Matthew Trueblood

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

I love the splitter in general, so I'd lean this way, too. But I'm not sure it's a good fit for Wesneski's mode of movement--or at least, that the arsenal he'd be leaning into by choosing that tweak over a change of slider shape is the one that best suits him. It'll be interesting to see which way they go.

As the Cubs ponder ways to make external upgrades to the pitching staff, let's look at one important young pitcher already on the team who might have another level of performance within reach. Image courtesy of © Lon Horwedel-USA TODAY Sports Last week at Baseball Prospectus, the excellent Mario Delgado Genzor wrote an insightful piece about the art and science of pitching. Specifically, he broke down something he calls the Pronator's Triangle, and discussed how pitchers' wired-in physical movement preferences might inform the construction and effectiveness of their arsenals. It's a really good article. If you're a BP subscriber, make sure to check it out. As I read Mario's work, I thought instantly about Hayden Wesneski. Even in a season that saw Keegan Thompson's career go completely off the rails, no pitcher on the Cubs roster was more disappointing than Wesneski in 2023. He had looked like a potential mid-rotation starter in his brief audition in 2022, but that didn't translate to success in a full-fledged opportunity to join the rotation when the team broke camp last spring. Instead, he quickly had to be demoted back to Triple-A Iowa. He spent the rest of the season yo-yoing between the minors and the majors, often working as a long reliever or swingman, and only found even a semblance of a groove after moving into short relief in September. Going into the season, we knew there would be challenges ahead. As I wrote last spring, Wesneski had a significant hurdle to clear when he joined the organization. He had a deep pitch mix, but he also had a bifurcated release point. In other words, he released some of his pitches from one arm slot, and others from another. That kind of split makes it easier for hitters to eliminate certain offerings as possibilities right out of the hand, and it can have implications for both durability and command, to boot. Wesneski tried to reconcile his arm slots, but it didn't stick. He still throws his four-seamer and cutter from one angle, and his sinker, sweeping slider, and changeup from another. That's a problem--one that helps explain why lefties hit .298/.369/.617 against him in 2023. It essentially disqualifies him as a starter in the big leagues, and limits his utility even out of the bullpen. With a problem that can be so large-scale and multi-systemic, though, that leaves a huge, scary question: What's the solution? You almost have to choose between rebuilding his entire delivery and rebuilding his entire pitch mix, and if you do the former, you might end up having to do the latter, anyway. Enter Delgado Genzor, with his delightfully clear communication of a nuanced pitching subject. The Pronator's Triangle describes the relationship between the plot points when you chart a pitcher's horizontal and vertical movement against one another, if they belong to the class of pitchers who tend to pronate through release of the ball. ('Pronation,' for the uninitiated, is what your high-school pitching coach probably called, 'turning it over.' It's not always a true turn of the arm or hand to tilt the palm toward a same-handed batter's box, but it is, at least, staying through the inside of the ball at release.) When we talk about pronation, we're most often talking about sinkers and changeups, but some guys do have perfectly useful four-seamers despite a tendency toward pronation. As Delgado Genzor also wrote, guys with a preference for pronation (as opposed to supination, which is the motion around the outside of the ball we usually associate with cutters, sliders, and curveballs) can still have very effective breaking balls. These are almost always 'gyro' sliders, in the modern parlance. They don't have a lot of sweep; they turn like a cement truck and drop mostly due to gravity. Here's an example of a Pronator's Triangle, cribbed straight from the article. It's the movement profiles by pitch category for Luis Castillo, who was at the center of the piece overall. Notice that, technically speaking, Castillo's breaking stuff doesn't have much spin-induced movement. It only 'moves' due to gravity, as the gyro spin slows down its progress toward the plate and doesn't produce the same resistance to that force as backspin of any form would. Compare that chart to Wesneski's movement plot (by pitch type, not category, because I think we'll gain more clarity this way in his case.) It's pretty simple. Wesneski's sweeper stretches the Pronator's Triangle beyond its breaking point. That sweeper works best off his four-seamer, in terms of movement, but his four-seamer comes from a different slot, so the deception is gone. His changeup also works better off the four-seamer than off the sinker, because he doesn't generate enough run on the change to differentiate it from that sinker. Again, though, that would only be true if movement were the only relevant variable. Instead, we have to account for the fact that the four-seamer comes from a different release point than the change, too. That leaves us with a couple of divergent paths ahead for Wesneski. One option is to focus on the four-seamer and the cutter, and try to learn a splitter to go with it. That would be a three-pitch mix good enough to work against both righties and lefties, if he could command it sufficiently and stay healthy along the way. The alternative would be sticking with the sinker and the changeup, leaning more into pronation from that slot to engender better movement on the change, and trading in the sweeper for a gyro slider. Wesneski had such a pitch early in 2023. He utilized one earlier in his pro career, too, but the Yankees prefer to give pitchers like him a sweeper as they near the majors. When he was throwing the gyro slider in the spring, though, Wesneski released it from that four-seamer and cutter slot, not the slot from which he throws his pronator stuff. If either of these avenues promised surefire success, the Cubs and Wesneski already would have plunged down it at full speed. Instead, all the data tells us there are boulders in either path for the righthander. He might not be able to find three pitches he can command (and which have the right kind of movement profile to neutralize hitters) from either slot. He might never find the thing that unlocks what seems like significant upside. After watching a lot of Wesneski for the last year, though, I would feel much more confident trying the second path. That means scrapping the sweeper, and re-training Wesneski to throw the gyro slider from a lower slot. It means changing the way he attacks the strike zone, and probably where he sets up on the mound. It means making the four-seamer a tertiary weapon and some hard work in finding feel for a circle change. That's a lot of possible pitfalls, and it's not to mention the biggest lift involved: getting Wesneski to buy in on leaving behind the pitch that made him low-grade famous, and which has netted him the best grades since before he even debuted in MLB--that sweeper. For those reasons, the team might go the other way. Learning a splitter and raising the slot on the sweeper is probably easier than doing what I just listed. Either road is worth exploring. Motor preference theory (pronation vs. supination) is not a perfect or complete one. Still, laying it out this way helps us see that continuing to try everything Wesneski tried throughout 2023 is a non-starter. One way or another, he needs to make big, big changes. This is just a paradigm to help us see which ones are possible. View full article

Not all efficiency is desirable. Sometimes, if you want a sport to feel substantial and valuable, there needs to be human error—and lots of it. Image courtesy of © Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports Have you ever looked at the leaderboard for career double plays turned by outfielders? I have. I do it probably once a month, not because it changes that much, but because it hasn't changed since I first stumbled upon it, and it probably never will again. I circle back to it because there's something to learn about baseball, I think, from looking at it over and over. Above the actual lists on such pages, Baseball Reference puts photos of the 24 players atop the board. Here's that array for career double plays by outfielders (mostly, of course, plays on which the fielder caught the ball and threw out a runner either trying to advance or scrambling back to the base on which they started, but this also includes the fistful of unassisted double plays turned by, say, Tris Speaker). Yes, that's Speaker right at the top of the list, with 38 more than the guy in second place—who, yes, is Ty Cobb. The point, though, is all of that black-and-white. This leaderboard is one of my favorite ways to meditate on the greatness of Willie Mays, because you could add another half-dozen pictures to this list and he'd still be the only one whose photo stands out. The next picture that wouldn't look like 23 of these look would be that of Jesse Barfield, who's tied for 34th place on the list. After him, the next would be Richie Ashburn and Ken Griffey, Jr., tied for 53rd. Mays turned 60 double plays in his career. Barfield turned 49. Ashburn and Griffey turned 43. I return to it, too, though, because whenever I read about baseball games (and about the growth of the sport in general) in the first half of the 20th century, what jumps out to me is how much of what was celebrated then would be denigrated—what has, in fact, been run out of the game altogether—now. At the dawn of the 20th century, when people talked about what was great about baseball, they emphasized daring, physicality, and tenacity. Looking back, it's easy to dismiss that as puffery or propaganda, but when you come across a leaderboard like this, you realize that it wasn't. The game was really once played in a way that demanded and rewarded the widely articulated American virtues of the time. In an American era defined by Teddy Roosevelt and his worldview, baseball emerged as the national pastime by trying hard to engender the same attitudes and actions Roosevelt himself would—although, ironically, Roosevelt himself disliked the game. It wasn't just about unapologetic violence, either, like Cobb's sharpened spikes and beanballs that actually knocked out batters who looked too comfortable in the box. There was a culture of aggressiveness on the bases. In a game relatively light on home runs, teams tried to create runs by relentlessly pushing their luck, and running into outs on the bases was part of the bargain. Everyone was fine with that. I don't long for most of that. Even at the time, Cobb's misanthropy was a point of criticism. Nowadays, we cringe whenever a pitch plunks a batter above the belt, even though they wear helmets made of materials that were nonexistent when Frank Chance was out there letting his merely hatted head take the brunt of pitches in order to gain 90 feet of progress. Takeout slides and other forms of brinksmanship didn't build character; they just showed a disregard for other people. However, I do think something was lost when people stopped foolishly pushing the envelope on the bases. Underneath some of the mythmaking and morality that dominated conversations about the game 120 years ago laid something real. Baseball can be instructive, and it can be edifying. I don't think it manages that, though, when we treat it like a video game. This isn't a critique of modern analytics. As that photo array above reminds us, the change has come slowly over many decades, not all at once since the dawn of the internet age. In fact, here are the average number of outs made on the bases per team in select seasons, going as far back as reliable everyday data on this can take us. Season Outs on Bases per Team 1953 79 1963 74 1973 72 1983 69 1993 67 2003 57 2013 53 2023 45 No, what I'm talking about is a change that happened because home runs became more frequent, and because teams started to realize there might be more value in stringing together hits and avoiding outs than in pushing the limits. Remember when you would get the latest version of a video game and set about trying to beat it? You'd be systematic about it. You'd learn from each mistake. If turning left got you killed, the next time you tried the level, you'd turn right. Through trial and error, you felt your way to the ruthless efficiency that finally resulted in solving the whole game. Eventually, you'd just come down the court in Double Dribble and hoist that corner 3, because you'd found a glitch and now you had the game by the short hairs. Long before sabermetrics, baseball teams started learning from their mistakes and stopped running wild. It's a sound strategical choice. I'm just not convinced it's good for the game, as we want the game to be. Sport, which is either a sibling or a cousin of the arts, is most valuable when it imitates life. Video games don't imitate life at all. Life isn't a closed system, and it doesn't repeat itself. You can't just learn from one experience and apply the lesson (unthinkingly, without modification) to the next similar experience. There will be important, even crucial differences between the new experience and the one from which you're trying to learn. To imitate life and not a video game, then, baseball needs what no video game can ever have: unpredictable irrationality. Sometimes, we need players to make what have to be called bad decisions, out of an overweaning eagerness to press an advantage or out of desperation to make up for a mistake. We need guys who give in to a certain arrogant instinct and guys who simply lose focus. Those aren't good things to have happen, but because they happen all the time in real life, they should happen in baseball, too, so we can better feel connected to (and better learn from) the game. These things happen in baseball, even now, because the game is played by people, not computers. As teams try harder to program and educate their players with each passing year, though, we just aren't seeing enough of those instances. Baseball isn't without random error and the unpredictability and excitement that come with it, but it's gotten too close to being without it. We need more screw-ups. Obviously, though, it always feels miserable when it's your team making the mistakes. The Cubs ran into a bunch of bad outs on the bases in September, often out of those same couple of motives I named above. That made their collapse especially maddening. It wasn't good for Cubs fans. Still, maybe it was good for baseball, insofar as baseball is meant to be good for us. No one will voluntarily start making outs on the bases just to make the game more reflective of human nature. That's why rules and physical changes (especially the pitch timer and the bigger bases) we've seen implemented lately are extra valuable. More random errors happen in football and basketball than in baseball, because there's a ticking clock (two of them, really) in each sport to force action and limit preparation for that action. The pitch timer brings that to baseball. It limits the ability of everyone involved, including baserunners and fielders, to think all the way through each pitch before it happens and receive instructions from the dugout. There might still be more ways to encourage irrationality on the field, but for now, it's worth waiting to see how these rules continue to reintroduce some chaos into the contest. The changes didn't increase outs on the bases in 2023, but they did engender more aggressiveness, in addition to a faster pace. Hopefully, those trends continue in 2024. View full article

There's only one week left in the posting window for the second-best Japanese starting pitcher coming to MLB this winter, and the Cubs remain in the mix for him. Let's take a deeper dive. Image courtesy of © Rhona Wise-USA TODAY Sports While he won't sign for anywhere near as much money as the Dodgers recently gave Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga is an exciting talent in his own right. No pitcher who appeared in last year's World Baseball Classic showed better raw stuff than Imanaga. His fastball was cranked up into the mid-90s, and spinning at the top of the zone with movement that no other hurler on Earth can match. He missed bats with his splitter, slider, and curveball. That international success was an affirmation of the impressive numbers he put up in NPB competition for the few years before that, and he further proved his excellence by having his best campaign to date in NPB last season. That said, the stuff Imanaga showed in shorter bursts and with the adrenaline of a postseason atmosphere in the WBC shouldn't be expected to translate perfectly to MLB. His average fastball velocity last year in NPB was more like 92 miles per hour than 94, where he was sitting in the WBC. That difference matters, obviously. So does the fact that, given Imanaga's stuff profile, his greatest vulnerability is to the home run. If that was true in NPB, it will certainly be so in MLB, and that could limit his upside. Still, we're talking about special stuff. Imanaga led NPB in strikeout rate in 2023, and that was with a more fastball-forward mix than we should expect to see him use in MLB. Even without average-plus velocity, he's going to have success and miss bats with his fastball, because the thing takes off like a jet at the top of the zone. Last year, 360 pitchers threw at least 200 four-seamers in MLB. Only one (Baltimore closer Felix Bautista) got more rising action on his fastball than did Imanaga at the WBC. We shouldn't expect Imanaga to sustain quite that much carry over a full MLB season, but he'd certainly land somewhere in the top five percent of all hurlers in this regard. The top 25 players on the aforementioned list of 360 got whiffs on an average of 23.7 percent of opponents' swings against the fastball. That's solidly north of 21.3 percent, the median mark for the league. In other words, carry on the fastball means whiffs, and Imanaga has carry, so he will get whiffs. The question will be whether he can accustom himself to pitching more carefully, to account for the fact that MLB hitters have more power and can punish even slight mistakes more thunderously than NPB hitters typically do. That means going to the fastball less often in traditional fastball counts, and showing sufficient command of his four or five other pitches to throw them for strikes on the edges of the zone. For Cubs fans who long for more swing-and-miss out of the starting rotation, Imanaga holds obvious appeal. He's likely to get a nine-figure deal, but he could be well worth that. He's going to rack up strikeouts, and he was tremendous at limiting walks in NPB. He'll have to give up a little of that zone-pounding mentality in order to adapt to MLB, but that might only let him strike out hitters more effectively. If he's a high-strikeout, low-walk, low-BABIP, high-home run rate guy, that's the sketch of an effective pitcher. It could take a broad range of specific forms, with the value he provides varying widely. A handful of similar hurlers to consider (from least to most exciting) include Drew Smyly, Kenta Maeda, Michael Pineda, Masahiro Tanaka, and Kevin Gausman. There's legitimate frontline starting upside, and if he can stay healthy on an MLB rotation schedule, the floor is relatively high. Imanaga has never made more than 25 starts or thrown more than 170 innings in a single season. In one reading, that's discouraging, because he certainly doesn't profile as a workhorse, the way a team might prefer a pitcher to if they're going to commit more than $20 million per year for five years. Given his size (5-foot-10, 176 pounds), that wouldn't be a fair expectation, anyway. In another reading, though, that means that the odometer on his arm is much less daunting than those of some other pitchers just entering their 30s. He might hold up unexpectedly well, just because he hasn't been asked to shoulder heavy workloads during his 20s. How much would you pay for Imanaga? Is he atop your list of remaining free-agent targets for the Cubs? View full article

Recently, we ventured deep into the wilderness of imagination, to try to understand why waiting into January doesn't dent the asking price of Scott Boras's top free agents. There is a huge-name free agent hurler out there, though, whom Boras doesn't represent. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports It's not as though Josh Hader is represented by some hayseed lawyer out of the same rural slice of southern Maryland from which he himself hails. He's signed up with CAA Sports, the second- or third-largest agency for MLB players. It's just that, be it CAA or Wasserman or Octagon or anyone else, every agency other than the Boras Corporation loses some leverage as the calendar flips to January. It's not weird that that happens to everyone. It's only weird that Boras manages to be (almost) immune to that effect. When Hader hit the market in November, all the buzz was about his desire to top the record contract to which the Mets signed Edwin Diaz last winter. Díaz got the most money ever guaranteed to a relief pitcher, when he inked a five-year, $102-million deal in Nov. 2022. Here's the thing, though: Díaz was never a realistic goal at which to aim. Hader's platform season in 2023 wasn't as good as Díaz's 2022 was. Díaz is a mere two and a half weeks older than Hader, which means he was a full year younger when he signed his deal. Most importantly, though, Díaz was signing a deal at the Buy It Now price. Steve Cohen, the Mets' wildly aggressive and mega-rich owner, wanted to keep his beloved closer and the trumpets that became such a sensation alongside him at Citi Field in 2022, and he didn't care about shelling out several million more dollars than other teams would have given Díaz. Once Hader actually hit free agency (rather than being brought back by an overeager incumbent, which was never on the table in his case), $100 million was essentially off the table. Two months have passed since then, and while this winter's market for player talent has moved much slower than other recent ones, that much time depresses the asking price and shifts leverage away from a player and toward whatever teams have interest in him. At this point, I don't think it's at all certain that Hader will get a five-year deal. If he does, it'll come in at the same $16-million annual average value for which Kenley Jansen has been working for almost a decade. If he wants to eclipse that number and get closer to $20 million in AAV, he'll have to settle for a four-year term. We're starting to get into the realm, then, at which Jed Hoyer's ears perk up. Hoyer might not want to spend massive money on a reliever, but he's opportunistic when he senses good value. Much could depend on Craig Counsell, here. If Counsell gives the green light on Hader's makeup and clubhouse presence (which, by the end of his time in Milwaukee, were widely praised), then a four- or five-year deal worth a total of $80 million probably makes sense. A Cubs bullpen with Hader would be such a different animal than the current hodgepodge that it's hard to express it in simple terms. He's a very traditional closer who expects to be used pretty lightly, and that should and will restrict his value a bit. It's why he's not going to get Díaz money. On the other hand, slotting him into a low-maintenance, high-octane role shutting down games with ruthless efficiency in the ninth inning would free Counsell up to make more creative, versatile use of all the other arms already in the mix for Chicago. Adbert Alzolay is a good-not-great relief ace. As the second-best arm in a bullpen with an elite closer, he goes from fun to downright sterling. Stack Mark Leiter, Jr. and Julian Merryweather in with Alzolay, and you've got an impressive corps of setup men, plus the ability to rest them more often. As is true of signing an ace starter, bringing in an ace reliever pushes everyone else on the depth chart down one space, thereby making them all a bit more valuable. Hader comes with plenty of red flags. He has already gone through one or two miniature crises, as almost every great closer does during their careers, and while it's encouraging that he seems to have adjusted and moved past them, those rough patches leave us with vivid insight into his particular mortality as a great reliever. Despite careful usage and the lightest total innings load for which any closer can reasonably hope, Hader's fastball velocity dipped in 2023, and his slider velocity keeps climbing. Diminished velocity separation makes it harder to miss bats with either offering, especially when the arsenal is relatively limited. Hader has seen his release point creep upward, such that he's not creating quite as extreme a horizontal or vertical angle for hitters as he used to, and while doing that has maintained a steady vertical movement differential between his two crucial offerings, it's come at the cost of some horizontal movement gap. Changes like these can seem trivial for a starter with a deeper arsenal, or for any pitcher in his mid-20s. For a two-pitch reliever who turns 30 in April, they beget some genuine concern. That said, the man struck out 36.8 percent of opposing batters in 2023, and that was his worst mark since he was a rookie. It's a video-game number. He's become more walk-prone as he's adapted and (inevitably, because every reliever does almost as soon as they drive off the lot of their Triple-A apartment building) declined, but he's also become an adroit avoider of home runs. His stuff overpowers hitters and induces extremely weak contact. During his tenure in Atlanta, Hader only gave up home runs to 1.3 percent of opposing batters. That's less than half the league's rate. If the Cubs can get Hader for what I think they can now get Hader for, they ought to be interested. The fact that he rejected a qualifying offer and will cost whichever team signs him at least one draft pick does make him slightly less appealing, but then again, maybe you add that to the list of reasons why his leverage is evaporating. If he could be had for $75 million, so much the better. The Cubs would still need to do much more to finish a successful offseason, but as Hader waits, his value sinks. Hoyer will, eventually, smell blood in the water. What do you make of Hader's unique career and stalled free agency? At what price would he appeal to you? Let us know. View full article

In a minor move they hope will bolster their organizational bullpen depth, the Cubs have signed an erstwhile Red Sox reliever who spent time in both the Rays and Yankees organizations in 2023, before going to Japan to play for the Hanshin Tigers. Image courtesy of © David Richard-USA TODAY Sports It won't have anyone crossing Josh Hader or Robert Stephenson off their wish lists, and it's not even likely to be a big-league deal, but the Cubs have inked right-handed reliever Colten Brewer for 2024. Breaking the news on New Year's Eve: Brewer himself. In parts of five big-league seasons, Brewer has fewer than 100 innings pitched, and he spend the second half of last season overseas. Still, it's an interesting pickup, and a good fit for the Cubs' pitching predilections. Brewer throws a hard cutter, very much his primary fastball, rather than acting as a type of breaking ball. With that pitch sitting in the mid-90s and a curveball that can be nasty when he has command of it, he's not only broadly appealing, but exactly the kind of pitcher the Cubs like to target. If they could sign nothing but guys with unusual cut on their fastballs and a breaking pitch that paired well with it vertically, they would do so. Still, it's tempting to dismiss this move as mere filler. Brewer is over 30, has only rarely filled a regular role in a big-league bullpen, and is almost certainly signing a non-guaranteed, minor-league deal with an invite to big-league spring training. That doesn't move the needle, even by the low standards of relief pitcher signings. There's a little more meat on the bone than you might think, though. As you'd expect of a guy whose repertoire is mostly cutter-curveball, Brewer has historically had reverse platoon splits, across all levels of professional baseball. Righties had a higher OPS against him every year from 2018 through 2022, and it was often by a wide margin. When he's gotten hit hard or had major control problems, the trouble has mostly come against fellow righties. In 2023, though, right-handed batters were considerably worse than left-handed ones against Brewer. This data is only for the very limited time he got Stateside, and the samples are minute, but in 61 plate appearances, righties struck out 21 times, drew just four walks, and had an anemic .514 OPS against him. That could be random noice, but the strikeout rate suggests that there's something real there, and pitch data fills in the gaps. This season, Brewer finally found a slider with more lateral tilt and greater velocity separation from his cutter. Here's the year-by-year chart of his velocity by pitch type. He also got more horizontal movement and more depth on the pitch, relative to that cutter that stands in for a more typical pitcher's four-seam fastball or sinker. You can call it a sweeper, or not, but it was a different and more effective pitch than the previous sliders he'd tried. Brewer had spent spring training with the Rays, but the Yankees scooped him up just after Opening Day, and they excel at helping pitchers engineer just this type of slider transformation. Brewer got so comfortable with his newly redesigned slider that it took over for his curve as the primary breaking ball in his attack. There's still little chance that Brewer will emerge as more than a middle reliever, and given the Cubs' current bullpen options, he's no lock to so much as take the mound for the team in 2024. Still, considering the terrific success he had in Japan and the material changes he made this season, it's a nice little pickup. Presumably, the Cubs like the upside in his new breaking ball, and we know how nicely what he was already doing pairs with the Cubs' organizationl approach. What do you think of Brewer? Is there anything here? Would you rather have him or, say, Jose Cuas at the bottom of the bullpen depth chart in 2024? Speak your piece below. View full article

And I think Boras is thinking exactly the opposite: that a very long-term deal is in order. So, I'm with you. The Darvish deal, especially. That was insane. At least Machado is still in his prime, and had the opt-out to force their hand a bit. Still trying to figure out what he was thinking with Darvish.

This is right about where I'd land, too. I don't share Jed's automatic aversion to long deals, and to me, the batted-ball data has been overblown. But what I DO think is important and worrisome is that Bellinger just isn't a center fielder anymore. He was below-average out there last year, for me. He could still be solid in a corner, but the Cubs don't need him there. I think he's pretty much a first baseman, and for a first baseman, the offense isn't exceptional, even if you believe (as I generally do) that his real production last year is sustainable and that Statcast isn't destiny. I would just let him go, because I absolutely believe Boras gets a deal for him that outstrips what the Cubs would be willing to sufficiently support. But we'll see.