Before Game 3 of the ALDS, Zack Greinke answered eight questions in just 67 words. The former Cy Young winner would soon be starting his 12th career postseason game. Earlier in the season, Greinke had been the main piece in the biggest deal of the deadline, joining the Astros and making them almost unanimously the best team in the league. Fifteen of the 32 FanGraphs writers who made a prediction on the World Series winner chose Houston. On July 30th, the Astros had a 24% chance of winning the World Series. On July 31st, that number had increased to 26.4%. To put that in perspective, the Nationals had a 4.7% chance.

However, Greinke will be the first to tell you that with success and high expectations comes media attention. Greinke had gone from an overperforming and small-market Arizona Diamondbacks team to an absolutely stacked Astros team. Houston was “World Series or bust,” especially now that they had sacrificed some of their future for Greinke. Before Game 3, the media crowded around Greinke to try to get answers and information about the big game. He did not oblige. They got eight answers but not much information from any of them.

One of those answers stated that the game was just a normal game. However, for Greinke, his performance was anything but normal. During that contest, Greinke would surrender six runs in 3.2 innings. Greinke’s mental ability to deal with a postseason game and the pressure that comes with it was questioned and became a major storyline due to the interview. In Game 1 of the ALCS, Greinke gave up three runs in six innings, which isn’t bad considering the Yankees lineup. However, for Zack Greinke, it is disappointing, frustrating, and it continues a recent narrative that he cannot handle the postseason. The postseason comes with a lot of added pressure and adrenaline, which can sometimes cause pitchers to throw harder. However, this is not always a good thing, as we have seen this year with Greinke. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Lorenzen is one of a kind. We’ve heard plenty of his multi-faceted accomplishments as of late. As far as pitchers go, the guy can mash. He was a two-way star at Cal State Fullerton, slashing .335/.412/.515 in his draft year, while posting 19 saves and a 1.99 ERA out of the bullpen. In the big leagues, he’s a career .267/.306/.514 hitter with seven home runs in 116 plate appearances. The hits haven’t come cheap, either. His 14 batted balls this season have had a remarkable 98.70-mph average exit velocity, despite him only barreling one of them.

Lorenzen can also move better than most. His top sprint speed of 28.2 mph in 2019 places him in a tie with Bryce Harper, Shohei Ohtani, George Springer, and Jorge Polanco, among others. His general athletic prowess means he’s been serviceable enough to play in the field with some level of frequency, converting all eight of his chances in 34.2 innings split over three outfield positions. On September 5th, the day after his historic performance, he even earned himself a start in center field for the out-of-contention Reds.

His Swiss Army knife capabilities aren’t the only reason he’s unique. Lorenzen is an outlier on the mound as well. Lorenzen has spent the last four years as a solid reliever, working to a cumulative 3.48 ERA over 290 innings out of the Cincinnati bullpen. After a failed run as a starter in his rookie season, he seems to have found his niche working in the later innings.

This is far from out of the ordinary. But while failed starters tend to simplify their pitch mix upon shifting to the bullpen, Lorenzen has doubled down on his six-pitch arsenal, throwing each of his four-seamer, sinker, cutter, changeup, cutter, slider, and curveball between 7% and 28% of the time. It’s rare enough for any pitcher to have a true six-pitch mix, much less a reliever. I ran a Statcast search to find every pitcher since 2017 (when Statcast arsenal data begins) to have thrown at least six pitches between 5% and 40% of the time, minimum 250 pitches per season. Lorenzen still stands out: Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball and player development have become increasingly data-driven, but the determination of the athlete under evaluation is essential too. At least that’s the case with Mike Ford of the New York Yankees.

During his junior year playing for Princeton (2013), Ford was the Ivy League Baseball Pitcher and Player of the Year. Yet no team picked him in the draft that summer. Today, as one of only eight undrafted free agents playing in the major leagues, his approach to hitting has opened eyes all around baseball.

Ford could have easily given up on baseball after he was passed over. During an interview with Yahoo Sports, he said “It was a little bit embarrassing being passed over in the draft at times. I did well at school at both, but I didn’t have good 95-mph fastball, or I didn’t put up 20 homers. I was just a good player. I don’t think anything 100 percent necessarily stuck out. I think with the Ivy League, a lot of times a lot of those guys kind of fall since they will be seniors, that’s what I’ve heard from a few teams since then. We passed because we thought we could get you next year.”

His embarrassment and disappointment quickly gave way to resolve to prove he belonged in the majors, and that resolve led to his determination not just to generate more power at the plate, but to remain quiet at the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

Emilio Pagan made his debut in 2017 with the Mariners. He impressed somewhat as a 26-year-old rookie, notching a K-BB rate of 24.5% en route to an xFIP- of 93. Not bad. The Athletics traded for him that offseason, whereupon Pagan promptly did much worse. His strikeout rate dropped four points while his walk rate rose three. He also suffered from long-ball-itis and saw his xFIP- climb to a below-average 112.

The Rays then got ahold of him in the three-team Jurickson Profar deal with Texas. Pagan began 2019 in Triple-A but was called up in mid-April when Blake Snell fractured his toe. Three days later, Pagan was sent back down; two days later he was back in the bigs. All he’s done since then is help his team chase a playoff spot.

As the team’s nominal closer, Pagan has accrued 1.4 WAR, which ranks ninth among qualified relievers. Take leverage and innings totals away and his 1.63 WPA/LI ranks fifth. Baseball Prospectus and their DRA-based methodology agree he’s good. Among pitchers with a maximum of 75 innings pitched, Pagan’s 1.7 WARP ranks fifth.

Pagan’s been dominating hitters to the tune of a 30.6% K-BB rate, seventh-highest among qualified relievers. And when batters do put the ball in play against him, they’re not doing much. His .213 xWOBA against is the lowest in the entire sport among pitchers who’ve faced at least 50 batters. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s safe to say the Boston Red Sox have been underwhelming this season. As a Red Sox fan who follows the local media, it’s overwhelming to hear just how underwhelming they have been. If you have followed Boston sports media during this baseball season, you would think the team is tied with the Detroit Tigers for the worst record in the league. In fairness to Boston sports pundits, the team has a wealth of talent that has played below their usual standard for most of the season. This has the local radio shows calling to trade the beloved Mookie Betts, suddenly turning on ace Chris Sale, and openly criticizing manager Alex Cora, not even a year after he was hailed the Bill Belichick of baseball.

Oh, how quickly the tides turn in the city of Boston.

The team has certainly regressed from their magical 2018 season. That’s just the way baseball works sometimes. But the true mystery to me has been Andrew Benintendi. The Red Sox left fielder was coming off a fantastic 2018 season that saw him post a WAR of 4.3 and a wRC+ of 122. These numbers have dipped to a 2.6 and 112, respectively, through 115 games. No, it isn’t the most dramatic decline in the history of baseball, but Benintendi was a key part of Boston’s success in 2018. Of all the players to take a step back this season, I wasn’t necessarily expecting it to come from him.

Traditionally, the critique of Benintendi has been that he is an elite hitter against right-handed pitching and less than stellar against left-handeders. This trend has come to a screeching halt in 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Flaherty spent the first half of the 2019 season disappointing most Cardinals fans who expected a continuation of his breakout 2018 campaign. Flaherty, who posted a 4.64 ERA with a 26.4% strikeout rate and a 1.86 HR/9, had been quite disappointing up to that point for a ST. Louis squad that was relying on his ability to become their ace. The Cardinals were 44-44 at the time and two games back of the Cubs for the NL Central lead.

On July 16th, Flaherty took the mound against a Pirates team that would fall apart in the second half. Flaherty dominated, giving up just three hits and one run over seven innings of work while striking out eight. A line like this would soon become the norm for Flaherty, who has been absolutely on fire since the All-Star break. His efforts have helped propel the Cardinals to the top of the NL Central in the middle of a playoff race.

How did Flaherty turn it around? The biggest cause for success is his slider, which statistically has been one of the best pitches in baseball since the break. Additionally, Flaherty started locating his fastball better and got a nice little bump in velocity. Flaherty’s sharpened tools have allowed him to significantly increase his O-Swing % and decrease his Z-Contact %, meaning that he’s getting hitters to chase more out of the zone but also miss more in the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever looked at Mike Trout’s Baseball Reference page, you’ve seen a lot of black ink, indicative of leading the league in some offensive category. Trout is currently leading the league in a lot of such categories — and he has done so in the past. He’s likely to lead the AL in homers for the first time this year, and as noted recently by Ben Lindbergh, that would be the 10th category out of 17 basic ones at Baseball Reference that he’s led the league in at least once in his career. Only about two dozen players have led the league in more of these 17 categories at some point in their careers.

Trout is also leading the league in another category that would also be a first for him: hit by pitch (HBP). He’s been plunked 15 times this season (editor’s note: now 16), one more than Shin-Soo Choo as of this writing. HBP is not what you would call a sexy stat, but it does have value. It’s as valuable as a walk — in fact, per FG’s linear weights, a little more so, apparently because it occurs slightly more in base-out states that have higher run expectancy (RE) than average.

HBP, like walks, are valuable because they put a runner on base, where he has a chance to score, while simultaneously avoiding an out, thus giving another batter a chance. They’re a good thing. But they also come with a risk. If a batter is hit by a pitch, he could suffer a significant injury and miss time. The resulting lost time is lost value. This raises an obvious question: is the increased value gained by getting hit by pitches greater than the potential risk of losing value to injury? If it is — and one would assume that in this stat-savvy age, it would have to be — by how much? Read the rest of this entry »

You probably didn’t pay much attention (or even notice) when the New York Yankees acquired 28-year-old outfielder Mike Tauchman from the Colorado Rockies in exchange for pitching prospect Phillip Diehl towards the end of spring training on March 23rd. Who could blame you? Tauchman’s major league resume to that point was ugly: a .153/.265/.203 slash line in 69 plate appearances over 52 games for the Rockies.

From 2013 to 2016 in the Rockies’ farm system, Tauchman hadn’t shown much in his age-22 to age-25 seasons. He displayed a decent hit tool but didn’t flash much power, combining for only eight home runs across four minor league seasons. If Tauchman wanted to crack Colorado’s major league roster, he needed to make a change.

Prior to the 2017 campaign, as reported by the New York Times’ James Wagner, Tauchman worked with Justin Stone, a hitting instructor at Chicago-based Elite Baseball Training. With three-dimensional sensors and plates that measure force, Stone, who was hired as a hitting consultant by the Chicago Cubs in 2018, used biomechanics to help Tauchman improve his swing. Stone and Tauchman found that he was transferring energy inefficiently from his lower half to his upper half. In scientific terms, Tauchman’s kinetic chain, or the sequence of movements that make up his swing, was off. With Stone’s help, Tauchman learned to use his lower half better when starting his swing, enhancing the transfer of energy up the kinetic chain.

The results were undeniable. Still in Triple-A, Tauchman improved his wOBA from .322 in 2016 to .399 in 2017 and .420 in 2018. His 139 wRC+ was good for the eighth-best mark in Triple-A in 2017. In 2018, his 153 wRC+ was fourth-best, just behind fellow 2019 breakouts Daniel Vogelbach and J.D. Davis as well as Astros top prospect Kyle Tucker. Tauchman’s power had definitely increased: he tripled his career home run mark with 16 homers in 2017 and swatted another 20 in 2018. The Yankees front office took notice and was intrigued enough by Tauchman’s minor league success to add him as a depth piece just before the 2019 season. Read the rest of this entry »

I make pitching gifs on a regular basis. In fact, there are dozens of other accounts on Twitter that do it as well. We participate in trying to help other fans understand what happens during plate appearances that go beyond what meets the eye. They can be great for seeing pitch shapes and how they contrast each other, but it’s important to know that there are some factors that can make them a bit deceptive (I myself have been guilty of making more out of an overlay that there actually is).

Overlays can be good for viewing how pitches move in relation to each other or noticing how different spin and axis affect the shape of a pitch. The Athletic’s Joe Schwarz is great at writing about and breaking that stuff down with the help of another gif-creating giant, ‘cardinalsgifs‘.

These two use gifs to demonstrate how a pitcher has made adjustments, for better or worse, and compare how it impacted the shape of their respective pitch. Having a good camera angle for that practice matters as we are less concerned about how the hitter sees the pitch and more about how certain tweaks can alter its personality.

Most MLB cameras do not lend themselves to a good visual representation of an event. You’re not getting the actual pitch shape nor are you getting the real trajectories from the hitter’s perspective. Even direct-level views (via the Braves, Marlins, or Orioles, to name a few) aren’t always beneficial, especially if you’re trying to make a point of how “filthy” or “nasty” pitches are to hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

*Note: All numbers updated to August 12th, 2019*

Introduction

Consider the following comparison between Freddie Freeman (29) and Carlos Santana (33). Both players were starters for the 2019 All-Star teams of their respective leagues, and both are enjoying breakout seasons beyond their usual high production level, with nearly identical statistics across the board.

However, I argue that there is an underlying statistic that makes Santana’s success less impressive and Freeman’s worth MVP consideration. Recall the quality of competition of pitchers faced. The Atlanta Braves’ division, the NL East, contains the respectable pitching competition of the Mets (13th in league-wide in ERA), Nationals (15th), Marlins (16th), and Phillies (19th). Contrast this with the competition of the Cleveland Indians in the AL Central: The Twins (ninth), White Sox (22nd), Royals (24th), and Tigers (28th). Over 503 plate appearances, Santana has faced a top-15 pitcher (ranked by FIP) just 15 times, compared to 46 times by Freeman over 533 plate appearances. wRC+ controls for park effects and the current run environment, while xwOBA takes into account quality of contact, but all modern sabermetrics fail to address the problem of Freeman and Santana’s near-equal statistics despite widely different qualities of competition. Thus, I present the modeling system of playerElo. Read the rest of this entry »