Matthew Trueblood

The newest position player to the Cubs organization is a left-handed hitter who can both slug and get on base. However, as a lefty in the modern game, you're never truly safe from the question: Is this guy worth playing against left-handed pitchers? Image courtesy of © Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports We live in the age of optimization. It's not always ruthless, and it needn't be, but by and large, teams shield even some of their best players from matchups they view as difficult for them. That especially means that left-handed hitters see lefty pitchers less often. It's easy to miss that trend, because of the way rosters and rules have changed over time, but it's true. First, consider this chart, showing the percentage of all plate appearances that have featured left-on-left matchups over the last 110 years. I've added the trend line, not to suggest that it matters how closely any given season hews to that line, but to make clearer the general direction of change. Lefty hitters are seeing lefty pitchers slightly more often than they historically have, though markedly less than they did about a decade ago. That would seem to go against the claim above, right? Wrong. We have to correct for a few things. To wit: there are more left-handed pitchers than there used to be, too. Don't obsess over the apparent slopes of these trend lines, or anything. The charts are on different scales. As you can see, though, southpaws have become more prevalent over time (though they have made up a smaller share of all pitchers since the last rounds of expansion, in the 1990s, than they had before that). So, too, have lefty batters. Take those confounding factors out, by boiling things down to the share of all lefty plate appearances taken against lefties, and you can see what's really happening. There's no good way to show it to you graphically, but take the above and mentally factor in one more thing: Benches are tiny now. In the middle chunk of the 20th century, when Casey Stengel and then Earl Weaver ruled the game through assiduous use of platoons, they had 16 or 17 position players on their rosters, and could smoothly run two or three platoons at any given time. Only their very best regulars faced same-handed pitching on a regular basis. The 13-man pitching staff makes that virtually impossible. You have fewer players on your bench, and they have to be used differently. By the time you ensure that you have a backup catcher, a shortstop-capable infielder, and a center field-capable outfielder, you're left with just one bench spot to award to a player selected purely for their bat. Many managers don't feel empowered to use those guys as aggressively as they used to, either. So, let's get to Michael Busch. One reason why the Dodgers were willing to move on from him is that, because Busch has relatively little defensive value, he needs to hit exceptionally well in order to be more than an average contributor. Lefty hitters struggle with lefty pitchers, partially because they're given few chances to acclimate themselves to facing them, but also partially because those pitchers are getting nastier all the time. As a group, lefty batters haven't had an OPS north of .700 against southpaws since 2019 (thanks largely to the aeroball), and before that, it's been since 2009. If Busch is limited to platoon work, it really limits his ceiling. I don't think he needs to be thus limited, though. Last year, across Triple A and MLB, 112 batters had at least 100 plate appearances in left-on-left situations. Among them, Busch ranked: 13th in average exit velocity 40th in hard-hit rate 12th in launch angle sweet spot rate 9th in contact rate on swings 30th in chase rate on pitches outside the zone This is cheating, a bit. Since most of Busch's sample was against Triple-A pitching, we're not comparing apples to apples--or if we are, some of them are honeycrisp and others are red delicious. It's not perfectly equitable. Still, these data tell the story of a guy who deserves to be one of the few lefty batters entrusted with regular work even against lefty pitchers. If Busch comes to camp and shows the same ability to hang in against lefties that he showed last season, it ought to shape the Cubs' plans for him. That could mean making Christopher Morel more available in trades. At face value, Busch and Morel seem like potential platoon partners, but Morel has reverse platoon splits for his career, anyway. Unless the Cubs decide that one or the other has more defensive value than is generally perceived right now, they overlap pretty significantly in their potential areas of contribution, and that might push Morel out the door if the right offer comes in. Barring that, Busch's competence against same-handed hurlers still means good things. If he's an everyday first baseman, rather than one who needs to sit once or twice a week to dodge a lefty starter, he brings more value as an individual and gives Craig Counsell more options elsewhere. He's still unlikely to be the next Anthony Rizzo, but when you break down Busch's numbers and see this surprising balance in his game, you can start to understand how he still gets to All-Star status without being able to play a valuable defensive position or bringing outstanding athleticism to the table. Are you comfortable with Busch facing lefties, at least right now? Does it tinge your opinion on the Cubs' presumed pursuits of guys like Rhys Hoskins? Research assistance provided by TruMedia, and by Stathead, by Baseball Reference. View full article

The Cubs' erstwhile workhorse almost had his career careen into what would have felt like a premature end. Instead, he reasserted himself, in the least conventionally assertive way possible. The oldest orthodoxy in pitching is: away, away, away. Even Bob Gibson (one of history's most famous pitch-inside, intimidate them, own the plate hurlers) revealed in his large oeuvre of post-career pitching wisdom dispensed across multiple books, disclosed that he only came inside to set up batters. He got all his outs by attacking low and away. Zack Greinke opened up to Eno Sarris back in 2015 about his doubts that pitching inside has any real value. The reason the changeup and the slider exist is to create opportunities for pitchers to work opposite- and same-handed batters, respectively, away more effectively. Since 2015, though, that orthodoxy has started crumbling. As Greinke observed in that interview with Sarris, hitters do tend to hit the ball hard when it's out over the plate, where they can extend their arms. Maybe that, verified by batted-ball data that is so ubiquitous these days, has led pitchers and their teams to change tack. Maybe it's more about the changing shapes and angles of modern pitching. Either way, though, pitchers are pounding away outside less and less often, over time. Not even the softest-tossing starter in baseball was immune to the trend, for a few years. Kyle Hendricks is a dedicated and intelligent adapter. He evolves and tweaks things, and he does so systematically. Historically one of the most devout "away, away, away" guys in baseball, Hendricks changed up on the league from 2020 through 2022--literally, but also figuratively. He started trying to force hitters to cover the whole plate a bit more, and to get in where he could consistently induce a lot of weak contact. As we all know, though, the results of that change in approach were mixed. Hendricks was superb in the COVID-curtailed 2020 season, but over the following two years, his ERA was 4.78, and he gave up a lot of hits and home runs. As you can see, after returning from the shoulder injury that ended his 2022 season, he left that experiment with abandoning the outside edge behind. He's back to what once made him dominant, but he's now working against the grain of the league's evolution. In fact, among the 375 hurlers who faced at least 200 batters in 2023, Hendricks worked Outside at the highest rate in the league. Even though his raw rates of working away were higher in his prime, he never led the league before now. The results steadily reinforced that approach, too. Batters had a .477 OPS against Outside pitches from Hendricks in 2023, the lowest of his career. As those who watched him closely know, that's largely because Hendricks didn't only change where he pitched last season. He also rebalanced his pitch mix, in a significant way. Again, this is a pitcher who doesn't do anything without thought and purpose, and you can see the way his repertoire and approach have evolved by studying the way he deployed his arsenal on Outside pitches, specifically, in each phase of his career to date. From his debut in 2014 through 2019, when he made his switch to attack more often inside, he was pretty sinker-heavy, and he tried to use his cutter to draw 'X's on each side of home plate, as Greg Maddux used to describe it. He wanted hitters to have trouble guessing which way a pitch would move, even if they immediately spotted its location. As he changed his location targets a bit in 2020 and up through 2022, he changed his mix, too. It was more four-seamers and more curveballs, as a share of all Outside pitches. He ratcheted up usage of the changeup away, but it was still just the plurality of those offerings, not the majority. He was trying to use the principles of command discipline now so widely accepted in the game. Pitch A will be easiest to command in Location X, its movement profile sets up Pitch B in Location Y, but don't try to throw Pitch A or Pitch C in Location Y, or God help you. For most pitchers, that's probably sound thinking. Those pitchers pretty much all throw harder than Hendricks, though. Those pitchers pretty much all have worse feel and worse command than Hendricks has, too. As Hendricks got more confident and adroit in his manipulation of what are really two different changeups, and with negative feedback on some of those offerings when he tried to throw them right at the outer edge (with the slim margin for error that comes with a lack of velocity), he figured out that it was time to get back to throwing outside--but not the same way he used to do it. When last he was perching such a high percentage of his pitches on the outer third and beyond, Hendricks was fastball-heavy, No more. He's in the business of driving hitters utterly insane, by throwing what look like meatballs on the outer half, where they can extend their arms and obliterate the ball. Instead, it's the changeup. He's pulling the string over and over, and it's working. None of that is to say that it will work identically well in 2024 as it did in 2023. Hendricks is a wonder, and a unique artist on the mound, but he's not immune to time, injury, or the pitfalls of being so far below the league average in the single statistic that drives so much of the modern pitching paradigm. Still, last year's major adjustments were notable, and they're a good reminder that some of the ancient wisdom about pitching is timeless. What do you expect from Hendricks this year? How repeatable is his success? Let's discuss. Research assistance throughout this piece provided by TruMedia tools. View full article

You pegged it right for me, too. And yet... It feels like I'm forever torn between what I would do or want Hoyer to do, and what he's actually likely to do. I look at this layout and I think, "It needs a couple significant FA signings and three trades: one that's prospects for a key player, one that swaps need for need, and one that clears roster clutter for you and helps a team that doesn't have as much depth as you do, even if all you get out of it is small-scale salary relief." But that feels like so much more than Hoyer's going to do. It feels more like he'll make one big signing, skip the need-for-need trade, and go into the season with a team that's well-positioned to win 86 games but stretched to even dream on 95.

This was clarified last year, can't remember because of whom, but: the player has to qualify for a full year of service time. That's a slight but meaningful distinction from having to be on the roster all year. For instance, if PCA is up by the last week in April, he'd qualify.

The Cubs' offseason is far from complete, but they've made enough moves in the last two weeks to merit a refresh of the roster projection we did for them last month. Let's tackle the task. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports One month ago, I wrote up the most likely 26-man roster for Opening Day 2024, which then looked an awful lot like the team we last saw at the end of 2023, less the much-discussed Cody Bellinger. It was purely an exercise in framing, because we all knew the roster would look much different than that come late March. Now, things are a little more in focus. The lineup, the rotation, and the bullpen have each gotten an infusion of talent, and the depth chart at each position is starting to make more sense. Still, it feels certain that more will change. We just heard from Josh Illes this weekend about Jed Hoyer's enigmatic "fourth or fifth inning" comments, and the implication that there might be a lot more action ahead. For today, then, let's lay out the various units of the roster as it stands, while understanding that this is more work-in-progress than either rough draft or final copy. Lineup Mike Tauchman, CF Nico Hoerner, 2B Ian Happ, LF Seiya Suzuki, RF Michael Busch, 1B Dansby Swanson, SS Christopher Morel, DH Yan Gomes, C Nick Madrigal, 3B The addition of Busch really makes the lineup feel less shaky. Sliding his left-handed bat into the middle of the batting order, even with the understanding that he's somewhere south of stardom, pushes Swanson and Morel down into spots where they fit more naturally, and Busch seems better able to balance and lengthen the heart of the order than the guy he's replacing in this mix, Matt Mervis. As we creep closer to spring, I wonder increasingly whether Gomes will be the starting catcher again. Bringing him back on an affordable team option was a no-brainer, because he's respected and beloved by teammates and had a fine year at the plate. He's in hid mid-30s, though, and massive offensive regression would be no big surprise. We might see more of Miguel Amaya than has been generally believed, and sooner. Bench Amaya, C Patrick Wisdom, 3B/1B Miles Mastrobuoni, IF Alexander Canario, OF Again, I'm leaving Pete Crow-Armstrong off the roster and back in Iowa, for the moment. If the team can assemble a more reliable, dangerous position-player group, and if Crow-Armstraong has a great Cactus League, I won't object to seeing him break camp with the team. Right now, though, he looks like an almost glove-only contributor in the short term, and that's a tough fit on this roster. By contrast, Wisdom becomes a better fit for the team by the day. With Busch taking the majority of the playing time at first base, Wisdom pairs beautifully as a platoon partner for him, and can continue to be deployed on a matchups basis opposite Madrigal at third. Of course, a Bellinger signing would change some things, but it looks like there's a wide-open lane to 300 plate appearances for Wisdom again, in a way that could help the team. Starting Rotation Justin Steele - LHP Shota Imanaga - LHP Jameson Taillon - RHP Kyle Hendricks - RHP Jordan Wicks - LHP Javier Assad - RHP Even more than the Busch acquisition, Imanaga changes the landscape. While we continue to feel out how they'll actually do things, I'm listing six starters, because I expect the rotation to feel as much like a six-man group as a five-man one, even if they rarely use six in an on-schedule cycle. At any rate, this pushes Taillon and Hendricks down to the area where they fit much better, and the depth (in addition to prospects on the come, like Cade Horton) is such that they can give themselves a chance to win just about every day. Bullpen Adbert Alzolay - RHP Julian Merryweather - RHP Yency Almonte - RHP Mark Leiter Jr. - RHP Drew Smyly - LHP José Cuas - RHP Hayden Wesneski - RHP This unit feels the most out of joint right now--not worst, just least smooth or complete. They need more certainty at the back end of the game, but they also face the constraint of several players being out of options and unable to be sent to the minors. Few teams in MLB worry less about having those out-of-options guys piled up in the pen; Jed Hoyer is willing to lose the relief projects who don't work out. Still, they have some rebalancing to do, here and elsewhere. We'll probably end up doing this another time or two before Opening Day actually comes. The roster is far from final, and activity should come as soon as this week. For now, though, what do you think of the above production? Whom would you remove, and in favor of whom? Discuss it here. View full article

Jed Hoyer always speaks so guardedly and then half the time he doesn't do what he really only hints he's gonna do, but people always seem to take what he says at face value, anyway. I'm not directly faulting you, but I don't hear what other people seem to hear when Hoyer talks, and I think history supports my interpretation, which amounts to: not one word he says in public means anything.

All offseason, the Cubs have been locked in a slow, dangerous tango with Scott Boras, and nearly all of the rumors and musings have centered on Cody Bellinger, Jordan Montgomery, and/or Matt Chapman. There's one more big name on Boras's client list, though, and it's time to tackle him. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports I understand why Blake Snell is not some fans' cup of tea. If truth be told, he isn't mine, either. I like my aces to fill up the strike zone, and Snell (who walked a career-high 13.3 percent of opposing batters last year) stubbornly refuses to do so. He's an inveterate nibbler. He's also a two-time Cy Young Award winner. He has four truly filthy pitches, and he's actually pretty good at locating each of them. He just spends to much time trying to hit the corners and induce chases with his breaking stuff that he lets every count become a deep one. In the last 50 seasons (going back to 1974), 10 pitchers have had at least seven no-hit bids that lasted at least six innings. Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, and Justin Verlander each have double-digit games of that type. Then there are Max Scherzer and David Cone, who got through six hitless frames eight times each. That leaves five guys who have gotten that far seven times each: Aníbal Sánchez, Tim Wakefield, Roger Clemens, Dave Stieb, and Snell. A perennial 30-percent strikeout guy as a starter, Snell only really gets held back by injuries. When he took the ball, he averaged 5,6 innings per start in 2023, which just isn't that bad. Let's go pitch by pitch through his arsenal, to discuss why he's so good. Four-Seam Fastball Snell doesn't have a freakish fastball, from a spin or a vertical approach angle (VAA) perspective. He's the anti-Shota Imanaga--all the special in his heater comes from the high height of his release point and the speed on it. Sitting 95 and with the ability to add and subtract a few ticks in each direction from there, Snell gets good ride when he attacks the top of the zone with the fastball. He almost has to work up there for the pitch to really take off and get the whiffs he wants. Many pitchers, especially these days, excel at throwing their heater to one side of the plate or the other. They favor that side, and it sets up the rest of their arsenal, and they command the ball much better there than to the other side of the plate. That isn't in evidence at all with Snell. He's slightly better at commanding it to the glove side (away from a lefty) when a lefty is at the plate, mostly, he tries to move the pitch around to all quadrants and chase whiffs at the letters and above, without trying to cut the zone into thirds or quarters. Thinking that way about the fastball is what leads to starters with 13-percent walk rates, but it also makes it hard to square a guy up and leads to high strikeout rates. Curveball Coming from his high release point and spindly frame, Snell's curve catches you by surprise a little. You expect a hurler like this to have one of those elite spin rates--for the ball to sing with that high metallic sound as it comes of their fingers, like blade or a wine glass has been struck just right. Instead, he has a Drew Smyly-ish hook, with as much tumble as crazy top spin. Still, he does have that top spin, and he uses it to induce elite whiff rates on the curve--especially from righties. Overhand curves are often part of reverse-split packages, and indeed, lefties make contact better and more often against Snell's hook than do righties. It's a pitch that works gorgeously off the fastball, though, regardless of the handedness of the opponent. Changeup The offering for which Snell doesn't get enough credit is the changeup, a pitch of which he does have pretty tight command. It's not a bat-missing monster, but it does induce whiffs. More importantly, it's a weak contact machine for him. Opponents had an average exit velocity south of 80 miles per hour and an average launch angle of just over 2 degrees on Snell's changeup in 2023. He didn't throw the pitch a single time to a lefty; he threw nearly 600 of them to righties. He just pounds away at one target with it, and because righties have to be ready for three other pitches, they're helpless on it. Slider This is the pitch that occasionally gets hit hard for him. Snell's slider is a 'gyro' type offering, with a small deviation in actual spin axis from the fastball but a wide variance in the exact spin he applies to it from one offering to the next. It still gets a ton of whiffs, but a pitch like that is not going to be easily or prettily commanded. It's far from a sweeper, with a mostly vertical movement differential from the fastball, and it'll sometimes hang on the glove-side third of the plate, above the knee. When that happens, he does pay for it. It doesn't happen so often that he really gets hurt in the big picture, though, as evidenced by the two Cy Young Awards and the career ERA of 3.20. Snell is a much more complete pitcher than he gets credit for. Entering the offseason, I ranked him fourth on my list of the top 50 fits for the Cubs in free agency, one ahead of Imanaga. I still think that's true. It's very hard to swallow the worry and pony up over $200 million for a pitcher like Snell, because he issues so many walks and has had hip trouble, groin trouble, and loose bodies in his elbow within the last five years. Once you step back from focusing on your preferred picayune problems, though, you can see the big picture, and it's worth that kind of investment. Snell is the last player available who really represents an infusion of superstar talent and transformation for the Cubs. With him joining Justin Steele, Imanaga, Jameson Taillon, and Kyle Hendricks in the starting rotation, the team would take a leap to a new level of expected competitiveness. Obviously, it's wildly unlikely to come to fruition. If the Cubs do spend that kind of money at this point, it's more likely to be on Cody Bellinger. Still, I think Snell might be a wiser investment than has become the consensus. He does a lot of things very, very well--more than enough to make up for the things he does that are aggravating. Would you still want Snell on a long-term, high-dollar deal? Or does Imanaga slake your thirst for rotation reinforcement this winter? Let's discuss it. View full article

The Cubs' newest starting pitcher doesn't throw especially hard, and because of that fact, some outlets have tabbed him as a back-end arm. That kind of lazy, radar gun-only scouting should be left in 2014. Ten years later, we know better. It's true: Shota Imanaga doesn't throw all that hard. While he's touched 96 miles per hour a few times relatively recently, he more frequently sits between 91 and 93 miles per hour. In an MLB where the average four-seamer hums in at 94, that marks him as below-average in one regard. When you combine that apparent weakness with the fact that he's left-handed and his relatively small frame, you can talk yourselt into viewing him as a guy who will be lucky to hold up the back end of an MLB rotation. Multiple evaluators have done just that, led by the venerable Baseball America. While the non-velocity concerns raised by some are valid (and will be briefly treated here, in due time), the dismissiveness with which Imanaga's potential to be an above-average starter has been downplayed is half-baked. Take every pitcher who threw at least 200 four-seam fastballs last year, and their per-pitch run value on that offering has a correlation factor of 0.27 with velocity. In one (much too simplistic) reading of the data, then, velocity can explain about 27 percent of a pitcher's fastball effectiveness. I don't know whether that number surprises you. It feels right to me, but in the modern game, we hear so much about velocity that the relationship might sound unexpectedly weak. It's true, though, and we've advanced enough in our collection of data about pitching to say with some certainty that other attributes affect the effectiveness of fastballs, too. Imanaga doesn't have even average velocity, but he does do a couple of other things well. We know that his spin rate and his vertical approach angle (VAA) are both substantially better than average. As it turns out, if you have to choose, you want the guy with those two attributes, rather than the guy with the more commonly cited one. Spin rate (0.25) and VAA (0.25) have almost as strong a correlation with run value per pitch as does velocity. Now, the three attributes overlap, and don't add up to explain three-quarters of fastball effectiveness. But it's not as though every pitcher with a good spin rate has a good VAA, and that citing the two is thus redundant. Velocity carries a correlation coefficient of 0.23 with spin rate and of 0.25 with VAA. Spin and VAA share a coefficient of 0.22, meaning they're no more likely to coincide than velocity and either of them are. These are interrelated characteristics, then, but each has independent value, and a guy with Imanaga's combination of the two newer, less heralded markers is as valuable (or more so) than one who throws hard but lacks anything special in terms of spin or VAA. The best comp for Imanaga's fastball characteristics might be Andrew Heaney, another high-spin, flat-VAA, relatively low-velocity lefty. Heaney certainly has profiled as a back-end starter for much of his career, but that's much more because his slider usually doesn't miss bats and because his changeup is inconsistent than because of that fastball. When he's had those elements working, as was the case during his 2022 stop with the Dodgers, he's been dominant. If Imanaga is able to sustain his higher-end velocities better than expected, he starts to profile more like Freddy Peralta, anyway, but Heaney would hardly be a disappointing comp. That brings us to Imanaga's other offerings. He has a sweeper and a splitter right now, each of them effective in their own ways. In fact, he throws two different flavors of changeup--one a split-change from an unusual, four-seam grip, and one more of a straight change. The splitter is the pitch that will devastate big-league hitters, assuming he can find a feel for it with the different ball they use here in the States. I believe completely in the value of Imanaga's fastball. The splitter is always a tough pitch to project, but he seems to have the feel and the experience with it to adapt. The differentiator for him will be the breaking ball. I called it a sweeper a moment ago, and that's what it is, but the team and Imanaga might come together to decide that that pitch is better shoved into a tertiary, complementary role, with a more vertical, 'gyro' slider taking over as the primary breaker. That kind of pitch would work better against right-handers and give Imanage three different looks against them. A sweeper, as we discussed over the weekend, is an unavoidably platoon-vulnerable offering. For a lefty, it often has limited utility. Imanaga might overcome that, but reshaping the breaking ball might be the key to making him the partner the Cubs want for Justin Steele at the front of the rotation. His fastball, despite the malign with which it has been treated in some corners, needs no such adjustment. Does Imanaga's lack of raw heat concern you? Will Imanaga miss enough bats to dominate in MLB? Here's the place to discuss it. View full article

Though he quickly became a secondary consideration once the full scope of the trade was known, the Cubs added an interesting relief pitcher in Thursday's trade with the Dodgers. Let's talk more about him, and about how modern pitching analysis works. Image courtesy of © Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports For parts of the last two seasons, Yency Almonte has been downright dominant. At other times, he's looked almost helpless. That's partially because he's dealt with (and sometimes tried to pitch through) injuries, but it also has something to do with his skill set--and the inherent weaknesses in his game. Almonte, who will turn 30 in June, has two years of team control remaining. He can't be optioned to the minors, which somewhat limits his roster utility, but if he pitches the way he did throughout 2022, that won't matter. That year, he allowed fewer than four baserunners for every five innings pitched and had an ERA of 1.02. None of that is quite sustainable, but if used carefully, he can be something on the comfortable side of the wide spectrum between those numbers and the 5.06 mark he put up in an uneven 2023. Although his season ended early due to a leg injury, Almonte had a great summer last year. His ugly overall numbers were mostly the result of a hideous April and early May, during which his ERA crested at 9.00. From May 20 through the injury in August, though, he allowed just a .577 OPS and had a 2.70 ERA. It was all thanks to finding a previously missing feel for his sweeper, which will be the star of much of the rest of this discussion. When Almonte's sweeper was beyond his command, and especially when it was a bit short on downward movement, he got into a lot of trouble. Once he cleaned that up, he regained his effectiveness, but he still issued a lot of walks and doesn't strike batters out the way you expect a flamethrowing modern reliever to. What gives? In short, Almonte's problem is a platoon issue. He has the capacity to dominate right-handed batters, but limited answers for lefties. That hasn't shown up in his raw results based on handedness over the last two years, but it's true. Yency Almonte, 2022-23, Platoon Splits Split AVG OBP SLG K% BB% HR% BABIP vs. LHH 0.202 0.314 0.288 16.5 12.4 1.7 0.232 vs. RHH 0.204 0.293 0.332 27.9 8.6 2.7 0.264 Right-handed batters got more hits and a few more home runs against Almonte since the start of 2022, but it's lefties who run up his pitch count, draw walks at a high rate, and against whom he doesn't miss bats. Opponents' contact quality doesn't support the idea that he's simply throwing more hittable meatballs against righties, either. They just got luckier than lefties did over a short sample. Almonte is a righty-killer because he primarily uses a sweeper. That's the pitch at the heart of his arsenal. Against righties, in fact, it's one he throws a healthy majority of the time. Yency Almonte, 2022-23, Pitch Types by Opposing Batter Handedness Split FA% SI% SW% CH% vs. LHH 38.2 7.9 34.5 17.9 vs. RHH 1 41.3 56.8 0.1 As you can see, though, even against lefties, he leans heavily on the sweeper. That's his pitch; it's how he went from a fringe big-leaguer to a (however inconsistently) nasty relief weapon. If you had this pitch, you'd throw it a lot, too, and forget about who was up. elpBQTVfVjBZQUhRPT1fQmdVRFVGQlFYMWNBWEZ0UkF3QUFBVkJSQUFBTkFBY0FCbGRXVXdaVUNBSlVDQXBV.mp4 Here's the thing, though: as you would guess, that result isn't quite typical. Against lefties, this is a much more representative sweeper from Almonte. eFprWWpfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWxOWkJ3RldBd2NBQUZjR1Z3QUFCMVZUQUZrQldsY0FBbFpXQndVSEIxSlhWZ1FF.mp4 There's good, tight break even on that pitch. It's just that, given the angle a left-handed batter gets on the ball out of Almonte's hand and the shape of the movement, it's much easier for them to lay off than it is for righties to do the same. That's compounded by the fact that (understandably) Almonte tries to dot the outside edge with a backdoor version of that sweeper to lefties, only to see it really get away from him. It's just not a pitch that lends itself to being thrown with good command on the arm side of the plate. Yency Almonte, Pitch-By-Pitch Outcomes, Sweepers, 2022-23 Split Ball% Called Strike% Chase% Whiff/Swing% vs. LHH 43.7 25.8 22.3 44.6 vs. RHH 36.8 34 35.6 49.8 You can't throw a pitch that results in a ball over 43 percent of the time once every three pitches, but that's exactly what Almonte has done against lefties over the last two years. He can't land the sweeper in the zone consistently, which is fine when hitters expand the zone to fish for the pitch at a 35-percent clip, but when they can identify it early and only chase outside the zone 22 percent of the time, it spells trouble. Even though lefties didn't rack up gaudy numbers against him, they extended at-bats and innings by working him for walks and staying alive until they could try to square up one of his other offerings. This is normal, and it's a good entry point for a short conversation that feels long overdue. This week on 670 The Score's Bernstein and Holmes show, host Laurence Holmes pleaded with the baseball world to "get together on what's a slider, and what's a sweeper, and are they really different?" It's been bandied about a bit since the sweeper took the league by storm a couple years ago, but that question hasn't been adequately or satisfactorily answered until now--at least, not in terms that lay people can grasp. For an instructive contrast, consider Almonte and new teammate Adbert Alzolay. Last year, Alzolay broke out as the Cubs' relief ace, and it was largely thanks to his ability to pair each of his fastballs with his slider--a pitch with some tilt but a pretty vertical shape. He could attack lefties with that offering, because it worked naturally off of his heat even as it moved toward the opposite-handed batter. Almonte's breaking ball isn't a slider, like Alzolay's. It's a sweeper. It's probably time to stop thinking of sweepers as a version of the slider. For a long time, we put what should really be called two different pitches into one bin, because there were few good ways to reliably differentiate them. Now, we can do so pretty well, and we ought to. Here's Almonte's heaters, paired with his sweeper. Feel free to study those two charts for a bit, but the differences should really jump right out. Alzolay's slider is a pitch with greater gyro spin--what's sometimes called a 'bullet' slider, because it has that football-like rotation that contributes only inefficiently to movement, by slowing the ball down so that gravity can act on it and pull it downward. Almonte's is a sweeper, with far more tilt, and the movement he gets comes from the spin he applies. As you can intuit (or see by the spread of the pitches shown in the plots above), the slider Alzolay throws is an easier pitch to command, which is crucial when trying to get out opposite-handed batters with a breaking ball. It also has a more vertical movement differential from his fastballs, whereas the relationship between Almonte's heaters and his sweeper is pretty horizontal. By and large, you get out same-handed hitters with horizontal movement, and you get out opposite-handed ones with vertical movement. Thus, a sweeper (which will, all else equal, always be a more horizontal pitch than a gyro slider) can be highly effective against same-handed guys, but is rarely so against opposite-handed ones. True, old-fashioned sliders are more versatile. They're not as nasty. Alzolay will never miss as many bats, on a per-swing bases, as Almonte does. Alzolay can throw his more effectively to lefties, though. Why did Almonte use the pitch so often, so stubbornly against lefties, then? That answer is simple: He doesn't have a useful changeup at this point. He's comfortable with both the sinker and the sweeper against righties, but against lefties, he really needs something to complement his four-seamer. Since he doesn't get the movement separation he needs on the changeup, he tries to find his outs by pairing the four-seamer with the sweeper, instead. He only induced whiffs on 8.8 percent of swings against his change from 2022-23. Hitters don't hammer the pitch, but they can easily fight it off when he does land it in the zone, and he doesn't do so nearly often enough. Only 10.4 percent of the changeups at which opposing lefties did not swing were called strikes. When you're never in the zone with a pitch, hitters don't have to respect it. So, to get lefties out, what should Almonte do? It starts with changing the areas of the zone he targets most often. Here's where he threw his four-seamers and sweepers against them over the last two seasons, using TruMedia tools. You can see the way he favors the glove side of the plate with the four-seamer, a result of the angle he creates for himself by lining up on the extreme first-base side of the pitching rubber, and obviously, too, the way he tries to break the sweeper off of that pitch. That's where his pitches go against left-handed batters. Now, consider where he finds his whiffs against them: Changing location patterns isn't as easy as identifying the need to do so, but Almonte clearly needs to let his four-seamer run more up and away from lefties. Maybe, once he sets their sights up there, the sweeper down and in will look a bit more enticing. Even then, though, don't expect an extraordinary forward leap from Almonte. It looks like control will remain a bugaboo for him, and while he had a handsome strikeout rate against righties over the last two years, he's never had a gaudy one, by modern standards. That's thanks to the sinker he uses against them, rather than the four-seamer that has a little more deception and life at the top of the zone. The sinker doesn't miss bats, though it does help Almonte minimize hard contact in the air. He has great velocity and good spin on the fastballs, which helps him induce harmless contact. The breaking stuff is tasked with getting the whiffs. Instead, think of Almonte as a right-handed reliever who should be highly effective against fellow righties, but shielded from lefties. To shore up that weakness a bit, the Cubs and their new pitcher might work together to add a splitter in place of his ineffectual changeup, or to realign him a bit on the rubber, as the team did with Jose Cuas after acquiring him last summer. The former would let him deemphasize the breaking ball against lefties and balance out his profile. The latter would help him change the sights a bit on his four-seamer and sweeper, but the sweeper is too good to tweak much, and that means accepting the vulnerability to lefties that it brings with it. Craig Counsell might just need to manage around Almonte's shortcomings and get the most out of him, and given the new skipper's track record, that's not an unreasonable thing for which to hope. Where do you envision Almonte fitting into the 2024 bullpen hierarchy? Do you trust him more or less than Cuas, or Daniel Palencia? How about Julian Merryweather? Chime in below. View full article

I think it's the latter, and I think it's Busch... but I also don't think even they know. I think they carefully carved out a move that leaves them able to go several directions from here, because they're not sure about any of these guys or eager to meet the asking price on Chapman.

The Cubs suddenly can't stop adding players to their 40-man roster. This time, it's a sweeper monster of a relief pitcher, with two remaining years of team control. That's not unexpected, given the value Busch and Almonte can deliver, but it sure does underscore the stakes of this move. Ferris is a tremendous prospect, but far from the big leagues, and the Cubs will get considerable value from Busch in both the short and the long term. This comes far short of being a finishing move for the Cubs' offseason, but it pushes it forward in a big and important way. Busch's left-handed bat balances and deepens the batting order, and Almonte's upside as a strikeout guy in middle relief does the same for the bullpen. To get both without giving up a player who would help any time even in the next two seasons is a coup, even if the upside of Hope and Ferris is huge. Let's crank up the conversation. How do you feel about this move? What would your Opening Day lineup look like from here, and which move do you expect next? View full article

The Cubs have made a major addition to their 2024 roster, but there are serious questions about the health of the player they're bringing in—enough of them to compel the two sides to cobble together a complicated contract. In short, the deal reflects the real concerns teams had about Imanaga as they got more information about his shoulder (which was operated on in late 2020) and the prognosis for long-term durability there. There's an important distinction to be drawn, there, between those concerns about long-term commitments and the idea that Imanaga is damaged goods. Just last winter, we saw this play out on a much larger and more familiar scale. Multiple teams flinched at the finish line of deals with Carlos Correa because of a plate in his lower leg that they believed could hobble him in his 30s. Correa ended up with a deal that included multiple team options and guaranteed him only $200 million, as opposed to the $350 million and $315 million the Giants and Mets, respectively, had first put on the table. The concern there wasn't present inability to perform, though. If it had been, Correa would have ended up signing for far, far less money. Rather, the sticking point with both scuttled deals was disagreement about how much a team should discount a player from the value they would otherwise have because of a projected health issue. Longer ago but, perhaps, more directly comparably, the Dodgers signed Kenta Maeda to an eight-year deal when he came over from Japan prior to 2016. Because of concerns about his elbow, Maeda only got $3 million in guaranteed salary for each season of that deal, but he could earn more than $10 million more each year if he stayed fully healthy and in the starting rotation. The contract only guaranteed him $25 million, but he made roughly $52.7 million over its span, even with the pandemic season forcing everyone to take prorated shares of their official salaries and despite Tommy John surgery robbing him of his entire 2022 campaign. Maeda pitched just over 866 innings over the life of the deal, but when he was on the mound, he was very, very good. Imanaga's situation falls somewhere between those two cases on the spectrum. His asking price wasn't knocked down as much as Maeda's was, although one team never in the center of the reported mix for him felt so emboldened by the collective unease within the last week that they waded in with a one-year offer attached only to a vesting option, and they were not immediately rebuffed. However, while Correa's issue only shortened his deal from 13 years to six, the 30-year-old Imanaga will end up with just two years of guaranteed money. After that, this deal will include options for both parties, and it could incorporate some incentives, too. If his shoulder were in pristine condition, Imanaga would have successfully commanded a nine-figure deal, given the current market for starting pitchers with upside. There are legitimate concerns about how his approach will translate to MLB, but the team can work with him to make his repertoire work just fine Stateside. Far more intractable are worries about his arm holding up, but again, that doesn't mean that it's currently in tatters. This is where the gap between our knowledge of MLB and NPB pitchers becomes important. Were Imanaga already in MLB when he underwent his surgery three years ago, we would all have a clearer understanding of the exact nature of that injury, and it would surprise no one that the fact of that injury affected his market. On the other hand, Carlos Rodon had shoulder surgery in 2019, and he signed for $162 million last winter. We can confidently say, then, that Imanaga's health record diminished his market, and that that has left the Cubs with a somewhat complex contract and an uncertain asset in the person of their new No. 2 starter. Nonetheless, he's an exciting addition, and this deal appears to limit risk for the team while allowing the player to preserve some upside in his own right. Do you expect the Cubs to pursue another starter after signing Imanaga? Let's discuss that, and other questions that leap to mind in the wake of the team's first substantial move of the winter. View full article

Jed Hoyer's long winter's nap is over. He's up, and the team now has another left-handed starter to pair with their incumbent ace atop the rotation. Image courtesy of © Sam Navarro-USA TODAY Sports Shortly before the end of his posting window, Shota Imanaga has agreed to a deal to join the Cubs and help lead their rotation. Imanaga, 30, is not big or hard-throwing by modern standards, but he has good strikeout stuff and has been one of the best pitchers in Nippon Professional Baseball for the last half-decade. USA Today's Bob Nightengale reported it first. This is a great way for the team to escape their winter doldrums. Imanaga is not a perfect pitcher. He'll run into some trouble with home runs, and he'll need to tweak his approach to adapt to MLB hitters and their superior power. There are also some lingering whispers about his shoulder, which kept his price tag south of the nine-figure megadeal he and his representation envisioned when the posting period began. Still, he's a terrific second starter in the short term, alongside Justin Steele and (the Cubs will hope) half a step ahead of Jameson Taillon and Kyle Hendricks, among others. We've broken it down a bit in the past, but let's pause to use some TruMedia tools to examine his arsenal in greater depth. Imanaga has a high-spin, high-riding fastball and a splitter on which he kills spin gorgeously, and which doesn't involve much of a change in spin axis. It can be devastating. As most Japanese starters do, Imanaga also maintains a deep arsenal beyond the fastball-splitter pairing. He merely tinkers with a sinker and cutter, but he has both a sweepy slider and a curveball, which let him change speeds, eye levels, and looks to continue racking up whiffs when hitters try to sit on the heat and the splitter. Without question, he'll be a fly-ball pitcher, and that could lead to some inflated home-run totals as he comes Stateside. Health is the other major question mark. He's come in just shy of 160 innings in each of the last two seasons, and now there's a tangible reason to believe that his arm might need ongoing maintenance. Still, he's a material upgrade for a rotation that badly needed one, and gives the Cubs more options (just as he removes some of Cubs fans' agita) for the balance of the offseason. For now, maintain a soupçon of caution. The deal won't be official until a physical scheduled for tomorrow, and there are some concerns in that realm that could still nullify the arrangement. The Cubs have already done some due diligence on that front, though, and it's unlikely that the final examination will result in a derailment. UPDATE: Jon Morosi says the deal will have an AAV in the $15-million range. That tracks, especially given the late changes in his market, but underscores the potential upside of this deal. If Imanaga is even a steady fourth starter in the vein of (pre-2023) Taillon, he's well worth $15 million per year, and this deal will not stretch to five guaranteed years. If his stuff plays the way the Cubs hope, he's a bargain, and crucially, the deal only costs them cash. The posting fee doesn't count against their competitive-balance tax payroll calculation, and they don't lose a draft pick. These are ancillary but important reasons why the fit here is so good. How does this move work for you, as a first strike of the offseason? Are you excited about Imanaga, or worried about how his game will translate to MLB? View full article

The Cubs need at least one bat to bolster their lineup for 2024, and ideally, it would be someone who hits for power. Because of that, though, there's real risk of overlooking the upside of their current lineup, including a locked-in leadoff hitter extraordinaire. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports There was nothing quiet, exactly, about Nico Hoerner's breakout campaign in 2023. He stole 43 bases and played sparkling defense at second base, racking up highlights along the way. Because of the shape of his batting profile, though, it can be easy to gloss over the value he delivers with that part of his game. After his second-half surge and in light of the granular data we can now glean about his performance, Hoerner belongs at the top of the lineup for 2024--and he'll be a difference-maker in that slot. Even speed and aggressiveness as great as Hoerner's don't count for much if a player can't get on base or hit for real power, and through the middle of last season, Hoerner just wasn't doing enough of either. In fact, through the All-Star break last year, he was hitting just .271/.321/.376 for his career, and .275/.330/.382 for his career. That's adequate. That keeps you in the lineup, if you're fast and play great defense at a fairly important position, but it just doesn't make a lineup better. It doesn't actively put runs on the board, even paired with that speed and aggressiveness. After the All-Star break, though, Hoerner was sensational. He batted .297/.377/.391 in the second half. A .377 OBP guy, in a league that averages a .325 mark, has ample value. Part of the improvement was thanks to a better batting average on balls in play, and as you can see, there was no sudden power jump. The BABIP was more of a modest increase than a spike, though, and it wasn't the result of mere luck. He had his approach better organized down the stretch. Here's a TruMedia heat map of Hoerner's exit velocity on batted balls, by pitch location, split between the two halves. Hoerner generated more hard contact in the first half, by going and getting the ball up and away from him. He was very good at shooting that pitch to right field. It had a low ceiling of isolated value, because Hoerner doesn't hit for the kind of power that leads to extra-base hits when stroking the ball the other way, even in his hot zones. In the second half, he focused more on crushing pitches in the middle of the zone, but that came at the price of some of those unique hits to the right side. Here's the telling thing, though. Keep that heat map for exit velo in mind, and consult this map of his swing rate by location for the two halves. Most hitters generate a lot of value by swinging at the ball down and in. That's a power hot spot for most guys. It's a place where you can do major damage, if you have a typical swing. Hoerner doesn't have one, though. As the first set of charts will attest, he's good at hitting the high pitch. He's not going to hit it hard enough to make it worth trying to lift it very much, but that's ok on pitches up in (or even above) the zone. His swing is geared for contact, not dingers. With his swing plane, he doesn't cover the pitch down and in all that well, but that's ok. He wised up in the second half and swung at that pitch less often. Instead, he raised his sights and hit more line drives. His Hard Hit rate and average launch angle were up in the second half, fueling his BABIP uptick. On top of a more complete and nuanced approach, Hoerner has one trait that makes me believe he can sustain what we saw late in 2023: no one hits the league's toughest fastballs better, or at least more often. Some 366 hitters saw at least 100 fastballs with a vertical approach angle (VAA) of -4.5 degrees or higher in 2023. A flat VAA is one of the top things on every pitching coach's wish list lately. It signals deceptiveness, and that hop that makes it so hard to square up a really good heater. On average, hitters whiffed 33.2 percent of the time against those flat-VAA fastballs. Hoerner, by contrast, whiffed on just 5.2 percent of his swings against them. That was not only the lowest miss rate in baseball, but a full 1.8 percentage points better than Travis Jankowski, second-best. Luis Arraez was third, at 7.8 percent. Overall, Hoerner takes what is a very blue heat map for most hitters and splashes it with red. Hoerner is a viciously tough out. He neutralizes the best, trendiest fastballs in baseball. He might never find more than 10-homer power, and he doesn't even have elite doubles power, but he's going to hit for average for at least the rest of his prime. Now that he's tightened his approach, he's also started walking more, and that, too, should continue. Pencil Hoerner into the leadoff spot for the next two or three years, and start your mental work on the Cubs lineup with No. 2. Are you buying Hoerner as a dangerous leadoff man? Does that temper your desperation for another addition to the Cubs lineup? Let's discuss. View full article