Talkin' Baseball (MLB Podcast) - The Weirdest Cy Young Season (Jimmy's Three Things)

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Timestamps:0:00 intro1:16 Donaldson4:23 Blake Snell21:25 Left vs Left Sweepers Away Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Jimmy's Three Things here on this Tuesday morning. It's September 26. Feels like fall. I'm very excited about that. Playoff baseball is on its way. We're going to be live streaming in the playoff stream lounge. It's not called the Playoff Stream Lounge, but maybe now for the playoffs, we'll call it the Playoff Stream Lounge. It's called the Stream Lounge. Jake will be there every night. I'll be floating, making breakdowns in the background, working. I'm very excited talking baseball goes every day. Me, Trev, Jake, we're recapping every game. or all the games from the night before. I'm super excited. We also have our official sponsor of this episode of Jimmy's Three Things is Billies, Blitzball Blitz at Billies. It takes place this coming Sunday, October 1st. Nice little morning activity for you before the football games kick off. We're going to be playing at Billy's, the bar.

Our whole cruise there setting up our Blitzball Stadium. We have over 160 people already. purchasing tickets and coming. So nearing 200 people, it should be loud and fun and crazy. And me and Jake will be pitching in game one. So I'm sure that like, even though it's kind of like this weird fake world, the nerves will be there if you guys are all there and loud. Anyway, three topics today. Number one, not the best story came out about Josh Donaldson and his introduction to the Brewers.

We have foul territory TV where you got Prisinski and Cratsy interviewing Rowdy, Rowdy Tellez on the Brewers. And when was Rowdy teammates with Rowdy Telez? When was he teammates with Donaldson before in Toronto, maybe? Because in the story, he talks about being teammates. Toronto in 2018, 2019. Was Donaldson there then? Or was he doing his like Braves other stuff?

Josh Donaldson. interested in this. 2018, he was with, 2018, he was with Toronto. So they, and Rowdy Telez, 2018 was with Toronto, but only 23 games. So I don't know if they were,

I don't know how much time they shared together in the same clubhouse. Anyway, anyway, here's the clip. What's the one piece of trash talk that you put on, your first piece of trash talk that you put on J.D. When you saw him or when you felt comfortable that he wasn't going to beat you up.

Routy is, kind of like, I got to play into this JD so scary routine and then he's like, no, I'm not playing into that. I wasn't scared of him to start with. You're a little scared of him. I absolutely was not. He walked in the clubhouse. He walked

in the clubhouse and walked straight by and I was like, hey, with a couple other words after that. I'm going to guess the other words were hey, motherfucker. And I was like, hey, oh, with a couple other words after that. I was like, when you walk in the clubhouse, you

introduce yourself to your new teammates and he goes everybody knows who i am all right and then i was like i was like yeah hey and then when when you see a former teammate you say what's up and he was like hey are you on the seafood diet and i was like yeah good one seafood eat food beat you to it fuck off fuck off at the end beat you to it fuck off i don't know they could be very much just busting balls it's just all fun in games it seems like that the way cratsy and career taking it but it seems like rowdy's like nah fuck off dude that's like when you see ex teammates say hi and when you have new teammates introduce yourself and you know maybe donaldson does go around and introduce himself and this is just one story and he was like walking

through and you're trying to play the other side like this is just a fun tidbit and he is going to go but we've also heard stories about uh you know we've heard stories that when when don'tson left teams all the clubhouse and like uh crew that works with the team and like uh crew that works with the team. We're texting each other just like celebrating because he makes their jobs miserable. But we've always heard he's a good teammate in the clubhouse from other places. So I don't know. Just kind of like, Ugh, Oro. Routy doesn't seem to be laughing.

Like these guys are laughing at this story. He seems to be like, fuck off, dude. Get out of here. So not the best look for Donaldson there with that story. That's a quick hitter. Second topic I want to talk about is Snell. Blake Snell pitched against the Giants last night. another really good outing.

I'll include links to the articles in the description on YouTube because I haven't done that before. But I, you know, I usually you can see them on the screen. And first thing I was doing was looking at, I was going into the stats and being like what's made Snell different this year and trying to see like what my conclusion was. And then I was like, let's see if people have written articles. Turns out there's a couple like really good articles of late because the season is such an anomaly. So this first one is from, what is this, OutlookIndia.com? Outlook India. Article on Snell?

Okay. Weird. They don't even have the author. I can't even credit them. Who wrote this? It doesn't say I'm scrolling trying to find the author. Didn't say it anywhere. Outlook India.

September 20th. So, but I did like some points in this article, which I wrote here. Snell is having a great season. He could become the first AL and NL pitcher since 1913 to lead the majors in both ERA and walks. It's a complete anomaly. His ERA sits 30 points ahead of the closest contender, Justin Steele, and he has 12 more walks than Charlie Morton. It would be a very exclusive club. He would become the only second pitcher ever with 200 more strikeouts and 100 plus.

plus walks in a season in fewer than 200 innings. If he can issue seven more walks this season, which you might have done since this article. If Snow manages the Clinch of Cy Young Award, he would be the first pitcher since Irwin in 1959 to lead the majors in walks while securing the prestigious accolades. So nobody in 40, 20, nobody in 80 years has won the Cy Young while leading the league in walks. And Snow has always walked people. It's been a big issue for him. And it feels like instead of trying to fix the issue, he's just joined in. He's doubled down on it.

He's laughed in the face of the issue. He's like, I walk people. Let's just be smart about it. He is saying that he differentiating good walks and bad walks. And rather than surrender hitable pitches, he is willing to issue walks and pitch his way out of trouble. So like, okay, if I get into trouble and I'm down or this guy kind of has my number, why don't I walk him in five pitches? then have a 10-pitch battle where he's going to foul some off and then maybe like try to lay one in there that he ends up getting a hit on

or you know I walk him on the 10th pitch. That's a waste of pitches. Let's just have five pitch walks. I don't know the stats on like, you know, how many pitch walks he's throwing. But that's interesting. And then there's, and I am going to go to baseball swan do my own little stuff for you guys. But another article, this one from MLB,

and I believe this is Brent McGuire, who covers the Angels recently. and I DMed them because I liked one of these stats near. I want to figure out how to do it. When runners get on base, Snell strands them at an 85.9% clip. So it's almost like, okay, I walk a lot of guys and I pitch with a lot of guys on base.

Instead of trying to fix that, which maybe he's tried to do in the last couple years, he's just, you know, he's become the nightmare and fought back, big green style. The 12th best marked by a starting pitcher in a single season. is that strand rate, 85.9%. Also, the defense behind him has been great. They've provided plus seven outs above average when he's on the mount.

That's the stat I'd love to find for a future Jimmy Liddix is which pitcher benefits the best. And there's been articles about it and SOS and Brett McGuire puts it here. But I couldn't find out how to find that split myself. So if you know how, let me know because I want to have a lot of fun with that. So let's dive in to Blake Snell's Baseball savant page Because I wanted to find out if I could see anything

That's making him Pitch differently So I have a bunch of tabs already open And the one thing that I found Pretty quickly was his His secondary pitch usage is just up From years prior So you can see here, if you're looking, and if you're just listening, I'll let you know.

Last year, his four-seem fastball was 55%. He threw that 55% of the time. It's down to 48% of the time, so it's less than half. Less than half the time he's throwing his four-seem fastball. He has dropped his slider. Last year, he threw his slider 25 or 24.3% of the time. He's dropped that to 13% of the time. Now, when I talked to Trevor Poof a long time ago about this, he said, if a guy throws a pitch less than

15% you don't really put it in your mind it's kind of a sneak attack pitch his other secondary pitches have bumped up so his curve ball was at 15% last year now he's bumped that up to 19% and his change up was at 5% last year the lowest it's ever been and that bumped up to um 18.3% so the change up and the curve ball are right around the same as secondary pitches and the slider When you look at baseball savant, if you guys ever go on yourself, it's also good to know and realize that pitchers very much have two different arsenals. They throw these pitches to lefties and these pitches to righties. So if I go look at what Blake Snell, who's a lefty, what he throws to righty batters, right, who should see him better, he throws all of them. He throws the fastball.

He throws the change up 22% of the time. and the curveball 20% time. So he ups his secondary pitches. The slider goes to 11%. It actually goes down a little bit. But when he faces lefties this year, he's throwing the fastball 60% of the time and the slider 24.

The curveball comes in play. The change up, you don't throw a change up to a lefty, left on left. It doesn't happen a lot. So pitchers are two different pitchers, usually. Now if we go back and we look at all of them, The one thing I wanted to do was I wanted to show you the change up. So let's look at the change up over the years.

You can see that in 2018, when he won the Cy Young, he was throwing it 19% of the time. Then he kept throwing at 20%, 9%, 19% in 2020. In 2021, it drops like crazy. And then in 2022, it dropped to 5%. He didn't throw it at all. He just scratched it. And then this year, it's way back up. And if you look at the numbers on it,

in 2021 it got hit like crazy. It had a 429 batting average against a 352 expected batting average. So, you know, they were getting lucky, but still, that's not great. A 595 slugging against and a 483 expected slugging. It was not a putaway pitch. So it just wasn't a good pitch in 2021. He probably, if I go look at just that year, I wonder if he scratched it halfway through. So I'll look at this as by month. Yeah. So he started the year in April throwing it 20% of the time. And then it just got hit and he just dropped it over the course of the year to in August of 2021. He wasn't throwing it at all. So now you go to 2022 and same thing. He tried to start throwing it again, but not even that much. And then it went down because it was so bad the year before. But if you look at the numbers in 2022, they were not as bad as 2021 at all.

they were getting better. They were, you know, he had a 2-11 batting average and a 2-11 slugging. So that's pretty good, actually. And the put-away numbers are jumping up and the width percentage is up. But this year, he's throwing it a ton. It's back up to 18 percent, and the numbers on it are great. So that led me to think, okay, so this is a big difference for him. The change-up is back.

He took it out of his arsenal. He's got a nice fastball, but you need other pitches, especially the righties, that go away from them. the change up goes away, right? The curveball and the slider, they go into Ritey's. You need pitches that go away. So he needed the change up to Ritees. So then I wanted to think, all right, well, like, what's different? So let's look at the pitch velocity.

He started throwing it way hard, a little harder in 2021. 88 miles per hour was the average. It dropped down. This year it's at 86. So it needs to be different than the fastball. So that helps. If you look at, something like the release point was a little different the uh the horizontal release which is

left and right so he's he's throwing it maybe a little more like sidearm he's getting his hand extended a little bit more but the bigger difference i saw was when i went and looked at the spray chart of it and this could be chicken or the egg so this spray chart right here is from 2021 and it's mostly he's throwing it to Ritey's away from them to get them to chase away. And then in 2022, when like he's a little nervous about the pitch because he got lit up in 2021. He's doing the same thing. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

And then if you go here this year and look at where he's throwing his change up, it's all over the zone. So it's in the zone. It's an attack pitch as well as a swing and miss pitch. which is cool. He's just got a lot of more trust in it. Let's go look at the curveball, which is another pitch. And his release point horizontally is doing the same thing on this chart.

So he just must have fixed his release point a little bit. But if we look at the curveball pitch velocity first, it's actually gotten a little faster. In 2021, it was the slowest. And if we look at spin rate, it dropped down a bunch. Or it was really down last few seasons, so that's up. I guess what I want to look at with the curve ball is the drop.

Average horizontal break. So horizontal's left to right, obviously, the horizon. And it's got less break on it. So let's look at vertical. So is it becoming more of a 12 to 6? Oh, not really. Maybe he's just using this much better. I'm going to change this to curveball.

and let's see where he's placing the curveball and where he where was he placing it last year so just toggling this shit right now uh pitch chart curveball loading we'll go over here and we'll load this one and we'll come back a lot of curve balls he's thrown so this year he's throwing it all over the place because he throws the curve ball to righties and to lefties and you know a lot down a lot swing and miss, but he also has thrown some high and he's filled up the zone nicely. Last year, the same thing.

And in 2021, if we care at all, the curveball has kind of replaced the slider in a way, it seems. He's throwing it so much more than the slider. The slider he's using versus lefties because it goes away from them, right? So curveball goes up and down.

So you can throw it to both. batters, lefties and righties because it's more downward break. The fastball you throw to both batters, there's no break. And then you need pitches that go away from the batter. So the slider goes away from the lefty because it's a lefty slider and the change up goes away from the righty because it's

a, you know, it breaks armside run. That's why it works that way. And the curveball's the same. What did I want to look up? The walks. Let's see if we can find splits on I'd love to see like the count how many

how long his average counts are I guess I don't even know if you do pitches per plate appearance for pitchers I know you can do that for hitters full count he's had

165 plate appearances go full I wonder how that compares to last year last year he had 150 full count plate appearances. This year he's 130. So it's actually, he's leaned into it more, I guess, all around. Kind of wild. So he's just dominating in the zone more, just like buckling down more.

Let's see if I can go all pitches or no, we'll see right here. If you look at this page, you can see the exit velocity. It was 90 last year. It's 87 this year. which is his average, average exit velocity 87 miles per hour. But if you look at the hard hit rate, last year is 39% and the year before that's 41%. So, like, I could conclude that he's not giving in if he feels like he's going to lose a batter and he's not going to give in and just like give them a ball that they can tee up. He's going to make every pitch hard to hit.

I have no idea. I have no idea. That's one conclusion. The defense surely helps. Let's look at the batted ball profile. Way more ground balls than last year. Way less fly balls than last year. Line drives are the same.

The change-up seems to surely help. Let's take a look at his pitches. What they actually look like. We'll get a visual. Just get the most recent. Put-away change-up and put-away curveball. Let's see. Jake Berger and Nick Fortez.

in six innings and strikes out burger down the first inning what that was the change up that was a change up i guess i guess so nothing looks like a change up to me looks like a little like cutter or something and here's a curveball to get out fortes he went around yes curveball is more like really darting it's not like a loop it probably tunnels well it almost is more like a slider it just goes down for so what's his slider look like if that's his curveball on three two outman swings and miss did uh for those listening at home i did a a confused dog head tilt um when's this game this game is september 13th i'm going to find a uh september 13 i want the camera angles to be the same i want the camera angles to be the same so it that you can really see the difference of the

movement between the two pitches i'm going to find a slider and a curveball because I'd like to see the difference. It feels like they're very similar. Here's one, a swing strike to James Outman and a curveball, both in the same inning. Okay, so they're labeling these different, even though they're in the same inning. This one's a slider to Outman. On three, two, Outman's. And I, you know, it looks like a slider.

slides. Truly like kind of just like a slider that runs the whole way. No like crazy break to it. Like a sweeper. Just kind of runs. And now here's a curveball. You got to get me a little. Oh, I mean that was.

So I think the first video I watched was just deceptive. Because this is a curveball. Look at, I mean, look at the sharp. That's nasty. Okay. I agree. Anyway, they go. Snell's having an anomaly of his season.

He's upped his change-up percentage. It's back to where it should be. And he's using his change-up versus right. He's his slider versus lefties, his curveball to both, force him fastball. He's saying, fuck it. I allow walks. That's who I am. You deal with it.

And also, he's, like, great with runners on and a good defense behind him. Blake's now. Third topic I took to Twitter to ask you guys if you had any suggestions. So I have no idea what this is going to be. And we're going to go to my tweet. I tweeted at 6 a.m. As I was driving to work and said, I'm recording my three things in an hour. And do you have any 40 replies here?

Let's see. I'm trying to do one that I can like deep dive into baseball reference. So it's got to be one that I don't have to, that I can like, you know, improv right now. I'm pretty new to baseball and the handedness of batterers pitcher is bawling to me. So maybe a deep diamond how much that really matters. I mean, that's boring. Oh, I mean, I half just did that how they have different arsenals. When a lefty throws a sweeper down and away.

Why is the shortstop always covering the middle of the diamond and not in position to field where the ball is thrown? Which is to the hole at shortstop. When a lefty throws a lefty a sweeper. We're going to put this baseball savant video search. This is from Tom Sanyitko. Sanyitko. Okay, so pitcher-handedness lefty.

When a lefty throws a sweeper, pitch type sweeper, down and away. When a lefty, so the, oh, the batter handedness is lefty. So when a lefty throws a lefty, a sweeper, game day zones down. and away so a lefty batter so seven so like seven zone seven 13 okay when a lefty throws a lefty a sweeper down and away why is the shortstop always covering up the middle of diamond and not in position to field where the ball is thrown which is to the hole at shortstop so first let's take a look at this we have the pitcher being a lefty the batter being a lefty, they're throwing a sweeper down and away, okay?

And let's, and let's say that the plate appearance result is that the pitch result is in play, and the batter ball type is a ground ball. So first, let's see where these balls are hit when they're hit, because we can search this. This is any lefty pitcher, any lefty batter, but a sweeper down and away, and we are going to go, by shit, you have to go by like League. Will league give a spray chart? It's hard to get spray charts for this.

Let's see what league gives us. Spray chart. Okay, so here's the league spray chart. When a lefty throws a lefty. So I think Tom's, shit, Tom's question is going to be answered. There's way more balls. So he's saying the shortstop is playing up the middle

than over here. And it looks like if you switch to, if you play the third baseman more centered and the shortstop up the middle, you're going to have the best success. So he's saying, why is the shortstop always covering the middle of the diamond and not in position to field with the ball stone,

which is to the hole at shortstop? So it looks like, I think teams should put their third basement over here and it's very rare. Most of the balls are going here and you want to shift your second baseman over and your shorts up as far as you can go. Like, let's see who got this out right here.

Dom Smith, the check swing. He got the sweet spot on it. Bear hit. So there's your answer, Tom. The spray chart doesn't, if anything, it tells you shift to the center so your shorts up can run over there and cover like this ball. I wonder who fielded this one. Three and two.

Cooper will go from first. Jazz Grounds one to six. second base, babbled by Giorme. Second baseman. So let's see this, though, even further. I think we can do batterball location shortstop, and we can see how many shortstop have fielded a batted ball from a lefty pitcher to a lefty batter that's a sweeper down and away.

There's been three balls fielded. So it just seems more, Tom, that that pitch, that specific pitch, lefty throwing a sweeper to a lefty down and away, the shorty. Shortstop just isn't important at all. It's only been fielded by a shortstop three times. 2-2. On the ground, past bummer, trickling off the second base. Okay, so this one wasn't even fielded by the shortstop.

It was a trickler that the pitcher tried to bear hand. It's slow roller. They're infield in because it's a runner on third one out, and eventually Tim Anderson grabs it, but it wasn't hit to him. It was right up the middle. Lights just turned off in here. Let's see this one. Oh, this is one we already saw.

and it went right is Dom Smith right to the shortstop who is over the middle and this one shortstop feels on the second base side of the bag comes over oh he bobbled it and the runner was safe let's look at uh base hits so all the ones that were hit to the shortstop position i might need to toggle that off we only have one there so let's just it can be hit anywhere So this is lefty pitchers throwing a sweeper to a lefty, down and away, and based hit. Okay, battered ball direction, oppo. So when they do go opo on this pitch, which I get what you're saying, you're saying that they would most likely go with the pitch the other way.

But like, hitters don't do that that much anymore. So that's what stinks about it. This was a double. is just the same one same one that we just saw right off the back Nailer got a double off that ground ball the left fielder let's see

Ali started for the pirates G1B there you go so that's there's one that Tom is upset about if the shortstop's playing normally does he get that one okay let's see

see if there's more because you know what like the shortstop was irrelevant on the other side. He only made a couple plays. If there's more... Like he did last night. There's more blue pits. No, this one's... Well, the third baseman's covering that way.

And that's Freddie Freeman. He's so fucking good. I'm trying to see if there are more that we can... Because we only found three where the shortstop made the play. Now, granted, they were up the middle or on the second bag side. This one's a fucking dribbler by Yordan that they cannot get to in time.

So, uh, I feel like the hits that are given up to that side are just such bad contact. But you're right. That's like what they're trying to induce. That's down the line. And if they were playing normal, the third baseman should have been there. Or like covering the line. He probably is able to get that.

But they're shifting so much. I don't know. I'm starting to agree with you now, Tom. I didn't at first. And now I'm just because like what. Okay. So they shifted and the third baseman made that play. So that one works out.

In the end, I think there's not a big enough. sample size of that specific pitch to that specific batter being it seems like the left side that's a bunt you're not going to play in all right i don't know that very specific pitch is kind of yeah i mean you almost want to play your third baseman like he's going to bunt but you can't like shift that crazily pitch to pitch especially the third baseman uh i don't know that's kind of an interesting query a very specific query of a question by tom that is interesting. What do you guys think?

After looking at all that data, do you play the third baseman normal? Can you shift pitch to pitch that drastically? What do you guys think? Those are Jimmy's three things. Thank you very much for watching. Subscribe to the channel. We're trying to get to 100K before the World Series ends because that would make us feel accomplished, even though that's not true.

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