Here's how we know that Christian Yelich is (mostly) back.
We also take a look at the undeniably unique and equally painful time that is the Alex Colome Experience.
Happy Tuesday, fellow rich people.
In case you missed it, one of the biggest sports stories over the weekend was an alleged fake high school played in a nationally-televised football game on ESPN against the top team in the country. Just check this out for the SparkNotes:
This got me to thinking….how hard would it be for Tom, Jake and myself to shed a few el-bees, shave, get a haircut, make a TikTok account and join a local U18 select baseball team under fake names? And how would we perform against a bunch of high schoolers for an entire summer? Jake and Tom would probably have a better shot considering they play for the Mud Hens, an unbeatable squad of elite athletes in an adult baseball league around the Twin Cities. Could any of us play well enough to get some desperate low-level college coach to see if we wanted to play for them? Could we pay off the pitchers to give us meatballs to make our stats look better? (Considering in this hypothetical we are already paying far too much money for baseball equipment, training, team fees, travel fees and fake IDs, clearly money isn’t an issue in this scenario.) Could we hire a couple of 24 year-olds who actually did play in college with an actual chance to mash 17-year-old pitching to do this and crowdsource funds on the World Wide Web as a way to show just how wild the world of private sports can be? Does anyone else sit there at night and think about how great it would be if Culver’s had a dollar menu?
Let’s converse.
Alex Colome, not a friend of mine
~Jake
Monday afternoon, Alex Colome nearly blew another save. The most surprising part of that sentence is probably the nearly part, at least if you’ve followed the Twins at all this year.
His ninth inning started easily enough; he forced groundouts from Detroit’s Jeimer Candelario and Miguel Cabrera paving the way for Eric Haase. Admittedly, I thought to myself that Haase, a rookie catcher who has run into 19 homers this year, was sure to ruin a pleasant Monday by parking this one beyond the Little Caesars-decorated fence. Instead, Haase dribbled a ball to Colome’s right, where the veteran pitcher fielded it and threw it approximately three Miguel Sanos too high.
Unfortunately for Colome’s statline, the play went down as a single, bringing Harold Castro to the dish. Castro bounced one right in front of Colome, who once again overthrew the 6-foot-4 Sano. It was a mind-boggling display of lacking athleticism. That play jumped the Tigers’ win expectancy from 10.4% to 20.9%, which feels low, honestly. That led to the game’s highest leverage moment, though, with old friend Robbie “Don’t Call Me Rex” Grossman coming to the dish.
Grossman flew out to Max Kepler to end the game and Colome earned his 10th save of the year. With most relievers, it would be easy to laugh it off and move on to the next game. With Colome, though, it’s just one time where luck went his way in a season where everything has gone wrong.
Some of the surface numbers don’t look as bad as it might seem; his ERA is only 4.35, for instance. That’s not what you want from your big offseason relief signing, but it’s hardly disastrous.
What is devastating, though, is his performance in close games. It’s been downright Conjuring 2. After Monday’s save, he’s up to 10 saves in 16 tries. Six blown saves sure feels like a whole heck of a lot when you’ve only had 16 opportunities but it’s not the worst--(Look away Brewers fans)--Brent Suter has eight blown saves and only one save. Nevertheless, those six blown saves (and his four losses) have felt talismanic for this dreadful Twins season.
It all started with his first appearance for Minnesota when he blew a save in the season opener against the Brewers. He turned a 5-2 scoreline into a tie game largely by throwing away a would-be double play ball into centerfield. (Moreover on that play, with a three-run lead and one out, you can just take the sure out at first and keep the tying run on deck!) Sensing a theme yet?
He ended up with three unearned runs in that game, which hardly feels fair when you’re the one who threw the ball away. Nine days later, he turned a 2-2 game against Seattle into a 3-2 game in the eighth inning and the following day he gave up four hits and three runs in just one-third of an inning for another blown save. Another 10 days later, he blew another save then was tagged with a loss in his next appearance. By the end of April, he had allowed runs in six of his nine appearances.
This is old news, I know. He’s been a bit better in the second half of the season, posting a 3.50 ERA in 18 innings pitched (prior to Monday’s game) and has allowed just a .209 batting average. The reason for the article now, though, is because the bad Colome is returning. Since Aug. 18, he’s blown two save opportunities and recorded three saves, including Monday’s rollercoaster.
He now sits with the second-worst win probability added among all relievers (-1.72) and is rocking an abysmal -1.0 bWAR. That bWAR feels low but is somehow merely the fourth worst mark by a Twins pitcher this year (Matt Shoemaker and JA Happ each sit at the bottom of that particular table with -1.9 bWAR apiece).
Colome has always been a guy living on the wire as a low-strikeout, high-walk pitcher. That wire is always going to sna when your stuff disappears. Colome is just a two-pitch pitcher and both are registering their lowest pitch values of his career. He’s thrown a cutter 67% of the time this year, and it’s been worth just 0.4 runs in 2021, well below his 6.1 mark in 2020 and his 10.7 mark in 2019. His four-seam fastball has been completely useless, registering -7.1 runs in 2021, the fifth-worst mark in baseball. That’s a marked drop from last year’s 0.7 total. It’s not like he has a third pitch that he could throw more and his primary pitch is far from elite. He’s stuck with what he has, at least for this year. He may want to look at adding back a curveball or a changeup, pitches he hasn’t thrown since 2016.
Whether or not he adds another pitch will likely be the choice of another team as Colome’s deal expires at the end of this season with a mutual option for 2022, which the Twins will surely decline regardless of the $1.25 million buyout. This needs to happen for my well-being, if for nothing else. There are a lot of stats that can tell you whether a reliever is good or not. There’s also something to say about how you feel when you see a reliever enter the game, though. For all his huffing and puffing, I was always confident in Joe Nathan. When Colome enters the game, I feel how Nathan looked. The numbers back that feeling up, of course, but the feeling is what lingers. That’s why we care and it’s why my heart can’t handle any more Alex Colome. He’s done irreparable damage to my heart. I need it to stop.
Christian Yelich has found it
~Curt
As I sat down to type this Monday night, Chrisitan Yelich ripped a 101 mph liner to right for a double in the first inning. That feels like a good omen.
But what feels like even better of an omen is the fact that Yelich has been producing results akin to that for nearly the entirety of August.
We’ve seen what a Yelich Breakout looks like in both numbers, batted-ball results and mechanics in the past...and, folks, this sure looks a whole lot like what we’ve seen in those instances.
Let’s start with the numbers.
Entering Monday night’s game, Yelich was 23 for his last 64 (.359) with two homers and a .950 OPS. He extended his hitting streak to nine games with that first-inning double, which was his 13th hit in his last 30 at-bats.
The walk rate is a bit down from what we’ve come to get used to with Yelich, with just six walks in his last 77 plate appearances, but the trade-off in patience has come in the form of a more aggressive Yelich--and after being arguably too selective throughout the past 12 months, this is a good thing.
Yelich has swung at 46% of pitches over the last three weeks. Before that? Less than 39%. Since August 12, Yelich is 10th in baseball in exit velocity. Before that, he was 112th. Now, exit velo is generally not all that predictive, but Yelich’s best seasons have come when his exit velo is highest.
Perhaps even more importantly, Yelich’s average launch angle has jumped from four degrees up to 10 degrees over the last three weeks. Hitting the ball hard has rarely been the primary issue for Yelich, but, when he was struggling to find his way during stretches of the 2021 campaign, it was often because he was pounding everything into the ground. This is nothing groundbreaking; fly balls, on average, do much more damage than grounders. Yelich is an interesting case because he is a high-BABIP (batting average on balls in play) hitter and that’s thanks in large part due to his high grounder rates mixed with good exit velocity and plus speed. But he is also one of the best in the game at getting the most out of his fly balls, so to speak.
Yelich’s fly ball rates are still relatively low save for a July spike against breaking pitches (as shown below), but he has seen a bit of a spike in line drives, which explains the majority of the launch angle increase.
The home runs have really been all that’s lacking during the current breakout, but there are signs that they are close. 39 of the 56 balls Yelich has put in play over the last three weeks have been hit over 90 mph. Anecdotally, too, it seems like there have been a couple handfuls worth of pitches where Yelich is just a tick off from sending the ball 410 feet, like the sac fly below that was about a half-inch away from being a salami.
Any big league hitter’s swing is about timing, but Yelich’s is really about timing. He’s not the biggest or strongest guy, but he has the ability to generate great amounts of power from his leverage, torque and balance.
Take a look at the swing on his double in the first inning of Monday night’s game. Yelich’s upper body is ever so slightly early on the off-speed pitch, yet he still manages to keep the ball fair by keeping his hands in and spanking it 101 mph. The timing is there.
The biggest advantage that the Brewers have yet to fully unlock this season is a locked-in Yelich for an extended period of time. The elements are all there for a late-season run by a player who can be one of the elite hitters in baseball. If it comes around, the Brewers will be even tougher to beat in October.
Some Random Notes
~Curt
I had some unbudgeted extra time on my hands on Monday afternoon, so I spent it looking up baseball things online. These are, as advertised, random.
-Scooter Gennett (.490 OPS) has the lowest career OPS against lefties as a Brewers for any player with at least 150 PA. Speaking of Gennett, it’s harder to find many players whose careers are as interesting. He posted a 123 OPS+ in 2017, a 125 OPS+ and was named an All-Star in 2018, then appeared in 42 games the following year and hasn’t returned since. He appears to be coaching youth baseball now.
-Yovani Gallardo had a higher OPS against lefties while playing for the Brewers than Craig Counsell. But Counsell is one of just 14 players since 2000 to post a .750+ OPS, 2.5+ WAR season age 38 or older. The others: Barry Bonds, Edgar Martinez, Rafael Palmeiro, Steve Finley, Moises Alou, Gary Sheffield, Jim Thome, Chipper Jones, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, Adrian Beltre and Nelson Cruz.
-Brad Boxberger is excellent at something I never figured he would be excellent at: chucking the ball right down the middle and getting hitters to miss. Boxberger has gotten whiffs on 23 fastballs middle-middle this year. That marks 2.5% of all his pitches this year, the highest percentage in baseball. The whiff percentage specifically out of all pitches down the middle is 27.1%, the fourth-highest mark in baseball. (Interestingly enough, JP Feyereisen is No. 1 and Josh Hader is No. 2). Boxberger isn’t fooling hitters outside the zone with a chase rate in the first percentile and only had eight combined middle-middle whiffs across 2019 and 2020. I’d love to know if the Brewers saw the potential for this when they signed him to a minors deal in the off-season.
-Devin Williams’ current 20.3 K/9 in August is the highest single-month mark for any Brewers reliever ever (min. 3 IP).
-In 1978, John Grubb had a 137 OPS+ on the season, but in 43 plate appearances against the Brewers he batted .075/.119/.150
-Willians Astudillo, as the readers of this here newsletter well know, does not strike out. He has been set down on strikes just 25 times in his career. In 502 plate appearances. This does not happen to him, like, ever. Yet Aaron Ashby’s filthiness made it happen.
