FanGraphs

You all know the R.A. Dickey story by now. Journeyman major leaguer reinvents himself as a knuckleball thrower in his 30s, then refines the pitch to become one of the better starting pitchers in baseball, culminating with his selection as the National League Cy Young Award winner last year. The knuckleball is always a fascinating [...]

Jun 18, 2013, 1:24 pm EDT via fangraphs.com

In 150 at-bats back in 2011, Brett Lawrie captured our attention and imagination. “If he could hit nine homers in such a short time, Lawrie could have 30-homer potential over the course of a full season,” is likely a sentence you read before the 2012 season. It’s probably a sentence I wrote, as a matter [...]

Jun 14, 2013, 4:30 pm EDT via fangraphs.com

Before R.A. Dickey struck out five Giants over 8.1 innings of scoreless ball in early June, we sat down for a brief second to talk about his health, his knuckler, his new situation, and what he’s learned this year. Eno Sarris: The last time we talked a while back, you were having a great season [...]

Jun 13, 2013, 9:00 am EDT via fangraphs.com

If you interrogate some of the career-best numbers Adam Lind is putting up this year, you get a complicated answer full of maybes and what abouts: he’s swinging less, making more contact, and has a more even batted ball mix. If you interrogate Adam Lind about the numbers he is putting up this year, you [...]

Jun 12, 2013, 9:00 am EDT via fangraphs.com

In 1992, the Reds took Chad Mottola with the fifth-overall pick of the draft. To put it bluntly, he was a bust. The erstwhile outfielder went on to play 16 professional seasons, but nearly all of them were in the minor leagues. He appeared in just 59 games at the big-league level, the last 10 [...]

Jun 6, 2013, 8:00 am EDT via fangraphs.com

Marcus Stroman is back, and he’s back big — at least to the degree a 5-foot-9 pitcher can be described as big. His first performance of the 2013 season certainly was. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays prospect threw five scoreless innings, with six strikeouts, for Double-A New Hampshire on Sunday. Drafted 22nd-overall last year out [...]

May 22, 2013, 8:00 am EDT via fangraphs.com

It’s been well documented that the Toronto Blue Jays’ season hasn’t exactly gone as planned. A rash of injuries to the veteran pitching staff has created a number of holes. Those gaps have been difficult to fill with competent contributors because the organizational depth was compromised in an effort to beef up the big league [...]

May 20, 2013, 4:00 pm EDT via fangraphs.com

The 2013 season is still in its infancy but two organizations have already faced more than their fair share of struggles in their minor league systems. The Texas Rangers entered the year with one of the better systems in baseball, while the Toronto Blue Jays fell somewhere in the middle after nearly gutting the system [...]

May 14, 2013, 3:00 pm EDT via fangraphs.com

Knuckleballers aren’t like other pitchers, or so the saying goes. Their pitches flutter like butterflies, they pitch at less than max effort, they don’t depend on velocity, and they can pitch into their fifties. All of these things seem true, and yet the more we know about knuckleballers the more they might actually be more [...]

May 14, 2013, 9:00 am EDT via fangraphs.com

J.A. Happ got hit in the head by a line-drive comebacker. When the same thing happened to Doug Fister, he got lucky; when the same thing happened to Brandon McCarthy, he also got lucky, if you understand that “luck” can go both ways, like “accelerate.” Happ is fortunate in that he seems to be doing [...]

May 8, 2013, 5:21 pm EDT via fangraphs.com