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When Is a Slump a Slump?
You probably know that Aaron Judge has not hit a home run since banging two of them on Aug. 25 against the Rockies. That’s 16 games ago, and over those 16 games, he’s hitting .207/.352/.359 and the Yankees are exactly .500 and have lost series to the Rangers, Cardinals and Nationals.
The sane reaction to this is: Sure, OK, every hitter slumps. Heck, the first 27 games of this season, Judge hit just .178 with four home runs, and he looked pretty helpless. He then went on a 102-game run for the ages: He hit .377/.506/.944 with 47 home runs, 109 RBIs and 86 walks. Considering how the game has changed, that’s even BETTER than Barry Bonds in his prime.
There’s nothing to see here. He’ll probably hit four homers tonight.
Thing is… this is officially the longest homerless streak of Judge’s career. He had a 15-game homerless streak in 2017, his rookie season, and he had a couple of 14-game homerless streaks in 2018 and 2019. So it’s not exactly out of character… but it is a little bit longer. And look, with Judge, he’s 6-foot-7 and close to 300 pounds, he’s 32 years old, he’s playing centerfield most days, you do have to wonder if he’s a little bit worn out. The Yankees have not given him a day off since June 19 (though they do occasionally DH him).
It’s never good to overreact—Judge has hit the ball pretty hard at times during this slump and, like I say, he might hit four home runs tonight. But, look, Yankees fans are well aware that he has not performed well in his last three postseasons—he’s hitting .143 with no doubles and five home runs in 77 plate appearances—and while the Yankees obviously want to win the division and get the bye (they’re now two games up over the slumping Orioles), what they need in October is a healthy and locked-in Aaron Judge.
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The Gift that Keeps on Giving
It looks like the woman who is suing Deshaun Watson, alleging that he sexually assaulted her during a date in 2020, will meet with the NFL in the next couple of weeks.
“I’ve personally never had confidence in the NFL’s disciplinary process,” her lawyer, Tony Buzbee, told ESPN, “but my client has chosen to engage in it.”
Watson, through his attorney, has denied the allegations, denied even knowing about it, even though Buzbee’s team asserts that they have been trying to privately settle this lawsuit for 10 months. Browns coach Kevin Stefanski says Watson will definitely start on Sunday against Jacksonville, and that the 27th sexual misconduct complaint against Watson will not distract him or the team. “We concern ourselves with our opponent,” our guy Stefanski said.
Gotcha.
Pitch Values!
I thought it would be fun to use Baseball Savant to look at the very best hitters in baseball against every pitch. So, here we go!
Fastballs
Aaron Judge, .511 wOBA
Juan Soto, .488 wOBA
Joc Pederson, .469 wOBA
Mark Vientos, .438 wOBA
Brent Rooker, .437 wOBA
Not too many surprises here—you don’t want to throw fastballs to the heart of the Yankees lineup, that’s for sure. I actually started this little section because I was noticing the way that Rooker DESTROYS fastballs. He’s doing it for Oakland, so almost nobody’s noticing, but Rooker is hitting .298/.370/.580 with 36 home runs this year. There are a bunch of teams all around baseball kicking themselves for not picking this guy up.
Also, let’s give it up for the Mets’ Mark Vientos, who is our nominee for the 2024 Pedro Cerrano Award. Straight ball, he hit it very much—slugging .652 on fastballs and .600 on off-speed stuff. Curveballs, though, bats are afraid. He’s hitting .176 and slugging .359 on the curves.
Because Baseball Savant is so awesome, you can actually break it down even further.
Juan Soto (.507 wOBA) is the best in baseball against four-seam fastballs.
Willson Contreras (.553 wOBA) is actually the best against sinking, two-seam fastballs, though Judge isn’t far behind (and has seen a lot more two-seamers).
Joc Pederson (.616 wOBA) unloads on cutters.
Offspeed
Yordan Alvarez, .453 wOBA
Aaron Judge, .453 wOBA
Shohei Ohtani, .450 wOBA
Alec Burleson, .439 wOBA
Ezequiel Tovar, .411 wOBA
You’re just not going to fool Yordan. I think that’s his superpower. Sure, he’ll unload on pretty much everything, but he’s just so absurdly balanced at the plate that he can be looking fastball and instantly adjust and blast your offspeed offering to the moon.
Here’s the breakdown of the offspeed pitches:
Kyle Tucker is the best against changeups (.599 wOBA).
You’re not going to want to throw split-fingered fastballs to Bobby Witt Jr. (.585 wOBA). The top four against splitters are Witt, Judge, Shohei and Yordan.
Statcast has a special category for forkballs and screwballs, but they’re thrown so rarely that it’s barely worth mentioning. Brandon Marsh has somehow faced five screwballs this year (he hasn’t put any of them in play) and four forkballs (he crunched one).
Curveballs
William Contreras, .508 wOBA
Gunnar Henderson, .499 wOBA
Jesse Winker, .444 wOBA
José Ramirez, .443 wOBA
Corey Seager, .438 wOBA
Shohei Ohtani is next after the top five and Aaron Judge is eighth, so don’t think that they’re slugs against curves.
José Ramirez is one of the best curveball hitters in baseball and has been for a long time. He’s been pounding curveballs more or less every year since he came up. And yet, because he’s so good against the fastball, pitchers still throw him a higher percentage of curves than they do most of the other top hitters. He’s just a pick-your-poison kind of hitter.
Sliders
Christian Yelich, .472 wOBA
Cal Raleigh, .452 wOBA
Vladimir Guerrero .444 wOBA
Gunnar Henderson, .432 wOBA
Bobby Witt Jr., .421 wOBA
Once again, Ohtani and Judge are in the top 10—there’s simply no way to pitch to those guys. But pitchers might want to throw a few more sliders to Juan Soto. He’s hitting just .171 against sliders… but there’s a good reason for that. He almost never swings at one. Soto’s ability to recognize pitches is so otherworldly that when he sees a slider coming, he just spits on it. If the slider somehow ends up being called a strike, he’s OK with that—tip your cap to a great pitch. But he’s not going to get himself out going out of the zone. That’s how you average 132 walks a year over four seasons.*
*Soto has led the league in walks in each of the last three seasons, but this year he’s in a battle—at the moment his 118 walks is one behind his teammate Judge.
“And When You Speak of Me, Speak Well.”
Are you following this wild story revolving around Twins prospect Derek Bender? He was Minnesota’s sixth-round pick out of Coastal Carolina this year, and, apparently, while playing for Fort Myers in the second game of a doubleheader last Friday, he told multiple hitters on the Lakeland Flying Tigers what pitches starter Ross Dunn would be throwing.
After the game, the Lakeland coaches alerted the Fort Myers staff. I’m actually surprised that the home plate umpire didn’t say anything, but, anyway, Bender was benched for the final two games of the year, and the Twins released him on Thursday.
As I write this, nobody has reported with any conviction what Bender’s motivations were. The best guess so far doesn’t relate to gambling, but instead suggests that he just wanted the season to end. Fort Myers was in position to go to the playoffs, and I’ve seen some reporting that Bender was homesick. They were comfortably up in their division but then lost a few games in a row and the game in question was pivotal to Fort Myers or Lakeland making the postseason. Bender gave up what pitches were coming. Lakeland won the game 6-0.
Obviously, the first thing any of us thought of when we heard this story was the scene where Crash Davis gets ticked off at Nuke Laloosh for shaking him off.
Crash: Throwing a two-hit shutout, and he’s shaking me off, can you believe that [bleep]? Charlie, here comes the deuce, and when you speak of me, speak well.
[Nuke looks in for the sign].
Crash: Nah, nah, serve it up.
Nuke: Yeah.
[Nuke throws the curve. Charlie blasts it for a home run to rightfield. Crash walks to the mound.]
Nuke: You told him I was going to throw a deuce, right?
Crash: Yep. Man, that ball got outta here in a hurry. Anything that travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don’t you think?
I guess the “Bull Durham” version is funnier.
Around the Horn