Parker Hageman

Carlos Correa’s recent surge has been refreshing, and it’s going against the modern trends of hitting. Image courtesy of © Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports Josh Donaldson is arguably the poster child for the new era of hitting. In an interview on MLB Network back in 2016, he explained his entire approach. “If you're ten years old and your coach tells you to get on top of the ball, tell him no,” Donaldson said emphatically, staring into the Studio 42 camera. “Because in the big leagues, these things that they call ‘ground balls’ are outs. They don’t pay you for ground balls.” Donaldson was coming off an MVP season with the Blue Jays, and he won the award by air raiding the entire league. He was second in the American League in slugging and third in home runs. He led the league in both runs scored and runs batted in. Elevating the baseball paid him handsomely. Most hitters and organizational philosophies agreed. In today’s game, we see fewer ground balls than ever before. Apparently, those 10-year-olds (along with everyone else) listened to Donaldson. In 2024, just 42.9% of all batted balls in play have been the ground-ball variety – the lowest rate in the last 30 years. While the league attempted to spice up the game by eradicating defensive shifts and biggie-sizing the bases, the results have mostly stayed the same in the new environment. In 2016, when teams could stack their infield to the pull side and gobble up any worm-burner ball headed their way, players had a batting average on ground balls in play of .246. All that maneuvering resulted in (or at least failed to prevent) an even lower batting average on ground balls: .242 this year. It would seem foolish for anyone to lean into this mess. But that’s exactly what Carlos Correa has done. Often, when you start to see players heat up, you’ll find a common trend of them elevating the baseball more, hitting the ball harder, or pulling the ball more frequently. Pulled, hard-hit line drives and fly balls result in more home runs and extra bases. It's the signature and symbol of the Twins' approach. That’s not what happened with Correa, however. View full article

Rerick is a really interesting prospect. He really hasn't done the thorough offseason development programs a lot of the elite prep pitchers do so you could say there's go to be some more in the tank. He's got a bit of the babyface yet so you could see him making another push. I scouted him in May and he was as advertised. He was still in the low 90s during his last inning of work. It's pretty solid.

It's also a tactic to "save" passed balls/wild pitches. Frawley talked about that strategy a little bit in the article linked above: I can't tell you if this is happening with Jeffers -- if you just look at the photo above, he appears to be in the same depth as he was in 2021. League wide, however, we've see a big drop in the number of passed balls allowed (even with the one-knee set-up!). From 2014 through 2021 (excluding the shortened 2020 season), catchers averaged 354 passed balls per season. Starting in 2022, that dropped to 231 and was 232 last year. This year's pace is set to be even lower than that. Wild pitches are also down about 200 per season in the last two years. 10 years ago catcher called fastballs at a 57% clip. That's down to 47% this year. In theory, with pitches with more spin, there should be more balls in the dirt. If a catcher is further up toward the plate, there is less of a chance that ball hits the dirt. The other factor for this is that a lot of the decline in passed balls/wild pitches happened after pitch com was introduced, theoritically eliminating more of the cross-ups that might happen when a catcher is throwing down longer sign sequences.

Parker breaks down how the Twins are setting up catcher Ryan Jeffers to frame pitches. View full video

There's been a shift in the state of the art of pitch framing, having everything to do with where you set up to wait for the ball. The Twins are on the cutting edge of it, especially with the man they hope is their catcher of the medium-term future. Image courtesy of © Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports If you log onto the World Wide Web and check out the 2024 Catcher Framing Leaderboard on Baseball Savant, you must scroll pretty far down to find Minnesota Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers. It's been a slow slide down that leaderboard since 2021, when he was near the top of the list, saving the team two runs in the process. But his downward trajectory isn't all his fault: the Twins have instructed catchers in the organization to sit middle-middle, presenting prominent targets. This somewhat counters the bottomfeeder ethos introduced by Tanner Swanson. The Twins catchers were encouraged to get under the ball and get it back toward the middle of the zone, thus blurring the edges of the strike zone for pitches at or near the bottom. Swanson moved on to the New York Yankees organization, and his successor, Tucker Frawley, leaned into the philosophy that catchers should set up middle-middle to present a clear target well within the borders of the strike zone for the pitcher. This method diverted from trying to nab pitches on the corners to some degree. Framing is still very much a practice the Twins emphasize in their receiving methods – catchers will still pull pitches toward the middle of the zone – but the newer practice centers on the idea that pitchers will miss less when aiming directly at the center of the zone. Research shows that even the most elite pitchers in the league do not have the precision we like to believe. Many readers will swear Greg Maddux had command so fine he could hit a penny off a hummingbird's back, but most pitchers regularly miss their intended targets by up to two baseballs’ diameters. If a catcher is set up on the edges of the zone, this could mean pitches wind up in non-competitive areas. The concepts of framing and targeting are intertwined. Both are mainly trying to increase the margins in favor of the defense, and to flip counts. By setting up middle-middle, the defensive side is hedging that they will be able to increase the number of favorable counts by having their pitchers throw more in-zone strikes – even if they miss their intended target. While a catcher might gain strikes by providing targets or setting up on the corners or bottom of the strike zone, pitchers may lose more strikes by egregiously missing their spot. No amount of showmanship behind the plate will win a strike that bounces on the way there. View full article

What I think is interesting about this change is that the Twins basically moved him back to his natural slot. It goes to the notion that he was coached out of it at some point in the minor leagues.

you are wrong. respectfully.

Parker Hageman breaks down how pitchers are approaching Byron Buxton differently this season and why it's leading to an astronomical swing-and-miss rate. View full video

I think most hitters in today's era will tell you that it's not that simple. Even Joey VOTTO says that earlier in his career he was able to do it more when pitchers used to front hip sinker left-handed hitters with high 80s/low 90s pitches, but that attack method has gone away with more velocity and spin. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/sports/baseball/foul-balls.html Plus, it's not really a sustainable skill among hitters. Even Luis Arraez's 2-strike foul rate fluctuates 3-4% each year and this year it's up and he's also got his highest 2-strike swing-and-miss rate of his career (13%).

Was going to do a short blurb on this topic but Matthew covers it well. The main reason for his passivity is that teams are targeting the lower third of the strike zone on him: If you go back to the Caretakers post I did at the end of spring training, Julien told me that he's basically spitting on pitches that are down, regardless of if they are in the zone or not. You can read that conversation here 👇 You can see here his 2024 swing rate: When you combine where teams are pitching him and where he's swinging, he's getting himself behind in the count and also rung up on pitches down in the zone. He's at a point where he likely needs to make a decision about whether he tries to swing at more pitches down in the zone or delivers on pitches up in the zone more often.

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Spring training is full of little victories. For Chris Paddack, making a pitch move three inches to the left made him very happy, and now, he gets the chance to convert that into the bigger victories that come in the regular season. For most of the spring, Paddack would throw his slider with a typical grip along the horseshoe of a baseball and try to manipulate the ball by pulling down on the side. This resulted in inconsistent glove-side movement. The new grip would be similar to a two-seam fastball, but with a notable difference – he moved his thumb up the side of the ball. View full article

The pull heavy approach certainly was a weakness for him. It wasn’t just about distance traveled, it was also about not being to drive outside pitches away. Most power is to the pull side, true, (“It’s the quickest way off the field,” Dozier told me in 2017) but when you have a pull heavy approach, you leave yourself open to pitches on the outer-third which was a huge probably for him in his final year with the Twins. It cuts both ways in your argument. Dozier’s rookie season was not great and he continued to improve. Most hitters make strides. There are plenty of rookie hitters that take steps back but, again, to Julien’s point, if hitters 4-5 years ago did not have the same scrutiny that today’s hitters do in terms of analytics teams coming up with new plans of attack. So where a rookie hitter 7 years ago might not get that league-wide treatment until year 2, rookies now get that almost from week-to-week. To me, Julien has shown elite levels of plate discipline at a rookie level and strong exit rates on pitches in his zone/count. I’d hedge bets that those traits play well going forward. I’m not discounting your point about outperforming his expected numbers. It has merit. Plus, he could get more treatment of left-handed relievers this year (like teams did against Miranda at the end of 2022) and exploit some of his weaknesses (down in the zone)

Couple of thoughts: Why wouldn't there be more in the tank for Julien? He's coming off his first year in the league. He outperformed his batted ball expected metrics but certainly not by a margin that was out of the norm. Dozier, compared to Julien, was a one dimensional hitter. Dozier tried to exclusively pull the ball down the left field line. He did this successful for multiple seasons but it eventually caught up to him, either because he tried to pull too many pitches he shouldn't have or because teams exploited this tendency and he refused to adjust. Regardless, Julien has much more hitterish tendencies than Dozier did. Final thought, I do believe a lot of what Julien said about experiencing teams adjusting in his rookie season. I also think front offices now have had an entire offseason to design an attack plan. So he might be seeing something different this year. That said, he's extremely good at spitting at pitches not in his zone and pitchers are not *that* good at hitting their spots.

If you arrive late to a ball game, you might miss an opportunity to witness Edouard Julien’s biggest offensive attributes. Image courtesy of © Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports On Saturday, as a solid volume of people were making their way to their assigned section at JetBlue Park in Ft. Myers, Edouard Julien dug into the batter’s box, destroying the painstaking work of turning the home plate area into a clean slate that six grounds crew members completed just 15 minutes earlier. Almost as soon as he entered the box, Julien was running out of it, having deposited Nick Pivetta’s first pitch of the game cleanly into right field for a base hit. In his next two at-bats, Julien followed the same script: He swung at a first-pitch curveball and then a first-pitch slider. The results were not the same as his opening at-bat: he fouled off the curveball and bounced the slider harmlessly to Enmanuel Valdez at second. Following the game, Rocco Baldelli was asked why the trend has gone away from the patient, count-working approach by leadoff hitters. “The pitching is so good,” he said. “If you get a really good pitch to hit on the first pitch of the bat, you better freaking swing at it, because you may get nothing like that again the rest of the bat.” But Julien doesn’t just "freaking swing at it;" he impacts it. He’s becoming an ambush artist: a patient but lethal assailant. From a fundamental standpoint, Julien’s swing is somewhat atypical for a left-handed hitter. A high percentage of lefties have shown the tendency to drive fastballs in the lower third for power. Think of Ken Griffey Jr’s swing. Overall, lefties slugged .455 on fastballs in the lower third. Julien, meanwhile, posted a .108 slugging percentage on those same pitches. On the plus side, while the rest of his lefty-swinging brethren slugged .387 against fastballs up in the zone, he drives those pitches better than average (.468). Of course, like most hitters, Julien also makes meals out of being thrown pitches in the middle third (.345/.389/.642) and it’s where he produces the most hard contact (50% of contact is 95+ MPH). So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when Julien enters the batter’s box, this is almost exclusively his first-pitch swing location. View full article

very underrated arm.

2-for-9 with a double this spring.

Fort Myers, FL – The Minnesota Twins announce that they have sent infielder Brooks Lee to minor league camp. Lee, Twins Daily’s number 2 ranked prospect, left Thursday’s game against the Nationals with back spasms. He will be looked at by the Twins’ training staff to determine the next course of action. His reassignment is unrelated to the injury but he is unlikely to play in any games between now and the start of the regular season. “I think he had a better than a good camp,” Rocco Baldelli said of Brooks Lee’s spring performance. “I think he had a great camp. He showed us that he can go out there and play shortstop. He left everyone with an excellent feeling with his time here.” The switch-hitting infielder hit .333/.351/.611 with seven extra base hits in 13 Grapefruit League games this spring. He made some modifications to his swing that have produced favorable results. The Twins’ roster is now down to 40 players in camp. View full article