Notes and Essays, Week Ending 5/9
5/3 N1: Matt Olson currently has a share of the NL lead in home runs and the lead in doubles outright. That makes my eyes bulge, because of the “line drive hitter” category I invented, the first requirement of which is 85% or less home runs/doubles. Olson has 11 home runs and 13 doubles, a .846 ratio. The other criterion for “line driver hitter of the year” is a .300 average, and Olson is currently hitting .293, and a hit short of that. The “line drive hitter of the year” is the guy who qualifies on all points and has the most home runs. Olson is on pace for 52 home runs. If he had the .300 average, 52 home runs would shatter the all-time single-season record, which is Albert Pujols’ 43 home runs in 2003. Pujols also hit .359 with 51 doubles (.843 ratio).
It’s not just this year; Olson really does stand out for his performance, which I guess flirts with the 90th-percentile in both cases. He’s hit 29 home runs in each of the last two years, with 41 doubles last year and 37 in 2024. In 2022, he had another great combination — 34 home runs and 44 doubles. Of course, the Braves would rather have his 2023, a complete departure and flipping of the ratio, when he had 54 home runs and 27 doubles.
I guess Olson could hit .300, but he never has, and he’s a career .262 hitter with Atlanta. I’ve gotten feedback that the .300 requirement for 2020s baseball is unrealistic. Point taken.
One irony is that Olson debuted with one of the craziest “homer-only” ratios we’ve ever seen: 24 home runs and 2 doubles in 59 games in 2017. Olson was lift and only lift. But by the next year, that was all out of his system: he had 29 home runs (that number is to him what 36 was to Dale Murphy), and 33 doubles.
The other irony is that the man he replaced in Atlanta, Freddie Freeman, is one of the ten best players of all time by this methodology and today’s best by a mile: he has five league titles. Among active players, only Anthony Rendon, with two, has more than one. We certainly think of Freeman as a different type than Olson. GIven their career 2B/HR ratios of 0.668 (Freeman) and 1.137 (Olson), this is understandable, although they have certainly come together a bit.
5/3 N2: With his .388 average, Ildemaro Vargas leads MLB. Nick Gonzalez, Xavier Edwards, Otto Lopez and Shea Langeliers are all at .336, although they have a different number of at-bats. This early in the season, given the knowledge that they were all hitting .336, I probably wouldn’t have expected that.
So there’s a brain teaser for you — how many ways are there to hit a certain average? I’m assuming that, the more sample there is, the less likely the exact H/AB pair is represented. Taking the extreme, after a couple of games, you do know that .300 means exactly 3 hits in 10 at-bats. But I’m surprised that an average to the single point apparently loses its identification basis quickly.
5/3 N3: You’ve heard of Connie Mack as “The Tall Tactician.” The 6/18/27 Philadelphia Inquirer offers “the lean leader” for him. (It wasn’t capitalized, by the way, which could suggest it wasn’t anything official, just the writer’s own description. But those kind of nicknames capitalized would look awfully funny in a story, absurd, really, kind of like “Dear Leader.”)
5/4 N1: While Munetaka Murakami’s early-season hitting has rightly made him a headline grabber, and Kazuma Okamoto has also emerged as a big-time threat at the plate, hitting over twice as many home runs as any of the other Blue Jays, their slugging has not gone as far as one would assume: they have been very deficient in singles and doubles. Murakami has no doubles on the year, and 79% of his total bases via the home run; Okamoto has just two doubles, and 62% of his total bases via the home run. That got me wondering about whether they slanted strongly in this direction in Japan as well, and whether they have decided fly ball games (I suspect a high fly ball ratio goes with a high HR/2B ratio).
To answer these questions, this year in the States, at 0.75-1 GB/FB, Murakami has been a bit more the fly ball hitter; Okamoto is at 0.87-1 (those are both fly ball ratios, but not necessarily extreme ones, by the way). But over the course of their Japanese careers, Okamoto has actually been the bigger fly ball hitter, and by a good margin. In 2023, for instance, Murakami’s GB/FB was 85% higher than Okamoto’s. Comparing the two directly season by season, Okamoto has had the more fly ball-tilted ratio in five of the last seven years, although Murakami edged him last year, with his fly ball ratio falling a good ways to 0.70-1.
As far as the other half of the question, though, Murakami comes to this high HR/2B ratio more naturally from his Japanese statistics. He has has 45 HR and 27 2B per 575 AB over his NPB career; those numbers for Okamoto are 36 and 31.
Cueing up the lowest GB/FB ratios this year, some that stand out to me are
Jose Ramirez 0.46-1
Evan Carter 0.49-1
Yordan Alvarez 0.59-1
Kevin McGonigle 0.61-1
Josh Smith 0.64-1
This is a good thing to know about J-Ram, is the only reason I cite him. His career ratio is 0.82-1. It has been 0.71-1 2018 on.
I’m not sure what the back story is with McGonigle. Maybe he just does whatever is preached to him successfully? For, with decent sample size in each season, he was at 1.36-1 in 2024, 0.82-1 last year. So his numbers are really trending in the fly ball direction. It’s a change to his game rather like what Bryson DeChambeau did to his body.
With Smith, I just think his ratio is weird because I was noting the other day that he’s hit for no power this year. He has 20 hits and 18 are singles. This does not seem like the sort of guy who should be hitting fly balls. It’s not like Smith has great speed that could make hitting grounders particularly viable for him, granted, but I don’t think Whitey Herzog would put up with the little guy hitting all those fly balls.
5/4 N2: Obviously, teams give up a lot of runs when they lose, so there’s nothing surprising in this, but there are 52 pitchers who have lost at least 3 games so far this year, and they combine for a 5.64 E.R.A. Thank goodness they are no longer teammates, but there are two 5-game losers, Chris Paddack and Simeon Woods Richardson. In addition to his league-leading losses, Paddack has also given up as many earned runs as anyone in baseball, and Woods Richardson is 1 earned run behind him. The three guys who have given up as many earned runs as Paddack (Slade Cecconi, Zack Littell, and Brayan Bello) all have a record of 1 win, 4 losses.
5/4 N3: In Emerson Hancock (#2), Logan Gilbert (#8) and Bryan Woo (#9), Seattle has three of MLB’s top-10 in SO/BB ratio. The Yankees have two representatives: Cam Schlittler (#1) and Will Warren (#4). Plus, Ryan Weathers is 11th.
5/4 N4: Maybe Willy Adames’s streaks even out, but boy, are they pronounced. He was having a good year through San Francisco’s first 17 games, hitting .273 with .545 SLG. But in the last 17 games, he’s hitting .119 with 1 walk and 27 strikeouts and hasn’t hit a home run.
5/4 N5: I knew I’d seen that .119 of Adames’s 2026 “second half” before — it’s Ke’Bryan Hayes’s full season average, although Hayes only has 26 starts and 21 complete games (he must get pinch-hit for). There is an OPS+ of 2 for Hayes, .368 regular OPS, which does beat Adames’s .294 during his streak.
5/4 N6: I could probably find other guys, but in Justin Wrobleski (3.8 ks/9, 1.25 E.R.A.), Clay Holmes (6.5 ks/9, 1.69 E.R.A.), Michael McGreevy (5.5 ks/9, 2.52 E.R.A.) and even ultra-quick worker Steven Matz (6.8 ks/9, 3.86 E.R.A.) it does seem like low k rates are having a bit of a moment.
5/4 N7: As a number-one overall pick, if anyone was supposed to eventually be an All-Star, it was Mickey Moniak, but it wasn’t supposed to come this way, as a prolific power hitter. Scouts have never known quite what to do with him, and when is production idled, they decided maybe they wouldn’t do anything with him at all. I note that he doesn’t have anything approaching elite raw power, taking exit velocity as the proxy for that. Only in 2024 has he hit a ball 112 MPH or harder. By year since 2023 (using 150 Batted Ball Events as the mimimum for 2023-2025, 25 BBE this year), his average rank in maximum exit velo has been 145th with an average of 344 qualifiers.
But there is something to be said for consistently squaring the ball up and having enough control that you are consistently taking aggressive swings. The best exit velo of Jazz Chisholm’s career is 112.2 MPH, and Chisholm is 1 shy of better than 1 HR for 20 AB in his career. Another light guy, Mookie Betts, also doesn’t have high maximum exit velos. His last 112+ MPH ball was in that big year of 2016, when it is too easy to say, “Obama was president.”
5/4 N8: Carlos Correa currently well-above-average in Defensive Runs Saved and Outs Above Average, the first part of what has given him the 14th-best MLB bWAR among position players. By DRS, Correa was an automatic “+” fielder his first eight years, but has been negative the last three, and was -13 in Defensive Runs Saved last year. Correa’s OBP has also been strong, .380.
5/4 N9: You look at his bWAR column, 0.0 in both 2025 and 2026, and you wonder if the statistic is registering, but Kyle Karros has strong marks this year in Pit/PA (4.37), Chase% (22.7, 85th percentile), and BB% (16.5, 93rd percentile). He’s on the young side, will be 24 this summer. Baseball America saw plate discipline as a big strength, making that assessment even though his career minor league walk percentage (11.5%) made him look just one of many.
5/4 N10: Jarred Kelenic is back. Started in right field for the White Sox on Saturday and Sunday. Now 5’11” when he was once 6’1”, it appears he may not have gotten past the ABS police. Despite walks and some homers at AAA, the .202 average does not make a strong argument that this time will be different.
5/5 N1: On a base-stealing list, I ran across Mallex Smith. I’m not sure I ever knew him well enough that I can now claim I had forgetten him. In 2019, his 46 steals led MLB. That is also the most steals a Mariner has had since Ichiro had 56 his rookie year. Smith actually played better for the Rays, hitting .270 in 2017, then .296 as a batting average qualifier in a .249 league in 2018. That season. he was positive in batting runs, fielding runs, and of course, base running runs, for a 3.5 bWAR. In the Mariners season in which he led MLB in steals, he hit just .227. The rest of his MLB career consisted of just 47 plate appearances in 2020. He had 238 plate appearances in the Mexican League last year, with stats that translate to a light bat, and had 16 steals in 22 attempts.
By speed metrics, there were always faster players than Smith, but he was close to them: from 2016-2019, his average ft/sec was 29.7, and his average HP to 1st, 4.03. Strangely, he never learned to bunt for hits, with a total of just 5 over 2018-2019.
5/5 N2: As a rookie in 2018, Harrison Bader hit the magic 30 ft/sec mark on the nose. Surprised me a little to see that. There has actually been more dropoff in his times to first by season: 4.07, 4.12, 4.17, 4.21, 4.27, 4.32, 4.36, 4.31, 4.40. We throw out this year because of low sample size and the hamstring, but for the sake of completeness, I included it.
5/5 N3: Bryce Harper’s slugging average is .519 this season. That matches his career mark. Since his MVP 2021 (SLG .615), Harper’s SLG has been between .487 to .525 every season. With the Nationals, he had ample fluctuation, but with the Phillies, I would say you know what you are going to get, and Dombrowski’s off-season comments (while perhaps not completely at odds with this theme) strike me as somewhat ironic.
5/5 N4: Coming off a 10 SO/0 BB game against the Angels, the White Sox’ Davis Martin is now 2nd in MLB in bWAR, tied for 2nd in wins and 5th in FIP. But I made at least a half-dozen “underlying metrics” analyses and saw no real difference from a year ago, when he was the personification of mediocre, with a 4.10 E.R.A. and a 2.2 SO/BB ratio. In some respects this year, even from a surface standpoint, he has not stood out — at .233, the batting average against him isn’t much lower than league average. I’m betting this run will seem a fluke in retrospect. But maybe I didn’t do a thorough enough review.
5/5 N5: A Tarik Skubal injury is a bummer, and it makes you wonder if he shouldn’t have taken the chance that this could happen, and whether it will dampen his market. Oddly, I don’t think loose bodies in the elbow means a higher likelihood of recovery than TJ surgery, just a faster one. But I would still be all in for Skubal this winter (or next signing period) because, box score scouting, something was wrong this year. It was no longer Skubal here, everyone else there. He was mortal. Yet he was stil beyond great. The old case of a great pitcher being 85% and still schooling people. So if I signed him, I would be confident I would be getting a very high floor.
5/6 N1: What strikes me about the Phillies/Athletics line score from Tuesday is that the Phillies not only won 9-1 but outhit Sacramento 14-4. As the Phillies had been getting outhit by an average of 2.2 a game, this would seem to improve that differential quite a bit.
My intuition is that outhitting your opponent by 10 has you in a higher percentile than outscoring your opponent by 8, but this is a difficult thing to check with Stathead. There are actually 1.82 hits in 2026 for every run, but the slope that equates the two (there is a y-intercept) is probably much lower. If you just took the 1.82 hits per run, you might think that a difference of 10 hits translates to 5.5 runs, and that therefore an 8-run win is much more impressive. But what is dead wrong about that is that the correlation between the two is far from perfect — in fact, it’s not unusual for the team that is outhit to actually win the game.
So an open and interesting question. I suppose I’d revise to guess that outscoring your opponent by 8 is about equal to outhitting it by 10.
5/6 N2: With a careeer .372(!) BAbip, Brandon Marsh will never be everybody’s model for success. Some will consequently always look askance at his lifetime 116 OPS+ as a Phillie. This year, having cut down his strikeouts, he is just hitting for a good average proper — .322. But Marsh has added a fresh element for skeptism. Not since 2022 has he had a chase rate in the 30%+ range, but that’s at 37.7 this year. Yet his O-Contact is 65.4%, well over his career 53.0%. Certainly, there’s skill to hitting and spoiling pitches out of the strike zone. But it doesn’t seem like much of a foundation for real improvement.
5/6 N3: All 21 of Michael Harris’s strikeouts this year have been swinging. The typical percentage is 76%. Ernie Clement also doesn’t have a looking strikeout this year, but he has only 10 in all. With 8.6% of his strikeouts looking last year, Harris was second to his teammate, Ozzie Albies.
The only other player top 10 in both 2026 and 2025 in lowest percentage of looking strikeouts is Masyn Winn.
Jose Ramirez, who was top five every year between 2022-2024 in lowest percentage of looking strikeouts, belongs right there with Harris. With his percentage 12% last year, nothing was drastically different, although this year, he does have 4 looking strikeouts from 22.
Ramirez stands out as the rare guy on this leaderboard whom you wouldn’t say right off is an aggressive hitter. I love this stat (although Z-Swing% with two strikes would be better), because it gives a different definition of an aggressive hitter beyond the “chase” dimension. It is a percentage for times when you weren’t aggressive enough, and in that way identifies aggressive hitters by default.
Next in the category we might cite Luis Arraez and Salvador Perez. From 2022-2026, they both have two top-five finishes in looking strikeout percentage, and another in the top 10.
Also with more than one top-10 finish in looking strikeout percentage since 2022: Albies, Yainer Diaz, Freddie Freeman, Adolis Garcis, Andres Gimenez, Teoscar Hernandez.
5/6 N4: As a pitcher, Ohtani is 12th highest of 77 on pace for 162 innings in his percentage of pitches in the zone. That surprises me. He’s certainly not your presumed Japanese pitcher living on splitters out of the zone (yes, I know, this is his first 10%+ split season since 2021). Ohtani’s 51.1% Zone is actually a hair lower than his career rate, so he is always in the zone more than your average guy. A change to his pitch mix this year, by the way, is less heavy reliance on sliders (but I know that’s all mixed up in sweeper classification).
I’m not quite sure what to make of “zone percentage.” Ranking 18th this year, Jack Leiter is one spot ahead of George Kirby, but I’m still not buying that Jack has good control. In any event, I’m certainly nit buying that last year, when he had 4.0 BB/9 and 52.0% Zone.
5/6 N5: Outside of Mason Miller and maybe Michael King, San Diego has been so lacking in star performance this year that Jackson Merrill, having a down year with an 87 OPS+, has their highest combined number of runs and RBI. Merrill is somehow on pace to score 100 runs, even though base running runs doesn’t indicate that he’s doing anything special there. He’s hit in one of the top four spots in the lineup in every game he’s started, and he does have an .876 OPS when he’s hit with nobody out, which is the best run-scoring position.
By Batting Runs, the three best Padres have been Luis Campusano (+5), Miguel Andujar (+4) and Xander Bogaerts (+4) — the first two on pace for just 268 and 421 plate appearances, respectively.
5/7 N1: An interesting candidate as “a luck factor variable” is something Baseball Savant includes, maybe just for the sake of accounting, maybe just because every part of the pie should be available, but nonetheless someting I am glad to have found. It is hard to sum up in a way that is not convoluted, but it is “fielding runs by batting team.” It is, in other words, how well the teams you were playing fielded.
I think you can see why I would opine this might be a luck factor. It has nothing to do with you, but it might affect your success.
At -18 runs, fielding against the 16-21 Twins has been by far the worst this year.
In the snakebit category (a Diamondbacks pun?) are Cleveland, Toronto, and Arizona — they are between +13 and +9.
Note that team schedules differ at the end of the season only because of the division a team is in. There is no guarantee that good and bad teams play to their general performance against you, but if you face good defensive teams more, and bad ones less, this cumulative fielding opposition performance will generally be positive, and vice versa.
With this thought guiding us, the Pirates (+30) and Reds (+24) faced the best fielding in 2025. That makes great sense; MLB’s #2 (Cubs), #3 (Brewers), and #6 (Cardinals) fielding teams were in their division. But that the Brewers (MLB worst) and Cubs (MLB 3rd worst) faced the National League’s worst fielding makes less sense, even though they didn’t have to face their own squads. This seems to go more under the luck factor.
Maybe I should do this in a separate note, but we could also look at the luckiest and unluckiest individual batters.
For 2025, five luckiest, in order: Trent Grisham, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Brice Turang, Trevor Larnach, Shohei Ohtani.
Five most unlucky, in order: Ben Rice, Andrew McCutchen, Carlos Correa, Brenton Doyle, Mookie Betts.
Grisham I don’t really get. As all he did was hit fly balls, and he had just a .253 BAbip. He would seem to be a pretty much “fielding independent” player. That he was rated as very lucky suggests that I might not really understand the numbers more broadly.
Rice’s standing out here is consistent with what we’ve heard, in the way of that he was just “good” production-wise (128 OPS+) but among baseball’s best in his “hard hit” rate, etc.
5/7 N2: On Bobby Richardson….Not to kick a 90-year-old when he’s alive, but he was an All-Star in seven seasons and has just 8.1 career bWAR. If he was, in fact, overrated, not only his Yankee employment but his fielding (just two Rfields of +5 or better, while he was perennial Gold Glove ‘61-’65) blame/explain.
5/7 N3: In recent weeks, Kyle Tucker invariably has had a hit, but his season remains a remarkably quiet one. So I checked to see if he had the most “one-hit” games this year. Those with 20+ such games.
22: Ivan Herrera + Matt Olson
21: Tucker, Jorge Soler
20: Cody Bellinger, Junior Caminero, Heliot Ramos
The list happened to produce good seasons, by and large, but like Tucker, guys who are not “hit men.” Guy who are, in fact, what we might call mediocre at getting hits. The average average is .261; the median is .252. No one is stinking out the larger stadium joint; the lowest is Soler’s .238.
What about all-time, in a single season? What are the best showings?
Looking at the top five, the same pattern with batting average persisted. When you can see the guys, you can also see why I filled in the gaps for plate appearances and game starts. The first of those helps you hit in a high percentage of games (whether that’s for one hit or more), and the second is the game universe more generally that is necessary for the record subset.
(1) Cal Ripken 1990 86g (.250, 695 PA, 161 starts)
(2) Bobby Bonds 1977 84g (.264, 679 PA, 157 starts)
(2) Elvis Andrus 2014 84g (.263, 685 PA, 156 starts)
(4) Bobby Richardson 1965 83g (.247, 713 PA, 157 starts)
(5) Trea Turner 2022 82g (.298, 708 PA, 160 starts)
Ripken, of course, maximized games. Bonds is a famous leadoff hitter, and I think of Turner, Richardson and Andrus also as guys who hit at the top of the order.
5/7 N4: Judge’s current pace is for 66 home runs….Also bidding for his fourth AL-run title, where he currently has a 2-run lead over Trout…. Certainly true, what they say about his hot streaks: has a .500 OBP and a .972 SLG over his last 10 games.
In the way that 50 or 60 home runs has just become normal for him, I am reminded of Sosa, but I thought I would subject that to scrutiny. From 1998-2002, his age-29 to his age-33 season, Sosa hit 292 home runs. Judge’s run started four years ago, in his age-30 season. He’d need 82 home runs to catch Sosa’s 292. But Judge’s HR-per-AB over the period is 10.4%, compared to Sosa’s 9.7%. Games played are a part of the at-bat difference, but Judge has also averaged 114 walks over the last four years, while Sosa averaged 92 per season in his run.
5/7 N5: I had a feeling that Skenes’ one career complete game was in fact an 8-inning complete game loss. That is in fact the case. Probably more than a small chance that, when he first does it the proper way, it will come with chasing a no-hitter.
5/7 N6: A different description for an inside-the-park home run I found and like: “an interior home run.” Too bad there’s not more occasion to use it….
5/8 N1: Shota Imanaga threw 69.7% strikes yesterday, but the other seven pitchers in the Cubs-Reds game all struggled mightily in this regard.
/Cubs/
Trent Thornton 46.2% S
Gavin Hollowell 53.1% S
Daniel Palencia 57.1% S
/Reds/
Rhett Lowder 47.5% S
Connor Phillips 51.9% S
Luis Mey 51.3% S
Jose Franco 56.5% S
The home plate umpire was Scott Barry. If we assume the yearly “stats by umpire” in BRef’s “Pitching League Splits” only point to the home plate umpire (and, calling two teams for every game, the total plate appearances by umpire would seem to correspond), then Barry over 2021-2025 has had a 9.1% walk rate in his games. Comparatively, the overall MLB walk rate last year was 8.4%.
Seems like it could be a significant difference.
5/8 N2: Obviously too early even to draw conclusions about where Konnor Griffin is right now, let alone where he will be, but he is a batting average qualifier, so I will take the same liberties with him as I do everyone else, if you excuse me. According to FanGraphs, he’s swinging and missing a third of the time, and Baseball Savant has his whiff rate at the 95th percentile. He’s striking out less, 28.8%, which Baseball Savant has 82nd percentile.
Kind of going with this “miss” tendency, as his offense has been fine and perking up lately, his BAbip is a very high .355. He has great speed and power, so that makes sense. Yet his exit velo right now isn’t showing the power — 87.7 MPH.
5/8 N3: Always above average and 19.5% career, this year Andrew Benintendi has been swinging and missing and swinging and missing — 31.7% whiff. This has translated to BB and Ks, which are 7 and 40. I know I’m not exactly going out on a limb, but I think we might need to stick a fork in him.
5/8 N4: Aaron Judge does his particular thing, and his plate discipline characteristics have shown only moderate change over time. As part of this profile, his FanGraphs whiff (I mean 1 - contact%) is 31.8%, after it was 32.4% last year. But interestingly, that whiff rate led MLB qualifiers last year, while this year, his rate ranks just 18th! Whiff rate in MLB is up just 0.1%.
All statistics of course close in range over time, so that’s the main thing that’s going on.
Then, I suspect that current plate appearance qualifiers ahead of Judge in whiff like Matt Wallner, Garrett Mitchell, Nolan Gorman and Andrew Benintendi might not be qualifiers at year’s end, in part because of their whiff.
There is also just the fact that 2025 happened to be a down year for exceptionally high whiff guys. 2021-2024 saw an average of three players a year with 33.1%+ whiff, led by seasons of Javier Baez (37.5%), Joey Gallo (37.4%) and Luke Voit (36.3%).
The other question is, what do we do with Mune Murakami and his 41.1% whiff? Gallo’s 37.4% as a batting average qualifier in 2021 was actually a good performance for him — he was 39.4% career, and not coincidentally was a .194 career hitter. Throwing out the fluke year of 2019, he never hit better than .223.
Hitting .237, Murakami of course isn’t exactly lighting up batting average, anyway. Part of me says that if Judge can be Judge whiffing as he does, why can’t MM be some version of what we’ve seen (which after all is below peak Judge) whiffing like he does, or at least whiffing at 38% or something?
And hitters do adjust, although sometimes at the expense of power (see Fernando Tatis). Brent Rooker was 28 years old in 2023 and whiffed 35.1% in 137 games. His whiff rate didn’t identify him as a phony. On the contrary, in 2024, he increased his OPS+ from 127 to 165. His whiff rate improved, too, to 31.8%.
Note that with the improvement in his whiff, he doesn’t show that that kind of whiff rate is sustainable. But he does say we should take a broad view.
This is obviously a very cursory exploration, and I defer to more extensive research.
5/8 N5: I’ve heard about how Nap Lajoie made mincemeat of the fledgling American League, hitting .426 in 1901 and also leading in home runs and RBI, but didn’t realize that Cy Young did the same on the pitching side. Baseball Reference WAR has him 4.3 wins ahead of second-place Joe McGinnity, with Roscoe Miller another 1.5 wins behind McGinnity. Young had a 4.27 SO/BB ratio; second was Roy Patterson, with less than half of that. In 1892, the year before the current pitching mound and slab were established, Young had a 176 ERA+. But from 1893-1900, you knew he would be very good, but he was always in the 120-154 range. But joining the upstart American League, he exploded to 219. Continuing with the wind at his back, he was 166 the next year. However, Young’s 195 ERA+ in 1908 at age 41, while he started 33 games and completing 30, dispels any notion that some benevolent statistical sleight of hand creates the illusion of greatness.
One can probably make too much of ERA+ in early eras. Forty percent of the runs Young gave up in 1901 were unearned. He certainly wasn’t living off of that; bWAR doesn’t care about earned versus unearned, and we saw where Young stood by bWAR. He was also 33-10, while the remaining Boston pitchers were 46-47. But considering those unearned runs, one can see how Young had only 5 shutouts despite a 1.62 E.R.A. Clark Griffith, the future Senators legend and the Pioneer/Excutive Hall of Famer, tied him for the league lead in shutouts. Griffith’s White Sox (he also managed) beat out Young’s Americans for the pennant, and his 17 games over .500 as a pitcher also made him the only other guy in the league more than 10 games over .500. Griffith, whose success as a pitcher went far beyond 1901, is listed as having been just 5’6” (Young was big — 6’2”, 210 lb.)
5/9 N1: I went over some of Harrison Bader’s speed metrics a couple of days ago, specifically that they’ve fallen off over his career. But looking farther, I see that he was elite last year in his “bolts,” his number of 30+ MPH runs. He was 16th in all of MLB, compared to ranking 79th in average sprint, and 109th in home-to-first time. Even though lows are tossed in average sprint, it still seems to be affected by the player’s typical effort/taking care of himself component. The “bolts” can be more informative.
5/9 N2: The progress teams have made against the stolen base since the rule changes came into effect hasn’t reached Florida, where the Marlins and Rays have combined to allow 86 steals in 94 attempts. With numbers not on pace for 200 steals, this isn’t going to kill them, but it would be nice if they threw somebody out once in a while. The Rays weren’t in the notorious Marlins class a year ago, but were tied for the third-most steals allowed, if they did throw out a reasonable 21%. The Marlins allowed 191 steals at an 89% success rate.
5/9 N3: Alek Manoah made his MLB season debut Friday, pitching a scoreless inning of relief for the Angels. Confusing, as it came against the Blue Jays. Velocity 92.2 versus his 93.6 career average on his four-seamer. He got the first “looking” strikeout of Ernie Clement that has been recorded this season.
5/9 N4: In Xavier Edwards, looks like I had the wrong 200-hit candidate on the Marlins. Otto Lopez is on pace for 220, if only 25 walks. He’s a nice player, but as he entered this year with only a .260 average and didn’t graduate rookie status until he was 26, a continued performance approaching this level would be an upset. He has a .904 OPS right now; the best of any of his other four half seasons has been .732.
5/9 N5: A .533 secondary average for Travis Bazzana through 9 games. I’m going to have fun monitoring his walk total. Baseball America had Bazzana a 60-grade runner, but he only stole 12 bases in 84 games last year. He had 8 in 24 at Columbus this year, and is now 6 for 6 at the big-league level.
5/9 N6: 19-20 might not be great, but it sure beats the 105 losses Sports Illustrated (Will Laws) predicted for the Nationals. I still suggest you Nats fans go out and have a drink should you reach .500, because you don’t know if you’ll have another chance this season.
5/9 N7: With his defense coming out as outstanding, FanGraphs and Baseball Reference WAR both have Bobby Witt the AL MVP.
5/9 N8: A .980 OPS for Seiya Suzuki. Has very much made up for lost time (he started the year injured).
5/9 N9: With “-8” Batting Runs, Bo Bichette really hasn’t done anything well. Twice a member of the 40-double club, including last season, he has just 5 in 156 AB this year. 2.5 runs created/game is an eyesore. Among those on pace for 502 plate appearances, he has MLB’s 3rd-worst secondary average.
With a .132 Secondary Average versus his career .326, Mike Yastrzemski is also off. And I noted what a great spring training he had! Hasn’t hit a home run.
5/9 N10: His SO/BB ratio has never been better, but a quirk with Nolan McLean this year is he’s throwing a lot of pitches, at least per batter. At 4.23, he’s 5th in MLB among those on pace for 502 plate appearances against. Anything under 4.00 doesn’t stand out as high, and McLean was at 3.94 in the majors and 3.79 in the minors last year.
5/9 N11: With his 74.5% strike performance Friday, Chris Sale is 3rd in MLB on the season with 68.4% strikes. As I’ve said, Cam Schlittler is #1, and if you project his 481 strikes from 692 pitches to Sale’s 746 pitches, he’s 8.5 strikes ahead of Sale. So it’s basically an extra strike a start for Schlittler.