Episode 2213: (Get) Out of Left Field

Summary[]

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Giants extending Matt Chapman and Manny Machado's pursuit of Nate Colbert's Padres home run record, Stat Blast (20:42) about Luis Arraez's extreme three-true-outcome avoidance, Ben Joyce's potentially unprecedented pitch speeds, and whiff-averse flamethrowers, and then discuss (54:31) the Yankees' left-field dilemma(?) involving Alex Verdugo and Jasson Domínguez, the Brewers' expectations-surpassing success, and NPB's suspicious power outage, before finishing with several follow-ups (1:33:35).

Topics[]

Luis Arraez's extremely low three true outcome rate
Players with the fewest three true outcomes relative to rest of league
Ben Joyce's 105.5 mph fastball
Pitchers who throw hard with few strikeouts and vice versa
Unrest in Yankee fandom over keeping Alex Verdugo as a starter and not promoting Jasson Domínguez
Brewers solidly exceeding projections, in command of the NL Central
Theories why offense is down in NPB
Correction/clarification to the streak seasons with a 40-year old hitter
Wild pitches and passed balls have reversed and gone back down
Episode 2189 follow-up: White Sox second basemen have hit home runs
Shohei Ohtani apparently setting the single-month power-speed record
Did we really talk about Shohei Ohtani less this year?

Banter[]

Giants extend Matt Chapman for $151M/6 years
Manny Machado close to passing Nate Colbert for the Padres home run record

Final Notes[]

Luis Arraez completes another game without a walk, strikeout or home run.

Stat Blast[]

Players with the fewest three true outcomes relative to rest of league[]

Luis Arraez leading the NL in batting average, which would give him his third consecutive batting title, and all three would be for a different team. Ben and Meg discuss how trading the batting title leader would be unthinkable in earlier eras of baseball and reflects the current focus on power over hitting for average.
Bill Madlock has the most batting titles (4) among players who are not in the Hall of Fame.
This year, Arraez's walk rate is only 3.7%, and his strikeout rate is only 4.4%, both well below his career average. He has only four home runs, compared to 10 last year. He has struck out only twice since the All Star break. His 97 PAs without a strikeout is the longest single-season streak since Jeff Keppinger's 107 strikeoutless PAs in 2010.
Ben calculated the percent of three true outcome (TTO) plate appearances for qualified hitters relative to the league TTO rate, going back to the live ball era. For the purpose of this discussion, we will call it TTO%+.
Luis Arraez is at 8.8% TTO, compared to 33.6% for the league, for a TTO%+ is 26.2.
The lowest TTO%+ belongs to Stuffy McInnis at 22.8 in 1922 (3.6%/15.9%). (Meg likes the name Stuffy.) Stuffy also has the second-lowest. Next are 1970 Matty Alou and 1947 Emil Verban, followed by Luis Arraez.
Ben got worked up when Arraez was intentionally walked, since that increased his TTO%, but he felt vindicated when the next batter, Fernando Tatís, Jr., hit a walk-off single.
Ben notes that the podcast was obsesssed with Willians Astudillo's low TTO rate and overlooked his teammate Luis Arraez.
The league TTO% peaked at 36.1% in 2020, followed by 35.1% in 2021.
The highest TTO%+ in the live ball era belongs to Babe Ruth with 297 in 1920.

Pitchers who throw hard with few strikeouts and vice versa[]

Ben Joyce struck out Tommy Edmond with a 105.5 mph fastball. This is the hardest thrown strikeout pitch on record.
According to Statcast, Aroldis Chapman holds the record for fastest pitch with a 105.8 mph pitch in 2010 and a 105.7 mph pitch in 2016. The difference of just a few tenths of an mph is probably with the margin of error given the state of pitch tracking technology. Pitch Info puts the hardest pitches by Aroldis Chapman at 105.1 in 2010 and 2024, notably his first and last seasons.
Ben Joyce throws hard but strikes out batters at a little below league average rate (23.2%).
Ben and Michael Mountain found that fastball speed (relative to league average) correlates with strikeout rate (relative to league average) at +0.4.
Looking at pitchers with at least 30 IP (because Ben Joyce is at 34), the one with the highest "fastball speed to strikeout rate, relative to league average" is 2012 Aaron Cook. In 94 IP, he struck out only 20 hitters for a K/9 of 1.9 using a 91 mph average fastball, which is "not so slot in 2012 and yet somehow he didn't strike out anyone."
If you require an average fastball of at least 95 mph (to focus on hard throwers), the leader is Ben Joyce's teammate, rookie Jack Kochanowicz, who has thrown 32⅔ innings, but struck out only 12. "If we have Jack Kochanowicz face Luis Arraez, would there ever be a strikeout?" Ben Joyce is 9th.
The pitcher with the most strikeouts above expected from fastball velocity is 2003 Eric Gagne.
If you set the minimum to 100 IP, then the top strikeout underperformers are Graham Ashcraft and several years of Nathan Eovaldi. The top overperformers ("strikeout monsters") are Gerritt Cole, Justin Verlander, and Spencer Strider.

Notes[]

Matt Chapman was due to become a free agent at the end of the year (with a player option to stay with the Giants), so it's a bit unusual to see him sign an extension well before the end of the season, particularly since he is a Scott Boras client. Ben and Meg both feel that the contract is fair.
Chapman has by far performed the best Boras Four (or Five, if you count JD Martinez). Blake Snell is pulling himself out of a pretty deep hole, Jordan Montgomery "is still digging that hole deeper", and Cody Bellinger has been just okay.
In Episode 1179, we learned that Nate Colbert holds the Padres franchise home record at only 163. In Episode 1952, a Stat Blast found that this is by far the lowest record among active franchises. Manny Machado is now at 161, FanGraphs projects him to hit three or four more home runs this season, so it'll be close.
Alex Verdugo is not hitting well, and he's okay but not great as a defensive outfielder. Meg notes that service time manipulation does not explain the Yankees keeping Jasson Domínguez in the minors because he accumulated service time when he was on the major league IL. Those count toward service time but not rookie eligibility, so holding him back wouldn't earn the Yankees a Prospect Promotion Incentive from him next year. Domínguez is on the 40-man roster, so he will be postseason eligible. Ben and Meg try to come up for a rationale for why the Yankees are clinging to Verdugo.
Meg: "It's not that I'm wishing the Yankees ill. It's that I'm not expending any emotional energy on them at all."
The Brewers have been using their excellent defense to compensate for poor starting pitching. Ben: "But I always say like that's the thing. If you can't quite figure out how a surprise team is surprising, look at the defensive stats because seven times out of 10 at least (I pulled that number out of my butt), but I would say that it is the defense."
Joe Sheehan noted that the continued expansion of the playoffs means that people focus not on the best teams down the stretch but rather the mediocre teams on the bubble.
MLB OPS this year is 714, which lower than we're used to seeing, but NPB's Central league is down to 639, losing about 10 points every year since 2018.
One factor in the NPB drop in offense is the sudden improvement in pitcher development. Average 4-seam velocity in NPB was 146.7 km/h in 2014, but is only 141.5 km/h a decade latter, a drop of 5.3 km/h (approximately 3.3 mph). By comparison, MLB 4-seam fastballs went up only 1.2 mph over the same period.
Ben consulted Jason Coskrey, who suggested that some batters have switched to lighter bats to counteract the improvements in pitching.
Ben consulted Jim Allen, who also cites the advancements in pitching, but also that pitching injuries are up, and many pitchers are leaving for MLB, so that can't explain all of it. He believes it's mostly due to the deader ball, which discourages power hitting. This year, home runs are half of what they were over the previous three years, and teams used tracking data to observe that barreled balls were traveling less, around 3 meters or 2.5%. One team believes that the quality of the yarn has gone down, resulting in worse aerodynamics. Anecdotal observations suggest that around mid-season, NPB started using balls originally intended for the 2025 season, and home runs are now closer to the historical level.
Overall, the power outage encourages small-ball tactics, which is more valued in Japan.
A listener pointed out that Ben's claim that the last season without a 40-year-old hitter was 1919 is a bit misleading, because that includes pitcher hitting. If you remove pitcher hitting, then the streak goes back only to 1971, which probably not coincidentally lines up closely with the introduction of the DH, which is a position most friendly to older players.
This year, wild pitches and passed balls per game is the lowest since 1984. Ben speculates on why this could be, such as lessening the effects of catcher fatigue.
White Sox second baseman Nicky Lopez hit a home run on September 4. Ben discovered that rookie Brooks Baldwin hit one on August 12.
A listener in the Facebook group noted that Shohei Ohtani's 12 homers and 15 steals in August is the highest single-month power-speed number on record.
In 2023, 56 of 156 episodes (35.9%) mentioned Shohei Ohtani in the episode description. This year, it's only 24 of 107 (22.4%). If you remove the episodes where the only mention of Ohtani was due to Ippei Mizuhara's gambling scandal, it drops to 20 of 107 (18%), a year-over-year drop of 48%. Ben says that it makes sense that Ohtani's mentions dropped in half because he is now just a one-way player instead of two-way.