Archive for Cutter

Last year, Justin Steele verged upon pitch-tracking-era history:

Justin Steele is 21 four-seamers away from history*.

Most four-seamers thrown w/out giving up a HR in the pitch tracking era:

Heath Bell: 807 in 2010
Justin Steele: 786 in 2022.

— Alex Fast (@AlexFast8) July 22, 2022

If you don’t know how this ends, my exceptionally dim-witted-but-nevertheless-talented colleague and friend Alex Fast jinxed it in spectacular fashion:

This streak by Steele ended on his first pitch of tonight's game. Schwarber slugs a 90.8 mph four-seam fastball from Steele over the RF wall. https://t.co/1cZyei5EHT

— Meghan Montemurro (@M_Montemurro) July 22, 2022

Nevertheless, the streak remains interesting because Steele is up to his same antics.

Only four pitches have been thrown 500 times this year and allowed just one home run. Here they are, in order of total pitches thrown and accompanied by total plate appearances (PA) completed:

1. Steele’s four-seamer (725 thrown, 199 PA)
2. Kevin Gausman’s splitter (622, 160)
3. Jordan Montgomery’s sinker (584, 170)
4. Hunter Greene’s slider (516, 100)

It’s one thing to accomplish this feat at all; it’s another all together to do so with a fastball (kudos to J-Mont, but a sinker ain’t a four-seamer). Here is the top of the list of only fastballs that have allowed one or fewer home runs, ordered by most thrown. The gulf between first and second from a volume standpoint is astounding:

Read the rest of this entry »

Using my Pitch Leaderboard, I identified every “new” pitch* thrown during MLB’s glorious first weekend. Then, using my Pitch Comps tool, which uses pitch specs (like velocity, spin rate, movement, and release points) to compare pitches to one another, I wanted to see if I could make any quantifiable declarations about the quality of these pitches in small samples. I can’t write about everyone, so I’ll select the most interesting ones (in my humble opinion).

(*Including existing pitches from rookies for whom we now finally have MLB statcast data as well as existing pitches thrown by players who missed all of 2021 due to injury. It will be interesting to see if the latter group looks measurably different post-injury than they did pre-injury.)

At the end of the season, I’ll revisit to find out these comps were actually indicative (i.e., “predictive,” in a sense) of quality, but it’s also strongly possible the comps will change as samples grow. This is very experimental, but it’s something I’ve wanted to try in the past but hadn’t found the motivation to do.

Why pitch comps? I know I am prone to bias watching a handful of pitches from a pitcher. I can’t scout because I can deceive myself into just about any conclusion (and I think the same can be said for most of us, whether we like it or not).

Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor Bauer, the National Fantasy Baseball Championship’s No.-9 starting pitcher and No.-31 player overall, has pitched to the tune of a 4.12 ERA this year. All things considered (“things” being, primarily, the juiced ball), Bauer hasn’t been awful. But after compiling a pristine 2.21 ERA in last year’s breakout with equally pristine ERA estimators to boot (3.14 xFIP, 3.21 SIERA), this year’s peripherals (4.35 xFIP, 4.21 SIERA) are far less inspiring, even when adjusted for context.

The easiest way to write off Bauer’s 2018 season as an aberration is, well, to look at everything else he has ever done. He sports a career 3.97 ERA, with just one season (2018) with an ERA under 4.00. The blind squirrel who took an approach as simplistic as this in 2019 would have invariably found a nut.

Such an approach, however, would grossly undersell Bauer’s gains in 2018, which were quite legitimate. Using the most basic of peripherals, Bauer’s swinging strike rate (SwStr%) took the best 3rd-biggest step forward in nominal terms, behind only Patrick Corbin (and his slider) and Gerrit Cole (and his fastball).

Yet 2018 gains do not necessarily beget sustained excellence. Bauer’s narrative is a fairly complex one, so let’s give it proper attention.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not as if the Chicago Cubs’ trade for started-turned-reliever-turned-starter Mike Montgomery came cheap. Dan Vogelbach isn’t a top-flight prospect, but with plus power and a solid plate approach at Triple-A Iowa this season, it’s not like he’s a nobody, either.

Then again, neither is Montgomery. A supplemental first-round pick almost 10 years ago, he was a Kansas City Royals top-5 prospect for four straight years and a Baseball America top-40 prospect for three of them. Then 2012 came; he was thrown into the James Shields–Wade Davis–Wil Myers–Jake Odorizzi blockbuster before continuing to generally fail to impress anyone. The Seattle Mariners acquired him in 2015, the year in which he debuted, in exchange for Erasmo Ramirez, and Montgomery delivered 16 suboptimal starts. He’s in Chicago now, providing relief every sixth day to a starting rotation that has generated the best staff WHIP in more than 100 years. Cool. Got that out of the way.

Montgomery is no ordinary sixth starter, though. I beg you to read this automated scouting report generated by Brooks Baseball regarding Montgomery’s pitches and their outcomes in 2016. Extreme number of ground balls. Blazing fast. Extremely high number of swings & misses. The remarks for all five of Montgomery’s pitches are, in a word, glowing.

Read the rest of this entry »

“What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski? … Is it being prepared to do the right thing? Whatever the cost? Isn’t that what makes a man?”

I know how that exchange ends, and you probably do too. Perhaps the Dude’s response to the other Jeffrey Lebowski, the millionaire, was, indeed, right. But maybe there’s something else — something I’ve concocted to make myself feel better. Perhaps what makes a man is the capacity to admit he is wrong.

I was wrong. About Jeremy Hellickson, specifically. In late April, I pegged Hellickson as someone who would regress in his strikeout rate (K%) based on his zone contact rate (Z-Contact%). Technically, I was right — Hellickson’s 75.7% zone contact rate as of April 24 has converged almost all the way back to his career rate of 84.6% (it currently sits at 83.1%).

It’s the change-up I was wrong about. Hellickson’s change-piece posted some filthy outcomes through the end of April. I claimed nothing about the pitch changed. I looked at velocity and movement. I didn’t look at location. Hellickson is spotting the ever-loving crap out of his change-up, and it has worked wonders for him.

Read the rest of this entry »

Any day now, Zach Sanders (@zvsanders) will come out with his end-of-season FAVRz/Fantasy Rankings. Look out for them.

For this post, I will provide three sets of rankings using that same approach (summed up z-scores) for our end-of-season “Bullpen Report: Expected Fantasy Rankings”. The Bullpen Report team should follow up with role reports for each division in the coming weeks as well.

The first set of rankings you will find almost anywhere: on the fantasy sites that you use, via player-raters, etc. It’s the standard 5×5 fantasy value (Wins, ERA, WHIP, SO and Saves). The second grid will be for 6×6 leagues (addition of Holds). The last grid will be for 5×5 and 6×6 leagues, but instead of standard ERA and WHIP, we’ll look at rankings if you were to use expected ERA (via SIERA) and adjusted (adj)WHIP through BABIP differential: I will explain below.

1) 5×5 Rankings (Wins, ERA, WHIP, SO and Saves) – actual 5×5 value in column 4; expected 5×5 value in column 5:

Read the rest of this entry »