The history of pitchers missing body parts is quite short. Baseball fans will recognize the name “Three-finger Mordecai Brown,” who, despite the nickname, only lacked most of his right index finger. Brown was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1949 by the Old Timers Committee for a 14-year career that saw him win an astounding 239 games and possess an ERA of 2.06 over 3,172.1 innings. Jim Abbott spent 10 years in MLB despite missing his entire right hand. He would rest his glove on his right forearm during windup and place it on his left hand after pitch release. In 1993, as a New York Yankee ..read more

By Axel Post There are a lot of baseball players. It’s hard to keep track of who has been surprisngly good this season. I’m not going to sit here in this blog and tell you that Shohei Ohtani has had a good season, you probably already know he is good. I’m also going to leave off guys like Brent Rooker, because although he was pretty unknown before the season, you’ve probably noticed his success to begin the year. My goal is to find a middle ground of players, to shed light on what you, my genius reader, may not already know. Yandy Diaz, 1B, Tampa Bay Rays You might know that Yandy Diaz is a go ..read more

Matt Harvey has once again found himself in the spotlight of the baseball world. In a career that can only be defined as a rollercoaster, Harvey accepted the opportunity to pitch for Team Italy in the 2023 World Baseball Classic. Despite lacking the electric stuff that once made him great as a New York Met, the 33-year-old right-handed pitcher pitched to a 1.29 ERA over 7 innings in 2 starts on the brightest of stages. A Rise to Stardom Harvey wasted no time breaking onto the scene in Queens. In his second season and first full season, a 24-year-old Harvey pitched to a 2.27 ERA in 178.1 innin ..read more

6-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Full count. A chance to walk-it-off and prove yourself as a prospect… but you weren’t set in the batter’s box fast enough. Unfortunately for Braves prospect Cal Conley, he is apart of the many MLB players who are adapting to the new pitch clock rules. Imagine what basketball looked like when the shot clock was first introduced. The game transformed from possession focused and low scoring to high octane and frequent transition. While baseball’s changes might not be as dramatic, Major League Baseball’s efforts to cut the length of its games has forced hitters and ..read more

In the sabermetric era of baseball, the statistic “WAR” has become the overarching determinant of a player’s value. WAR, which stands for Wins Above Replacement, measures the value of a player’s production while putting it in terms of how many wins they generate above a replacement-level player. It is important to note that this replacement-level player is not whoever falls next on the depth chart, but rather a theoretical estimation of how a standard replacement would produce. While player evaluation is a rather nuanced science, WAR is a strong estimator of value that comes in an easily-inter ..read more

We are in the middle of some exciting times here at BaseballCloud and are looking to expand our roster! One of the positions we are looking to fill is a Marketing Manager. This person will be responsible for leading, creating, and promoting creative content in a collaborative role with the management team for our three companies: BaseballCloud, Yakkertech, and Aqueti. If you are someone who loves to generate creative ideas and bring them to life, especially in the world of baseball, then this is the job for you. Qualifications and Responsibilities A passion for sports, in particular baseball a ..read more

We are in the middle of some exciting times here at BaseballCloud and are looking to expand our roster! One of the positions we are looking to fill is a Digital Designer. This person will be responsible for the design of the digital website and digital marketing assets, email and promotional materials, and social media content for our three companies: BaseballCloud, Yakkertech, and Aqueti. This position will be an integral part of the creative team that will collaborate with management and staff to elevate our visual identity across all platforms. The ideal candidate is a strong communicator w ..read more

The Dilemma I believe that we have been looking at pitch quality all wrong. Many mathematical models designed to evaluate a pitcher’s stuff have been misdirected. These heavy claims are baseless without evidence, but in this piece, I plan on exploring a massive shortcoming with traditional stuff analysis, and how we can change that. We often see pitchers with A-Grade stuff on paper who struggle to translate that to strong in-game results. Our knee-jerk response is to blame their command. While this may be a valid explanation for some pitchers, it is rarely the main reason for the discrepancy b ..read more

Primer: I started working on this prior to the All-Star break, so this post is long overdue. I still firmly believe in these breakouts and their abilities in the future, regardless of any mid-summer struggles. With that being said, I now present Believe Breakout: Pitcher Edition. This mini series will feature three pitchers and three hitters who have broken out in 2022. I will analyze what has lead to the breakout thus far and why I believe their performance is sustainable moving forward. Here we go. Shane McClanahan Shane McClanahan is the first pitcher headlining this crop of breakouts. The ..read more

Introduction The term “stuff” has frequented the art of pitching for decades. In the ball-flight tracking era, stuff has transformed from an optical observation to a quantifiable science. We’ve all seen the electric Jacob deGrom fastball and the air-bending Devin Williams changeup; perhaps we don’t need advanced programming languages to tell us that those are effective pitches. Nonetheless, the days of evaluating pitches by their visual aesthetic have come to a close. It is time to shift our attention to mathematical models that transform bare pitch data into meaningful insights about the util ..read more