Here at FanGraphs, we strive to provide you with entertaining baseball content. In the past, that often meant articles written by Jeff Sullivan. Now that he works for the Rays, that’s not an option — but still, some of our articles resemble his work. For the most part, that’s not on purpose, just a side effect of all of us reading so many of his pieces over the years. Today isn’t that. Today I’m going to riff on a classic.

Twice a year, Jeff wrote about the worst called ball and strike of the half season. Sometimes it was a comedy. Sometimes it was a straightforward discussion of how a pitch down the middle was called a ball. Either way, it was a wild ride, and it’s wholly Jeff’s.

That’s okay, though, because called strikes and called balls aren’t the only things that can be bad. Okay, fine, the worst called ball was pretty bad:

But that’s not why we’re here! Today, I want to look at the worst swinging strikes of the season.

The worst swinging strike is harder to pin down than the worst called strike. For example, this swinging strike is on a pitch that’s incredibly far out of the strike zone:

That’s not a good swing. It’s not particularly close to being a good swing. About the best thing you can say about it is that maybe the ball will get away from the catcher, but with a runner on first, that’s scant comfort. If the ball could travel through the ground with no resistance, Statcast projects that it would have crossed home plate nearly two feet below ground level. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to another edition of my Thursday chat. While I wait for the queue to fill, a couple of housekeeping notes. First off, either next week or the week after, I will be migrating my chat to another day, not because I don’t love you Thursday regulars (well, most of you) but because my daughter’s preschool schedule requires a bit of juggling responsibilities within our household. People always ask, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” and here, I have.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: So please do not be shocked if my next chat is on, like, a Monday or a Tuesday (the day is still TBD). Embrace the change.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Second, my piece on Aaron Judge’s recent hot streak, and the great team home run race between the Twins and Yankees, is up here. I think I set a personal best for bells and whistles — GIFs, vids, tables, spray charts — added to a piece, and so you will have plenty of things to entertain you but most notably, a Judge sentencing baseballs to die.  https://blogs.fangraphs.com/aaron-judge-is-mercilessly-punishing-baseb…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Velocity. Via Pitch Info, here’s his progression for his cutter: 2016 94.2 2017 93.5 2018 92.7 2019 92.1

12:07

Jay Jaffe: That’s two full clicks gone, and with it some movement — about 2 inches of horizontal movement and an inch of vertical movement. Not great, Bob!

Read the rest of this entry »

Luke Voit is expected to come off the Injured List when the Yankees return home on Friday. Out of the New York lineup since the end of July — a sports hernia put him on the shelf — the 28-year-old slugger is currently on a rehab assignment with Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre. His bat looks healthy. Following a shake-off-the-cobwebs 0-for-3 in the first of his four games as a RailRider, Voit has gone 8-for-14, with a pair of home runs, against International League pitching.

He’s already proven that he can hammer big-league pitching. Originally in the Cardinals organization — St. Louis drafted him out of Missouri State University in 2013 — Voit has been an offensive force since donning pinstripes 13 months ago. Acquired in exchange for Chasen Shreve and Giovanny Gallegos, the right-handed slugger has gone on to slash .293/.395/,547, with 33 home runs and a 150 wRC+ in 564 plate appearances.

Voit sat down to talk about his evolution as a hitter prior to Tuesday night’s game against the Pawtucket Red Sox.

———

David Laurila: If I looked at video from when you first entered pro ball, and video of you now, would I see the same hitter?

Luke Voit: “No, you’d see a completely different guy. I used to have a wide stance. My hands were probably in the same spot, but over time they’ve gone from down to my waist almost to where I have like a Gary Sheffield… my hands are moving. For awhile I had a big leg kick. That started working for me, then I slowly… it felt like pitchers were quick-pitching me. Not on purpose, but rather the quicker the guy was to the plate… that’s something I struggled with. That’s when I developed this little leg swing.”

Laurila: When did you make that change? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that the Yankees have weathered quite the storm when it comes to injuries. Despite losing more player-days (2,210) and payroll dollars ($70.9 million) to the injured list than any other team, they own the AL’s best record (88-47) and highest-scoring offense (5.86 runs per game), and they’re fast closing in on the Twins for the major league lead in homers. They’ve done all of this despite receiving comparatively modest contributions from their two most potent sluggers, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge. But while the former has been limited to one home run and nine games played amid myriad injuries and setbacks, the latter appears to be finding his stroke.

The 27-year-old Judge, who missed two months (April 21 to June 21) due to an oblique strain on his left side, has played just 78 games this season and homered 18 times, but six of his homers came during the Yankees’ just-completed nine-game west coast road swing, that after he had homered just once in his previous 28 games and 127 plate appearances while hitting.222/.339/.333. For the trip, he hit .359/.375/.897 — there’s one walk and 13 strikeouts in 40 PA, a fair tradeoff for that extreme power — lifting his season line to .277/.386/.514 (135 wRC+). Along the way, he set personal season highs with a 116.0 mph, 467 foot blast off the A’s Joakim Soria on August 20, and — wait, you think I’m not gonna show Judge sentencing that ball to die?

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday, the Red Sox and Royals resumed a game from August 7 that had been previously suspended due to rain. The original contest took its pause knotted up 4-4; it resumed in a 2-1 count in the top of the 10th. It was a strange viewing experience. With the game still tied in the home half of the inning, Andrew Benintendi came up to bat. The chyron showed his season stats entering this day, August 22, but marked his batting line from a day when he was two full weeks younger:

It was a testament to a few things — the surprising rigidity of baseball’s schedule, the allure of a chance, however small (entering the day, our playoff odds had the Red Sox with a 1.7% shot at playing October baseball), the grip of a discounted hot dog on the hearts of children. But the whole ordeal also made me think about how we think about time — how we sometimes consider it banked, or free, or very precious, or, when we’re mad, or tired, or perhaps inconvenienced, something we’d just like to hurry along. The Red Sox played the Royals for about 12 minutes, and in that span, they showed us time in four different states. These are those four. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether they would take a time machine into baseball’s future, Yu Darvish’s midseason makeover and ability to pick up new pitches, then answer listener emails about whether the warning track should be widened, players having the second halves of Hall of Fame careers, and a robot ump challenge system, plus a Stat Blast about the most common stolen base totals for players with lengthy careers.

Audio intro: Matthew Sweet, "Time Machine"
Audio outro: Sleater-Kinney, "The Future is Here"

Link to Sam on the baseball time machine
Link to Sam on Bellinger’s homers
Link to article on Darvish’s knuckle-curve
Link to article on Darvish’s midseason turnaround
Link to Glanville on the warning track
Link to Ben on Cruz
Link to order The MVP Machine

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The 2019 Arizona Fall League rosters were (mostly) announced today, and we’ve created a tab on THE BOARD where you can see all the prospects headed for extra reps in the desert. These are not comprehensive Fall League rosters — you can find those on the AFL team pages — but a compilation of names of players who are already on team pages on THE BOARD. The default view of the page has players hard-ranked through the 40+ FV tier. The 40s and below are then ordered by position, with pitchers in each tier listed from most likely to least likely to start. In the 40 FV tier, everyone south of Alex Lange is already a reliever.

Many participating players, especially pitchers, have yet to be announced. As applicable prospects are added to rosters in the coming weeks, I’ll add them to the Fall League tab and tweet an update from the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account. Additionally, this tab will be live throughout the Fall League and subject to changes (new tool grades, updated scouting reports, new video, etc.) that will be relevant for this offseason’s team prospect lists. We plan on shutting down player/list updates around the time minor league playoffs are complete (which is very soon) until we begin to publish 2020 team-by-team prospect lists, but the Fall League tab will be an exception. If a player currently on the list looks appreciably different to me in the AFL, I’ll update their scouting record on that tab, and I may add players I think we’re light on as I see them. Again, updates will be posted on the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account, and I’ll also compile those changes in a weekly rundown similar to those we ran on Fridays during the summer.

Anything you’d want to know about individual players in this year’s crop of Fall Leaguers can probably be found over on THE BOARD right now. Below are some roster highlights as well as my thoughts on who might fill out the roster ranks.

Glendale Desert Dogs
The White Sox have an unannounced outfield spot on the roster that I think may eventually be used on OF Micker Adolfo, who played rehab games in Arizona late in the summer. He’s on his way back from multiple elbow surgeries. Rehabbing double Achilles rupturee Jake Burger is age-appropriate for the Fall League, but GM Rick Hahn mentioned in July that Burger might go to instructs instead. Sox instructs runs from September 21 to October 5, so perhaps he’ll be a mid-AFL add if that goes well and they want to get him more at-bats, even just as a DH. Non-BOARD prospects to watch on this roster include Reds righties Diomar Lopez (potential reliever, up to 95) and Jordan Johnson, who briefly looked like a No. 4 or 5 starter type during his tenure with San Francisco, but has been hurt a lot since, as have Brewers lefties Nathan Kirby (Thoracic Outlet Syndrome) and Quintin Torres-Costa (Tommy John). Dodgers righty Marshall Kasowski has long posted strong strikeout rates, but the eyeball scouts think he’s on the 40-man fringe. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark reported that Royals owner David Glass was discussing a potential sale of the baseball team to John Sherman, who currently owns a minority interest in the Cleveland Indians. Jeff Passan is reporting the deal would be worth more than a billion dollars, which could potentially exceed Forbes’ estimate from earlier in the year. In very related news, Jeffrey Flanagan of MLB.com reported that the Royals are close to an extension of their television rights with Fox Sports Kansas City that were set to expire after this season. That deal, worth an estimated $50 million per season, looks light in relation to recent deals. Combined with the news of a potential sale, it seems possible the Royals have opted for a lesser television deal in favor of certainty in order to sell the team.

The potential television deal will be addressed later in this piece, but the bigger news is clearly the potential sale. Glass purchased the team for $96 million back in 2000, and if he were to sell the team for a billion dollars, it would be one of the most profitable sales in the history of the sport in sheer monetary terms. The graph below shows all sales of MLB franchises since the Orioles were sold back in 1988. During that time, every team except for the Yankees, White Sox, Twins, and Phillies have been sold, with the Diamondbacks and Rockies still with their original ownership group in some form. There have been 33 sales, with the Royals a potential 34th transfer.

The graph above can be a bit misleading as inflation and the amount of time a team has been owned can greatly affect the numbers above. The sale of the the Dodgers is still the biggest on the list, with the Mariners coming in second, and even after accepting a deal at only 75% of the rumored price, Jeffrey Loria’s profit on the Marlins was enormous. The average profit on a sale over the last 30-plus years (without the Royals) has been $306 million. Over the last decade, seven sales have averaged $900 million in profits. Read the rest of this entry »

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” – Mark Twain

While you may have thought that the Orioles were officially eliminated sometime back in February, they actually lasted five months dangling in the aether between the realities of implausibility and impossibility. The Orioles don’t have as strong a claim to being the worst team in baseball as the Tigers do, given that the O’s had an easier path to their tragic number thanks to a division with two of the best teams in baseball and last year’s World Series winner. Camden Yards hosted a terrible team in 2019, but that’s alright and perhaps even a bit awesome.

The Setup

For the Orioles, there were no delusions about what 2019 would bring. While many teams should be faulted for not spending last winter, keeping their wallet shut as if they were method-acting in a local production of A Christmas Carol, the Orioles don’t bear that blame. In this case, there really was no reason to spend money. This wasn’t a team with any 2019 upside; the best thing that could have happened in Baltimore would have been Chris Davis retiring to be a professional juggler, medicine-show salesman, or Fortnite streamer. But short of that or another winter miracle, the O’s were going to fly the L flag frequently.

If someone in the organization had appointed me benevolent dictator of the team, I probably would have traded Mychal Givens in the offseason, given the rather short shelf life of non-Mariano relief pitchers. The Orioles either chose to go a different way or simply felt that the offers they received weren’t tempting enough. The team’s approach wasn’t necessarily wrong; Givens wasn’t predestined to struggle in the early months of 2019, and given that he’s not a free agent until after the 2021 season, the O’s will have other opportunities to trade him, perhaps during or after a stronger 2020.

In the end, there weren’t really that many big picture moves to make over the winter, as the team had already traded off most of their veterans with any kind of significant value. Trey Mancini and Andrew Cashner didn’t have much trade value going into last offseason; Mancini had a rather lousy 2018 season and Cashner was apparently only really fit for a team looking for guys who could pass as extras in a Civil War film.

Without much to trade or much reason to spend, Baltimore had a busy waiver and minor-league signing year, picking up some players in the Rule 5 draft, some catchers so that every pitch didn’t go right to the backstop, and frightening me with the signing of Alcides Escobar to a minor-league contract. None of the prospects the O’s acquired were obviously pushing for major league jobs in 2019 and it was too soon in the rebuilding process for them to have developed a stable of interesting fringe prospects to play with, so the team went with whatever mildly fascinating player they could dig up for free, and gave them every chance to stick in the lineup.

The Projection

Like every other projection system, analyst, beat writer, fan, or person foggily aware of the existence of baseball who hadn’t just gotten back from a sojourn in Brigadoon, ZiPS did not think the 2019 Orioles were going to be a particularly good baseball team. The amusing thing is that the bleak projection, a 59-103 record and playoff odds in the one-in-thousands, was actually significantly better than 2018’s final record. ZiPS projected a 12-game improvement in 2019, one of the largest bumps in the majors. Rather than hope, this was really just Bill James’s Plexiglass Principle in action, as the O’s weren’t just a lousy team in 2018 but a rather unfortunate one as well.

The Orioles had two jobs in 2019: find out useful baseball things about the various players who fell into the organization over the winter, and keep fan morale high enough to at least outdraw the Miami Marlins.

The Results

The Orioles allow home runs. I’d say all the home runs, but Dan Straily couldn’t pitch 1400 innings this season. The team made their bid for statistical infamy by setting the record for most home runs ever allowed by a pitching staff, accomplishing the feat with six weeks remaining in the season, but is that really so bad? Baseball is a nostalgic game, and the grossly inept seem to be remembered in the same treacly sepia tones as the greats. The 1962 Mets were a dreadful team that lost a ton of games, with a roster mainly consisting of The Wrong Frank Thomas, old Richie Ashburn, and the first two dozen fans to show up when they opened the gates in the season debut. What they weren’t is forgotten, and losers in baseball tend to be lovable when the memories of them don’t fade. How much did the Cubs wring out of not being able to win the World Series for over a century? If you’re going to be lousy, be amazing at it. Don’t be like the 90s Royals, who were actually trying and failing.

More importantly, the O’s did use the season to find out things about their players. They resisted doing anything that would obviously stand in the way of that exercise; Alcides Escobar didn’t make the team, and the organization resisted the bad idea of bringing back Adam Jones after he failed to sign a contract. Baltimore played pretty much all of their halfway-interesting role players to assess what they could do to help the team in the next four to eight years. And while they didn’t find any actual stars, they did find players who have some utility to a future team. Hanser Alberto, who had a near-.800 OPS for Triple-A Round Rock in 2018, showed tremendous versatility and a hit tool good enough to perhaps be Homer Bush for a while. John Means ought to be at least an innings-eater for the next six years, and a total of 16 pitchers have gotten starts for Baltimore this season. Mancini has shown he is more the 2017 version of himself than the 2018 one, and Chris Davis is conclusively not having a bounce back. The catching situation is likely tolerable already, unlike most of the rest of the team, and will get better thanks to a certain draft pick.

The farm system’s improvement continued; the organization’s ranking has jumped to 12th THE BOARD. That’s not Padres, Rays, or Dodgers territory, but the team entered the season ranked 26th, and while McDongenhagen didn’t explicitly rank the farm systems in the preceding years, the team’s system was…worse. They now have 11 players with a 45 FV or better and while we haven’t seen big power from No. 1 pick Adley Rutschman yet, he’s about as highly polished a hitter as you’ll find in the low minors.

The Baltimore Orioles are in a much better position than they were a year ago and a phenomenally improved one from 18 months ago. They know more about the players in the system, they’re developing talent, and while attendance is hardly promising, at least there aren’t dumpsters full of Boog’s pit beef hanging around on Russell St.

What Comes Next?

This was never going to be an easy rebuild, with the team opting not to retool before the situation became dire, something that helped the Brewers make a quick turnaround a couple of years ago. This was a total, full-on, tear-down-the-entire-termite-infested-house project, completely new construction on a barren plot of land. I’m still hopeful they trade Jonathan Villar this winter, as the team’s roster is filling out enough that they don’t need Villar quite as much to complete a roster card. It’s also time to release Chris Davis. The money is gone, and it’s much better to pay Davis not to play baseball for your team than to pay him an identical sum to be on the roster.

While I’m hopeful the Mike Elias/Sig Mejdal braintrust would avoid such a signing anyway, I’m crossing my fingers that the Orioles losing in the latest MASN drama will keep them from getting any bright ideas about an Eric Hosmer-esque signing to “jumpstart” the competitive cycle. The team still isn’t close and they once again need to look for lottery tickets; the odds are long but it’s infinitely better to have tickets for tomorrow’s lottery than losing tickets from yesterday’s.

There was a bit of a bloodbath in the scouting department this past week, but I think people overreacted to the news. The team isn’t banning scouting — even the most saber-friendly teams spend a ton on scouting — but the front office almost certainly wants scouts who speak the same language they do. From scouting to player development to (hopefully) eventual promotion to the majors, there’s a lot of non-statistical information that needs to be conveyed and it helps if everyone’s speaking the same language. There has been a lot written in the local press about the years of expertise lost, but when it comes down to it, that expertise didn’t prevent the Orioles from having one of basebll’s worst farm systems for years. Think of it as the scouting equivalent of the Moneyball movie quote: If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?

The Absitively, Posilutely, Way-Too-Early ZiPS Projection – Trey Mancini

The team could theoretically trade Trey Mancini, who has largely rehabilitated his value from 2018, but I’m not sure they need to, considering that there are three additional seasons until he hits free agency, and that 1B/corner OF/DH types are simply not valued as highly in baseball as they once were, perhaps to the point that they’re currently undervalued (see the Edwin Encarnación trade).

ZiPS still isn’t buying into Mancini completely (he was really awful in 2018), but his projection is now back in the league-average player territory. League-average players have value, else we’d use WAA instead of WAR for everything! I’m slightly more optimistic than ZiPS is as Mancini’s plate discipline has been slowly but steadily improving on a yearly basis, and one of the elements of his big 2017 — a BABIP that wasn’t supported by his peripheral numbers — isn’t present in the system. Of course, ZiPS takes that stuff into consideration as well, but I think given my history, nobody would accuse me of wearing black-and-orange colored glasses! Mancini’s a regular ol’ good player and there’s nothing wrong with that, apart from his outfield play, where he’s likely a win worse every year. It’s yet another reason to release Davis; any time you’re playing Davis at first, you’re likely sticking Mancini in the outfield, where his lousiness has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.