Eric Hosmer is a hard man to shift against. Though he fits the two main criteria for an overshift (namely: he’s left-handed and plays baseball), that’s where his list as an ideal candidate ends. If ever anyone was going to poke a groundball the opposite way, it would be Hosmer — his groundball rate is perennially among the league’s highest, and he hits a fair number of them to the opposite field. Teams generally agree — he’s faced a shift in fewer than half of his bases-empty plate appearances this year, and only 40.7% overall. Both place him in the bottom third of left-handed batters when it comes to the defensive alignment.

You don’t have to dig into his groundball numbers for long to work out why. The reasoning behind a shift is simple; hitters pull groundballs. League-wide, a whopping 55.5% of groundballs have been pulled, against only 12.1% hit the opposite way. The split is the same regardless of handedness, but first base is conveniently located on the lefty pull side of the field, which makes shifting a left-handed batter a high-percentage move.

For some reason, though, Hosmer doesn’t fit that mold. In 2019, he’s pulled only 46.4% of his groundballs, almost exactly equivalent to his career average of 46.3%. He’s at 16.3% opposite-field groundballs for his career over a whopping 2,263 grounders. His pull rate is in the bottom 20% of batters this year, and was in the bottom 3% last year, the bottom 10% two years ago, the bottom 15% for his career — you get the idea.

This isn’t to say there’s no merit to shifting against Hosmer — you’d need a more detailed mapping of infielder speeds and groundball exit velocity to work the math out perfectly. But look at his groundball (and blooper) distribution from 2016 to 2019 and tell me you want to shift against this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe his breakout has gone a bit unnoticed because his name broke out when inked to a huge signing bonus four years ago. Maybe it’s quiet this season because three years ago, he was involved in one of the biggest trades of the decade and the next spring he was the top prospect in all of baseball. In his first year and a half in the big leagues, he was merely an average player. He’s playing this season on a non-contending team and he’s lost time due to injury, but in the 100-plus games he has appeared in, Yoán Moncada has not just been one of the game’s most-improved players, he’s been one of the 10-best position players in baseball.

To provide some sense of where Moncada rates among today’s players, let’s start with the youngest set. Here are the best 2019 campaigns from players 25 years old and younger (all stats are through games on August 26):

There are only three players younger than Moncada with a higher WAR this season. Rookie Peter Alonso is having a monster season, yet Moncada has been just as valuable. Given Moncada’s lesser playing time, he’s arguably been better than Alonso  and a cut above a rising star like Juan Soto and a no-doubter like Francisco Lindor. How about his ranks among third basemen, Moncada’s new position this season? Read the rest of this entry »

Guillermo Martínez is 34 years old, last played pro ball eight years ago for the independent Grand Prairie (now Texas) AirHogs, and never made it above High-A in affiliated ball. He is also the rookie major league hitting coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. There’s a long history of men who never achieved much in their playing careers becoming outstanding in second acts as coaches, and in his responsibility for the offensive success of Toronto’s much-vaunted youth movement (the average age of their hitters, 26.2, is the youngest in the American League), Martínez has more than enough raw material to make his mark in his first season in the role.

Last week when the Blue Jays came to Seattle to take on the Mariners (dropping two out of three), I sat down with Martínez to talk about his first year of coaching in the majors, and in particular his first year of coaching another, much more famous, rookie: Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

After making his debut for Toronto late in April at the precocious age of 20, Guerrero has had an up-and-down — or, more accurately, a down-and-then-up — season for a middling Toronto club that is nonetheless understandably optimistic about the cohort of young hitters of which Guerrero is a part. First, the down: Through the end of June, across 226 big-league plate appearances, Guerrero had posted a wOBA of just .317, and — even more worryingly — was striking out far more (19% of the time) and walking less often (9% of the time) than at any previous level.

Some regression was to be expected, of course, upon facing big-league pitching for the first time. But it wasn’t just that the results that were underwhelming. It was that they matched up with the story told by the eyes. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
Read the rest of this entry »

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With three losses in a row against the Nationals at Wrigley Field this past weekend, the Cubs (69-61) slipped out of first place in the NL Central. They’re now three games behind the Cardinals (72-58), the furthest they’ve been from first since May 1, and just one game ahead of the Phillies (68-62) and two games ahead of the Mets (67-63) in the race for the second NL Wild Card spot. They’ll face the latter in an important three-game series starting today, but the bad news for them is that they’ve had to pack their suitcases to head to Citi Field. At 25-39, the Cubs own the major’s eighth-lowest winning percentage on the road (.391), and the lowest of any contender by 44 points (the Mets are 30-39 at .435 on the road).

In a race for a playoff spot, that’s quite a handicap, of course. In fact, in the Wild Card era, no team has ever won less than 40% of its games away from home and still reached the playoffs. Just a small handful of teams has won less than 45% and done so. Here’s the bottom 10:

Of the 10 teams above, the 2006 Cardinals, who won the World Series despite finishing with just an 83-78 record — the low-water mark for any World Series champ — and the 2005 Astros at least made it to the big dance, but aside from the 2015 Astros winning the AL Wild Card game, the 2008 Dodgers were the only other team from the above group to advance in the postseason.

I limited that list to 10 because beyond that, the rankings get pretty bunched up, with three teams at .458 (from the strike-shortened 1995 season), six at .469, 11 at .481, and so on. In all, 43 of the period’s 206 postseason teams (20.9%) had sub-.500 records on the road; if you’re a stickler for a full 162-game schedule, it’s 40 out of 198 (20.2%). Just 10 of those teams won a pennant, and only three — the aforementioned 2006 Cardinals, and the 1997 and 2003 Marlins, because of course — won the World Series. It’s not a particularly viable route to dog-piles and champagne showers. Read the rest of this entry »

Billy Hamilton has been a Brave for a little over a week — only since Atlanta picked him up off waivers from Kansas City on August 19 after losing Nick Markakis and Ender Inciarte to injury — and he’s already achieved that highest aspiration for any member of the Braves organization: He humiliated the New York Mets, and on their home turf at that. The play came with the score tied 5-5 in the eighth inning of Saturday’s second game of the weekend series, with Ronald Acuña Jr. at the plate, Rafael Ortega at second, and Hamilton at first. Acuña, who at that point was an uncharacteristic 0-for-4 on the night, wasted no time in taking a Brad Brach hanger on the outer third of the plate softly into left. Then, this happened:

J.D. Davis, the Met unfortunate enough to wind up holding the ball on this particular play, spoke to our own Jay Jaffe after the game:

I was going to make a play to third,” he said, in a clubhouse near-silent after a late loss to a division rival, “and then I saw that the runner [Hamilton] was already like three-quarters of the way … so I just held onto the ball, and I looked at first to see where that runner was. But then as I released it to throw it to ‘Rosie’, he was already rounding third and headed home … I should have just thrown it to ‘Rosie’ and got it in. [You feel kind of] helpless, with Hamilton and his speed … it was just perfect timing. It was a good, high-baseball IQ kind of play.

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Amir Garrett emerged from the bullpen into quite a jam. With the Reds up 5-1 heading into the eighth, all had seemed fine, but Michael Lorenzen allowed the first three batters he faced to reach base. As Garrett prepared to face Anthony Rizzo, one swing of the bat could tie the game. Knowing that, Garrett didn’t mess around — he went to his best pitch right away.

The first slider he threw might have clipped the inside edge of the zone, but it was called a ball. Still, down 1-0, he didn’t give in. He went back inside with a slider — and hit Rizzo. That free base drove in a run, and now Garrett was right back where he started with one less run to work with.

With free-swinging Javier Báez up next, it was time for another slider. Garrett again clipped the corner, and this time was rewarded with a grounder that Joey Votto threw home for a force out. Garrett breathed a sigh of relief. There was no time to relax, though — with only one out, the situation was still precarious.

Ian Happ, coming off of a scorching-hot six game stretch where he had compiled a 343 wRC+, stepped in next. Fortunately, though, Happ has one major weakness: sliders. Garrett took no prisoners:

Read the rest of this entry »

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 — JT Chargois, Brad Keller, and Adam Ottavino — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

JT Chargois, Los Angeles Dodgers

“I was having trouble getting one to spin — to turn over — so my high school coach showed me a spike. Over the years I’ve manipulated where I hold my [pointer finger] on the ball, but it’s still a spiked-curveball grip. I just throw it like a heater. Instead of getting out front and pulling it like a curveball, I stay true on it as though it was a heater.

“When I get in trouble — maybe it’s backing up on me — and I need to make an adjustment, I tend to change my mindset to more of a curveball, to more of a downer-pitch. I want it to have two planes, as opposed to just moving horizontally.

“It was actually taught to me as a curveball. Then I started throwing harder as I got older. I got stronger and was literally trying to throw the crap out of it. That’s kind of how it migrated into a slider. As opposed to having more of a wrist-turn to get a bigger break, [a slider] is more about the manipulation of your hand position at release point. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about what GPS directions have to do with analytics-averse managers, MLB’s black and white uniforms fiasco on Players Weekend, Sam’s takeaways from his trip to see a former podcast guest’s game in the Southern California Vintage Base Ball League, a philosophy professor’s quest to establish that the tie goes to the runner and a complaint about replay review, and whether Lance Lynn’s career year and the ascendance of data-driven development suggest that players who re-sign with the same team will no longer outperform players who depart to play for a different team.

Audio intro: The Inbreds, "My Favorite Satellite"
Audio outro: PUP, "Bare Hands"

Link to column about MLB and Players Weekend
Link to podcast episode about vintage baseball
Link to Southern California Vintage Base Ball League website
Link to article about Ted Cohen’s quest to make ties go to the runner
Link to audio recording of the essay “There Are No Ties at First Base”
Link to Matt Swartz’s earliest research about other people’s players
Link to Matt’s most recent research about other people’s players
Link to Zach Kram on trading top prospects
Link to Michael Baumann on Lance Lynn
Link to order The MVP Machine

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