Personally, I experienced the news mostly as a longtime Cubs fan, for whom Kasper has become a staple of spring and summer. Neither football nor basketball fans can fully understand what a great local broadcaster means to an MLB team, especially once they’ve been in place for over a decade, but this is a community of baseball lovers, so I need hardly explain it to you. 

A broadcaster has an exponentially gentler aging curve than a player. There’s no default expectation that a broadcaster will move on, at some point, the way a player inevitably will. Most importantly, a broadcaster’s career can stretch three times as long as even the most durable player’s. For all of those reasons, a broadcaster can first shape, then refine, then embody a fan culture, changing the very fabric of a franchise across three generations. 

Kasper’s unpretentious wit, threaded with his intimate knowledge of both the history and the modern makeup of the game; makes him a great game-caller. He keeps the game at the center of his show, but lets in enough levity and breadth of interest to keep dry or low-stakes contests lively. He balances a decorous style and objective eye with an unfeigned emotional connection to his subject, which lets fans feel that he wants the team to win (almost) as much as they do. In short, I view him as the best play-by-play broadcaster in baseball, save possibly Tigers radio man Dan Dickerson, and (for the very reasons given above) we should pay as much attention to a broadcaster of that stature changing teams as we do to players, managers, and executives doing the same.

For 16 years, Kasper and his partners (first, Bob Brenly, and then Jim Deshaies, who was perhaps the pitch-perfect fit for Kasper’s style) kept the Cubs watchable in bad years, and made them thoroughly likable in good times. At all times, Kasper was a bulwark against mounting pressure for a historically unique and almost countercultural franchise to assimilate into a corporatized, sanitized big-league baseball culture. Kasper has been willing to change with the times, but never eager to embrace the depersonalization of the game.

Now, just when it’s needed most, that bulwark is gone.

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The Rangers acquired Dane Dunning and Avery Weems from the White Sox in exchange for Lance Lynn, which is a solid return, but I don’t have a ton to tell you about it in the context of their rebuild—because it’s really, really hard to figure out where the Rangers are in their rebuild, or whether they’re in one at all. 

Not dealing Lynn at the trade deadline in August was a strange choice, and it does seem like it cost Texas any hope of acquiring a star-caliber player or prospect in return for him. Still, they got a solid pair of arms here. On Dunning, I wrote a good amount in September, at Baseball Prospectus, as part of a piece on several rookie hurlers who had a chance to make a major impact in the postseason. Of course, he was then denied the opportunity to have that kind of impact, because the White Sox built a flawed pitching plan for Game 3 of the AL Wild Card Series in Oakland, one centered around Garrett Crochet. Dunning deserved a longer look, and had he gotten it, he might have helped the team advance in the postseason for the first time since 2005. 

That said, he’s really more of a backend starter, as I hinted within that piece. He has, in theory, four pitches, but differences in the arm paths he uses to throw them make using all four effectively difficult. He’s also unlikely to miss bats at an especially high level, even as he further progresses. The Sox are converting him from a low-grade, long-term asset into a potentially high-impact, short-term one, and that’s probably the right way for that team to use this kind of player. It adds another shoot of green to the trade tree that goes back to Chicago trading Héctor Santiago and Brandon Jacobs to the Diamondbacks in a three-team trade seven years ago Thursday, netting Adam Eaton. Later, of course, the Sox swapped Eaton to the Nationals for three young pitchers: Dunning, Lucas Giolito, and Reynaldo López. Giolito alone makes the deal worthwhile. Using Dunning to land Lynn gives the move the chance to bear fruit in the form of a deep playoff run in 2021.

Avery Weems, meanwhile, has yielded a handsome return on an even smaller initial investment, and on a much shorter timeline. The White Sox took Weems out of the University of Arizona in the sixth round in 2019, but they only paid him a $10,000 bonus. Chicago scout John Kazanas, who has worked for the team for 30 years and had seen Weems since he was in high school, saw past some hideous numbers and recommended the lefty as a senior-sign draftee.

Almost immediately, the scout’s conviction (and the team’s trust in him) paid dividends. Weems posted great numbers in the low minors after signing last year, and while he didn’t pitch at the alternate site in 2020, he turned heads in instructs this fall. He’s a reliever, eventually, but he could be a good one, and soon. He’s sitting in the mid-90s, with a plus breaking ball and command of both pitches. To get a deal for a mid-rotation starter across the finish line by throwing in a player signed for so little, just a year later, is a coup for Chicago, but Weems is also likely to be part of a good, young Rangers bullpen in fairly short order. His path to this point in pro ball also makes him a candidate to sign an outrageously team-friendly extension, should he ever merit that kind of consideration.

The Rangers have had modest success in building veteran starting rotations in recent years, but doing so is costly. Lynn and Mike Minor were grand successes, but Kyle Gibson seems to be much less of a win, and the trade that brought them Corey Kluber yielded nothing and cost them an electric relief arm. At long last, they appear to be committing to the objective of getting younger and finding sustainable success again. This move accomplishes that.

On the White Sox side, this is exceedingly simple: they (and their new manager) love a veteran workhorse. Lynn is that, even if his ceiling is lower than some of the other players they might have targeted in trades or free agency. The last two seasons are the two in his whole career in which Lynn has thrown hardest. His spin rates on each of his pitches (except his changeup, where spin is mostly irrelevant) reached career highs in 2020. He’s learning to lean more on his cutter, while still employing his sinker as another complement to his diet of high four-seamers.

Lynn’s 28-percent strikeout rate in 2019 was an outlier, and he’s unlikely to ever do that again. Everything he throws is hard, but he doesn’t actually throw that hard. Between the four-seamer, the sinker, and the cutter, he’s attacking with something in the 90s on almost every pitch. In 2020, among the 160 pitchers who threw at least 500 pitches, Lynn had the 62nd-highest average fastball velocity, but the 12th-highest average velocity on all pitches, because he just keeps pounding batters with his varying flavors of heat. That won’t lead to tons of missed bats, but if he can continue to show both command and control the way he did during his two seasons in Texas, it’s a recipe for success. Some mechanical adjustments he made upon joining the Rangers facilitated those improvements and should allow him to sustain them.

With Giolito, Lynn, and Dallas Keuchel leading the rotation, the White Sox should be able to withstand some short starts from the likes of Dylan Cease, Michael Kopech, and Jonathan Stiever in 2021. The makings of an elite rotation are here. Though it’s a one-year coalition, with Lynn set to be a free agent next winter, it’s an exciting one, and it could be a bridge to a rotation that features those young guns more prominently in 2022 and beyond. For a win-now team, this deal is a no-brainer, even though both hurlers they gave up look like quality big-leaguers.

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Molina had already poked a key single to catalyze the seventh-inning rally in which St. Louis had tied the game. He’d hit a game-tying home run, his first dinger of the year, in the latter innings of a seven-inning doubleheader game earlier in the week. Despite having been sidelined with COVID-19 even after his teammates got back onto the field, Molina already has a handful of crucial hits for the Cardinals this season. The stage was set for him to do that yet again, and give his team the win. 

Instead, Wittgren threw Molina one pitch, and then he was able to head back to the visitor’s dugout on the third-base line. The pitch was a changeup, low and on the outside corner, and Molina was way out in front of it, weakly floating the ball out toward shortstop. Francisco Lindor and César Hernández turned a slick double play, with Molina’s leaden legs making up for the slowness of the ball off his bat. Wittgren rarely throws his changeup against righties, but in Cleveland, this is (in one sense) the new norm. Only 43.5 percent of the team’s first pitches in plate appearances this season have been four-seam fastballs or sinkers, the second-lowest figure in the league. Rapidly, the whole league is turning down a path a few clubs began blazing several years ago. The first-pitch fastball will soon be a minority occurrence.

Fastballs (FA, SI) as Percentage of All 0-0 Pitches, 2008-2020

Mostly within the last half-decade, as pitch design and some of the fancier analytical approaches to player development and strategy have evolved, there’s been a race toward near-perfect parity between fastballs and non-fastballs to start plate appearances. This has the same flavor, when studied closely, as the growth of defensive shifts throughout the league over the last decade. Here are the eight teams who have made the most notable changes to their fastball rates on 0-0 so far this year.

Changes in 0-0 Fastball Rate, Teams, 2019-2020

The Pirates are under wholly new management, and it shows. They’d quietly fallen well off the cutting edge with regard to pitching, and now they’re making a bid to catch back up. The Orioles and Twins are usual suspects on a list like this, too, because they’re each a few years into organization-wide leaps in terms of dedication to analytics. The Braves and Indians, though, are clubs who had already enjoyed several years of success; who have had continuity on their coaching staffs; and who take relatively humanist (or at least, anti-technocratic) approaches to pitching. The Red Sox, meanwhile, were the team who threw the fewest first-pitch heaters in 2019, and they’ve proved that the number can still be driven considerably lower, just as the Joe Maddon Rays kept proving that the previous standard they had set with regard to shifting was merely one more step toward an undiscovered, far-off practical cap on the number of shifts a team could deploy. 

The Tigers and Dodgers, of course, are counterexamples, and anytime the Dodgers are zigging where the rest of the league zags, it merits a raised eyebrow. In this case, though, it feels a bit more like when the Joe Maddon-led Cubs backed off from shifting in 2015 and 2016—like one team proving that they have found another path to success, without invalidating what the rest of the league is doing. 

In one reading of the data, though, none of this is really working. The league’s OPS on the first pitch (both the raw figure and the adjusted figure, relative to the league’s overall offensive output) has steadily risen over the 33 seasons for which we have pitch-by-pitch data. Since about 2012, in fact, the increase has been more sharp than steady. The league’s .946 OPS on the first pitch this year can’t quite match last year’s .994, but it’s higher than in any other season on record. Hitters are seeing fewer of the pitches for which they’re supposed to be looking on 0-0, but doing more damage on that pitch than ever.

You know the punchline. That figure, the OPS on the first pitch itself, is a selective sample. It only counts times when batters not only swung at the first pitch, but made contact, and put the ball in play. You can’t strike out on the first pitch, and you’re still seeing a fastball more often than you do on 0-1, for example, so you can definitely put up better numbers on that pitch than in most other counts, by themselves. However, only 10.4 percent of all plate appearances are ending on the first pitch so far this year. That would be the lowest figure on record, by a healthy margin. Batters are swinging less often on 0-0 than they have since 2014, and when they do swing, they whiff pretty frequently. After all, that’s what non-fastballs are meant to induce. Half of all plate appearances start 0-1, at which point the pitcher has a clear advantage.

The league is throwing more changeups and sliders, as percentages of total pitches, than they have since pitch tracking began in 2008. They’re throwing fewer four-seam fastballs than in any year since 2012, and fewer sinkers than in any other season on record (though, so far, sinkers haven’t actually lost ground from 2019, as they had in each of the previous five campaigns). Nothing’s coming in straight anymore, even in counts in which batters used to be able to expect that, and it’s making hitting a whole lot more difficult—even if it’s also creating opportunities for quick damage.

His swing is wildly unorthodox, with a big leg kick (that sometimes goes nowhere), an early hip clearance, a tilt just like that of the model modern power hitter—and then a really bizarre, very quick, yet unathletic whip of bat through zone. He generates a ton of bat speed, but doesn’t contact the ball with the bat more or less perpendicular to the flight path of the pitch as often as most hitters do. He extends his arms (especially his back arm) far, far more than most hitters do before and through the point of contact. It’s really difficult to read the ball off his bat, which sometimes helps his BABIP, but the resultant slice hurts his power production. Meanwhile, he can be tied up inside, and he doesn’t cover the low, outside corner well. He’ll expand his zone, especially down, and is even susceptible to a right-on-right changeup tumbling in toward his feet. When he’s right, he can be a nightmare for opposing pitchers, but his unique setup, swing, and approach are a nightmare for a coaching staff tasked with keeping him right. It’s funny: he and Starlin Castro have had radically different career arcs, but Castro is just eight months older than Ozuna, and they now seem very, very similar—from broad things like their poorly-aging bodies and discouraging defensive profiles, to details of their swings and approaches. I certainly expect Ozuna to be a better hitter in 2020, but not by so much that it invalidates the comparison.

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In August, he has seven whiffs on the slider. He’s gradually ramped up the spin rate on the pitch; it now approaches 2,600 revolutions per minute. With a slider he can command so much better and a fastball he’s trusting more than ever, he reemerged as a dominant force in Minnesota’s muddled bullpen. It’s very difficult to maintain command and execution of four different pitches as a reliever, and May made the right choice when he junked the curve instead of the slider. Now, he can cut loose with the same arm action on everything he throws, and he’s more comfortable with all three offerings.

Here’s one thing worth noting: regular, predictable usage patterns might benefit May quite a bit. After the first appearance of his encouraging stretch, he went another five days without taking the mound, and was asked for just one out when he did return. Since then, however, he has pitched almost exactly every third day, sometimes getting as many as six outs at a time. If the Twins think he’s benefiting from that routine, they might consider shifting him to an opener role. They could certainly use someone to pad the landing in each game for Martín Pérez, and arguably, Kyle Gibson and José Berríos could use the same. If the team doesn’t want to mess with either Gibson or Berríos based on their seniority in the rotation, they could have May open for Pérez each time through the rotation and then lurk as a short reliever for a couple of games between those games.

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Something about the timing and nature of this move has people thinking it means something bigger. There had already been whispers that the team would treat Caratini as a trade chip; those whispers have given way to full-throated discussion. A frequent line of thinking on Twitter right now is that when Contreras is ready to return (technically, just before the deadline), the room on the roster will come from a deal that jettisons Caratini in exchange for the relief upgrade the Cubs sorely need.

I don’t view it that way. In every season of the Joe Madden era, the Cubs have carried three catchers at certain points. In 2015, they opened with Wellington Castillo as an ill-fitting spare part alongside Miguel Montero and David Ross. Later that season, with Castillo long traded, the team brought Kyle Schwarber up to join the rotation of catchers, moonlighting there while also getting at-bats as a left fielder. In 2016, they opened with the notion of Schwarber serving as a third catcher again. He went down for the year in the second series, but by mid-June, Contreras had come up, and he would take time from both Montero and Ross (along with some outfield work of his own) throughout the second half and the postseason. In 2017, they started with just Montero and Contreras, and after Montero was cut in a fit of pique in June, Madden quickly began riding Contreras too hard. The front office dealt for Alex Avila in July, to ameliorate that state of affairs, and then in August, they traded for Rene Rivera to provide depth in September. Last year, they carried Chris Gimenez for about half the season, kept Taylor Davis on call in Iowa, and swapped Gimenez for Bobby Wilson as an emergency option down the stretch. 

I think the Cubs will listen if a team makes an exceptionally attractive offer for Caratini, but I don’t think they plan to move him. I think they want Maldonado to stabilize the run-prevention infrastructure a bit, and be a veteran voice for the catching cadre.

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Cashner still throws that heater at roughly 94 miles per hour, so he has some ability to overpower opponents. His changeup works off that pitch much better than it worked off the sinker, because it creates much more movement differential (as you would guess, Cashner’s sinker both drops more and moves more to the arm side than does his four-seamer) and a greater velocity differential. He can also change eye levels better with the pitch, because he’s both more confident and more effective in the upper half of the zone with the four-seamer than with the sinker.

The same things largely true of the changeup are even more true of Cashner’s revamped curveball, which he’s throwing with less speed but greater vertical movement. That means that he’d be getting more of a movement differential even if he were still throwing the sinker, but with the switch to more four-seamers, it’s been especially pronounced. He’s getting a lot of ground balls with that pitch this season, which helps explain his success despite a low strikeout rate.

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These days, there’s always a new analytical frontier in MLB, and one of this season’s is a dramatic league-wide increase in defensive shifts against right-handed batters. 

Prior to 2019, the only team documented to have shifted righties at least 25 percent of the time was the 2017 Rays, at 25.8 percent. This season, five teams—perhaps the exact five you would guess, and perhaps the five most analytically advanced organizations in the game—are at or above that 25-percent threshold. The Astros shift right-handers exactly that often. The Dodgers, Orioles, and Rays all shift somewhere between 32 and 37 percent of righties. The Twins have shifted those batters 42.3 percent of the time.

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Marisnick has taken some exceptionally harsh criticism for the play, and that’s understandable. As he admitted, he made a mistake and it caused a severe injury to another player. Where some see intentional malice or negligence, fhough, I saw a player redirect himself two separate times, seemingly seeking the best path to an open corner of home plate. Some (including Yadier Molina, bless him) saw those moves as aiming for Lucroy, but remember: the play was coming from the line in right. I firmly accept, and believed even before Marisnick explained it this way, that he was unable to read Lucroy’s body language as he set up to take the throw, and that he thought he could sneak in the front door if Lucroy let the ball travel and tried to tag him toward the back edge of the plate. For a runner, that throw is the hardest to read. If it’s coming from left field, every movement the catcher makes will tell you something useful about where the ball is. If it’s coming from center, you know any throw that’s on line will basically put the catcher at the front third-base corner of home. Catchers waiting for throws from right, however, have to set up sideways, like a shortstop waiting for a throw on a stolen-base attempt. That makes their movements, large and small, hard to read. I don’t think Marisnick meant to hurt anyone, or even collide to drive the ball out of Lucroy’s mitt; I think he’s a really fast guy who missed a read and couldn’t adjust quickly enough. I still think, though, that he probably ought to have been ejected, in addition to being called out (as he was) for the collision. That’s a smallish but meaningful message, and penalty, akin to having players tossed from NBA games for flagrant fouls, and I think it’s probably time to make that the rule.

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Alas, batters are rarely fooled by sinker movement, which is why they have a considerably higher league-wide contact rate against the pitch than against any other.

Contact Rate on Swings, By Pitch, MLB, 2019 (%)

Sinker – 84.6

Fastball – 78.1

Cutter – 75.2

Curveball – 68.2

Changeup – 68.1

Slider – 63.0

Splitter – 62.5

It’s also why the league is throwing fewer sinkers every year—why, indeed, it’s becoming a specialty pitch for a handful of relievers and a rare secondary option for most others who throw it. The sinker just isn’t as nasty as it seems, motion trails be damned. Besides, Alvarado’s movement doesn’t set him apart from the pack. Here are the 10 hurlers whose sinkers move to the arm side least, so far this season, of 89 qualifying pitchers:

Average Sinker Movement, Glove Side, MLB, 2019, Min. 50 Thrown (in.)

Mike Leake: -6.0

Brad Keller: -6.4

Dereck Rodriguez: -6.6

Marcus Stroman: -6.6

Joe Biagini: -6.6

Sonny Gray: -6.7

Jameson Taillon: -6.8

Kyle Hendricks: -7.0

Lance Lynn: -7.1

José Alvarado: -7.3

It’s important to note that being at either extreme, where movement is concerned, is usually preferable to being average. The fact that Alvarado’s sinker moves less to the arm side than those of most hurlers doesn’t necessarily speak badly of it; we might do better to think about these guys’ movement as having an unusual amount of cut, for a sinker, rather than as lacking tailing action.

Where vertical movement is concerned, Alvarado also isn’t an outlier, though again, he’s close to one end of the spectrum.

Average Sinker Movement, Vertical Rise, MLB, 2019, Min. 50 Thrown (in.)

Jake Odorizzi: 9.8

Nate Jones: 8.9

Joe Biagini: 8.6

José Quintana: 8.0

Tanner Roark: 7.9

Dereck Rodríguez: 7.9

Marco Gonzales: 7.9

Fernando Rodney: 7.7

Mike Fiers: 7.5

José Alvarado: 7.4

Again, when we think of exceptional sinker movement, we tend to think of the greatest possible downward movement. That’s not how it works in all cases, though, and Alvarado’s rise might work in his favor. As with the lateral movement, the vital takeaway is that he’s not shredding opponents by making the ball take off in any particular direction, in a way other pitchers don’t.

That leaves us with the question of what is unique about Alvarado, though, and there turns out to be plenty.

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