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 »

There are still a lot of teams that are fighting for a postseason spot while we wind down the season. As I watch a lot of games down the stretch, I hear many different announcers bring up the same thing. If you want to win championships, then you need to follow a key ideology that the Astros and Red Sox have both preached in their title-winning seasons: You need to be able to take your walks, and you need to be able to put the ball in play instead of striking out.

In 2017, the Houston Astros had the lowest strikeout rate as a team. They were able to do that while also having the league’s highest team isolated power. Last season, the Red Sox had the third-lowest strikeout rate in the league while having the ninth-best walk rate and fourth-best ISO. This got me to thinking about teams’ walk and strikeout rates. But I did not want to just look at it from the full season perspective. I wanted to compare teams’ rates from before the All-Star game to post-All-Star game (more specifically August 26th, because that is when I am writing this).

Thanks to FanGraphs, I was able to pull the data for the two date ranges and compare the numbers. Let us take a look: Read the rest of this entry »

As the Statcast era continues to age, we baseball obsessives are collecting more and more pitches to analyze in countless different ways. MLB Advanced Media releases 90 different metrics for every pitch thrown, including a pitch’s classification, where all the defenders are standing upon the pitch being thrown, exit speed, launch and spray angle, etc. Analysts across the web, armed with this exhaustive data set, have been able to unearth previously unknowable mysteries regarding team and player performance and league-wide trends.

One area of pitching analysis that has been largely untouched by the public is pitch sequencing. Baseball Savant has done some work with visualizing how a pitcher sequences his pitches, but to my knowledge there is no way to look at pitch sequencing for the league as a whole and see which sequences are most used and most effective. I was curious how pitchers have attacked hitters since 2015 (the beginning of the aforementioned Statcast era), so I parsed through every pitch thrown in the regular season starting from the beginning of the 2015 campaign up until August 11th of this year. I looked at how pitchers have paired pitches during every plate appearance. I discarded pitches that were not thrown to the same batter or the same inning; a pitch that is thrown to end an inning followed by a pitch to start an inning should not be considered a sequence (same can be said for two different plate appearances). The sequences should be read as the pitch on the right precedes the pitch on the left. Now, let us look at the trends:

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 »

The trade and struggles of Chris Archer have been well-documented by the baseball community. As many patrons of this very website know, Archer was sent from the Rays to the Pirates at the 2018 trade deadline for Austin Meadows, Tyler Glasnow, and a player to be named later, who was revealed as Shane Baz. Both Meadows and Glasnow have been very productive at the major league level for the Rays, while Baz is FanGraph’s 63rd-rated prospect on THE BOARD, carrying a future value of 50.

Archer, on the other hand, has been an unmitigated disaster. The once-tantalizing strikeout artist has delivered a 5.01 ERA paired with a 5.05 FIP. He has still struck out batters at a 26.0% rate, but his walk rate with the Bucs has surged to 10.1%. The main culprit for Archer’s spell of bad performance has been home runs; Archer has always tended to give up more fly balls than the average hurler, but since his move to Pittsburgh, 19.6% of his fly balls have gone over the fence, about 6% more than league average over that time span. Naturally, this leaves all of us baseball fans wondering, what happened to the pitcher who just four years ago was deemed by Dave Cameron as one of the 10 most valuable assets in MLB?

The Pirates were once thought of as one of the savviest organizations in baseball, a team that could spin washed-up pitchers into innings-eating workhorses. Detailed in Travis Sawchik’s book Big Data Baseball, the Pirates were one of the first teams to weaponize the infield shift. Pirates pitchers under the tutelage of pitching coach Ray Searage have been taught to rely on sinkers and two-seamers and to induce ground balls that can be gobbled up by the shift. As hitters have adjusted to the shift and focused on putting balls in the air, the Pirates’ approach of tailing fastballs low in the strike zone has become outdated. What was once the fountain of youth for veteran pitchers has become the focus of ridicule from the more analytically inclined. Read the rest of this entry »

A look at the relief pitcher ERA leaderboard yields names many baseball fans are now familiar with. Felipe Vazquez, Adam Ottavino, and Ken Giles have been in the spotlight before. The breakout seasons for All-Star trio Kirby Yates, Shane Greene, and Liam Hendriks have been well documented. Will Harris has been quietly dominant for multiple years. Even Scott Oberg had 200 innings of respectable relief pitching under his belt entering this year.

And then there is Aaron Bummer. Like most of his teammates on the White Sox who don’t routinely flip their bats into near-earth orbit, Bummer is fairly anonymous to the baseball world at large. Yet he has been without question the best arm in a surprisingly respectable White Sox bullpen, notching 49 innings across 41 appearances in 2019, posting a 1.65 ERA that is good for third amongst qualified relief pitchers.

Bummer is an outlier on this leaderboard in more than name recognition. The names ahead of him are racking up the strikeouts, with Yates posting a 14.58 K/9 to go with his 1.08 ERA while Hendriks holds 12.42 and 1.30 marks, respectively. Bummer averages a measly 7.88 K/9 by comparison. Few other relievers with such stellar ERAs have struck out batters at the low rate that Bummer has.

Bummer has largely accomplished this through an astronomical 68% ground-ball rate, surpassed by only worm-burner sensei Zack Britton. So how did this 19th-round relief-only prospect who topped out at 23rd on any White Sox prospect list turn into a ground-ball machine with one of baseball’s most effective fastballs? Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a few bugbears when I watch a baseball game. I feel most of these are derived from the fact that I have never been taught how to play the game or faced something being thrown at me faster than 50 mph. A lot of these are behavioral or unwritten rules, but some leak into how the game is played.

The thing that I don’t understand the most is the first pitch called strike. Below are videos of Nolan Arenado, Mike Trout, and George Springer all taking first pitch called strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Look, another article about the juiced ball! I know, I know. At this point, the narrative of the juiced ball has been written from many angles. (For anyone reading this who is somehow not familiar with that narrative, Jay Jaffe’s piece from June is replete with graphs, tables, and external links.)

As fans, this narrative is interesting, as it contextualizes the product we see on the field. It feels like there are more home runs — hey, there are more home runs! It’s human nature to wonder why. Baseball writers have tough jobs, and they need something to write about. Many baseball writers have tried to tackle the “why” to satisfy both reader curiosity and their editor’s article quota.

While this narrative is interesting for fans, for teams, it’s of massive importance financially. Teams have payroll budgets, and presumably, some of those teams will have room in those budgets for free agents this offseason. Teams also have players under contract who are eligible for arbitration, on whom the team must place valuations in advance of submitting a figure to arbitrators or deciding to non-tender the player. In short, teams have financial decisions to make, and they rely on all the information at their disposal to make them. Wasted dollars represent opportunity cost more than anything, in a league where advantages are razor thin and random variance plays such a key role in success or failure from year to year. Read the rest of this entry »

With Noah Syndergaard trade rumors whirling around the baseball world, it is fair to ponder how a team who would acquire him could improve upon his 2019 results. To be clear, this incarnation of Syndergaard is still an excellent pitcher, but he still leaves us wanting more; Syndergaard has the physical profile and repertoire of a pitcher that teams dream about in their search for their next front-line starter. So how can he improve upon his already great season?

Look no further than his right-handed colleague, Gerrit Cole. When Cole was trade to the Astros, the baseball community expected that the Houston would be able to optimize Cole’s raw stuff to build one of the best pitchers in baseball. We expected the Astros would ditch his mediocre sinker and trade it for more breaking balls, Cole’s bread and butter. Sure enough, that was the case, and Cole has become one of the most dominant pitchers in the league:

Let’s look under the hood at Syndergaard’s 2019 season. Here is a zone plot of all of his pitches this year: Read the rest of this entry »