Matthew Trueblood

Ben Brown spun seven no-hit innings Tuesday night in Milwaukee, with 10 strikeouts. His fastball and his sharp curve were both at their best, but he threw the fastball about two-thirds of the time. Why? For part of the answer, look behind the plate. Image courtesy of © David Dermer-USA TODAY Sports The Cubs are one of the most fastball-forward pitching staffs in baseball. That's been true for a while now, as the game tends toward the bends and sweeps of breaking balls and toward elite velocity. Sometimes to their benefit, and sometimes to their detriment, the Cubs have resisted that patterned evolution, preferring what can only be called an old-school approach--even as they embrace new-school ways to optimize pitcher development and performance. Pitch selection is, of course, only partially the result of organizational prerogatives. It's also about what a pitcher actually throws, and is comfortable throwing in a particular situation. Organizations decide which pitchers to acquire, and what pitches to try to foster for them, and they provide gameplans and guidance based on scouting reports on the opposing team. At some point, though, the choice about which pitches to throw gets made by the men on the field, and specifically, it's often made by the catcher. Some teams take such a firm hand in their gameplanning (and the execution thereof) that their catchers call more or less the same game, controlling for the pitcher and the opponent. In the Cubs' case, however, there's an interesting divergence. Yan Gomes isn't exactly starting every at-bat with the slider, but he's much more normal in his mix between fastball and breakers than is the team's younger, more frequent backstop, Miguel Amaya. There's a natural distortion here, stemming from the fact that many of the Cubs' pitchers have an offspeed pitch (rather than a breaking ball) as their chief non-fastball offering. Shota Imanaga, Kyle Hendricks, Mark Leiter Jr., and Héctor Neris all lean on changeups or splitters for the same things most pitchers use breaking balls to do, so it makes sense that the Cubs' catchers would receive fewer breaking balls than anyone else in the league. The daylight between the two, however, indicates a real (if smallish) difference in the way they approach at-bats and utilize pitchers' arsenals. Ben Brown's fastball was sizzling Tuesday night. Even against a Brewers offense that does great work against top-end velocity, he was overpowering, and Amaya made a pretty simple decision: they would ride that pitch all night. Brown threw 25 fastballs and nine curves the first time through the Milwaukee order. He threw 24 heaters and 11 curves the second time through. Only the third time did he shift to an even 12-12 mix of the two pitches, before leaving the game after 93 pitches in seven frames. The pattern was similar (though exaggerated in its deployment) to the one he used against the Mets back at the beginning of the month, before his sojourn in the bullpen. The strategy Amaya and Brown were deploying was the same as the one Gomes and Brown used then: keep the curveball in mind but out of sight, for the most part, the first two times. That way, the third time, the secondary pitch can have a greater effect when it gets ratcheted up. Tellingly, though, Amaya was even more extreme in his execution of that plan than Amaya was. Again, they won't call radically different games, especially when working with pitchers like Brown, who have fairly limited arsenals. Yet, one or two calls that differ can both explain the difference between the two statistically--and matter a great deal. There's not a clearly right and wrong approach, between the two, but there are different implications to the choices they make, even if each of those choices feels small. Getting a strikeout one pitch sooner, rather than having to deal with a foul ball and then exposing the opposing batter to the curve earlier than you wanted. Giving up a key hit because you went to the well with the heater one time too many. Each set of marginal choices comes with different potential costs and benefits, and Amaya and Gomes weigh those costs and benefits differently. To speak generally, I think Amaya needs to call non-fastballs more often, including and especially breaking balls from pitchers who have good ones. If and when Cade Horton joins this team, he needs to be using his slider fairly frequently, for instance. Right now, the young backstop is doing a fine job of handling a pitching staff that is thriving, but he's pushing toward an extreme in catcher approach that comes with some unwelcome risks--like the fastball that catches too much of the zone in a hitter's count and gets swatted over the wall. View full article

Mistakes are slip-ups. When you make a mistake, you understood what you were trying to do, and the context in which you were trying to do it. You just flubbed it. Errors, on the other hand, are (by definition) about misunderstanding or being ignorant of something. They're distinct things. But sometimes, alas, something is both things at once. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports The Chicago Cubs signed Dansby Swanson for seven years and $177 million prior to the 2023 season. By that time, they had already watched Xander Bogaerts, Carlos Correa, and Trea Turner sign elsewhere, all for at least $100 million more than that. They targeted and courted Swanson, both because of his superb, fundamentally sound defense, and because they believed there was more in the tank for him at bat. While everyone understood that he wouldn't be as dynamic a player as the other elite shortstops in that free-agent class, the hope was that he was equal to them as a leader, a defender, and a brace for an overall contender. It looks like they were wrong about Swanson, but more importantly, it looks like they were in the wrong mindset altogether when they chose to focus on him. Swanson turned 30 in February, and his defense--the linchpin of the argument for his value being commensurate with his salary, even in a vacuum--has taken a marked step back since roughly Aug. 1 of last year. He committed multiple key errors down the stretch last season, and that trend has continued this year, but just as telling are the tough plays he's only almost made over that span. We can also use Aug. 1 as a dividing line when it comes to Swanson's bat. Since that date, in 399 plate appearances, Swanson is hitting .212/.288/.369. Even if he were playing elite defense at short, that would be underwhelming, but since he isn't, it's downright damaging. This team is reliant on Swanson, and he's not giving them anywhere near what they need. To get hurt by Swanson, right now, you have to make a glaring and easily avoidable mistake: throw him something on the inner half, above the thigh. Swanson had 405 plate appearances through the end of last July, so if we take his 2023 season to that point and compare it to his performance in August, September, and the first two months of this year, we have his Cubs tenure cut almost perfectly in half. He's gotten just slightly worse in terms of strikeout and walk rates in the second timeframe, and his overall average exit velocity and launch angles look similar. However, through the end of last July, his exit velocity on batted balls between 10 and 35 degrees off the bat was 96.7 miles per hour. Since then, it's 93.4. He's lost the ability to drive the ball in the launch-angle band where hits happen, and as a result, both his power and his BABIP have cratered. To be sure, what Swanson is giving the Cubs is preferable to what Javier Báez is giving the Tigers right now. He's been bad at the plate, but not nearly as bad as Báez, or as the Cubs' own catching corps. It's more underachievement than outright disaster, taken at face value. When you widen the lens, though, you see the greater problem. The Cubs signed Swanson instead of one of the shortstops whom everyone knew would provide greater offensive punch. The only premise that made that a viable strategy was that they would surround him with better hitters than other teams would surround their more dangerous two-way shortstops with. Then, the team simply failed to do that. We know they had various levels of interest in high-end hitters over this past winter, but they didn't act boldly enough to land any of them. Instead, they came into this season leaning on the hope of a repeat performance from Cody Bellinger; linear, positive development from Nico Hoerner, Christopher Morel, and Ian Happ; and nailing the instruction and matriculation of one or more rookie bats. Either that, or they needed Swanson to be a whole lot better at the plate than he was during the most important months of their 2023 season. Even if he were consistently hitting like the player he was early last year, the team wouldn't be a good offense. They'd just be less bad. He hasn't been, and it was never fair to expect him to be. It's more fair to wonder why his defense is suddenly more average than awesome, and again, it looks like the franchise might have been overconfident in their assessment of his potential to age well at the most demanding defensive position outside of catcher, but that problem pales in comparison to the fact that they need Swanson to hit like a good team's fifth or sixth hitter, when he's only rarely demonstrated the ability to do that at any point in his career. The Cubs organization believes, persistently, that it can turn straw into gold when it comes to hitters. There is absolutely no empirical support for that self-belief. Paying Swanson what they did only made sense as part of a broader plan to spend a whole lot of money in 2024, and throughout the second half of this decade. It now looks like they never had such a plan. Given that seeming reality, signing Swanson was a mistake, but also a grievous error. They set themselves and their $177-million man up for failure, and unless they're about to hire the Dodgers' hitting infrastructure away or pay very handsomely for the likes of Juan Soto and/or Pete Alonso this winter, failure is going to continue to come their way. View full article

It makes for a very sad origin story for the Pedro kerfuffle. Seeing him charge a pitcher 20 years BEFORE Pedro, but AFTER we all first saw him charge Pedro, it makes the choice to do so even weirder!

Monday is Memorial Day, but it also happens to be the 40th anniversary of one of the most bonkers moments in Chicago Cubs history. Let's talk about the Foul Ball Incident. Image courtesy of YouTube There's no adequate way for me to fully render, in words, what happened at Wrigley Field on May 27, 1984. We're going to discuss some key highlights, but for both the benefit of your understanding and the sheer entertainment, you should watch the video in full. Fair warning, though: this video is over half an hour long. In fact, half an hour is almost exactly the length of time that passed between pitches that day, in the bottom of the second inning. I'm not aware of another case in which, absent an act of God, two teams had to wait that long between pitches being thrown in a big-league game, and if we're being honest, there was no need for it to be anywhere near that long between offerings in this case, either. It just got away from them--from the umpires, then from the Reds, then from the Cubs, and then from everyone. For reasons beyond my understanding, YouTube restricts the video based on the age of users, so you'll have to go watch it on the site, rather than right here on the page. It's a holiday, though. You have time. Go check it out. If I can borrow from Bill Hader's timeless character on Saturday Night Live: this video has everything. I have watched (estimating here) 7,000 hours of baseball in my life, but I've never seen anything like it. Maybe that doesn't quite capture my meaning, though. I also haven't seen anything loosely similar to it. I haven't seen anything to which it would make any sense to compare this sequence of events. For those of you without 33-plus minutes to spare, here's the extremely short version: With two runners on base Ron Cey hit a long fly ball down the left-field line. It was foul, and foul by a pretty wide margin, really. However, rookie umpire Scott Rippley called the ball fair, sparking vehement arguments from several members of the Cincinnati Reds--most notably, pitcher Mario Soto. Cey had not even finished rounding the bases before Reds players, in their gray pullover jerseys with massive lettering across the back, were encircling Rippley and holding each other back from physically attacking him. A conference between the umpires ensued. With the input and wisdom of home plate umpire Paul Runge and crew chief Bob Engel, Rippley was overruled, and the ball was correctly called foul. The Cubs, indignant, more or less stormed the field. This is where this goes from standard-issue pre-replay baseball argument to something stranger and way more fun. There were, at any given time, between five and seven members of the Cubs organization arguing with the clustered four-umpire crew, and this lasted for well over 15 minutes. That deep into the argument--ages and ages by any reasonable baseball argument standard--the Reds lost it, and Don Zimmer got fully involved, and things took a turn for the downright wacky. Soto charged the umpires as they conferred, and seeing that, Zimmer raced over to try to prevent an attack. Either confused about Zimmer's intentions or just grabbing the first thing he collided with after trying to corral his own pitcher, Reds catcher Brad Gulden took down Zimmer, and a full-fledged brawl quickly got underway. Richie Hebner started absolutely throwing bodies around, enraged by the semi-accidental tackle of one of his coaches who was just trying to play peacemaker. Miraculously, though, that brawl broke the previously unbreakable tension, and the game resumed pretty quickly afterward. Hilariously, both the Cubs and the Reds played the game under protest, even though there was absolutely no reasonable grounds for either team to do so. That reads crazy, but it was crazier than it reads. First of all, as TV viewers, we had a very different experience than we would have if anything remotely akin to this happened in 2024. The camera operator following the flight of Cey's fly ball on the initial play messed it up badly, keeping the foul pole as (more or less) the left edge of their shot until the very last second, so while it was hard to pick out the ball at all given the video quality of the time, the vibe of the shot was: home run. Secondly, and relatedly, Harry Caray immediately got every single thing about the play as wrong as possible, in the funniest possible way. He relied on Rippley's call as the play unfolded, clearly having lost the ball himself somewhere down the line. Trying to use the monitor in the booth to clarify things on second and third looks, he only got more confused (thanks to our friend the fair/foul framer). He believed, at first, that perhaps the ball had glanced off the foul pole, because of the very sudden leftward pan at the end of the tracking shot. Even once Steve Stone sold him on the fact that the ball had been foul, though, he embarked on an intransigent, legalistic argument about whether the other umpires should be able to vacate and replace the call of their colleague, who was closest to the play. One of the things that makes 1984 so hallowed in Cubs lore is the fact that that summer brought the chemistry and the friendly but very real creative tension between Harry and Steve along so well. This is a wonderful instance to study, for those too young to remember the interplay between the two at their best. Forget the broadcast for a moment, though. You've just never seen a baseball play argued this way. The Reds swarmed Rippley to argue the initial call; there were as many as five of them clustered around him in the moments before he called in his cohort to help. The Cubs, not to be outdone (and in fact, seemingly, determined to outdo), responded with a full-fledged diplomatic delegation when the call was overturned. For whatever reason, the umpires didn't disband their convocation after making the change in call--or at least first resolving to. They stayed in a knot by third base, which allowed the Cubs to send waves of friends of the court forward with all the best legal baseball ideas of the moment. This is a fun way to play "Remember Some Guys," in addition to being bizarre and hilarious. Here are the personnel who spent significant time milling around with the four umpires during this interminable negotiation: Manager Jim Frey (that's normal) Third-base coach Don Zimmer (sure, makes sense, he was on top of the play) Coach John Vukovich (well, fine) Coach Ruben Amaro (it's getting to be a lot now, right?) On-deck batter Larry Bowa (getting in his training for a contumacious managerial career) Richie Hebner (who had no role in the action and no reason to be in the thick of this; here's where it's getting wacky to me) Mel Hall, who had been on first base when the ball was hit Notice, first, the lack of the name Ron Cey on that list. He went straight to the dugout and camped out there, waiting for the resolution. I guess if I had a half-dozen people pressing my case against just four arbiters, I might do the same thing. ZImmer is the real star here, though. He was already a man of towering temper and boiling blood pressure, and he just lost it in this debate. As Vukovich went about a long series of calm, earnest, seemingly cerebral entreaties, Zimmer stomped around the circle shouting invectives toward the center--and occasionally, when a space opened up that would admit him, charging right through the center to get right in the face of the umpire opposite him. It didn't even seem to matter much which one, though he was certainly angriest with Rippley. He was so ardent, though, that he had to stop, put his hands on his knees, and regain his breath multiple times, before then taking another run at them. It's actually pretty understandable, as you watch it, that this eventually boiled over into a brawl between the teams. It was, as much as anything, because the umpires were unable to control and close the case, and thus, both sides got so fidgety and annoyed that they wanted to beat up the umps. Unable to do so, they made a tacit agreement to just cut loose on one another instead. Two final notes neatly capture the insanity of this moment. First, even after Stone rather concisely rejected Harry's proposal that the Cubs play the game under protest (because there were absolutely no grounds for protest there), both teams did manage to file one. Vukovich and Frey belonged in a courtroom drama for that. They clearly spent a lot of time just arguing to get that doomed protest on the books. The Reds, who ended up really without a grievance, seem to have glommed on just because it felt like a dangerous situation in which to decline to be party to the process. Second, a couple of innings after the trouble, the fan who caught that very foul ball came up to the booth to meet Harry and Steve, and Harry put him on the microphone for a moment to retell his story. The young man asked Harry if he would sign the baseball he'd caught, and Harry agreed. With a chuchle, he informed the viewers that he had written on the ball: "Fair or fowl? with a 'W'." He thought that was pretty funny. Here's the thing: the only strange element that could have intruded on that impossible series of events but didn't was a bird. The pun he made referred to absolutely nothing. It wasn't at all funny, but after that odyssey, everyone laughed, anyway. That day was baseball at its most ludicrous, and closing the story with an utter non sequitur felt delightfully fitting. View full article

The twin killing. The pitcher's best friend. The rally-killer. Though multiple generations of fans came to take the double play for granted, it was the first mark of a great defense doing exceptional things on a baseball diamond--of peak team performance in the field. Now, that majestic creature has become an endangered species. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports When the Chicago Cubs ruled the National League at the dawn of the 20th century, it was thanks (in some part) to their famous infield, immortalized in the florid language of a New York sports editor: Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance. As we now know, they didn't turn double plays at an exceptional rate for the time, but the ones they did manage seemed to so thwart Giants rallies that the annoyed author declared their names "the saddest of possible words". At that time, rallies depended heavily on stringing together singles and walks, so the double play could be a killer; it pushed you all the way back to Square One. In the 110 years since, the progress of the game has made the twin killing a bit less of a death knell for an offensive irruption, as power has blossomed. Still, it's a huge play every time the defense makes it, even if many of them don't involve highlight-worthy dives or slides. As the ball got livelier, hitters became more dangerous and parks got smaller, the pitcher increasingly needed the double play as an escape rope, and infielders became incredibly adept at turning them--even as baserunners became increasingly ruthless in their efforts to prevent them, until the norms of the game (and then a rules change) put an end to that. Now, though, the double play is disappearing. It's happening slowly, so maybe you haven't even noticed it yet, but it's happening. More strikeouts and more home runs, of course, mean fewer balls in play, and as the launch angle revolution spreads its roots ever deeper into the soil of the game, more and more of the balls in play that do happen are fly balls. The thing is, it's not just ground balls diminishing in frequency driving this. Even when teams do induce grounders, infields aren't turning them into double plays at the same rate as they used to. The trend line isn't perfectly clear or especially steep, but it's there. Here, we're treating conversion rate as the percentage of fieldable ground balls hit in double-play situations that turn into actual double plays. Infielders just aren't as adroit on the pivot (or aren't strong-armed enough, or aren't positioned well enough) when the chance to turn two presents itself. In the first 13 years of the 30-team era, there were fewer than 3,700 double plays turned league-wide just once: 2001, when the total was 3,653. In 2007, we peaked at 3,983 double plays, and you'd have been perfectly sane to predict that the league would eventually see 4,000 of them in a single campaign. Forget about that. In the last five full seasons (2018-23), the highest number of ground-ball double plays was 2023's 3,466. Fewer runners reach first base. Fewer grounders are hit while runners are there, especially before two outs have been recorded. And teams struggle to turn those grounders into double plays, even when the chance comes. On a per-team-game basis, the only seasons since 1900 in which fewer double plays were turned than so far in 2024 were 1940, 1941, 1944, and 1968. Now, here's the wildest thing: In a league that has forgotten the art of the double play, and with a middle infield in which they've invested over $200 million on the promise of excellent defense, the Cubs are the absolute worst team in baseball at turning double plays. The. Worst. The Minnesota Twins have technically turned fewer twin killings. You know why? It's because the Twins walk the fewest batters in baseball and allow opponents an OBP about 10 points lower than the Cubs', and thus, that they have had 309 plate appearances where it was possible to draw a ground-ball double play, to the Cubs' 393. No team in baseball has a worse conversion rate, whether we count fieldable ground balls in such situations or just divide double plays by plate appearances in which one could happen. Part of the problem, of course, is that the team has been without Dansby Swanson and Nico Hoerner for significant stretches of the young season, and that they've replaced them with the weak-armed, undersized, generally underqualified Miles Mastrobuoni and Nick Madrigal. That's only part of the problem, though, because the thing about paying a premium for the gloves of Swanson and Hoerner is that they certainly didn't pay that premium for their arms. While both players excel at the quickness of feet and hands required to get single outs on lots of balls, both also have below-average arms for their position--both based on scouting looks and if you consult Statcast data. Hoerner's hardest tracked throws are relatively hard, considering the low average he's posted, but they've come on relays from outfielders toward third base or home plate. In other words, Hoerner is only throwing at an average or better speed when he has to hump up to throw it a long way. That's not a great sign, because it speaks to another problem when trying to turn the double play: Hoerner is powerful but not fast on the exchange from glove to hand. He's not cutting loose those relays (from the outfield or from the left side of the infield, in pursuit of the double play) as quickly as you want him to. Most strong-armed infielders can create as much velocity from deep in the hole at their position as on outfield relays. Not so for Hoerner. Swanson is an even more glaring problem, considering the importance of throwing arm at his spot and the difficulty he would have in being worth his lucrative contract if he could no longer play there. The Cubs knew Swanson didn't have a top-end arm when they signed him for $177 million over seven years two winters ago. They did so on the premise that his quickness, smoothness, and internal clock would keep him a plus shortstop for at least the first half of the deal. That might still be true, but to be sure, this deficiency has contributed to his inability to turn double plays at an acceptable rate so far. Double play chances can go by the boards for many reasons. In the modern game, there's an increasing tendency for grounders to be total mishits for the batter, which often means they're slower and hit more directly downward than in the past. That, in turn, makes turning a double play very difficult. It's what broadcasters will call a "slow-developing" play, where to get to the ball soon enough to turn two, a fielder would have to charge so hard as to be completely out of position to start that sequence by the time they collected it. That said, this ball has to be two. Swanson has to play shallower or take an inward angle to collect the ball, or else Christopher Morel has to show better range to his left and snare it, starting a turn with his momentum going toward second. Haniger Beats Out FC.mp4 In their respective Defensive Runs Saved breakdowns, Swanson's GDP Runs Saved (-1) and Morel's Plays Saved to his left (-5) are the worst single markers. The above is a good example of why. Here's another non-double play against the Cubs. This one is more about the things beyond the team's control, but it's not exclusively that. Wong Beats Out FC.mp4 This was a trickler, and Swanson would have been in brutal position for a flip to second if he had charged it any harder. At the same time, they had the catcher running, which is how they made the play close--and if Hoerner were quicker with the transfer and fire, they could have had him. Not coincidentally, Hoerner, too, has a -1 GDP Runs figure on his Defensive Runs Saved readout. One more, to underscore the point. Chourio Beats Out FC.mp4 Jackson Chourio helps illustrate one of the other growing difficulties in turning double plays, these days: Even though it's less emphasized than in the past, the average speed of a big-league player is greater now than in the past. That means that the clock ticks down faster now than 15 years ago, and faster then than 15 years before that. Swanson, here, has to adjust his own internal clock more to match that. He didn't charge this ball with the requisite urgency, which left Hoerner no chance of turning two. A more aggressive shortstop probably picks that up at sufficient speed to step on the base themselves and fire to first with their momentum going that way, and they probably get the out. Alas, this is the final thing we should mention, as we wind down this topic for now: Fielders are trained to think more conservatively in the modern game. The ones up the middle of the diamond (especially at shortstop and second base) are also selected with a heavier emphasis on offense than in the past, at the expense of some of their defensive chops. It's not that being a good hitter makes it harder to be a good infielder, per se, but that the league is prioritizing bigger, more powerful guys even up the middle. Even when that bigness and power doesn't come at the direct, absolute cost of some quickness, it interferes with the litheness required to turn a double play. We live, more and more, in the age of hitters trying to take four bases at once and defenses happily settling for one out at a time. The aesthetics of that shift in style vary from one situation to the next, but the implications of it are real. For the Cubs, who don't rack up strikeouts or keep hitters off the bases at an elite level, it would be nice if they could turn this around and start collecting outs in bunches. Alas, they don't currently have the tools for that job. At least they're not (entirely) alone. View full article

Is this a fluke or a skill? Will it regress, or will they continue to enjoy this edge? Yes. To all of it. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports Generally speaking, when we talk about pitch framing (that is, the value gained and lost by either team because of influences that distort the umpire's judgment of the strike zone), we think about three actors: the pitcher, the catcher, and the umpire himself. Catchers, research has taught us, can have a huge effect on the game by being good at presenting pitches near the edges of the strike zone. Naturally, they can do that better if their pitcher hits their spot, or comes near enough to doing so that the catcher doesn't have to lean, stab, or slide across the plate to receive the ball. Then, there's the ump. How susceptible to manipulation, either visual or political, are they? How good are they at calling balls and strikes in the first place? Without a doubt, framing is real, and it's important. However, there's a key player in the drama of every pop in the mitt that we tend to overlook: the hitter. It's rarely said out loud, and too often ignored by those who criticize framing as almost cheating because of the deception component involved, but the hitter has the (semi-literal) hammer in all framing situations. Every called ball or strike by the umpire is, in part, the result of the batter's choice: he didn't swing. By deciding whether or not to swing at any given pitch, the hitter decides whether or not the catcher and umpire even get to be involved in the outcome of that offering. There are also other, smaller ways a hitter can shape their zone--from where and how they stand in the box, to their body language as the pitch arrives, to reputation. The catcher is more important, on balance, but hitters have a say in the process. They get to make their own strike zone. In a piece earlier this month at Brewer Fanatic, I showed that this is (at least in some measure) a real and durable skill, and tried to illustrate some of the ways that might work and why. Unlike the Brewers (who signed hitter-framing stud Rhys Hoskins this winter), the Cubs don't have an individual player who has enjoyed a benefit of multiple runs via framing effects this year. However, as a team, no one benefits from calls more than the Cubs do. Of the nine Cubs with 100 or more plate appearances so far this year, only one has a net negative count-sensitive framing runs above average: Michael Busch. By contrast, Mike Tauchman, Christopher Morel, and Ian Happ have each gained more than a run from framing, and between them, it's over 4.0. The team has a total Framing RAA of 8.4. Paradoxically, this might hit you as bad news. Rarely does any fan base want to hear that their team has actually benefited most from calls made by officials. It has the ring of being told that their successes are somehow unearned, or that their failures are even greater than we already imagine. Remember, though, that this isn't exactly a fluke thing. Part of it is smart hitting, and a keen eye at the plate. It comes up far short of being a primary driver, but how often a batter swings at close pitches (those with between a 20 and an 80 percent chance of being called a strike, based on location and count) does correlate with the value they earn based on calls. Some guys cover the edges of the zone well; others are especially good at laying off the balls just off the black. Doing those things makes it more likely that called pitches will go your way. Again, the effect isn't strong or determinitive, but it's there. TruMedia, whose database we're using to lay out this information, also tracks the number of pitches that went in the wrong direction when it wasn't even all that close. Marquee viewers will recognize these as the pitches Boog Sciambi and Jim Deshaies refer to as "egregious". The Cubs' top seven hitters--Tauchman, Morel, Happ, Cody Bellinger, Seiya Suzuki, Nico Hoerner and Dansby Swanson--have combined for 43 called balls on pitches that were at least 75 percent likely to be called a strike, and just 20 called strikes on pitches that were at least 75 percent likely to be called a ball. That ratio is phenomenal, to whatever extent it's about their skills. Let's take a look at a few of these, to bring the concept to life. Remember the huge grand slam Ian Happ hit during that crazy game in Arizona in April? Well, on the first pitch of that plate appearance... Happ Benefits Before GS.mp4 As you hear Boog begin to say at the end of that clip, the fact that Tucker Barnhart had to reach across the plate badly hurt his chances of getting a called strike on that pitch. Given the magnitude of the miss, the call doesn't feel especially egregious, and 0-0 pitches that get called wrong rarely draw much notice. The difference between 0-1 and 1-0 is huge, though, and in this case, that pitch began a sequence that ended with what could have been a decisive swing of the bat. Happ might not have been taking all the way there, but I don't think he took that pitch because he thought it was a ball, either. He took it because he was locked in on a particular combination of pitch and location, and what he got didn't match it. That's a good reason not to swing 0-0, and we should give a slice of the credit for the resulting ball to Happ, for not being jumpy and for knowing what he was really looking for in a crucial situation. At the same time, we can agree that most of the responsibility for the call here goes to the pitcher and the umpire, with Happ and Barnhart playing real but secondary roles. Happ got another favorable call on a first pitch in a big spot, at the beginning of this month against the Brewers. Happ Gets Ahead 1-0.mp4 We'd have to parse the contributions to this call differently, right? Happ does seem to think this one's inside, and it's very close, either way. Bryan Hudson certainly hit his spot this time, and William Contreras (who has done well framing the inside corner against righties this year) did an imperfect but adequate job of presenting the ball. The ump just missed this one, despite being right on top of the call. It's on the black, but this should have been called a strike. No big kudos to Happ here, but the value accrues, anyway. Let's turn our attention to Tauchman, who has derived a lot of value from this skill since the start of last year--3.4 runs, with almost half that amount coming already this year. Tauchman will protect with two strikes, but he's diligent about not chasing along the edges (or even hitting a pitcher-friendly pitch) early in the count, or when he's ahead. Tauchman Benefits from Patience.mp4 This game can be ruthless, and right there, it was ruthless to Jared Jones. That ball is comfortably within the strike zone, but it's in a very tough quadrant for the umpire to call. It's meant to get a hitter who's looking for a fastball they can drive jumping at the ball, whiffing or mishitting it. He ran into a problem there, because Tauchman is a smart, patient hitter, and he stays within himself even in leveraged counts. Again, there's plenty of other accounting to do, but Tauchman earned his call. How about a couple of Christopher Morel calls, as we all carefully watch and mentally track his evolving approach? Here's a high breaking ball from Bailey Falter that went his way, just last weekend. Morel Benefits on High Curve.mp4 These are the types of calls that stand out more in people's minds. That should have been strike three, and instead, Morel got to a full count. It wasn't anywhere near the pitch Falter meant to execute, and Morel saw both the fact that it was a curve and that it wasn't going to be down in his sweet spot right away. Still, by rights, it should have been a strike. We can divvy up the credit and blame pretty evenly here, with Morel and the catcher doing their jobs well but Falter and the umpire doing theirs poorly. Had Falter done his better, Morel might have done something totally different, but the ump had the last job in the line, and had he done his, Morel still would have been out, despite a good non-swing decision. Here's another pitch with some notable similarites--but also some key differences. Morel Spins Away on Strike.mp4 It's a testament to the better organization and understanding of his approach that Morel has exhibited this season that he knew Yoshinobu Yamamoto would try a curve, and thus, that anything heading inside on him was a bad mistake worthy of dodging. Still, Yamamoto's pitch had enough bite to come back and find the zone despite the misfire, and it was pretty well-framed. Should Morel get credit for being (in one way) right inside his opponent's head, even when behind in the count? Or should we fault him for being badly fooled on a ball that ended up a should-be strike? It's probably some of both, so while the full value of that ball goes toward his 1.2 runs of framing value (offset, of course, by the odd bad called strike, but still in the equation), we probably wouldn't ascribe the full responsibility for it to him in a more advanced hitter framing model. In 2022, the Cubs lost 8 runs at the plate based on calls. In 2023, they swung that all the way across to a positive 8 runs. This year, they're on pace to triple that, or thereabouts. Will that happen? Probably not. Some of their luck will even out. Some of their guys' approaches will get out of whack, and they'll be punished for it. The mix of pitching they face will be different. A lot can swing this back toward zero, or just stall them out and prevent them from accruing more value based on calls. For now, though, it's been a helpful part of their offense--worth nearly a full win on its own. We can both credit Craig Counsell, the team's battery of hitting coaches, and the hitters themselves, and acknowledge that some of that realized value is just a little bit of help from the men in blue. Count that as part of their good fortune in still being above .500, amid a turbulent start to the season. They'll need to be better going forward, in case some of their umpire luck (or bias) turns for the worse even as they get healthy. View full article

With Kyle Hendricks demoted to the Chicago Cubs' bullpen for the foreseeable future, Ben Brown gets what figures to be an abbreviated spot start Thursday against Atlanta. It's a moment that emblemizes the team's sudden surfeit of multi-inning arms, which might only get richer soon. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports It's unlikely we'll see Ben Brown pitch even five or six innings in his nominal start Thursday afternoon against the visitors from Atlanta. He's been working out of the bullpen, where his combination of power and arsenal limitations seemed to be pointing toward a late-inning, short-burst role for him in the second half of the season. He's still stretched out enough to give the team three frames or so in the finale of their home series, but he's the tip of the spear in what will be something akin to a bullpen game. Brown is taking the spot of new multi-inning relief option Kyle Hendricks, though, so we might surmise that Hendricks will be available in that capacity as soon as Thursday, or else throughout the weekend series the team will then play in St. Louis. Though they couldn't be much more different in terms of sheer stuff and stage of their careers, Brown and Hendricks are working in corresponding, almost interchangeable roles, and have been throughout the season. They're part of a growing gallimaufry of options behind entrenched starters Shota Imanaga, Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, and Javier Assad. Hayden Wesneski is also in that mix, although he looks primed for a long run as a relief-only weapon, given both the team's needs in that area and their plethora of options in the rotation. So, in different but not opposite ways, are both Jordan Wicks and Drew Smyly, out on rehab assignments that could put them back on the active roster within a week. Wicks is the most likely to claim the rotation spot Hendricks is yielding on a full-time basis, but Brown and even Smyly could have something to say about that. If Steele can get the rust shaken off and settle in as a consistently above-average starter again, the front four in the Cubs rotation looks stable for a while. That gives Craig Counsell an extraordinary amount of flexibility with his bullpen, even if some of that flexibility will be where a manager might prefer the rigidity of surefire, single-inning relief aces. We don't have to look far into the future to see a pitching staff that has Imanaga, Steele, Taillon, Assad, and Wicks starting, with Héctor Neris and Mark Leiter Jr. anchoring the back end of the bullpen. Trade acquisition Tyson Miller fills another place in the pen, presumably on a semi-permanent basis. That leaves five more roster spots for the pitching staff, and they could almost all be filled by guys who have recent track records as starters and the ability to go more than one inning whenever needed--but none of whom have a track record of getting high-leverage outs in a big-league bullpen. That group would include Wesneski, Brown, Hendricks, and Smyly. In that scenario, the team wouldn't need to lean on any of Luke Little, Daniel Palencia, Porter Hodge, or José Cuas. They could just use whichever of the group (all of whom are optionable) was fresh and performing well, for a while. Soon, they surely hope, one of Julian Merryweather, Yency Almonte, or Adbert Alzolay will be healthy enough to return, but while they wait, this mix of long relievers and a revolving cast of short middle relievers would be workable. Whenever any of those three (Almonte and Merryweather feel closer, at the moment, but it's hard to predict the progress each might make) do return, the Cubs probably won't want to be locked in with four long relievers, though. That could mean optioning Wesneski or Brown, but those two have the higher ceilings and better matches of stuff to role for relief work. In short, as soon as one of their high-leverage short relievers returns, it gets difficult to carry Hendricks and Smyly. By now, you might have heard the whispers on Cubs Twitter. Hendricks will reach 10 years of big-league service this season--specifically, on June 26. The Cubs owe an extraordinary and wonderful debt to Hendricks, and cutting him before that milestone feels unfathomable, if not unconscionable. At the moment, though, the smart money says he has only that long to linger on the active roster. In the next five weeks, he needs to show something significant, or he'll be designated for assignment at the end of next month. If you're looking for a date when we might see Cade Horton join the parent club, that's also the timeframe to consider. Not only would waiting until Hendricks comes off the 40-man roster make it easier to add Horton, but pushing his debut back that far would prevent him from becoming arbitration-eligible for the 2027 season. To me, that shouldn't matter, but as a cherry on top of other reasons for waiting to call him up, it works. Injuries could (and probably will) further disrupt these so-called plans. As things stand, though, the Cubs are getting healthy again, after an early stage of the season during which they didn't have enough available arms to make any truly interesting choices between them. That's changing, and it's an exciting development. Hopefully, it also means they get materially better, with players like Brown, Wicks, Wesneski, and Horton claiming roles they'll fill not just for the balance of 2024, but for years to come--and shutting down opposing offenses more efficiently in the process. View full article

With one middle infielder returning from the injured list and another being called up from Triple-A Iowa for the first time, we knew there would be at least one infielder shoved off the 26-man roster. Surprisingly, though, there was only one. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports Luis Vázquez was not called up to deliver an injection of offense for the Cubs. He's a glove-first shortstop, and he's unlikely to make many starts for the team. He got the call, even as the team reinstated Dansby Swanson from the injured list, because the last few days were a maddening affirmation of the frustratingly persistent reality of the Cubs' infield defense: it hasn't been good enough. With both Swanson and Nico Hoerner sidelined by leg injuries for the last week, Craig Counsell was forced to use both Miles Mastrobuoni and Nick Madrigal as starting middle infielders, and they weren't equal to the challenge that posed to their admirable but limited talent. It's not just a Mastrobuoni and Madrigal problem, though. Even when Swanson and/or Hoerner have been on the field this year, the club's infield has been too porous. Christopher Morel and Michael Busch each have good athleticism for corner infielders, but they're inexperienced, mistake-prone, and ultimately just barely playable at their respective positions. Swanson and Hoerner were the best middle infield in baseball for most of last season, but they haven't looked like themselves this year, either. Add it all up, and the Cubs are 29th in MLB in Defensive Efficiency (DER, which is just outs divided by batted balls) on batted balls with a launch angle under 7 degrees this year. Within that broad and telling stat sit Morel's many mistakes, Mastrobuoni being too slow and too weak-armed for shortstop, and the team being the worst in baseball at converting ground balls in double play situations into actual double plays. They're not cutting it, and the team can't win unless they start getting much better glovework all the way around the horn. Getting Swanson (and, hopefully, Hoerner) back should help matters, and swapping Mastrobuoni out for Vázquez will, too. It's telling that the Cubs kept Madrigal, while demoting Mastrobuoni, because it hints at the possibility that they'll make more use of the diminutive defensive whiz at third base in the near future, with their starting middle infield restored and no further need for Madrigal at second base. He's a zero offensively, but he's hung onto a roster spot by doing sensational work at the hot corner since the team moved him there last spring. Vázquez is an offensive upgrade over Madrigal, although admittedly, it would be hard not to be. Last year, while he was underwhelming and unproductive basically all year, Madrigal did at least manage to fling a ball out to the deep part of left field. Here's his 2023 spray chart. That's hardly a budding power hitter, and because Madrigal's plate discipline isn't good enough, it's not even the picture of the Luis Arráez-type guy the Cubs hoped they could develop after acquiring him in 2021. It is, however, a theoretically viable spray chart, for a player who plays elite defense at a position in the middle of the defensive spectrum. Alas, that's not Madrigal anymore. Here's the same chart, but for 2024. Defenses have begun aligning themselves against Madrigal in ways that would be laughable--unthinkable, even--against pretty much any other hitter in the modern major leagues, including Arráez. He's losing what few hits his quality of contact should earn, because teams can place their fielders without fear of him burning them in any way. He's not quite a pitcher up there, because he does still make a lot of contact, but that's the only thing dividing him from the species of hitter legislated out of the game due to intractable incompetence. Vázquez is not a big bat. He's put up fine overall numbers in the high minors, but his skills aren't going to permit that to translate to MLB. He's unlikely ever to be an everyday player, at least on a good team. However, he's much, much more of a viable contributor than Madrigal. Here's his 2024 spray chart, for comparison. It's apples-to-oranges, because Madrigal has spent the whole season in MLB and the Vázquez has spent it in Triple-A, but the numbers tell us Vázquez is a vastly better hitter than Madrigal is. Stat Vázquez Madrigal Hard Hit % 38.3 19.1 Med LA % 30.3 29.4 90th %ile EV 102.7 98.1 Sweet Spot EV 90.9 86.7 wSSEV 81.1 78.9 So, while he's taking Mastrobuoni's roster spot, Vázquez will really take Madrigal's role--or he ought to. The question, then, is why the Cubs kept Madrigal around at all. His glove is valuable, but Vázquez could play third if needed, too. Two backup infielders who are both defense-first seem to constitute an unaffordable roster luxury for this competitive but incomplete Cubs team. In short, I doubt that the move is permanent, in any significant sense. With Brennen Davis hitting the way he is in Iowa, it's perfectly possible that he (or, should either of them make big strides, Alexander Canario or Owen Caissie) will come up at the expense of Madrigal within a few weeks. In the meantime, this move makes the most sense, because if Swanson or Hoerner need to DH at all while they continue to fully recover from their injuries, Vázquez is a preferable fill-in to Mastrobuoni. Meanwhile, now that Cody Bellinger is fully healthy and ready to play center field regularly again, Pete Crow-Armstrong became redundant, and even problematic. Having Bellinger in center most of the time again will allow the team to use Morel as the DH more often, if they so choose. Bellinger, Ian Happ, Seiya Suzuki, and Mike Tauchman are a sufficient outfield corps for now, with Patrick Wisdom able to moonlight in a corner if a need arises. You wouldn't want Wisdom as your fifth outfielder all season, but soon, that role will probably go to one of the minor leaguers named above. Crow-Armstrong might not ever be a first-division regular. He has a higher ceiling than Vázquez, but the high point on his bell curve of possible outcomes might fall closer to past Cubs outfield prospects-turned-journeyman fourth outfielders Corey Patterson and Félix Pie than to stardom. There's still time for him to push that curve to the right, but he needs to play every day to progress in that direction, and the big-league team can't give him those reps right now. On the surface, Monday's moves are mildly surprising. Given the Cubs' current situation, though, they make sense, and the confusion or tension they create could well be solved by another move or two within the next fortnight. View full article

The Chicago Cubs have faced mounting injury trouble all spring, and it's taken a heavy toll on their offense during a season already unfriendly to offense league-wide. Will a return to full strength this week be enough to turn things around? Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports On any list of the Cubs' best hitters, Cody Bellinger, Seiya Suzuki, Dansby Swanson, and Nico Hoerner have to be in the top six. Depending on your evaluations of the inconsistent Ian Happ and Christopher Morel, maybe all four of those guys are in the top five at any given time. At any rate, they're essential, and being without each of them for stretches of the young season has made the Cubs offense a sputtering mess recently. The last time the Cubs had all four in their lineup was on Apr. 14, in their 15th contest of the season. Thereafter, Suzuki went on the shelf for what turned out to be just over four weeks. Ten days after that loss, Bellinger, too, was sidelined for a fortnight. He returned just in time to play one game (May 7) with both Hoerner and Swanson, before the latter hit the injured list. Suzuki returned May 11, and he, Hoerner and Bellinger managed to play together three times before Hoerner was removed from the lineup due to his balky hamstring. In the last five weeks, the team has had three of the four together only one-third of the time: 11 games, out of 33. Reportedly, that could change Tuesday. Both Suzuki and Bellinger are healthy, and both Swanson and Hoerner have a chance to return from their injuries this week. That would be a welcome development, because this team has not functioned well at all in the absence of more than one of these four. With three or four of them in the lineup, they're 15-10 this year. With two or fewer of them, they're 11-12, after Sunday's 3-2 loss to the Pirates. In general, the team's scoring has trended downward since the first week of the season, and injuries are the main culprit. They especially cratered during Bellinger's absence, but whatever recovery they effected once he came back fizzled quickly as Swanson and Hoerner were hampered by their respective leg trouble. Even at full strength, this is far from an elite offense. A hot Morel and Michael Busch, plus a healthy Bellinger, Swanson, Hoerner, Happ, and Suzuki does make for that good a lineup, but that's a lot for which to ask. It's much better to hope merely for good health, with the understanding that Morel and Busch will continue to have hot and cold stretches, based on their offensive profiles. We shouldn't overlook the confluence of these injuries and a brutal stretch of tough pitching as a contributor to the team's offensive struggles. Over the last two weeks, the average fastball the Cubs have seen has been 95.5 miles per hour, which is not only the highest in MLB, but 0.8 MPH higher than the team who has seen the second-hottest heat. It's not just difficult to hit fastballs that hard; it's also harder to handle breaking and offspeed pitches when trying to cover them. The team's collective weighted on-base average (wOBA) on non-fastballs is .245 since May 6, 22nd in MLB. Through May 5, that same number was .274, good for 12th in the league. Over that two-week span, alone, the Cubs have seen Paul Skenes (twice), Jared Jones (twice), Chris Sale, Yu Darvish, Dylan Cease, Reynaldo López, and Mitch Keller. They were a depleted team facing a gauntlet of great starters. That's why they've only scored 3.4 runs per game over that span, including three times being shut out. The bad news is that that stretch of fierce competition isn't quite over. Atlanta comes to town for three more games this week, even as the Cubs lineup becomes whole again. The good news (apart from those impending and much-needed returns to play) is that after that, things open up quite a bit. The Cubs have series against the Brewers in Milwaukee at the end of this month and next, but those are the only two times they'll face a truly formidable pitching staff between the Atlanta series and one against the Phillies in the first week of July. In there are two series apiece against the Reds, Giants, and Cardinals, and encounters with the Mets, White Sox, and Rays. All of those teams lack the kind of elite arms the Cubs have seen recently, and all but the Rays also lack quality depth. By no means will the wins come easily from here. Still, some relief is right around the corner, and help is on the way. The Cubs' season will come down, in no small part, to staying healthier than they have over the first two months of the campaign. Great teams don't need to rely on that kind of luck the way this one does, but bad teams don't even have a chance if they do stay healthy, as this one clearly does. Starting Tuesday, we'll start to get a clearer sense of what this team is capable of than we've had for the last six weeks. View full article

The Chicago Cubs made a big commitment this winter, to a player they hope will be their first baseman of the future. There's a lot of noise mingled with signal so far, so let's try to pin down where things stand for him. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports Earlier this week, I saw a couple of comments in our forums espousing uncertainty about how Michael Busch is really doing. On Thursday, @CubinNY started a thread with the simple and startling title: Is Michael Busch cutting it at first? There's more of this sentiment out there than I would have guessed, because for me (unlike for NY), he is passing the eye test, despite some bad mistakes in the field and some obviously rough edges at bat. I remain very high on Busch, and was surprised that NY closed with the question, "How much time does he get?" I wouldn't have even guessed a clock was ticking, but it's pretty clear that multiple folks are thinking along those lines, and since his game does seem to tend toward extremes so far, I think this is a really good question to try to tackle in a robust and exhaustive way. Let's try it. Firstly, there are the surface-level numbers, which tell the story of a fairly useful (though not star-caliber) hitter. Busch is batting .254/.323/.472, with a strikeout rate just shy of 35% but a walk rate north of 9%, too. (These numbers were entering Friday, but they've changed little. Busch hung in as well as any of the Cubs against Paul Skenes Friday, then appeared only as a pinch-hitter Saturday.) That strikeout rate is unnerving, because sustaining those overall numbers with that kind of punchout rate is impossible, but there are some exciting things to note here. Obviously, he had that streak of five straight games with a home run, and he also clobbered a clutch homer against the Padres last week. When he's running hot, he's a well-rounded hitting machine, and not just because he can clear the fences. Busch has eight doubles and a triple, in addition to his seven homers. He's capable of being a complete slugger. The league has just picked apart some of his weaknesses, making his numbers ugly as he adjusts. It's a mile from being the only (or even the best) way to evaluate him, but maybe one way we can gain insight on where Busch stands is by digging into the new bat-tracking data released from Statcast this week. Firstly, we need to understand Busch's big limitation: he doesn't have good bat speed. For a starting first baseman, this is a bad place to start. Busch needs to generate average-plus power to be a long-term part of the solution for the Cubs, and swing speed and power (as one would intuit) go hand-in-hand. It's not easy to generate consistent power with a sluggish swing, and Busch has one. That does show up when you watch him, too, doesn't it? It's part of why he was getting beaten so badly, for a stretch, with fastballs at the top of the zone. He has to fight an uphill battle from below-average bat speed to reach above-average power. But bat speed isn't everything. How has Busch even cracked seven homers (let alone hit some of them so impressively, and split gaps with a good number of hard line drives, too) without average or better bat speed? One of the other measurements released by Statcast was squared-up percentage--the share of batted balls on which the hitter met the ball squarely enough to generate at least 80 percent of the possible exit velocity, given their bat speed and the speed of the incoming pitch. Kyle Bland of Pitcher List created an app that lets us go even deeper, and see the specific squared-up percentage (the actual per-swing percentage of possible exit velocity achieved) on a swing-by-swing basis. Busch is stellar when it comes to squaring up the ball. His seasonal squared-up rate is above the 90th percentile for the league, and when he's hot, he's as good at squaring it up as anyone in baseball. That makes up for a bat-speed deficit, and then some. Swing speed matters, but if you just clip the top or bottom of the ball, a good amount of bat speed can be wasted. One way to be a good power hitter is just to get a bigger piece of the ball most of the time than other hitters, even if they swing faster than you. What's interesting, though, is that Busch is having such severe strikeout problems, despite squaring the ball up with such regularity. There's a strong negative correlation (about -0.6) between squared-up rate and whiff rate, which is to be expected. Guys who get the fat part of the ball most of the time don't usually also whiff a lot, because between squaring it up and whiffing should be a good number of mishits. It hasn't been that way for Busch, perhaps because there are gaps in his swing that can still be exploited. The bat-tracking data also includes a measurement of the length of swings, based on the total three-dimensional distance traveled by the tip of the bat. It's a noisy measurement, but mapping it by pitch location does help us understand some things. There are two places where Busch's swing is longer than the average for that zone: low and in, and up and away. That's not a problem down and over the middle or inner part of the plate. On the contrary, it means he's catching that ball out front, and squaring it up a lot, even for a relatively hitter-friendly segment of the zone. Up and away, though, length kills you. A long swing can't get to a high fastball, unless you really cheat toward that pitch, get started early, and open yourself up to more trouble if it's any other offering or in any other location. Whiffing often despite the ability to square the ball up exceptionally well at other times is part of the penalty you pay for guessing up there, in order to cover holes in the swing. Dansby Swanson, Nelson Velázquez, and Elly De La Cruz are among the other hitters like Busch in this regard, and Cubs fans will recognize all of those as aggressive, smart "guess" hitters who occasionally look bad but can do real damage on contact. I talk often about players with "grooved" swings--those who will tag anything in a certain selection of spots, based on their swing path, but don't seem able to manipulate and modulate their bat path to reach pitches in other spots. A low contact rate against a high squared-up percentage is what I'd expect to see from a player with a grooved swing. It's also what I'd expect to see from a young hitter still learning how to cover the zone against big-league stuff, despite having the requisite skills to be more well-rounded. I think that's where Busch is, along with (to name one) Baltimore's Jordan Westburg. Defensively, of course, the edges are even rougher. He's had some bad defensive misplays and errors, and few impressive plays to balance things on the other side. I do think he'll be a rangy first baseman, making some plays you don't expect coming in on the ball or going to his right, and I think more experience will allow him to clean things up enough that the balls clanking off his glove (for instance) will be less of an issue. Right now, though, the growing pains there are more painful than the ones at the plate. I doubt this is the next Anthony Rizzo, but I think the Cubs are comfortable giving him all of this year and next to smooth some things out, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's a solid hitter in the middle of their order for the next half-decade. Though I don't think either thing is right on the horizon, I would bet that Busch is closer to becoming an extension candidate for the Cubs than to losing his job. It'll be interesting to see him continue making adjustments as he goes through his first full season in the big leagues. View full article

The Chicago Cubs' stocky Mexican righthander is now 195 innings, 50 total appearances, and 27 starts into his MLB career, with a 2.67 ERA. It's time we all reckon with our doubts about him. Image courtesy of © Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports In technology, there's a commonly used term for what's happened to pitching analysis since the dawn of the PITCHf/x Era in 2008: lock-in. It's what happens when a particular technological framework becomes so much the default that it becomes impractical (and eventually, unthinkable) to make a meaningful change. The QWERTY keyboard has you locked in. So does the standard file system for saving documents and photos on the computer. Lock-in is a common phenomenon, in some ways, and it's not always bad. Sometimes, though, lock-in blinds us to the opportunities that exist to reach something better. We've all gotten locked into the pitch-tracking model of pitcher evaluation, to such an extent that algorithmic and machine-learning tools have been called upon to boil pitches and pitchers down to single numbers, which are then treated as nearly definitive in conversations about those pitches and pitchers. It's a good example of how we can quickly become overly reliant on technology in certain settings, and Javier Assad is one good reminder of its flaws. Assad doesn't throw especially hard. He doesn't have any individual pitch that overwhelms hitters, impresses Stuff+ and other models, or generates a hilariously high number of ground balls. Even zooming out and looking at his overall numbers, he doesn't do the things (strike out more than a quarter of opposing batters, walk fewer than an average pitcher, etc.) that we expect above-average big-league starters to do. We're locked in on the concepts of velocity, movement, spin rate, Stuff+, FIP, and so on. Assad doesn't excel in any of those aspects, so we tend strongly to doubt the staying power of whatever success he finds. I'm not making an accusation; I'm making an admission. I do this, too, in no small measure. It's time for that to change, even if there's some chance I'll be burned by the pivot in another month or so. Assad made his 50th career appearance Wednesday night in Atlanta, with six scoreless innings to bring his ERA down to a baffling 1.49. His career mark is now 2.67, and vexingly, it's even lower (2.47) as a starter than it is in relief. That's with both a strikeout and a walk rate on the wrong side of the MLB average, and even in this sparkling start to the 2024 campaign, he's only crept up to 21.6% strikeouts and down to 7.7% walks. He's one of just 19 pitchers in the Wild Card Era to post an ERA under 3.00 over his first 50 career outings (among those with 150 or more innings in those games, clearing out short relievers), and he's far from the high end of that list. Query Results Table Rk Player Team ERA IP 1 Tony Gonsolin LAD 2.37 224.0 2 José Fernández MIA 2.47 305.2 3 Tanner Roark WSN 2.56 260.1 4 Matt Harvey NYM 2.61 331.0 5 Alek Manoah TOR 2.65 302.1 6 Jacob deGrom NYM 2.66 321.1 7 Javier Assad CHC 2.67 195.1 8 Mark Prior CHC 2.69 334.0 9 Shane McClanahan TBR 2.71 275.2 10 Sonny Gray OAK 2.87 319.1 11 Noah Syndergaard NYM 2.89 305.0 12 Joel Piñeiro SEA 2.89 214.2 13 Michael Wacha STL 2.90 273.0 14 Jeremy Hellickson TBR 2.95 295.2 15 Stephen Strasburg WSN 2.96 282.2 Rk Player Team ERA IP 16 Matt Morris STL 2.97 330.2 17 Hideo Nomo LAD 2.97 348.0 18 Julio Teheran ATL 2.98 302.1 19 Jaime García STL 2.99 256.0 Provided by Stathead.com: Found with Stathead. See Full Results. Generated 5/16/2024. How is he doing this? It would defeat the point I made above for me to come to you with some overly technical, analytical explanation. That said, we can look briefly at a few things, more for the way they depart from the modern norms of pitching success than for the ways they fit them. First, Assad has a deep arsenal. He's a true six-pitch pitcher, willing to use four different offerings pretty frequently against righties and five different ones against lefties. He throws the kitchen sink at hitters, which hardly anyone does anymore (and, thus, which hitters are less able to adjust to than they could 20 years ago). Second, Assad's stuff has a wide range of movement profiles, and he forces opponents to cover the whole plate and the whole vertical zone. That's hard to do, and most hitters get frustrated by it. Again, too, there's a platoon dynamic at play. He trusts different pitches to do different things against lefties and righties, and shapes them in pleasingly subtle, meaningful ways based on situation, familiarity, and swing path. Finally, and importantly, because of the above, Assad gets hitters out of the aggressive, damage-focused, pull-happy approach so common in today's game. He puts them on the defensive. When Statcast rolled out bat-tracking data earlier this week, it showed that Assad gets some of the slower swings in the league from his opponents, and that's because of his extreme unpredictability. His soft stuff also plays some part in taking the juice out of hitters' bats. They very rarely pull fly balls and long line drives against him, and as nervous as a middling ground-ball rate can be for those of us raised in a league full of strikeout artists and ground-ball guys, the opposite-field fly ball is another relatively safe way to get a lot of outs. That list of great career starts above tells the story here. Assad is not yet guaranteed to be any kind of ace. He's certainly more directly comparable to Tanner Roark than to José Fernández. Still, he's on the list, which is far more than I ever expected from him, and the fact that his success is difficult to explain in a 21st-century pitching paradigm doesn't invalidate it. Even Roark had his best career season in 2016, after exiting that first 50 games window. Don't expect Javier Assad to regress too much, just because he doesn't throw 98 or rival Tyler Glasnow for sheer dominance. View full article

The Chicago Cubs have had to thrust their young catcher into a truly primary role a bit sooner than they expected or preferred. So far, he's responded by pressing at the plate, but plenty of promise remains. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports After an uneven but interesting rookie season in 2023, Miguel Amaya came to camp this spring and quickly emerged as the better option to start often behind the plate for the Cubs. Amaya's development has been slowed and distorted by injuries, but he's flashed impressive tools throughout his professional career, and even while he was being half-wasted by a manager reluctant to trust young players, he carried that over into his first MLB action. Defensively, Amaya has been respectable since becoming the team's de facto starter at catcher. He's struggled mightily in his efforts to control the running game, but his framing numbers have been strong, and he's learning quickly when it comes to calling games and coaxing pitchers through difficult sequences. Offensively, however, Amaya isn't producing at anywhere near his potential level, and it's been a conspicuous problem for a Cubs offense often down one or two of its best hitters over the first seven weeks. On the season, Amaya's numbers are hideous: .195/.261/.280. If Yan Gomes weren't running an OBP (.213) 13 points worse than John Smoltz's, the Cubs would have had to demote their would-be catcher of the future, before he could even become the catcher of the present. He has to be much, much better than this, or he'll join the very long but utterly forgotten list of catchers of the past. There's hope that he can avoid that, but he has to make some big adjustments. Amaya's fundamental offensive skills aren't bad. He swings and misses slightly more often than an average hitter, but only slightly. He hits the ball hard enough to produce good power, though he doesn't elevate it as consistently as the team hopes he eventually will. With the new bat-tracking data that came out Sunday at Baseball Savant, we gained some unexpected insight: Amaya not only has average-plus bat speed, but pairs that with a short swing length. In other words, his bat takes a more compact and direct path to the ball than one would expect, given the speed at which he swings. That combination of traits is valuable, because if Amaya can lock in on a location and deliver his bat to that spot accurately, he can be a bit early and still catch the ball on the fat part of the bat. That's what happened on his home run in Seattle last month. cmVZdjVfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWxOV0FWUlZWUW9BRFFFRFV3QUFBUTREQUZoUUFBVUFBVndEQmxBQUNRQlhWZ0Zm.mp4 Alternatively, because the combination of good bat speed and a short swing leads to a short time from starting one's swing to the (real or theoretical) contact point and solid acceleration through contact, he can be a little bit late and still drive the ball, as he did on a scalded single against the Brewers earlier this month. WVFZOTlfWGw0TUFRPT1fRDFWWlZ3QlhYd01BQ2xFQVhnQUFDQUFFQUZnQkJRTUFVRlFNQlFFSFVBRUhBd1ZV.mp4 Pitcher List's Kyle Bland created an app for scraping and visualizing some of the new bat-tracking data, and it includes two numbers not reported by Statcast, but easily derived from the data the new metrics do report: time to contact point (from start of swing) and acceleration at the moment of contact (the rate of change in speed, rather than raw speed). These are valuable ways to discern which hitters can quickly get to the ball, even if they're mostly determined by swing speed and swing length. Of the 312 hitters with at least 100 measured swings so far in 2024, Amaya has the 18th-shortest swing time. He also has the 36th-highest acceleration. He's near-elite in this regard, and when he connects cleanly on tough pitches like that 97-MPH sinker from Elvis Peguero, it's not hard to see the value in that--or the offensive upside it gives him. Alas, right now, that upside is going to waste, for the simplest, oldest reason why any young hitter in professional baseball fails. Amaya is swinging at everything. Pitchers are being aggressive with him, since he hits at the bottom of the order and has enough of a penchant to whiff to make it worth the risks that come with being aggressive in the zone. Perhaps thrown off by that approach, or perhaps out of an overweening desire to help his team achieve more explosiveness and consistency, Amaya is just getting way too eager. His swing rate is up from 46.3% in 2023 to 56.3%, and his chase rate on pitches outside the zone is up from a perfectly healthy 28.1% to a calamitous 39.1%. A swing time as short as Amaya's gives him about 10 milliseconds longer to make a swing decision than the average hitter has. In the flight of an MLB pitch, that's an eternity. He's not using the extra time to make good decisions, though. He's actually whiffing on a lower share of swings than he did last year, and his strikeout rate is down. So is his walk rate, though, and more importantly, because he's being so injudicious with a swing that can so readily reach so many pitches, he's mishitting the ball more often than a hitter with his gifts should. If he can reorganize his strike zone and develop a better approach, Amaya can pretty easily add .200 to his OPS. The tools are all here, from a sufficient feel for contact to the bat speed and efficiency to generate good power. If he can't find a plan that allows him to key in on pitches and square them up more often, though, the team will continue to have an untenable blemish at the bottom of their batting order throughout the season. View full article

Eight years after drafting him and three years after waiving him as an almost-spent pitching prospect who couldn't get over the hump, the Chicago Cubs are bringing back righty Tyson Miler to bolster their depleted bullpen. For Seattle, it's much-needed reinforcement for a positional corps struggling to support one of the league's best pitching staffs, even if Slaughter is only a fringe prospect at this stage of his career. For the Cubs, it's a healthy arm for a bullpen with far too many injured ones, and Miller comes with one of the truly bizarre sliders in all of baseball--a pitch that has allowed him to post strong numbers this year, but which couldn't save him from the axe with the deeper, healthier Mariners pitching staff. You can think of Miller as a softer-tossing version of José Cuas or of Almonte, but he has better command than either, he creates just as crazy an angle for hitters as does Cuas, and his slider might be the most unusual pitch in the big leagues. It doesn't have any vertical depth--either relative to his fastball, or in absolute terms. In fact, it rises (or appears to rise) more than any other slider or sweeper in MLB, save those of submariners Adam Cimber and Tyler Rogers. Those guys' sliders go up because their fastballs go down. They throw their breaking stuff in the low- to mid-70s. Miller's is a fairly traditional slider, at over 80 miles per hour on average. It just keeps moving left, from his perspective, instead of sinking at all. Cuas is just one example of many of the fact that the Cubs like pitchers who create difficulty for hitters because of their extreme release points. Miller is that kind of guy. He not only throws from a sidearm slot and gets way over to the third-base side of the rubber, the way Cuas does, but has exceptional release extension--over 7 feet, on average. That combination is exceedingly rare, and makes him an exceedingly uncomfortable at-bat, especially (but not exclusively) for right-handed batters. Now, there's still value in throwing hard, and Miller really doesn't. He sits 89-92 with his four-seamer, although it does boast a very flat vertical approach angle (VAA) because of the low release point he achieves. He was fungible for Seattle for a reason, just as Cuas was for the woeful Royals last summer. Even so, Miller is more than a standard-issue DFA-and-trade guy. That's reflected in the stature of Slaughter, a more respectable depth piece than is usually exchanged when a team has given up leverage in negotiations by designating a player for assignment. The Cubs won some very small version of a bidding war here, and you can understand why. It's nice that Miller will now get to continue his career where it began, when he was a fourth-round pick in the Cubs' thinned-out 2016 Draft class. He debuted for the team in 2020, before beginning a long tour of the fringes of big-league rosters the following June. Back then, he was throwing from a three-quarter arm slot, and he could not do this. elo5S3ZfWGw0TUFRPT1fVUFVRlVsSlNVbEFBQ2dGWFVnQUFCUThDQUZrRkJ3QUFWMVpVQ0FBQ1VGZFJDRlpT.mp4 In fact, it's only this spring that Miller has really figured out how to make the ball swerve so evenly, without creating two-plane movement that might increase whiffs on swings but begets fewer of them. He's had a lot of success this young season, thanks to the change of breaking ball shape and stripping down his arsenal to its essentials. Miller won't emerge as the team's relief ace. He's out of options, and could easily be on another 40-man roster before the end of the season. For now, though, he's a familiar (and yet new and tantalizing) brace for a failing structure. The Cubs needed a better version of Cuas to stabilize their middle-relief corps for at least a month or two. Miller looks up to that task, with some chance of being a half-step better than that tepid recommendation. View full article