Kind of a lot going on in the world, ey? It’s a little funny to living such an easy, comfortable life here and spending so much of my time doing things like sitting on a computer, reading books, watching baseball, playing with my kids, and other activities that are basically leisure, and all the while there are millions of people around the world fighting for their lives in one way or another. You can start to feel a little callous, or something. But what are we to do about that? There’s really nothing to be done at the individual level to help the biggest problems in the world. Some people think they can help by acting very bold and emotional on social media, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t do anything.
I guess we just keep going. Keep doing the things that we have to do in front of us. What else can be done? Sitting around watching the TV getting all upset doesn’t help anybody and it can really degrade your own life.
World peace is an admirable goal and something that is worth pushing towards, but we should all come to grips with the fact that it’s never going to happen. But I’ll shut up about this now and get to what happened yesterday in MLB.
He was stopped at 82 pitches, so he probably had another inning in him. He wasn’t efficient with that 40.2% Ball%, but the whiffs are interesting to see. We are six starts in for him now. He’s given us 496 pitches to study. Here are the numbers:
I like a lot of it, I can’t lie! The 13.9% SwStr% is great, the 35.9% Ball% is not completely terrible, and that’s turned into a nice 3.11 JA ERA.
The issue, as we talked about last time, is how hard he’s been hit.
→ 15.3% Brl% → 35.3% FB% → 20% HR/FB → .343 xwOBA
There are only ten SPs with a barrel rate allowed over 13%. Only three of them have made double-digit starts.
The point of saying that is to point out that this Brl% is almost sure to come way down as Cecconi pitches more. If we look at pitchers with 2,000+ pitches dating back to last season, nobody has a Brl% allowed over 11.5%.
It’s a good general lesson to learn. If a guy is doing well in K-BB% stuff but giving up a ton of homers and doubles and stuff over a moderate sample size (5-15 starts?), there’s a very good chance he’ll improve in the near future. The K-BB% is likely to stay put while the hard contact allowed is likely to regress downward.
We see Cecconi now with a 4.15 ERA, but a 3.67 SIERA. And the pitch mix looks pretty good too.
We have small samples on these two breaking balls, but they’ve both been pretty nasty so far (23% SwStr% on the slider, 23.4% on the curve). If he keeps something close to what he’s been doing on the four-seamer, this guy could be really good, I think. He’ll get the Athletics next, and that will be another good one to keep an eye on.
Will Warren had a nice outing against the Angels. He did give up three earned, but apparently there was some bad luck and questionable calls there or something. Everything else was sparkling.
This SwStr% and K% mismatch is stark, but it’s been like that for a month now. He keeps doing the same thing.
You’ve heard me say a lot that his K% will come down. But it’s not coming down. Every time it comes down after a start or two, he goes out and raises it right back up with an outing like last night. The reason he’s been able to do this is probably because he has this four-seamer and sinker combination that hides well. The sinker gets a ton of called strikes and the four-seamer gets a good number of whiffs.
He must be tunneling those very well. His sweeper is kinda mediocre, but it does have a higher 13.2% SwStr% since May 1st.
I still think the K% is going to fall and end up around 26% when the season is over. And he is a guy who can struggle with command. He has four outings with 3 or more walks this year. He’s never a safe bet, but he’s certainly meeting our main rule about always starting a guy with a 20% K-BB%!
K-BB% Leaders since May 1st
Mike Soroka struck out nine Rockies and got out of the way before they went nuclear on the Nats bullpen. He did give up three earned runs, but you’ll certainly take the quality start and all of those strikeouts. Soroka is a guy who deserves some attention. He has done some interesting things this year.
The first thing you see is the strong 18% K-BB%. That gets him to a very good 3.15 JA ERA and a 3.47 SIERA (his ERA is 5.06 by the way). You see that he has strong strike-earning numbers on his four-seamer (52% Strike%, 10.7% SwStr%). And then he has pretty good marks on the slurve as well (14.9% SwStr%).
Since May began, he has a 25.4% K% and a 6.1% BB% with a 3.02 JA ERA. It’s all pretty good.
The hesitation is that he doesn’t get many whiffs overall (10.8% SwStr% since May), and the ground ball rate is not through the roof like we’d want it to be at 47%. That’s a fine GB%, but it’s not to the 55-60% level where I’d be calling for people to pick the guy because of the combination of low walks and high grounders.
But there’s a decent amount to like here with Soroka, and I think he’s a good streaming option in good matchups like last night. He’ll have to deal with the Dodgers next, but after that he gets the Angels if things go off on schedule. I suppose he should not be owned until that Angels start shows up in around 10 days.
Great stuff, as expected, from Bryan Woo.
7 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 6 K, 2 BB
This guy is extremely hard to hit. His 0.93 WHIP is now seventh-best in the league.
WHIP LEADERS
Eovaldi 0.81
Skubal 0.81
Skenes 0.85
Wheeler 0.89
Ryan 0.90
deGrom 0.91
Woo 0.93
H Brown 0.93
Rasmussen 0.95
Taillon / Fried 0.96
I don’t have much else to say! He’s probably a top 25 SP for next year, and who knows maybe he’ll even end up in the top 15 or something like that if he stays healthy all year.
The Yankees allowed Kyle Hendricks to have his second-best start since 2021.
So that was pretty shocking.
The Yankees haven’t scored a run since Saturday. They’re hitting .170/.231/.210 in their last 109 PAs. But I promise you that this doesn’t mean a thing for tonight and the rest of the week. They are just as likely to score eight runs tonight as any other day. And, in fact, more likely since they’re facing Jack Kochanowicz. Don’t buy into any of this three-day sample stuff if you’re playing stuff tonight. Weird stuff happens. And sometimes, weird stuff happens three days in a row.
Last night’s game took his SLG up from .366 to that .412. But let’s look at some splits to see if he’s truly been improving as time has gone on (this is what I would have expected).
So no, there has been no steady progression here. June, by a lot of marks, has been his worst month.
He has been swinging way, way more lately. He had a 43% Swing% in his first 112 PAs. Since then, it’s at 51%. That’s a huge change. Some of it probably has to do with the fact that pitchers aren’t that intimidated by him, so they’re throwing him a bunch of strikes. But it’s also probably a change to see if it can get him going.
Overall, I still have no confidence in saying that the guy will be good now. So… I don’t know, hope this helps!
Andy Pages also hit two dongers. There’s been some rough patches for him, but overall he’s been pretty great this year.
He has 49 RBIs, that puts him in the top 20 in the league. And he’s added six steals. So he’s done pretty well across the board.
I guess while we’re talking about the two-homer guys from last night, I have to mention Javier Baez.
I saw a highlight of the one homer and the guy is swinging his freaking bat around like a lunatic before he hits it.
I’m not a hitting coach. I promise you that Javier Baez knows more about hitting than me. So it’s ridiculous for me to sit here and tell him how to swing. But whatever, it’s my freaking newsletter and I do what I want. If Javy wants to come on the podcast and fight me, I’m down. But let’s please keep the fighting on the Internet and not in person.
It reminds me of that guy from the Brewers. What was his name.. he had this insanely dumb swing and he struck out so much but he had a run of hitting some homers back in like 2023 but then of course he inevitably flamed out and ended up back in the minors. I’m going to the Brewers 2023 page to find him. JOEY WIEMER. That’s him. Look at what this jagaloon was doing back in 2023.
I had an audible scoffing laugh when I just watched that. And this is a part of a whole story.
Back there in the middle of 2023, I was doing my normal thing just looking at the numbers every day and never watching games. So I saw that Wiemer had some power and speed so I picked him up on my home league team for a bit. And he was against the Pirates that week, so I was watching that game, kind of excited to see Wiemer do some damage.
But then I saw his swing and I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned that his K% was only 35% or whatever it was. What are you doing with your bat? How have you made it through so many levels of baseball the whole way to the Major Leagues without anyone ever being like “hey man you’re kind of whiffing a lot, maybe stop swinging your bat around so freaking much before you swing it?”. It’s mind-blowing stuff to me.
We haven’t seem Wiemer in the bigs this year. But we saw him last year. And sure enough, he had reeled it in.
It didn’t work, he hit .154/.214/.154 before being sent back down. He’s hitting .205/.314/.326 in AAA for Kansas City right now. So I don’t know, maybe the answer was to move his bat more rather than less.
Back to Javier Baez, I guess. Don’t pick him up. Never pick him up. He would have gone the way of the Wiemer if not for the ridiculous contract the Tigers gave to him.
And now I’m all pissed off from watching that Joey Wiemer swing so I have to go take a walk or something.
Pitcher Reports
I have no idea what happened with JP Sears being on top here… seems like something went wonky. I will have to look at this tomorrow.
