Puzzles

Carson Williams is a highly touted prospect in the Rays system with an interesting offensive profile who has been able to produce offensively during his minor league career despite running consistently high strikeout rates at every level. While the strikeout rates have been getting slightly better over time, should there be concern that the high swing-and-miss might prevent Williams from living up to his 60-grade Future Value projection (Fangraphs)?

About a month ago on an episode of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh noted that the ability to draw walks as a minor league player has diminishing value as that player gets promoted to the major league level because pitchers have much better strike-throwing ability.

Should we expect a dropoff in productive batted ball profiles, from an angles perspective, for minor league hitters when they make the jump to face major league pitching in their first full stint?

How often have we seen Major League hitters with a groundball-heavy batted ball profile make significant changes to their approach?

There’s been some interesting research done recently on pitcher release angles, horizontal and vertical (HRA and VRA), in quantifying a pitcher’s ability to locate their pitches well, as well as better explaining individual pitch performance.

Lately I’ve been thinking about hitters with platoon splits, and what factors are proving most influential in causing a hitter to struggle versus same-side pitching. Specifically, I wondered whether there were certain pitch shapes that platoon hitters struggled against more than others.

A couple of questions to follow-up from the most recent post…..

When reading another Fangraphs piece a while back highlighting Cole Ragans, I was intrigued by a note from Ben Clemens's analysis of Ragans's Changeup and the belief that it, despite no way to quantify it, was helping the rest of the arsenal. This led me to wondering how often pitches perform better relative to expectation as a result of effects from one "signature" pitch in an arsenal?

Earlier this week, Ben Clemens from Fangraphs wrote an interesting piece highlighting the velocity differential between Kevin Gausman's four-seam fastball in two-strike counts versus in all other counts. In the piece, Clemens poses an interesting question about how this velocity boost impacts performance in these counts. The uptick has been a trend throughout Gausman's career, yet year-to-year results have shown different outcomes as reflected in the pitch's RV/100. While Clemens focuses on other matters in his post, and a follow-up post later in the week, I found this performance fluctuation to be particularly interesting and was interested in exploring what, if any, trends might exist in helping us understand what factors contribute in determining whether Gausman's fastball is successful in two-strike counts within a given year.