Pitching Grips

Arianna Grainey-Imagn Images Ceddanne Rafaela has a weak arm. He also has a strong arm. This is an analysis I’ve wanted to do for a while. It’s not that important or complicated, and most of it is fairly obvious. But it gets at something that comes up from time to time in the various places baseball is discussed online. The conversation tends to start like this: Team A should sign Player X and move him to a new position. Inevitably, one of the first questions asked about such a plan is whether Player X has the arm strength to play that new position. The number that gets cited to “yay” or “nay” such a follow-up is arm strength, in miles per hour. But ask any baseball fan to sit with this for a moment, and they’ll raise a concern. Arm strength, to some degree, is a function of position. A third baseman has a longer throw to make than a second baseman. A right fielder has a longer throw to make than a left fielder. This means players with better arms tend to play those positions, as w...

The current standings between the two leagues are quite lopsided entering the second full week of May. Just three teams in the American League have winning records, while all five clubs in the NL Central are above .500. Then again, that division, which was not supposed to be all that strong entering the season, is doing a lot to prop up the National League as a whole; seven of the remaining 10 teams in the Senior Circuit have losing records. Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system . If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section , you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds. (Specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum o...

Kai-Wei Teng had a limited repertoire when he signed with the Minnesota Twins out of Taiwan in 2017. The right-hander from Taichung possessed just a fastball and a curveball. A lot has changed since that time. Now 27 years old and pitching for the Houston Astros, Teng attacks hitters with a five-pitch mix that includes a sweeper that is not only hard to hit, it is no fun to be on the receiving end of in catch-play. “It’s insanely good,” Spencer Arrighetti told me last weekend at Fenway Park. “I throw a sweeper. Lance [McCullers] throws a sweeper. We have a couple of other guys who toy around with it. But Teng’s is incredible. Truly. I played catch with him, and it looks like a fastball for 48 feet, then takes a 90-degree left turn. Not all sweepers are created equal. Some of them are a little loopier and bigger, but his is 85 mph. I mean, it’s gross. It really is a great pitch.” The numbers back that up. Teng has relied on his most-used offering 36.3% of the time this s...

Kirby Lee-Imagn Images One of my biggest regrets in the years I’ve been covering baseball is that I never got John Sterling’s list. You see, in addition to our mutual love of baseball, Sterling shared my appreciation for film noir. I don’t remember how it came up, but I learned of Sterling’s noir kick in the summer of 2023, when Yankees beat writer Chris Kirschner, of The Athletic , suggested I talk to the longtime Yankees radio broadcaster about it. I had never met Sterling before, but the next day in the Yankee Stadium press box dining room, I introduced myself. He was so excited to know that this 27-year-old kid also loved noir, and he immediately asked me what my favorites were. Right away, I rattled off In a Lonely Place , Out of the Past , and Double Indemnity , which looking back on it, must have made me seem like a noir novice, as if I said my three favorite Springsteen songs were “Born to Run,” “Born in the USA,” and “Dancing in ...