Are you looking for Kyle Crick? Did you check atop the Statcast leaderboards? Photo by AP.

Baseball statistics may have crawled out of the Primordial Soup over 100 years ago, but they have evolved more over the last five years than the decades before it. It’s hard to believe that earlier this decade the majority of baseball journalists- the people paid to watch, report and comment on the game- said Miguel Cabrera had a better year than Mike Trout because he had more, gasp, RBI. I’m not in the “RBI is worthless” crowd, but come on. Trout was clearly the better player. And then Cabrera was voted MVP again the next year for the same reasons. That was this decade. We’ve come a long way.

Thank Baseball Savant and Statcast for being the catalyst. Launch angles, xwOBAs and sprint speeds have entered the vernacular. Perhaps no two of their metrics have made as big an impact as exit velocity and spin rate. We can now know how hard the ball leaves the bat down to the tenth of an MPH and if the curveball was rotating at 2,546 RPM or 2,547. Statcast has been a godsend for the nerds and the curious.

But like every godsend, we are programmed to try to destroy it. Break the internet? Nah, Kyle Crick is breaking Statcast.

Crick’s journey to the Pirates’ bullpen was a turbulent one. Five years ago, he was a unanimous top 50 prospect in the game, but around that time he started to develop control problems at AA. That forced him out of the starter’s role and into the bullpen. Four years later, he was dealt to Pittsburgh as the centerpiece of the Andrew McCutchen trade. It wasn’t Crick’s fault, but there are better ways to become a major leaguer than effectively “replacing” the most popular Pirate in decades.

If there is one way to take off some of the heat, it’s doing your job very well. Crick’s 2.51 ERA and 3.02 FIP are practically identical to his first year in Pittsburgh. His ERA should probably be even lower. He’s only been scored on in one outing so far, a four run disaster where he was blooped and bled to death. He got a lot of soft contact, but it was hit in the exact wrong spots.

Soft contact has been a common theme for Crick this year. He’s allowed 32 batted balls so far, and only two of them have been hit 100+ MPH. Conversely, one third of them left the bat at 70 MPH or slower. Crick’s K/9 rate may be down, but hitters aren’t doing any better at squaring him up.

This year, he has an average exit velocity allowed of 76.5 MPH. Of pitchers with a sample size of at least 25 batted balls, that’s the lowest in Statcast history.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

Since 2015, the average exit velocity across baseball is 87.4 MPH. This year, it’s a tick higher at 88.2 MPH, making Crick’s accomplishments even more impressive.

The majority of that soft contact has come from his slider. Out of the 10 balls in play against his breaking ball, only one left the bat at over 80 MPH. On average, it’s yielding a 70.6 MPH exit velocity. Again, that’s the lowest in the Statcast era (min. 10 results).

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

Oh, hi, Dovydas. Fancy seeing you here. I guess that’s a sign for me to reiterate there’s some potential small sample size wonkiness in play. But we have a large enough sample size to take a look at spin rates, and nobody gets more spin on a slider than Crick.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

In Statcast history, the only pitcher with a higher average slider spin rate than 2019 Kyle Crick is…2018 Kyle Crick. (2017 Crick is also lurking around in 8th place, just for good measure.). He talked to David Laurila of FanGraphs about how he throws the pitch last month:

“It’s kind of like a slurve. I have a curveball grip, and I throw it like a slider. About three years ago is when I started throwing more of a frisbee again. I turned it from a normal curveball, with a normal downward angle, to a pitch that goes side-to-side. Instead of trying to get on top of the ball, per se, I started to just throw it from my normal arm slot, which is three-quarters.”

Let’s watch what Crick was saying in action. Here’s a fastball:

And here’s a slider.

Same arm slot. Same delivery. Crick’s slider is deadly in part due to him not tipping his hand that it’s coming. It gets whiffs and unbelievably soft contact. It’s a pitch that just might break Statcast, or at least its records.

The post Kyle Crick Is Breaking Statcast appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

Jordan Lyles is already one of the Pirates’ greatest reclamation stories. Can he keep it up? Photo by AP.

In a winter that was marred with inactivity, GM Neal Huntington perhaps drew the most heat for a move he did make: signing right-hander Jordan Lyles. To make room in the rotation for a pitcher with -3.3 career bWAR, the Pirates had to dump unremarkable, but overall perfectly satisfactory fifth starter Ivan Nova. Not exactly a good look. It looked worse as the offseason drudged on and other, seemingly better starting pitching candidates fell into the Pirates’ price range. It looked even worse when Lyles was getting pounded this spring. Somehow, someway, it looked even worse when he started the year on the injured list.

Going into the season, this seemed like the makings of one of Huntington’s biggest goofs as Pirates GM. The only way this team could succeed is with its starting pitching, and they were going to trot out a landmine every fifth day. Instead, this move just may be one of his greatest finds.

Lyles has arguably been the Pirates best starter this season, posting an eye-opening 2.09 ERA and 1.5 pitching bWAR in his first seven starts. The only pitchers from last year’s free agent class with more WAR than him so far are Patrick Corbin (2.0) and Hyun-jin Ryu (1.7).

Unlike Corbin and Ryu, Lyles has never had a year like this before. For comparison’s sake, let’s look at his season by season ERA+. Considering he has pitched in San Diego and Colorado, and through the pitcher-dominated turn of the millennium to the home run explosion now, this is the best way scale his yearly performances.

Courtesy of Baseball-Reference. Click to enlarge.

Like OPS+and wRC+, a 100 ERA+ is considered league average. Lyles flirted with that figure last year and in 2014, but he never cracked it before. Throughout most of his career, he’s been downright bad. This year, he’s in a completely differently stratosphere. He’s among the elite, ranking eighth in baseball in ERA+ among pitchers with at least 30 IP entering Monday.

And he’s doing it with his curveball. Lyles has used his curve 30.9% of the time so far in 2019. Since pitch tracking became available in 2018, the only other Pirate starters to use a curveball for a higher percentage of their pitches were Phil Irwin in 2013 (award yourself 10 internet points if you remember him) and Wandy Rodriguez. It’s a good pitch, which is why it sits near the top of the league leaderboards in whiffs.

This isn’t anything new for the Pirates. They have a good reputation for being a home to rebuild broken pitchers. Plenty of them, like Lyles, find success by throwing their “best” pitch far more often than ever before. With the exception of his stint in Milwaukee’s bullpen last year, Lyles is relying on his curve now more than ever.

Lyles’ curveball usage by month. Courtesy of Brooks Baseball. Click to enlarge.

It’s part of the reason why Lyles is already one of Huntington’s and Ray Searage’s greatest reclamation projects. Among pitchers who were predominantly starters for the Pirates, here are the largest WAR improvements compared to the year before they came to Pittsburgh in the Huntington era.

* Denotes midseason acquisition and compares WAR that season before the trade and after. Courtesy of Baseball-Reference. Click to enlarge.

Lyles has already had the 10th best turnaround for a Pirates starter, and we’re in the middle of May. Granted, some of these success stories are a bit exaggerated. Kevin Correia went from one of the worst WARs in baseball to replacement level. That’s still an improvement, but should you really pat yourself on the back for finding a quad-A player?

So here’s another wrinkle in that chart. What was their WAR the year of their turnaround?

Courtesy of Baseball-Reference. Click to enlarge.

Now Lyles’ turnaround seems even more impressive. If he pitches near replacement the rest of the year, he’s still an average starter. Not too shabby for the number five guy. If he continues to succeed, it stands to reason he could have the best season of any Pirate reclamation. Only five of these pitchers were true impact players. Lyles is well on his way to making it six.

But how likely is he to continue to succeed? His FIP is still an impressive 3.47, but there’s a noticeable gap between that and his ERA. He’s also sporting a 7.1% fly ball to home run ratio. That could creep up during the warmer days of summer when the ball travels better.  And then there’s his left on base percentage: 84.7%.

Some would call that strand rate unsustainable, but Lyles has actually pitched better with runners on base so far. Consider his splits based on situation:

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

Lyles is getting his best results out of the stretch, and it doesn’t seem like a fluke. He’s also getting softer contact and worse launch when there are runners on base.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

That time as a reliever must have done him good. The further he’s pushed into the corner, the better he pitches. So yes, the strand rate is high, but if he keeps pitching like this when he’s in those situations, it could stay high.

Lyles was brought in to be the number five but has pitched like an ace to this point. With the Pirates’ top starter Jameson Taillon on the 60-day IL, he’s going to need to keep pitching at a high level. And that just might be plausible.

The post Jordan Lyles Is Already One Of The Pirates’ Best Reclamation Successes appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

This Pirates roster is full of glass bones and paper skin.

This winter wasn’t a good offseason for the Pirates. They shed salary, didn’t address several key needs on the team, and apparently angered an unknown, vengeful deity that is smiting the roster until it is appeased again.

The names on the injury list are starting to pile up for the Bucs. They came into the year knowing Gregory Polanco was going to miss some time, but they did not foresee his replacement Lonnie Chisenhall being sidelined for this long. Corey Dickerson has been on the IL since early April, and Starling Marte was down for a bit as well. Cole Tucker is one of the most exciting young players in the system, but he was promoted far earlier than expected because Erik Gonzalez and Kevin Newman went on workmen’s comp. Jameson Taillon and Chris Archer are on the IL, which would seem like the perfect time to give 2018 minor league pitcher of the year J.T. Brubaker his shot in the majors. There’s just one problem- he’s hurt too.

And that’s just the short version. The long version is the Pirates have sent 17 different major league players to the injury list this season. According to Spotrac, that is the most in the majors. In terms of actual time lost, they have been sidelined 379 days — second only the Yankees. With nine players currently on the IL, that number will only go up.

In case you have lost track, this is what the injury list has looked like for the Bucs thus far.

Through May 6. *denotes still on IL. Courtesy of Spotrac.

You can build a pretty solid lineup out of those players. Actually, you can almost build the preseason projected lineup out of those players. And it’s not just replacement level fodder being put on the IL. These are players of consequence who make an impact when they are on the field. Losing Marte for 10 days is going to mean more to this team than missing 10 weeks of Jacob Stallings.

This rush of injuries is quite out of the norm for the Pirates. They were one of the healthier teams from 2002-2014, per the research of Jeff Zimmerman. There were some truly terrible teams in that stretch, but at least they were terrible and healthy.

And they continued to be better than most at keeping players on the field throughout the later half of the decade. Some years were worse than others, but the overall average was kind to the Pirates. That was, of course, until now.

Spotrac has kept track on the number of days lost to the DL/IL per team since 2015. Not surprisingly, this year’s team is on pace to be the worst by far.

Courtesy of Sportrac. Click to enlarge.

The 2019 Pirates have already had more days lost to injury than the 2017 club. Chad Kuhl and Edgar Santana — who will not pitch in 2019 since they are recovering from Tommy John surgery — are going to add almost 300 more days to that total by themselves, which will put the Pirates over the 2016 final figure as well.

Let’s shift over to the number of days to the number of players lost. MLB’s team transaction pages date back to 2001. After sorting through the archives of any mention of a player being placed on the DL/IL from 2001-2014 and using Spotrac’s data for 2015 and beyond, it’s safe to say the injury bug is going to impact more Pirate players than before in the 21st century.

Courtesy of MLB.com transaction page and Spotrac. Click to enlarge.

This is just the fifth time since 2001 that 17 Pirates have been placed on the injury list. The injury bug has never bitten more than 18. That record could be broken this month. It almost certainly will be this season.

This may be a downer of a post, but there really isn’t much of a silver lining here. I suppose one could argue it could technically be worse. Taillon has suffered through a worse fate with his elbow before, and Polanco came back sooner than expected. Still, that isn’t much of a silver lining.

You can blame the training staff, but are they really at fault when players gets hit by a pitch and breaks a bone? Or when two players ran into each other at top speed? How about when a middle infielder cut his thumb helping the coaching staff assemble a pitching machine? Or if a player has a virus and can’t play during spring training? There is a certain level of randomness to this. It’s not really anybody’s fault.

Except for the vengeful deity, of course.

The post The Pirates’ Uncharacteristically Extensive Injury List appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

Dead Pirate bat. Do not eat.

The Pirates’ offense is bad. (I feel like I’ve already written that once this week). There are a few bright spots here and there, including Josh Bell, Melky Cabrera and the recently promoted Bryan Reynolds, but most have been disappointments.

Starling Marte has a very uncharacteristic 73 wRC+. Adam Frazier isn’t faring much better, currently sitting at a .648 OPS. Francisco Cervelli might miss some time after being plunked in Texas, but he really has not been helping the team at the dish this season. Jung Ho Kang has the slashline of a player who had been out of the game for two years.

If you look at their results, there isn’t much cause for optimism. Is there any hope in the world of expected stats?

Find X

With the advent of Statcast, we now know not only how well a player is performing, but can also take an educated guess at how they “should” be doing. Statcast can take individualized exit velocities and launch angles and assign each batted ball event a hit probability. By accumulating those hit probabilities and factoring in how often a player walks, strikes out or gets hit by a pitch, they can give an expected batting average (xBA), expected slugging percentage (xSLG) and an expected wOBA (xwOBA). Of course, expected stats do not guarantee regression or better luck in the future. It’s just an estimate based on the data that is already at hand.

The mere thought of “expected stats” may cause an eye roll, but they do warrant existing. For an example, let’s say there are two players in the same game. Player A goes 2-4 with a couple of weakly hit singles, and Player B goes 0-4, but flies out to the warning track a couple of times and rips a hard hit ground out. Player A had the better game, but you might feel more confident with Player B the next day because he’s tagging the ball. He’s “due.” Whether you put more stock in the quality of contact or whether or not the hits fell in, both sides of the argument have merit.

Since we’re nearing the end of “small sample size” season, let’s take a look at those expected stats. I’ll be examining the 14 Pirates who have been to bat at least 30 times this season and the team as a whole. If the difference between the actual and expected results is in red, that means the player is underperforming compared to his xStats. If it’s green, he’s doing better than Statcast is expecting.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

The Good News!

Going by the xStats, Marte and Frazier are still hitting the ball well. Marte finished 2018 with a .337 wOBA and .342 xwOBA. His batted balls just haven’t fallen in for hits, as evidenced by his .230 BABIP clip. Frazier had a .315 xWOBA in 2018, and a .330 xwOBA in the second half. He’s making better quality of contact now than he did then. Going off of Baseball Savant’s leaderboards, Marte has the ninth worst difference in baseball between actual and expected wOBA, and Frazier isn’t too far behind at 18th.

Both players have battled through some injuries already in 2019. If they are healthy now and finally get the hits that cold, heartless math says they should be getting, then the offense should get a jolt from these key players. If you came to this post in search of hope, there it is. But if you came here to reaffirm your pessimism…

The Bad News…

If you were looking for some straws to grasp at for Cervelli or Kang, they aren’t here. Cervelli hit like his batted ball profile projected. Before he got hit, we saw him change his stance, going with a hybrid of his original look and his 2018 retool.

Quick video look! Savant seems to have ditched all videos before 2018 from the archives, so we have to go to Youtube for his original swing.

Here it is last season:

And in Texas this week:

That’s a different swing with barely any leg kick. Let’s see if it makes a difference.

Kang is getting the bases the algorithm says he should. So is Pablo Reyes. If you believe in the power of regression, Cabrera is walking on eggshells. As a whole, the Pirates seem to be under producing a bit, but even if they were meeting their expected stats, they would still be one of the worst offenses in baseball.

Before I wrap this article up, here’s a quick, micro-story about two rookie outfielders.

Hey, Rook

Bryan Reynolds has been the talk of the town lately. That tends to happen when you start your career with a nine game hitting streak with a bunch of doubles scattered in there. Jason Martin also had a couple big hits, but had subpar results in his first taste of the majors. It wasn’t too surprising when he was the first of the two to be optioned back to AAA.

The interesting angle is Martin actually made better quality contact out of the two. Not by much, and that’s not a knock on Reynolds. His expected stats say he’s fairly average at the moment. That’s not too shabby for a kid getting his first taste of the majors. Martin struck out more (which is factored in), but he hit the ball harder and with better launch. The separation between the two may not be as drastic as their early slash lines would indicate.

There. I made it through the whole post without making a joke about how this is just Pirates looking for x.

The post How Are Pirate Hitters Performing Compared To Their Expected Stats? appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

Pictured: the entire 2019 Pirates offense. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

The Pirates’ offense is bad. It didn’t look so hot coming into the year, and losing Starling Marte and Corey Dickerson to the injury list hasn’t helped. Francisco Cervelli and Jung Ho Kang’s struggles have been a hamper as well. The lineup been one disappointment after the other.

That is except for one Joshua Evan Bell. The Pirates’ first baseman has been their only consistently good hitter this April. In fact, this past month has been the best of his career.

Bell has already been worth 0.6 fWAR this year. That’s the same total he had in his entire rookie season. At this pace, he’ll set a new career high for WAR by mid-May. The defense is still suspect at best and he isn’t doing too well when running the bases, but for the first time in his career, he’s been more than just a “good” hitter. He’s been great.

Now there is one game left to go before we close the book on April, and knowing my luck, Bell will strike out five times tonight. Even if that happens, I’ll stand by the headline. And I’ve got charts to prove it!

We’ll start with a simple enough chart: OPS by month.

Through Apr. 29. Courtesy of FanGraphs. Click to enlarge.

Now let’s add some context to that OPS. His wRC+ by month:

Through Apr. 29. Courtesy of FanGraphs. Click to enlarge.

One of the persistent problems throughout Bell’s career has been getting the ball in the air. Chart three is all about ground ball percentage. This time, the lower, the better.

Through Apr. 29. Courtesy of FanGraphs. Click to enlarge.

Ok, time for a chart breather (there’s one more coming). Going off the first three graphics, the best four months of Bell’s career were August of 2017, July and September of last year and this April. All four are on basically even footing with one another. Bell got the ball in the air and got results. But how hard was he hitting the ball?

Time for the fourth chart, and it’s the one that separates him from any other month in his career. Here is his average exit velocity per month.

Through Apr. 29. Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

Bell is averaging an exit velocity of 94.1 MPH this season, which is in the top 5% in baseball. The only other time he has come close to hitting the ball this consistently hard was…last September. He may have had months with similar or even slightly better results than what he’s done in April, but he’s never hit it this hard before. His stats aren’t being artificially inflated by bloops and seeing eye singles. He’s earning his bases.

So what is he doing differently? He hasn’t cut down on swings out of the zone, and he’s whiffing a bit more, actually. There is still some noticeable tinkering in play with his swing, too. Take for consideration this crisp base hit he roped in Cincinnati during the opening series…

…and compare it to this home run he hit last week.

They are two very different swings. I don’t want to argue the pros and cons of an open or closed stance or big leg kick or a short one. The point is this has been a habit throughout his career, and the coaching staff went as far as to sit him a couple days to try to get him to stop doing it last September. If he did stop then, he’s back at it now.

So has anything changed? Is Bell just riding the manic highs of a small sample size and will come back down to earth when his 23.1% home run-to-fly ball ratio regresses? Perhaps, but there is one other encouraging sign worth noting- he’s finally hitting the breaking ball.

Bell hit .196 with a .287 wOBA against breaking pitches last year. Going by his xwOBA- which is weighed based on exit velocity and launch angle- he might have been lucky to get even that, finishing with a .261 xwOBA. This season, he’s hitting .292 with a .387 wOBA on sliders and curves. Again, there haven’t been a lot of cheapies there either. His .403 xwOBA on said pitches is in the top 10% in baseball.

I have previously cited how he told reporters this PiratesFest that he is going to try to drive the ball to opposite center field again. Speaking as the resident “pull your fly balls” table banger, this confused me. Who looks at the 410 left-center notch and thinks “yeah, I’ll hit it there.” But last year, of the 71 batted balls Bell hit against breaking pitches, 39 of them were pulled. Pulling the ball didn’t do him any good. Meanwhile, in 2019, those batted balls are going to opposite-center field.

Through Apr. 29. Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

It looks like he’s staying back on the ball more. He’s hitting these pitches harder and they’re falling in for hits. If the change in mentality is working, then he should keep running with it.

Bell is currently alone in the lineup. Once he gets a little bit of protection when Dickerson and Marte come off the IL and Cervelli and Gregory Polanco (hopefully) return the form, he might finally have some runners to drive home. If April is a signal of things to come, then this might finally be his breakout campaign.

The post Josh Bell Just Had The Best Month Of His Career appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

Jamo’s curveball is one of the best in the bigs. Why is he cutting back on it?

I began last week’s post by examining how the Pirates rotation has moved away from their bread and butter fastballs for sliders in the early parts of the season. Chris Archer’s slider-heavy approach is a big reason why, and Joe Musgrove is shifting the pendulum by opting to throw the slider more often than his cutter. Then there is Jameson Taillon.

We can joke that Taillon is the number five starter when compared to the torrid starts of his rotation brethren, but he’s still doing well. His 3.12 ERA and 3.36 FIP are right in line with his 2018 totals, and he really only has had two bad innings. The first was being kept in a little too long in Cincinnati on opening day. The other was when the defense completely crapped out on him in Chicago.

He’s certainly in a better place than he was one year ago. It was around this time in 2018 when he began to slump, leading to him adding a slider to his repertoire. Taillon spoke about that experience with FanGraphs’ David Laurila recently, saying:

“I had two bad starts last year, and at that point I felt like I was a two-pitch pitcher. I was fastball-curveball. I was pretty much asking my curveball to be a strike pitch, a swing-and-miss pitch, an out pitch, a weak-contact pitch. It had to take on a lot of different traits. I figured slider-cutter — some version of that — would be the play. So I started throwing it in catch, and then in a bullpen or two. After about a week, I broke it out in a game.”

That slider turned Taillon’s season around. Batters were not offering at his curveball because they knew he would have to come in with a heater eventually. Once he added the slider, his pitch selection radically changed.

Pre-May 27. Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

Starting May 27. Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

The slider became Taillon’s new number two. He did throw his curveball a little less after he started the new pitch, but he really de-emphasized his fastball and changeup. He was still essentially a three pitch pitcher, but two of those pitches were now breaking balls.

In the early parts of this season, he is using the slider even more. If you divide his four-seamers and two-seamers into two separate entities, then his slider is the most used pitch so far. The difference this time his curveball is starting to go M.I.A.

Compare his curveball and slider usage per game since May 27.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

Taillon was very excited with his new pitch in his first couple starts, so he was very slider-heavy. Starting around June 7, it averaged out that he used his curveball roughly 20% of the time and his slider 25%. There are obviously some peaks and valleys, but he hovered around there for most starts. This year, it’s about one-third sliders and 15% curves. The divide between the two pitches has never been this drastic for this long a stretch of starts. It’s a very different dynamic.

He also has a very different approach with two strikes. From May 27 on, he threw his curveball just as often as his slider when he had two strikes.

Starting May 27. Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

And the curve was the better pitch for getting strike three.

Starting May 27. Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Full season pitch selection on strikeouts can be found here.

This year, he’s struck out just one batter on the curve. The slider isn’t just a pitch he throws when behind in the count or to get a ground ball, like he told Laurila. It’s become his kill pitch of choice. This is his two strike pitch breakdown this year:

Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

The curveball usage has dropped in half with two strikes, even though it was one of his best pitches in that scenario last year. Meanwhile, Taillon’s strikeout rate has dropped from 22.8% to 18.4%, and his two strike whiff/called strike rate when he has two strikes has gone from 20.7% to 17.2%. He’s still getting to two strike counts, but he is not finishing batters off as often with his slider heavy approach.

Now this is not to say that Taillon’s slider is a bad pitch or he’s struggling this year. Far from it. His .258 xwOBA on the slider is a little better than average, and batters are only hitting .200 against it. He may have the highest ERA on the staff at the moment, but it’s a long season. He will not be the outlier.

But for those looking for him to take the next step, he has not done that so far in 2019. It has only been five starts, but it looks like he is getting into some new habits. It’s too early to say if they are bad habits, but he got into trouble last year by relying on the same looks too often. This could be a case of same problem, new year, but with a different pitch.

The post Where Has Taillon’s Curveball Gone? appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

Joe Musgrove is using fewer cutters and more sliders in the early parts of 2019. Photo by the AP.

If Pirates starters this decade can be defined by one pitch, it’s the fastball. In 2013, they turned to two-seamers to get ground balls. A few years later, they began to hunt strikeouts and became more four-seam heavy. Whatever the variety, Pirates starters have consistently ranked near the top of the league in starter fastball usage. That is, they did before now.

Last year, Pirates starters threw fastballs for 60.7% of their pitches, which was in a virtual tie with the Twins for the most in baseball. While they were very fastball heavy, it was a drop from 65.1% in 2017. Meanwhile, the team slider usage climbed over five points, from 10.2% to 15.5%.

This year, the slider is being used even more by Pirates’ starters, mostly at the expense of the fastball. At the moment, the starters’ fastball percentage is the lowest in the Clint Hurdle era.

Courtesy of PITCHf/x, compiled by FanGraphs. Click to enlarge.

With the exception of 2012, the Pirates ranked in the top 10 for fastball usage every year. Meanwhile, they never ranked higher than 15th in slider frequency. This year, they’re 14th for fastballs and fourth for sliders. If sliders are the flavor of the month, the Pirates are binging at the buffet.

“But wait,” you, the esteemed TPOP reader, may say. “Of course slider percentage is going to go up! They traded for Chris Archer, dealt away Ivan Nova and Jameson Taillon started throwing a slider midseason last year. They’re the reason why the fastball rates are down. We won’t fall for your subterfuge.”

Wow, subterfuge. Great word, TPOP reader. Yes, all of those things are true, but there’s at least one pitcher who is supporting this theory by himself: Joe Musgrove.

Musgrove (the last surviving member of the 0.00 ERA club at the time of this post’s publication) has a good fastball. Actually, he has three good fastballs: a four-seamer, a sinker and a cutter. He can throw them to each quadrant of the zone, essentially giving him a dozen looks with his heater. He relied on those heaters often in 2018, with 50% of his pitch selection being non-cut fastballs with an additional 15.4% being cutters.

Through three appearances in 2019, he’s reduced his four-seam/sinker usage to 45.4% and the cutter to 4.9%. Meanwhile, his slider rate is up from 18% to 28.8%. We started to see this trend in 2018 as the season progressed. Musgrove was throwing fewer and fewer cutters starting around his 10th game as a Pirate. At the same time, his slider became more prevalent.

Courtesy of FanGraphs.

There were theories Musgrove would benefit by doing this, and so far, he’s proving them right. It’s not just that he’s throwing more sliders, though. He’s using it differently this year, and he’s getting more spin.

Last year, Musgrove primarily used the slider for either the first pitch of the at-bat or with two strikes. It was an opener and finisher pitch. When the at-bat was underway and he was searching for contact or a strike, he would go throw the cutter. It is an admittedly small sample size to work with this season, but he’s throwing it far more often on one and no strike counts.

Musgrove’s slider usage, based on count. Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

There’s still a slight bias for using it early in the count, with nearly half of his sliders thrown coming in the first two pitches of the at-bat. It still is a good putaway pitch with two strikes, but he hasn’t shied away from using it in other counts, too. Last year, he did not throw a 3-1 slider. He had enough faith in the pitch to do it twice against the Cubs last Thursday.

That extra faith may be stemming from the better results he’s getting with his breaking ball. In 2018, batters had a .243 xwOBA– which is measured by launch angle and exit velocity — on his slider. This year, his xwOBA with the pitch is .132, which is among the very best marks for starters across baseball. He’s also upped his whiff percentage to 23.7% with it.

Musgrove’s results with his breaking ball are better, and the pitch is moving more. He has progressively been adding more spin to his slider in his time with the Pirates. So far this year, its spin is venturing into uncharted territory.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

There are three explanations for why the spin rate is going up. The first is Baseball Savant and PITCHf/x misclassified some cutters– which don’t spin as much — as sliders in 2018, skewing the data. The others are he has a new group or is executing better. The later two are far more fun to speculate over, and there may be a case for the grips. He did start mixing in Chad Kuhl’s slider grip on some pitches last June, so we at least know he’s willing to experiment. Whatever the reason may be, Musgrove’s slider is only as good as its spin rate.

Since he’s come to Pittsburgh, Musgrove has averaged 2,430 RPM on his slider. That’s the magic number for him because it gets far better results when it spins at least that much compared to when it does not.

Since 2018. Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

When the slider moves, he gets more whiffs and softer contact. When it doesn’t, it’s a below average pitch. Scroll up a tad to the chart before this one to see why the breaking ball is working for him right now.

It’s too early to say for certain that this is Musgrove’s new course of action for the entire season. He’s only two starts deep in his 2019 campaign, so he- and the entire rotation, for that matter- could revert back to the pitch usages we saw in 2018. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. 2018 Joe Musgrove was still a more than serviceable hand.

But at the moment, he’s spinning his slider more than before, he’s using it more than ever before, and he’s doing the best pitching of his career. If he is going to break out, it seems like he is on the right path.

The post Joe Musgrove Has Revamped His Pitch Selection appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

Nick Burdi’s spin rate does not separate him from other relievers. His ability to hide the ball does. Photo by AP.

After two Trevor Williams posts over the past week, it’s time to move on to another TPOP darling: Nick Burdi. It might be time to give up the ghost and rename TPOP The Point of Trevor/Burdi. To be fair, there’s a lot to get excited about with the rookie right-hander. Kevin set the table a couple weeks ago. Now we can take a deeper look since there are results in the books and film to watch.

At the moment, Burdi is second among relievers in FIP (-0.54), which is a direct result of his 50% strikeout rate. Yes, his ERA is ugly at the moment and we’re still in peak “small sample size” season, but the early returns for him are glowing.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

Burdi is missing bats, and when hitters do make contact, it has been pretty soft. Last year, the Pirates hit the lottery with minor league free agent Richard Rodriguez. It’s obviously too early to say the same with Burdi yet, but it’s starting to look like the Rule 5 pick who was purchased for $500,000 in international bonus pool money could be something special.

The fastball is what jumps out first with Burdi, sitting comfortably in the 96-97 MPH range. There may have been some concern if he would fully recover after Tommy John surgery, but it looks like he has. This is the type of pitch every rookie wants as their bedrock. Burdi has that foundation set.

The slider has arguably been his most important pitch so far, using it 58.5% of the time. This isn’t an example of a secondary pitch only succeeding because batters are geared up for a fastball. There may be some of that in play, but the real takeaway is the two pitches play well with each other. For more on this, I would strongly recommend David Slusser’s piece on Rum Bunter from Tuesday.

His slider’s velocity has jumped nearly three MPH from his September cameo last year, currently sitting at 88.5 MPH. He is also burying the ball very well, getting plenty of whiffs as a result.

Burdi’s sliders. Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

In today’s game, the first instinct for understanding why a pitcher is getting so many swings and misses is he is spinning the ball well. That’s not really the case here, which is not to say Burdi’s spin rates are bad. Both are well above average, actually. But that’s just it, they’re only above average, not great. His fastball is in the top 30 percentile, and his slider the top 38 percent. Again, that’s good, but the Pirates have multiple pitchers who get more spin than he does.

Pirates top five pitchers in average spin rate, 2019. Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

Pirates top five in slider spin rate, 2019. Courtesy of Baseball Savant.

But spin is secondary for him. Where Burdi succeeds is his velocity and his ability to hide the ball during his delivery.

Burdi revamped and shortened his delivery a couple years ago. By doing so, batters don’t get as long of a look at the ball during his windup, if any. Patrick Hageman of Twins Daily made a great side by side comparison of his old and new delivery.

One thing I found interesting about Nick Burdi is how he rebuilt his arm path in an offseason. Check out the long-arm reach in 2016 (R) vs short action in 2017 (L). pic.twitter.com/l6r95xm7jH

— Parker Hageman (@ParkerHageman) December 14, 2017

It’s pretty easy to follow the ball in his old windup, with hitters getting an especially long look when the ball is behind his back. That’s not the case anymore. It’s worth noting these videos are not from the point of view of a batter in the box. Those brief glimpses of white are even rarer in games. Take this pitch during the the opener in Cincinnati. Burdi catches Barnhart looking for strike three.

Even as a left-handed hitter, Barnhart’s view of the ball during Burdi’s windup is obstructed by the pitcher’s body or head. Burdi’s delivery can be broken down into five parts.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

The rule of thumb is if you can see a gap between the pitcher’s body and the ball from the TV angle, a batter with the same handedness can see the ball. There isn’t a clean look here. As a lefty, Barnhart got a peek. It didn’t do him any good.

Batters aren’t going to be able to see the ball well and will be kept on their toes by the velocity. The only thing that can sink him is control, and not necessarily just walks. He’s gotten away with some meatball fastballs so far. Baseball Savant qualifies nine of his 27 heaters as over the heart of the plate. Fortunately for him, only one has been hit.

That could have– and probably should have– been a lot worse. Pitchers who throw 97 can get away with those against the Kyle Farmers of the world. If he is going to be a reliable late inning arm, he can’t make those mistakes to the Joey Vottos.

Even with that one caveat, Burdi is justifying why the Pirates acquired him and broke camp with him. He is a special pitcher, and it’s not just because of his spin rate or velocity. He has a rare combination of power and deception that could make him a force out of Pittsburgh’s bullpen.

The post Nick Burdi Is More Than Just Velocity And Spin appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

Behold: the face of a new way to categorize starts. Photo by AP.

Trevor Williams is a lot of things. Professional baseball player. Podcaster. SABR mystery. Master of getting soft contact. Meme lord. And now, the namesake for a new category of start I’m creating: the “Williams.”

This is a play on quality starts and the Maddux. A defined “quality start” is an outing where the starter goes at least six innings and allows no more than three earned runs. It’s not a perfect stat. A pitcher could allow six unearned runs and still qualify, but to generalize it, a quality start puts your team in a good position to win. A “Maddux” is a much rarer. To qualify, a pitcher must throw a complete game in under 100 pitches — a feat Greg Maddux accomplished numerous times throughout his illustrious career.

Ok, so what is a “Williams” (Williamses, pl.)? I’m defining it as an outing where a starting/marquee pitcher goes at least six innings in their outing without allowing a run. To be clear, they have to finish with no runs allowed. Jameson Taillon started Wednesday’s start with six shutout frames, but he surrendered a seventh inning homer, meaning he did not earn a Williams that night.

Some would argue going 7 IP/1 R or 8 IP/2 R is just as valuable or better than going six scoreless, but in today’s game, six strong innings is all a starter needs to do. It’s a really good day at the office when he’s able to hand the ball off to the backend of the bullpen with a goose egg on the scoreboard. A complete game or a shutout may be sexier and more valuable, but every pitcher, manager and fan will take six shutout innings from any of their starters 100 times out of 100. It is not just a quality start, but an elite one.

Trevor Williams (who will be referred to as Trevor from now so I can cut down on “Williams”es and “Williamses”es) gave such a start Sunday in Cincinnati. It was the 11th time he has gone at least a half dozen spotless innings since 2018 and the 14th time of his career. There’s a reason why his name is the preferred nomenclature for this new category. Since 2018, Trevor leads all of baseball in Williamses.

Courtesy of Baseball-Reference’s Play Index tool. Click to enlarge.

That’s impressive, but it isn’t exactly new information. That factoid is displayed on AT&T SportsNet before almost every one of his starts and has popped up in plenty of columns. Let’s dive a little deeper and get a little weirder.

Since he became a full-time starter in May of 2017, the only player with as many Williamses as the Pirates’ right-hander is Chris Sale. Sale has 16 since the start of 2017, two of which came in April of that year. That comp alone is impressive, but it’s worth noting Sale was in his prime by then. Trevor was a rookie.

Trevor has picked up these Williamses fast, appearing in only 70 games as a major leaguer so far. In the Live Ball era, through a player’s first 70 games, only three players have recorded more Williamses than him: Dwight Gooden, Jose Fernandez and Jacob deGrom. Plus, 12 of Williams’ outings were as a reliever, where he didn’t have the opportunity to earn a Williams.

Courtesy of Baseball-Reference’s Play Index tool. Click to enlarge.

The Pirates version of this is even more eye-opening. 70 outings may seem like a bit of an arbitrary number, so I decided to spot every other pitcher in Pirates history 30 games and make it an even 100. Trevor still leads the Pirates all-time in Williamses through their first 100 games.

Courtesy of Baseball-Reference’s Play Index tool. Click to enlarge.

From a career standpoint, Trevor is currently tied for 12th in franchise history in this category. He’s shooting up the standings, but his volume of starts are low and holding him back. However, it is a large enough sample size to take a look at what rate he achieves a Williams.

In 2018, there were 469 Williamses across baseball, meaning about 9.7% starts (and marquee appearances in the case of the Rays and their opener) resulted in a Williams. While that number may indicate this is a somewhat common occurrence, there are only 17 pitchers in the live ball era to average a Williams in at least 15% of their career starts. Trevor is near the very front of that grouping.

Min. 50 starts. Courtesy of Baseball-Reference’s Play Index tool. Click to enlarge.

Out of pitchers with at least 50 career starts, Trevor’s 24.1% Williams rate is the second best over the last 100 years, behind only the late Jose Fernandez. Clayton Kershaw is the only other player to crack 20%.

To be fair, there is a recency bias to this list. Fourteen of the 17 pitchers with a Williams rate of at least 15% are active. The three who aren’t (Fernandez, Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana) have pitched within the last 10 years. I have two theories as for why. The first is all of these pitchers are either in their prime or not too far removed from it. Their twilight years haven’t weighed down their career averages yet.

The other explanation is expanded bullpens have de-emphasized the innings pitched part of the equation. In Trevor’s first start of the season, he was pulled after six innings and 80 pitches. If this was the 70s or 80s, he probably would have been trotted out for the seventh. I’m sure earlier generations of players lost countless Wililamses late in an effort to protect a smaller bullpen.

Whatever the reason for why older players aren’t cracking the list, Trevor still leads all active players in Williams percentage. He’s one of the very best all-time at going deep into games unscathed. There are plenty of projections and analytics that say he’s a house of cards ready to fall. Finally, here’s one that celebrates how unique his career has been so far.

The post The Quality Start, The Maddux, And Now…The Williams appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.

It’s Bell or bust for the Bucs’ offense this year. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

On the eve of the regular season last year, I wrote Gregory Polanco was the most important player to the Pirates success that season. He had the most untapped potential out of anyone on the roster, and while he still didn’t reach it in 2018, it was his best season as a big leaguer. When he was hitting, the Pirates were winning.

Same theory, new year, different player. This year’s most important Bucco is the newly announced cleanup hitter Josh Bell. He has the power to take what looks like an average offense to the next level or the depths of mediocrity.

First base has been the sore spot for the Pirates this decade. Since 2010, they have only had three first basemen be worth at least 1 WAR: David Freese in 2016 (1.6), Garrett Jones in 2012 (1.6) and Gaby Sanchez in 2013 (1.0). Bell was supposed to change this, but so far, he’s following in the footsteps of his predecessors, being worth 0.6 WAR in 2017 and 0.9 in 2018. Worse yet, he set the pace for the infield.

The Pirates had one of their worst infields in franchise history last season, combining for only 3.4 fWAR. While Neal Huntington could have done more to upgrade the unit this offseason, they do look better now. After all, there is nowhere to go but up. If this spring is a sign that Jung-Ho Kang is back, he could be worth three or four wins by himself. Adam Frazier revamped his swing and lead all second basemen in OPS after the All-Star Break. It’s hard to get excited for Erik Gonzalez and Kevin Newman, but shortstop had been a black hole for years now. They will at worst be replacement level, too.

That leaves Bell at first. It looks like the ship has sailed for him ever having a good WAR, if for no other reason than his glove. Going by FanGraphs’ DEF, Bell was the worst fielder for the Pirates last year. He was the worst fielder on the team in five of the sixth months of the season, and the worst defensive first baseman in the NL for three months.

Courtesy of FanGraphs. Click to enlarge.

Barring a drastic turnaround, Bell’s defense will prevent him from ever becoming a SABR darling. But WAR isn’t everything. He can still be a good player, assuming he hits enough. Despite a stark drop in homers in 2018, he took steps in the right direction last year, improving his wRC+ from 108 to 112.

Courtesy of FanGraphs and Baseball Savant. Click to enlarge.

He needs to get his power numbers back to at least 2017 levels, but those are encouraging peripherals.

He also matured as a ball player. Bell is a notorious tinkerer, and the coaching staff challenged him to stop last September. He did. He sat a couple games, and when he returned on Sep. 7, he slashed .301/.427/.534 with four home runs down the stretch. If he can come close to replicating that over 600 plate appearances, the Pirates are golden.  The concern is the mindset he had while doing it.

I’ve already written about the importance of pulling fly balls for TPOP and in PiratesGuide. Bell didn’t do that during his final weeks of September, pulling only one of his 16 fly balls starting on Sep. 7. Of course not every batter needs to drive the ball down the line to be successful, but Bell says he was trying to hit it to opposite-center field. There are a lot of things that have held Bell back at the plate during his major league career, ranging from hitting too many ground balls, shifts and constant mechanics changes. This may be a silent culprit. He’s trying to hit it into the big part of the park at PNC.

This may be why Bell has been a traditionally better hitter away from Pittsburgh. Last season, he had a 126 wRC+ on the road and a 95 wRC+ at home. PNC Park’s left field is a power vacuum for him.

Results of balls Bell hit to left field as a LHH in 2018. Courtesy of FanGraphs.

If this mentality works for Bell and he gets results, good. It’s only weird if it doesn’t work. However, it seems like a flawed strategy from a player with enough flaws in his game already.

2019 is Bell’s make or break year. The Pirates need him to be a big time bat. Another “good, not great” year offensively with poor defense is not enough. Such a player won’t lose a team a lot of games, but he won’t win a lot for them, either.

The post Josh Bell Is The Most Important Pirate In 2019 appeared first on The Point of Pittsburgh.