There hasn’t been much joy in Mudville Queens so far this year. The New York Mets have stumbled hard out of the gate and currently hold the worst record in the National League. That’s far from what was expected before the season, when they were among the betting favorites to win the World Series. You know all that, undoubtedly. We’ve written about it, as have others. But despite that rough start, it’s not all bad. Mets fans also get to experience my favorite thing in baseball so far this year: thinking along with Nolan McLean as he pitches.

McLean is the kind of pitcher you’d design in a lab if your main goal was sheer whimsical delight (he’s also incredibly good, of course). He imparts a ridiculous amount of spin on the ball, which means his pitches move like they have a tiny rocket booster activating midway to home plate (or a minuscule amount of astrophage, for the Project Hail Mary fans out there). Here’s a visual representation of that in our Paired Pitches tool:

It’s actually hard to fit more than one of McLean’s pitches in the strike zone at the same time. His curveball moves more than any other in baseball, with a comical 48 inches of separation from his sinker. His sweeper isn’t far behind; it breaks to his glove side by 21 inches, while his sinker fades arm side by 18 inches, a 39-inch horizontal gap. Home plate is 17 inches wide. You can do the math. Read the rest of this entry »

Every successful professional athlete has to have a strong drive for self-improvement. You start each morning with the goal of being a little bit better than you were yesterday; I’m sure I’ve seen words to that effect on a ballplayer’s t-shirt or social media bio somewhere.

Brice Turang can do you one better: He gets a lot better every year. As a 23-year-old rookie, he hit .218/.285/.300, which is not the kind of line that ordinarily gets a guy 448 plate appearances’ worth of playing time. Fortunately for Turang, the Brewers (for all their other successes) have been pretty awful at home-brewing hitters over the past decade, and Turang entered 2024 as their starting second baseman. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Petry faced 644 different batters across the 1979-1991 seasons, and while he certainly doesn’t remember them all, his level of recollection is impressive. Now 67, the former All-Star right-hander proved as much when he became the latest pitcher-turned-broadcast analyst to tackle one my a matchup-focused career quizzes. As did David Cone, Mark Grant, Mark Gubicza, and Jeff Montgomery — those pieces can be found here, here, here, and here — “Peaches” reached into his personal memory bank to take a stab at answering my questions, and to provide entertaining anecdotes while doing so. Our conversation took place at Fenway Park this past weekend.

I began by asking him which batter he faced the most times.

“It would have to be somebody in the American League East,” replied Petry, who played the bulk of his career with the Detroit Tigers and is now Dan Dickerson’s primary partner in the team’s radio booth. “I’ll say Robin Yount.”

It was indeed Yount, who stepped in against Petry 89 times. I proceeded to ask which player recorded the most hits off him.

“That might be a trick question, because maybe it is Robin Yount,” said Petry, before going with a different answer. “But I think a lot of my answers are going to be George Brett, so I’ll say George Brett.”

He should’ve trusted his initial instinct, because Yount was the answer again. The Hall of Famer logged 24 hits in 83 at-bats against the right-hander, who went 119-93 as a Tiger and 125-104 overall, while tossing 2,080 1/3 innings over 370 big league outings.

“He is a guy who I’ve always, to this day, have so much respect for,” Petry said of the Milwaukee Brewers icon. “I remember when he was just a teenager. At that time [when Yount was in the majors at age 18], I was a teenager also, and thinking about whether I would ever get that opportunity to play, like he was doing. So, just getting to face him was among my most competitive moments.”

How about the batter to whom he surrendered the most home runs? Read the rest of this entry »

2:03	Brendan Gawlowski: Made sense to take a look at it because we’re going to have a couple new 50’s on the lists this week

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Dodgers signed Edwin Díaz to a three-year, $69 million deal last December, it marked the second straight winter that they paid top dollar for a free agent closer, after they’d inked Tanner Scott to a four-year, $72 million deal in January 2025. That they double-dipped in such fashion was both a particularly ostentatious display of their purchasing power and an acknowledgement that even the best relievers can be fickle and fragile. Scott scuffled throughout last season while also missing time due to multiple injuries, and ultimately spent October as a bystander as the Dodgers cobbled together a makeshift late-game bullpen and won their second consecutive championship. Now, after struggling with his velocity and command, Díaz has also gone down with an injury. On Monday, one day after failing to retire any of the four Rockies he faced, he was placed on the 15-day injured list due to loose bodies in his right elbow. He is set to undergo arthroscopic surgery on Wednesday to have them removed.

Even in small-sample season, the 32-year-old Díaz’s numbers tell enough of a story to suggest that something is amiss. He’s allowed seven runs in six innings for a 10.50 ERA, accompanied by a 4.96 FIP and a 4.39 xERA. His 15.2% differential between his 30.3% strikeout rate and 15.2% walk rate is just over half of his 29.8% differential last year. His four-seam fastball has averaged just 95.7 mph, down from last year’s average of 97.2 mph while with the Mets, for whom he posted a 1.63 ERA and a 2.28 FIP in 66 1/3 innings. His average arm angle has dropped, changing the movement profiles of both his four-seamer and slider:

Relative to last season, Díaz has lost over two and a half inches of horizontal run on his fastball and nearly an inch of cut on his slider, which itself is one mile per hour slower, as well. Neither pitch has fooled hitters to nearly the same degree as before, and his overall swinging strike rate has dropped from 17.3% in 2024 and 18.0% last year to 9.1% this season. Read the rest of this entry »

With big expectations entering the season, the New York Mets got off to a reasonably solid start; through their first 11 games, they had a 7-4 record and a half-game lead in the NL East. Since then, though, things have gone… less well. And after getting swept by the Chicago Cubs over the weekend, the team is now sitting on an 11-game losing streak, a skid that has dropped them into last place in the NL East, a full 8 1/2 games behind the Atlanta Braves. So, just how doomed are the Mets?

While you can’t win a pennant in April, you can certainly lose one. As my colleague Jay Jaffe noted last week, when the Mets’ losing streak stood at a mere eight games, the offense bears a large share of the blame. They’ve scored just 19 runs since the streak began, and have managed even three runs in just two of those games. The Royals, the next-worst offense over their last 11 games, have scored more than 50% more runs than the Mets (31 to 19), and considering they’re 2-9 over that stretch, it’s not like they’re cruising either. The loss of Juan Soto to a strained calf muscle is significant, but it’s hard to pin the team’s offensive woes solely on that. Their 1.7 runs per game is about three runs off both the 4.7 they scored last year and what ZiPS projected for this year, and no hitter in history has made that big of a difference. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, and welcome to another edition of my weekly chat. I’ve got a piece about Edwin Díaz’s impending elbow surgery in the pipeline, while yesterday I wrote about Yordan Alvarez’s hot start (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/amid-houstons-problems-yordan-alvarez-is-l…).

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Last Friday, I wrote about the Mets’ losing streak (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/no-offense-the-new-look-mets-are-in-quite-…), which has now reached 11 games. It’s brutal.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Thanks to everyone who had kind words about my tribute to Davey Lopes (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/davey-lopes-1945-2026-speedster-student-an…), my first favorite player. And now, on with the show…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Hah, that is brutal. I focused my piece on the offense’s shortcomings, knowing that there would probably be room for a follow-up on their pitching or some other aspect of their struggles at some point, but I did expect them to at least win a game here or there along the way.

Read the rest of this entry »

The other night, I was lying around, looking at my phone, trying to fry as many neurons as possible without using hard drugs or listening to Angine de Poitrine, and I saw something that bugged me a little. It was a highlight reel from a series of interviews with Padres closer Mason Miller and Kait Maniscalco, which started off as follows:

Maniscalco: Do you think closers have to have a couple screws loose to want to pitch in the highest-pressure situation in the game?

Miller: Quietly, yes. Outwardly, I think you can keep it together and be a fairly normal dude… I wouldn’t say anybody would say I have a screw loose quite yet.

There are two ways to read this question. First: Does it take an unusual personality type to thrive in a high-pressure environment like closing out a big league baseball game? Probably, to some extent. The ability not only to thrive under pressure but also to shake off failure when it comes is a special thing, one baseball people have tried and struggled to identify since the closer role was invented. Read the rest of this entry »

The book on Munetaka Murakami was pretty straightforward when he hit the market this winter. Phenomenal cosmic power – itty bitty contact rate. While acknowledging recent injuries, our writeup noted his contact rates against good velocity (63%) and secondary pitches (50%) as red flags in his profile. And these weren’t little red flags, either. As Eric and James put it, “…if Murakami is only ever the quality of contact hitter we’ve seen the last three years, with no changes or improvements, he basically can’t be a good MLB hitter.”

Through a month of play, Murakami has been a very good MLB hitter, with a 153 wRC+ driven by a 21.5% walk rate and eight homers. But he’s struggled with contact, and that’s putting it mildly. He’s striking out a third of the time so far, with the fourth-lowest contact rate in baseball through Sunday’s action. So what can we say about that? One answer is that it’s too soon to say – either his contact rate will go up or his production will go down. But that’s pretty unsatisfying. To be fair, it’s probably right, but that doesn’t make it satisfying. So let’s break his game down more granularly to see where the whiffs are coming from, where the power is coming from, and how the two are related.

We’ll start with the “can’t hit secondaries” part of the scouting report. In the early going, that has been abundantly clear. Sixty-six batters have swung at 25 or more sliders this season. Murakami’s 59.3% whiff rate is the third highest, behind Max Muncy The Younger and James Wood. If you broaden that out to all secondaries, 201 batters have offered at 50 or more secondary pitches this year. Murakami’s 53.3% whiff rate is the third highest of that group, behind only Matt Wallner and Daniel Schneemann. Read the rest of this entry »