean times, and we hope that you’ll think of us.  https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-fangraphs-update-were-asking-for-your-he…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis has a piece about our situation and those of several other sports media outlets https://www.theringer.com/2020/3/30/21199460/coronavirus-sports-media-…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: I’m currently working on an obituary of Jimmy Wynn, the Toy Cannon — a highly-underrated ballplayer who was a stathead favorite. That will run tomorrow.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show…

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