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 — Brian Bannister, Andrew Cashner, and Rick Porcello — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Brian Bannister, Boston Red Sox (VP/Pitching Development)

“Everyone starts that journey of trying to throw it slow, and in that process you choke the grip, you drag your back foot, you curl your toes — you do everything you can to make the pitch slower. But Zack Greinke will talk about how we had a teammate [in Kansas City] named Ramon Ramirez who threw his changeup 90 mph. He didn’t even try to throw it slow. We watched him do it successfully. We watched Felix Hernandez do it successfully. We were always watching James Shields dominate with a power changeup. That’s what we used to call it.

“Once we started realizing that your hand pronates more on a changeup than it can on a two-seamer, we could get the depth of an elite two-seamer by throwing our changeups as hard as possible. It added that element where it was almost a Brandon Webb sinker, but you’re holding it with a changeup grip. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals would not be here today without Patrick Corbin.

In a season with many ups and downs — really, just one “down” and then one much larger “up” — Corbin was a consistent arm in the Nationals’ rotation, especially as the ace of the staff, Max Scherzer, dealt with injuries in the second half and relative (by his standards) ineffectiveness upon his return. He was not the only rock — Stephen Strasburg was also superb — but he was the new rock, the highlight of the Nationals’ offseason, their prized signing.

On December 4, the Nationals inked Corbin to a six-year, $140 million deal, the largest contract given to any starting pitcher the entire offseason. With one full season in the books, it’s clear that Corbin has come to Washington exactly as advertised. As their third ace, Corbin’s presence in the rotation helped put them over the top. A team with three of the best 13 pitchers in baseball likely won’t stay defeated for long, and the Nationals overcame a horrid 19-31 start to win 93 games and clinch the top NL Wild Card spot.

Of course, this turnaround is not solely due to Corbin’s contributions, but having him in the rotation certainly didn’t hurt. He pitched 202 innings this year to the tune of a 3.25 ERA, 3.49 FIP, and 4.8 WAR. He outpitched both Steamer’s (3.3 WAR) and ZiPS’ (3.5) preseason projections. As a result, the Nationals had the best rotation in baseball, and they hope that their top three starters will be the difference here in October: Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller follow up on banter about Mike Minor’s pop-up do-over and guaranteeing homers, revisit an earlier discussion about whether the 2019 regular season was good, and then preview the postseason, touching on every team in the playoff field, the difficulty of predicting playoff success, the most compelling matchups, the different ways to pick a playoff rooting interest, and more.

Audio intro: Generationals, "Ten-Twenty-Ten"
Audio outro: Boat, "Come With Me We’ll Win"

Link to Dizzy Dean pop-up story
Link to Sam on the pennant races
Link to Ben on the Astros and Dodgers
Link to Sam on the Dodgers and Astros and fastballs
Link to Sam on the Yankees
Link to ESPN playoff preview
Link to order The MVP Machine

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In a season that had already seen strikeout rates and totals reach unprecedented highs, Justin Verlander helped himself to not one but two impressive, K-related milestones on Saturday night against the Angels in Anaheim. With his fourth-inning strikeout of Kole Calhoun, he became the 18th pitcher to reach 3,000 for his career, and the second this season after CC Sabathia. Two innings later, he whiffed Calhoun again for his 300th (and final) strikeout of the season. The two milestones — which had been paired in a single game once before, by the Diamondbacks’ Randy Johnson on September 10, 2000 against the Marlins — added a couple more bullet points to his case for a second AL Cy Young award, but they also served to remind us what a silly season it’s been for swings and misses.

After leading the AL for the fifth time last year with a career-high 290 strikeouts, Verlander began this season 294 short of 3,000, a distance that suggested that the 36-year-old righty would need until early in the 2020 season to reach the milestone. That still appeared to be the case when I checked in on him on May 1, in the context of Sabathia joining the 3,000 club; on June 24, when I wrote about Verlander dominating despite so many home runs surrendered; and on August 16, when I checked in on the progress of several stars who had enhanced their Hall of Fame cases this year. At that last juncture, Verlander was averaging 12.0 strikeouts per nine and needed 77 to reach 3,000. Figuring six innings and thus eight strikeouts per start, times eight starts — either actual or their equivalent via shorter late-season outings as the playoffs approached — my back-of-the-envelope math suggested he’d fall short.

The night that last piece was published, Verlander whiffed 11 A’s in seven innings, though he wound up on the losing end of a 3-2 game. It was his sixth straight game with at least 10 strikeouts, already a personal best, and he pushed the streak to seven games with an 11-strikeout complete game against Detroit on August 21 — yet another loss, however, as the two hits he surrendered to the Tigers, both solo homers, were enough to topple him. Two starts later, he punched out 14 Blue Jays while notching his third career no-hitter, and despite generally drawing down his pitch counts over his last four starts — 106 pitches on September 12 versus the A’s, 87 on September 17 versus the Rangers, 92 on September 22 against the Angels, and then just 80 on Saturday night — he had two more starts with double-digit K’s and totaled 36 over his final 23 innings. Where my estimate from mid-August to the end of the season was for 48 innings and 64 strikeouts, he instead threw 60.1 innings with 83 strikeouts. His rate per plate appearance rose from 34.5% (with a 5.4% walk rate) prior to August 16, to 38.7% (with a 3.7% walk rate) from that point onward. While the Tigers and Rangers both finished among the majors’ top five in batter strikeout rates, the A’s and Angels were in the bottom seven, so it’s not like Verlander had a particular advantage down the stretch. His was an impressive rally. Read the rest of this entry »

When he stepped off the mound after a dominant seven innings last Tuesday night, Jack Flaherty surely thought he’d thrown his last pitch of the regular season. The Cardinals led the Diamondbacks 1-0 and the Brewers by 3 1/2 games in the NL Central. A win that night would all but lock up the division; three games up in the loss column with five games left to play is a tough lead to cough up.

But it wasn’t to be. Andrew Miller gave up a tying home run in the ninth inning, the Cardinals ended up losing in nineteen (!!) innings, and the Brewers started to catch up. Saturday night, after a beatdown at the hands of the Cubs was matched by a Brewers loss in Colorado, leaving the Redbirds a game ahead in the standings, the Cardinals announced that Flaherty would start Sunday afternoon.

In the real world, the game was a breeze. Flaherty put together another strong outing, going seven scoreless and allowing only two hits, and the Cardinal offense came to life en route to an easy 9-0 victory. The Brewers, meanwhile, pulled their starters when a St. Louis victory became inevitable, eventually losing 4-3 in 13 innings.

But those are the results that actually happened, not the results that could have happened, and knowing what could happen is often more interesting than seeing the actual results. To that end, I was curious: did the gambit of starting your best pitcher in the regular season rather than saving him for a potential elimination game make sense? Let’s do the math.

To work out the cost and benefit of starting Flaherty, we need to work out the potential scenarios that follow a Flaherty start. First, there’s the world that actually occurred: the Cardinals win the NL Central and move on to face the Braves in the NLDS. In that situation, the cost of starting Flaherty in the last game of the regular season is low. He’ll start Game 2 of the series, and can start a potential Game 5 on regular rest. There’s almost no cost here; if Miles Mikolas had pitched yesterday instead, Flaherty would start Game 1 and Mikolas Game 2 instead of vice versa, and Flaherty would still start Game 5. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with the obvious: Defense hasn’t been the big surprise of Marcus Semien’s 2019. That story was written a few years ago. The big surprise of Semien’s 2019 has been that in consequence of a .373 wOBA and 7.5 WAR, he has precisely doubled the value he produced last year in the second-best season of his seven-year career. I wrote about Semien’s offensive breakout in May, noting his much-improved plate discipline, and suggesting that its probable cause — a change in approach at the top of the strike zone — augured continued success. Dan Szymborski picked up the thread in July, finding much the same, and also discussing Semien’s defense at some length. Dan concluded:

[D]efensive numbers are volatile, so having a second year of improved defensive numbers significantly betters the chances that Semien’s reinvention with the glove is for real. That the improvement is largely driven by error rate is an even more promising development because though errors themselves aren’t a great measure of defense, error runs tend to be more predictive on a year-to-year basis than range runs. This isn’t surprising given that range numbers necessarily have to jump into evaluating theoretical plays that never happened. In error runs, Semien’s +4.6 ties with Paul DeJong for the best in baseball at any position in 2019. If he continues on this pace, he will have added roughly 20 runs compared to the 2015 season, simply from avoiding errors.

Going into the final day of the season, Semien was +6.9 ErrR, which put him 19.5 runs ahead of 2015’s abysmal mark, and contributed no small amount to his overall WAR figure (which, incidentally, Dan optimistically projected for six runs in July, and which Semien blew past in August). In this piece, I want to pick up on something a commenter on Dan’s piece pointed out: that the major improvement in Semien’s defensive numbers came not right after his much-ballyhooed 2015 heart-to-heart sessions with Ron Washington, but over the course of 2017 — right when Matt Chapman became the A’s everyday third baseman.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, I joined upwards of 20 scouts gathered behind the plate at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey to watch RHP Norge Carlos Vera throw live against 12 batters. The 19-year-old Cuban was originally on the list of players who would have been eligible to sign with a major league club on July 2 before the Trump administration reversed the Obama-era United States-Cuba détente.

Vera’s father, Norge Luis Vera, is a former Cuban National Series star who pitched for Santiago de Cuba. He was a member of three Cuban Olympic teams, winning two silver medals (2000 in Sydney and 2008 in Beijing) and a gold medal (2004 in Athens) and holds the all-time Cuban National Series record for postseason wins, with 32. He also got the win in an exhibition game against the Orioles on May 3, 1999 at Camden Yards, going seven innings in a contest that also featured José Contreras pitching for Cuba.

The younger Vera debuted in the Cuban National Series – Cuba’s highest level of professional baseball – as a freshly-turned 18-year-old in August 2018, throwing seven scoreless innings against Granma, a team that had a cumulative wOBA of .372 heading into the outing. He was the second youngest member of the 2019 Cuban National Team that came to the northeast part of the United States to play against independent Can-Am League teams this summer. He defected while in New Jersey in late June or early July, shortly after striking out seven New Jersey Jackals hitters in four innings.

Kiley spoke with an international scout that was one of a relatively few at that start and Vera was 91-94, hitting 96 or 97 mph depending on the gun, mixing four average or better pitches for a starter look. He has since been training in northern New Jersey with former minor league pitcher Doug Cinnella. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Playoffs begin Tuesday evening as the Milwaukee Brewers (89-73) head to the nation’s capital to face the Washington Nationals (93-69). After a season during which most of the National League was in the playoff picture until very late in the season, both teams finished their respective campaigns in surprisingly convincing fashion, managing to clinch postseason appearances with time to spare. Both squads also fell short in their improbable runs for a division title late in the season, but making the Wild Card is still good enough to earn a bit of bubbly.

For the Washington Nationals, the end of the Bryce Harper era didn’t spell the end of their contending years. As it turns out, there is a foolproof way to replace a Bryce Harper: make a new one. Juan Soto only needed 121 minor league games to prepare for instant stardom in the majors had a fantastic 2018 run, hitting .292/.406/.517 with 22 homers and 3.7 WAR in 116 games for Washington. But Harper was still the Big Name on the team, and it wasn’t until his lucrative departure to Philadelphia that Soto could define Washington’s outfield.

Anything can happen in one game — the Detroit Tigers beat better teams on 47 occasions this season — but if I’m one of the other NL playoff teams, the Nationals aren’t the team I’d be pulling for to win. When considering the playoff construction of the teams — with less of an emphasis on depth and more on the top of the rotation — ZiPS projects the Nationals as the second-best squad in the National League. Second-in-the-National-League means they even edge out the Atlanta Braves by the slenderest of threads.

Read the rest of this entry »