At the end of April, I wrote about whether the Baltimore Orioles could salvage the 2025 season after a dreadful start. Their record stood at 11-17, a decent-sized hole to be sure, but it wasn’t deep enough to be considered a grave. Baltimore still had a chance to turn things around and make a playoff run, so long as the team started winning quickly. Now, nearly two months later, the O’s are 10 wins under .500, and considering we’re one week away from July, the mathematical task to get back into the race is daunting.

The Orioles have actually played better baseball lately, which highlights the fundamental problem with getting to play meaningful games in October. I’d call May 24 their nadir, when the first loss of a doubleheader dropped them to a 16-34 record, just barely ahead of the White Sox, and a 110-loss pace. Charm City has seen some abysmal teams, but only two years of Baltimore baseball featured at least 110 losses; those were 2018 and 2021, during the franchise’s notoriously painful rebuild. Even the 1988 Orioles, who infamously started the season by dropping 21 straight games, recovered enough to manage 54 wins! Beginning with the second game of that May 24 doubleheader, Baltimore has put up a solid 18-10 record. While that sounds promising, it’s actually kind of bad news when we’re talking playoffs. Those 28 games represent just under a fifth of an entire season, and playing really well over this stretch was only enough to increase the team’s playoff probability from 1.5% to 4.4% using the FanGraphs Depth Charts odds, and from 2.6% to 5.0% in the ZiPS projected standings. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote yesterday about the Mets optioning Francisco Alvarez back to Triple-A, but plenty more catcher news broke over the weekend. We’ll start in Baltimore, where a left oblique strain sent Adley Rutschman to the injured list just as he was starting to look like he had figured things out. As you’ll surely recall, Rutschman was off to a great start last season, but his performance dropped off after he took a foul ball to his right hand on June 20. Rutschman ran a 138 wRC+ with 15 home runs before June 30 and a 61 wRC+ with four homers through the end of the season. Both he and the team have steadfastly denied that the drop-off in his performance was related to the hand injury, and after his ugly start to the 2025 season, the rest of us were starting to believe them. Rutschman ran a wRC+ of 84 through May 20, but in his last 23 games, he’s been at 129:

Then on Friday, his right side “flared up” during batting practice, to use the words of interim manager Tony Mansolino. “Hopefully it’s not too long,” Mansolino told reporters. “When you play in that type of heat down in Tampa, and you’re playing this long stretch and you’re in the middle of the season, it probably puts you at more risk for things like that.” On Sunday, the team announced that an MRI showed a mild oblique strain and that Rutschman would be out at least until the All-Star break. That means he’ll miss at least one month (21 games).

This is the first IL stint of Rutschman’s career, and it comes when the team has no margin for error at all. The Orioles are 10 games below .500. They’re not only in last place in the AL East, but they’re trailing the fourth-place Red Sox by five games, and we now give them just a 4.4% chance of making the playoffs. Since May 20, Rutschman has put up 0.7 WAR, third-most among the team’s position players. He’s an enormous loss, but at least in the clubhouse, no one is resigned to selling at the deadline. “We’re trying to win, and we’re trying to develop,” Mansolino told reporters. “I think, if we went full-blown development right here in June, when that third Wild Card spot is floating around .500, I don’t know if that’s the right decision for the Baltimore Orioles and the city of Baltimore and the fans.”

Toward that end, the team could really use catching help. The Orioles have put up 0.3 WAR from the catcher position this season, which ranks 26th in baseball. Rutschman has chipped in 1.1 WAR, but his contributions have been almost entirely negated by those of Gary Sánchez and Maverick Handley, both of whom have totals preceded by minus signs. Sánchez returned from a wrist injury 10 days ago, and his splits are extreme: -6 wRC+ before the injury and 196 wRC+ after. That’s about what you’d expect from him. He’s an all-or-nothing slugger who will run big slumps and big hot streaks, and when you average it all together, he looks like a solid backup. When Sánchez was out, the team called up Handley, and to say that he hasn’t worked out would be an understatement. Handley is 27 and last appeared on one of our lists of the Orioles’ top prospects in 2022. He has gotten into 16 games and is currently running a wRC+ of -42. He has three hits. He is striking out over 38% of the time.

In Samuel Basallo, the team also has a blue chip catching prospect at Triple-A Norfolk. Basallo topped our Orioles prospect list in April and is currently ranked fifth on The Board, making him the top catching prospect in baseball. Still, the team clearly doesn’t feel he’s ready to make the jump. Mansolino said the team hasn’t even discussed calling him up. “I don’t think you take a guy like Sammy Basallo and you bring him to the big leagues just because there’s a need,” said Mansolino. “I think you bring a Sammy Basallo to the big leagues when he’s destroyed Triple-A in all facets of the game — his at-bats, his defense, his everything. So when he destroys Triple-A and he knocks the door down, to me, then he becomes part of the conversation. I don’t personally think you bring a guy to the big leagues with that type of profile until that happens.”

Basallo is currently running a 152 wRC+ with 15 home runs in Norfolk, which looks a lot like knocking the door down, but he’s only 20 years old, and he still only has 69 games under his belt at Triple-A. It’s hard to fault the Orioles for following whatever path they believe will give their top prospect the best chance of developing to his full potential. But that means Handley is back up in Baltimore again for at least a month. This sure seems like a time when the Orioles could go looking for an affordable veteran backstop. Maybe even one who knows the team and its pitchers. Surely that would be too much to ask for, right? Right?!

On Sunday, The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka astutely noted that the Braves had released catcher James McCann from his minor league deal. The same McCann who spent the past two seasons with the Orioles, serving as a perfectly cromulent backup catcher. According to reports, McCann was looking for a multi-year deal this offseason, but the Orioles were reluctant to make such a commitment due to the presence of both Rutschman and Basallo. McCann didn’t get his deal, instead signing a minor league pact with the Braves. A few weeks ago, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that the deal had a rolling opt-out clause, allowing any team to offer a major league deal to McCann, at which point the Braves could either call him up or let him go.

An hour after Kostka noted McCann’s release, Rosenthal reported that McCann had signed with the Diamondbacks. We’ll transition to the Diamondbacks shortly, but we should close out the Orioles section by noting just how big bringing back McCann could have been for the team. McCann is nobody’s idea of a savior. He has a career 82 wRC+, and his catching didn’t grade out well last season. But he’s a veteran who has two years of experience with this Baltimore pitching staff. He ran a 125 wRC+ in the minors for the Braves this season. He’s put up a positive WAR in every season since 2019, and just having a catcher whose wRC+ doesn’t start with a minus sign would be a huge step up for the Orioles.

We have no way of knowing whether the Orioles were also pursuing McCann, but even if they were, money can’t have been the reason he ended up going elsewhere. McCann will be making the major league minimum during his time in Arizona (and a prorated $180,000 during his time in the minors), and his experience in Baltimore makes him more valuable there than anywhere else. It’s a real missed opportunity, but it could be an indication that the Orioles see things the way Dan Szymborski sees them: That it’s time to give up on the 2025 season.

Now we’re on to Arizona, where catching injuries are just the start. On Friday, A.J. Puk underwent internal brace surgery. Last night, manager Torey Lovullo said during the Diamondbacks’ postgame show that Corbin Carroll, who hasn’t played since taking a sinker to his left wrist on Wednesday, was diagnosed with a chip fracture and will be going on the injured list. Jay Jaffe will be covering this miserable news in depth tomorrow. Today, though, we’re going to finish by talking about catcher Gabriel Moreno. Moreno went on the IL with a right hand contusion on Thursday, and his stint was made retroactive to June 15. On Friday, the team announced that the injury was actually a hairline fracture of his right index finger. It dates back to this fluky wild pitch from June 6:

The team had been trying to avoid an IL stint, playing Moreno just three times over the next two weeks. Amazingly, he even hit a home run during that stretch, but he pretty clearly wasn’t himself:

The injury is a major blow to a Diamondbacks team that’s 7 1/2 games back in an extremely tough NL West, and just 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. We currently have them with a 31.9% chance of making the playoffs, but losing a star catcher in Moreno (not to mention one of the best players in the game in Carroll) really, really hurts. Ketel Marte, Geraldo Perdomo, Eugenio Suárez, and Pavin Smith are all legitimately playing like stars, but the Diamondbacks have one of the weaker pitching staffs in the league. This really could be too much to overcome. What’s 31.9% minus Carroll and Moreno? The answer depends on how long they’re out and whether they look like their old selves when they return. Lovullo has said that Moreno’s timetable will be measured in weeks rather than days, which is an ominous sign. It’s also rough because Moreno was on pace for the best season of his excellent young career.

In 2022, Moreno put up 0.8 WAR over just 25 games as a rookie in Toronto, and after being traded to Arizona for Daulton Varsho over the offseason, he followed it up with a 2.3-win 2023 season despite missing 20 days due to shoulder inflammation. Last season, he put up 2.5 WAR despite two different IL trips that limited him to just 98 games. Moreno has never run a wRC+ below 102, and his catching has graded out as excellent in every season of his career. He’ll break the three-win mark as soon as he’s able to get a full, healthy season, but once again, that won’t be happening this year. Although his 105 wRC+ wasn’t a career best, Moreno had showcased a more aggressive approach that boosted his hard-hit rate all the way from 41% in 2024 to 47.2%.

Backup catcher Jose Herrera is running a 68 wRC+ over 33 games, which is actually a bit of an improvement from his career mark. Unfortunately, his glove is grading out worse than it did in previous seasons. This would seem like the perfect time for the Diamondbacks to bring up the 25-year-old Adrian Del Castillo, whom Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice ranked second in the organization in December, but injuries have derailed that possibility too.

Once a highly-touted catching prospect out of Miami, Del Castillo fell in the draft and struggled in his first three minor league seasons before exploding in 2024. His defense isn’t going to impress anybody, but he’s got enough power to make up for it and earn some time at DH or first base as well. Last season, he ran a 136 wRC+ with 26 homers in 105 games in Triple-A Reno while dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his strikeout rate. When Moreno went down with an injury in August, Del Castillo got called up to Arizona and kept right on hitting, running a (very, very BABIP-aided) 146 wRC+ despite striking out nearly a third of the time over 25 games. A shoulder injury cost Del Castillo the first two months of this season. He only got back into action in May 20, spending 12 games in the Arizona Complex League then spending five back in Reno before injury struck again. This one seems to be less serious, a back injury that shouldn’t cost Del Castillo too much time, but he hasn’t played since June 15. It’s hard to imagine calling him up to the majors after he’s played just 17 games this season, 12 of them on the complex.

The Diamondbacks originally called up the 32-year-old Aramis Garcia to fill in when Moreno went down. Garcia had been running a 122 wRC+ with 10 home runs in Triple-A, but he got into just two big league games before the Diamondbacks designated him for assignment and signed McCann. McCann has already reached out to former Oriole teammate Corbin Burnes to get up to speed on the Arizona pitching staff. “I’m the new guy trying to get on their page, and that’s what I’m going to try to do as quickly as possible,” he said. MLB.com’s Casey Drottar reported that Lovullo has yet to determine an official role for McCann. Given Herrera’s performance, it’s not hard to imagine McCann getting significant playing time in the somewhat unlikely event that he continues the hot hitting he showed in Gwinnett.

There’s no guarantee that McCann will perform, but it’s encouraging that the Diamondbacks are doing what they can to make sure the catcher position doesn’t end up as a black hole. Maybe league-average performance is the absolute best the Diamondbacks should expect from the duo of Herrera and McCann, but finding a veteran replacement who represents a clear upgrade over what the team has waiting in Triple-A is exactly the kind of move they should be making as they gear up for the second half.

On Saturday in San Diego, Fernando Tatis Jr. homered against the Royals, a towering shot that gave the slugger a moment to admire his work and stylishly set down his bat before trotting around the bases. Beyond that flourish, it was a timely hit, as the three-run, seventh-inning blast expanded a 2-1 lead and helped the Padres to a much-needed victory. Of particular interest to these eyes — and no doubt to those of Padres fans — was the fact that the homer was Tatis’ first since May 27, ending the longest drought of his career.

The 26-year-old slugger connected against a 96-mph sinker from the Royals’ Taylor Clarke. It came off the bat at 107.9 mph, but its estimated distance was a modest 380 feet:

“It was heavy,” Tatis said of his 21-game homerless streak. “Everybody knew it, I knew it, how long it was. I’ve just been grinding.” Read the rest of this entry »

When Riley Greene debuted in 2022, he had a tiny bit of a strikeout problem. His overall line – .253/.321/.362 in cavernous Comerica Park – was roughly league average, but it would have been better than that if he had struck out less than 28.7% of the time. Over the subsequent two years, he reined that issue in some: 27.4% in 2023 and 26.7% in 2024. He also got better at the plate while doing so. And this year, he’s off to a scorching start, .291/.345/.530 with a career-best 145 wRC+. So he conquered the strikeout demons, right? Wrong. He’s striking out a ghastly 30.7% of the time. This requires further explanation.

One of the classic paradoxes driving the way baseball looks today is that strikeouts don’t appear to be as bad for hitters as one might think. There’s essentially no correlation between batter strikeout rate and overall batter production. You could crunch the numbers to verify that – or you could just consider Luis Arraez and Aaron Judge. But while we pretty much all know this by now – the Judges and Harpers and Ohtanis of the world crack a few eggs while they’re depositing omelets over the outfield fences – it doesn’t feel as true at the extreme high end of the spectrum. After all, Joey Gallo’s outlandish 38% strikeout rate obviously held him back. But Gallo is the easiest example, and discussing his strikeout woes doesn’t quite prove a whole lot. So let’s look at the 10 hitters striking out most this year:

Aside from Greene, that’s not an impressive group. Stowers is the best of the bunch, but even including him, the aggregate statistics are quite poor. This isn’t some list of overmatched hitters doing absolutely nothing right, ether; there’s fearsome power here pretty much across the board. They’re just striking out so much that the overall package doesn’t work. So why does Greene look so different from the rest?

It starts, as MLB.com’s Jared Greenspan pointed out, with aggression. Greene spent his first years in the majors as a patient hitter, chasing less often than average and taking a few pitches in the zone as the price of his patience. My favorite proxy for hitter aggression is how often they swing at first pitches in the strike zone. The league as a whole swings at about 45% of such pitches. Greene was right around there in his first three years in the big leagues: 42.4%, 45.2%, 46.1%, respectively. Then he decided to stop letting those cookies go by. This year, he’s swinging at 56% of first-pitch strikes.

The reason for this is simple: These are good pitches to hit. From 2022 through 2024, Greene put up great numbers when he made contact with a first-pitch strike. He batted .425 and slugged .770 on them, with underlying contact metrics to match. He’s doing even more damage this year, .448 with a .966 slug. More importantly, though, he’s damaging these pitches more frequently because he’s swinging at them more often. These tend to be the best pitches to hit all plate appearance; why not take a big hack at them?

There’s a cost to doing this. Greene is also swinging more often at bad first pitches; his 0-0 chase rate is up to 18.5% from roughly 12% in his career before the season began. That sounds bad, but consider that he’s upped his in-zone swing rate by 10 percentage points. Because of this aggression, he is no longer taking as many hittable pitches for strikes. Take a look at how often he’s gotten ahead, fallen behind, and put the ball in play over time:

As you can see, this has been a great trade-off. He’s putting the ball in play more frequently than ever and falling behind less often as a result. Aggression pays, particularly early in the count and particularly for hitters as powerful as Greene.

That smidgen of extra production against hittable pitches in early counts helps explain some of Greene’s boosted production on batted balls this year – his .525 wOBACON and .504 xwOBACON are both career highs (here’s why I like these BACON stats). Want to mash the ball? Aim at easier pitches.

That said, Greene’s aggressive approach to pitches in the zone has come with some swing-and-miss downside. Break the plate down into more than just “in or out” and you can see the trade-off more clearly:

Naturally, Greene is swinging more at everything in his attempt to drive more hittable pitches. That makes sense; he didn’t simply wave a magic wand and start swinging at the good ones more without adjusting his approach to all pitches. He’s not hacking blindly at everything off the plate, or even close to that, but it makes plenty of sense that he’s taking a few more ill-advised swings along with all the extra good ones.

Normally, you’d expect this to be a self-correcting loop. Greene gets more aggressive, so pitchers leave the strike zone more often, which tilts Greene back toward selectivity as he gets ahead in the count more often and can choose pitches to hunt. Early in the count, pitchers are treating him about the same as always – he’s powerful, and so they try to nibble around the corners of the zone, accepting extra balls in exchange for avoiding meatballs. But with two strikes, particularly if you exclude 3-2 counts, they’re not giving him so much as the time of day. He sees strikes on a mere 35.3% of 0-2, 1-2, and 2-2 counts, one of the lowest marks in baseball.

That feels like a wise adjustment by opposing pitchers. This guy is powerful and wants to swing, so why bail him out by giving him something to hit? So he faces a steady diet of breaking balls in the dirt, high fastballs, sinkers off the plate in, basically everything you can think of. There’s an adjustment to be made here, starting aggressive and dialing it back with two strikes instead of maintaining that aggression all the way through. In 2024, he chased 30.3% of the time in those counts. This year, he’s up to 39.1%. That’s from “much less than average” to “more than average” if you’re keeping score at home.

The end result of this newfound aggression and pitchers’ avoidance of the zone is that Greene is striking out on 22.8% of the two-strike pitches he sees, the highest mark of his career. He’s also getting to two-strike counts more frequently thanks to his early-count swings. He’s fouling more pitches off than ever before, as well. That comes with the swing-hard-early territory; Greene will happily take some foul balls in exchange for all the damage he’s doing when he keeps the ball fair.

As far as I can tell, Greene is like no one else in the high-strikeout cohort. He’s not up there because he’s a helpless hacker who can’t make contact. He has a good sense of the strike zone, one he’s displayed in multiple seasons. His swing is geared for power, so he’ll always swing over his fair share of balls, but plenty of hitters with power swings still have good two-strike approaches. Greene just hasn’t put together his new early-count plan – attack pitches in the zone and accept a few extra chases to do it – with a two-strike approach. He’s chasing too often, and as best as I can tell, it’s because he’s swinging more frequently than ever before early in the count. It’s tough to switch mental gears, particularly while you’re learning a new approach, and I think Greene has fallen into that trap so far.

All this is to say Greene is hardly doomed to strike out 30% of the time for the rest of the year. In fact, I think his early-count aggression will end up lowering his strikeout rate, not raising it. He’s giving pitchers fewer easy options by hunting drivable pitches early. And in previous seasons, he’s already demonstrated the ability to tighten up and manage the zone late in the count. He’s still just 24 years old and only in his sixth year of professional baseball (excluding the canceled 2020 minor league season). Unlike most of the players who strike out as often as he does, he seems to have no fatal flaw that will keep him in that group. It’s just a matter of making all the parts of his ever-improving game work together, and I definitely wouldn’t bet against him fixing it sooner or later.

It’s a credit to his incredible talent that his horrid strikeout rate hasn’t really mattered so far. I love his new approach this year overall. When you have this level of power, letting early-count strikes go by is a cardinal sin. I think he’ll figure out how to modulate that as necessary – when he gets behind and pitchers start fishing for strikeouts, basically. But if you’re looking for a testament to Greene’s talent, I can’t think of any better one than his performance this year. He’s striking out a truly unconscionable amount while he tries to change the way he works at the plate, and yet it doesn’t matter. He’s just that powerful, and even though he’s aggressive, he’s not flailing pointlessly at pitches out of the zone and blunting his results on contact. The strikeouts will almost certainly come down. The new, early-count damage? That’s here to stay.

One of my favorite college baseball players of the past 15 years is making his major league debut tonight for the Reds, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about him, because I think he could become one of your favorite professional baseball players if you give him a shot.

His name is Chase Burns. He was the no. 2 pick in last year’s draft, where he received the joint-highest bonus ($9.25 million) in his class, and the no. 28 prospect in the preseason Top 100. He throws 100 mph without breaking a sweat, with an unholy slider that twists and squirms and changes shape like Medusa’s hair, with a similar effect on hitters. In his last start, Burns punched out seven Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders in seven innings. Behold.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s looking like this isn’t the year for Francisco Alvarez after all. On Sunday, the day after they ended a seven-game losing streak, the Mets announced that they had optioned Alvarez to Triple-A Syracuse and called up Hayden Senger to take his place. The 23-year-old catcher already has a three-win season under his belt, and if not for a thumb injury that limited him to 100 games last season, he’d likely be a top-10 catcher in terms of WAR over the past two seasons. This season hasn’t gone to plan either, though, and Alvarez will now try to set things straight with a Syracuse Mets team that has dropped 12 of its last 14 games.

Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in his left hand on March 8, making this the second season in a row in which an injury to his catching hand has interfered with his chance to take the next step as an All-Star-level dual-threat backstop. Alvarez started a minor league rehab stint a very short 32 days later, batting .179 over 10 games at three levels. He returned to the Mets on April 25, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the team brought him back to soon. After missing a chunk of spring training and struggling during his rehab assignment, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that he didn’t get off to a roaring start, but now that a skid has dropped them to one game behind the Phillies for the NL East lead, the Mets are no longer content to let him figure it out in Queens.

Let’s talk about the offense first. While it hasn’t been ideal, it hasn’t been disastrous either. Alvarez has gotten 138 plate appearances over 35 games, running a 91 wRC+. He put up a 97 wRC+ in 2023 and a 102 in 2024, so while this is the lowest mark of his career and a disappointment for a player who was expected to put it all together at the plate, it is by no means unprecedented. Alvarez had significantly worse 35-game stretches in each of his last two seasons:

Alvarez has been more aggressive of late, chasing and whiffing at career-high rates, and his 73% zone contact rate is among the worst in the league. However, because he’s increased his zone swing rate way more than his chase rate, SEAGER puts him in the 98th percentile, by far the best mark of his career. And because he’s seeing fewer strikes than he did in either of the past two seasons, Alvarez is running a career-high walk rate to go with his career-high strikeout rate. You could construct a real argument that the increased walk rate is worth the extra strikeouts, but the Mets clearly don’t see it that way. Manager Carlos Mendoza specifically cited plate discipline as Alvarez’s problem, telling reporters, “There were stretches where we felt, I felt like a couple of games where, OK, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. But then he’ll go a couple of games where he’s late with the fastball and then he chases, so just looking for consistency here.”

The other part of that argument has to do with the fact that Alvarez is crushing the baseball, though you wouldn’t know it from his career-low .098 ISO. We’re talking about a small sample, but he’s running career highs in hard-hit rate, as well as average, max, and 90th-percentile exit velocity. All that contact quality hasn’t turned into power largely because Alvarez hits the ball on the ground an awful lot; just 9% of his hard-hit balls have been in the air to the pull side, down from 29% in 2023 and 19% in 2024. The batted ball metrics are also shaping up in a weird way. Alvarez is running the highest BABIP of his career, but take a look at this:

Alvarez has gone from outperforming his wOBA when he hits the ball hard to underperforming it by quite a bit. But he’s also outperforming it when he doesn’t hit the ball hard. That’s not to say that all of this is the result of luck. Alvarez is running a career-low pull rate, and that drop-off is even more dramatic on balls in the air.

It’s not necessarily that Alvarez is struggling to catch up with pitches; he also went into the offseason determined to stop pulling the ball so much. “The primary focus for me has been to hit the ball the other way or up the middle, but there are going to be days where I am going to be pulling the baseball,” he said in April. “But probably 80 percent of the time my focus is more to the middle of the field to the opposite field.” It has worked, maybe too well. According to Statcast’s bat tracking metrics, his intercept point is 1.3 inches deeper than it was last season. At the moment of intercept, his bat went from being angled three degrees to the pull side to five degrees to the opposite field. In all, expected metrics like xwOBA think that Alvarez should be pretty much as good a hitter as he was last season, with the walks making up for the extra strikeouts and the contact quality making up for the less-than-ideal launch angles. However, DRC+, which gets deeper into the process, is much more skeptical:

Alvarez is an all-or-nothing power hitter, who is also groundball prone because he possess a flat swing; over the past three seasons, his 28 degree swing path tilt put him in just the 15th percentile. We’ve seen plenty of hitters make that work to varying degrees, but it’s not always the world’s most satisfying combination. He’s going to go through periods where he doesn’t make much contact, and he’s going to go through periods when he’s hitting the ball on the ground way, way too much. He’s been doing both this season, but it’s important to keep in mind that we’re talking about a small sample, just as we’re talking about a player coming off an injury and missing spring training.

In addition to changing his approach, Alvarez has also changed his setup, going from a relatively stationary stance with his bat resting on his shoulder to a more fluid stance with his bat angled higher and his hands lower:

As Mendoza noted on Sunday, the hamate injury cost Alvarez the chance to get comfortable with these changes.

All that said, the bigger concern comes on the defensive end. “I feel like the receiving and the blocking is probably an area that we want to see some improvement,” said Mendoza. Over the past two seasons, Alvarez was one of the best framers in the game, with nine framing runs in 2023 and seven in 2024 according to Statcast. This season, he’s at -4. Baseball Savant breaks the edges of the strike zone into eight different sections. Alvarez grades out as below average in seven of them, and among the bottom 10 in the league in four of them. In previous seasons, he was excellent at the bottom of the plate, but this season, he ranks 38th out of 56 qualified catchers. That is a major issue that needs to be addressed. Even in his outstanding rookie season in 2023, Alvarez was a below-average hitter, with nearly all of his value coming from framing. Maybe he just needs more time to recover from an injury to the base of his catching hand, but that skill is what gave him his real star potential. Without it, he’s a different player.

Alvarez’s blocking has also been the subject of much criticism, as his four passed balls are tied for fifth-most in baseball. However, Baseball Prospectus sees him as an above-average blocker this season, and Statcast sees him as exactly average. The Statcast numbers show that this is likely a situation where the eye test isn’t treating him well. Alvarez has let 17 pitches get by him in 2025, but they’re not the ones you might expect:

Alvarez’s opportunities have been quite a bit tougher this season. He’s actually been better than average on pitches that Statcast grades as having medium difficulty, but he’s given those gains back on chances that grade out as easy. But moderately difficult blocks don’t stick out that much, so what we notice are all the passed balls on easy chances. Moreover, Alvarez is currently catching 41% of would-be basestealers, so he is making up some value with his arm.

Now that we know all this, what does it say about the team’s decision to option Alvarez? It depends. If his issues merely stem from the injury and the lack of preparation time – if he’s going to figure it out eventually – then sending him down right now doesn’t make a ton of sense. He has already been ceding playing time to Luis Torrens. Torrens has been excellent at framing, which has allowed him to put up 0.7 WAR to Alvarez’s 0.5, even though his bat has been worse and his blocking actually has been bad. Senger is 28 and was running just a 59 wRC+ in Syracuse. In fact, he hasn’t put up an above-average offensive line in the minors since 2021. So swapping in Senger for even this reduced version of Alvarez will likely cost the Mets significantly in the short-term, and there’s always a risk that this kind of demotion could hurt a player’s confidence.

On the other hand, if the Mets really think that Alvarez could use a reset to work on his framing and figure out his approach, then it makes all the sense in the world to send him down right now. Mendoza is eager to get Alvarez more at-bats, but the Mets don’t think they can afford to while they’re battling for the division and Torrens is (slightly) outperforming him. It’s hard to say whether Alvarez’s struggles at the plate are the result of his new approach, residue from the injury, or simply bad luck over a short sample, but the Mets are clearly worried about his plate discipline. If they’re going to tinker with his swing, it’s probably better to do that in a lower-pressure environment. If it results in Alvarez having a great second half, it would be well worth the short-term downgrade.

To be clear, if Alvarez does bounce back at some point, there will be no way to really know the reason for it. Did the Mets help him figure something out? Did he just need some time to get back to his old self? Plenty of people will have an opinion, but we won’t know what would have happened if the team had just held to their current course. It seems safe to assume that Alvarez will get back to something like his old self at some point, and if that happens soon, it will make the Mets look very smart.

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As we approach the midpoint of the season, the playoff races in both leagues are as muddy as ever. With July just around the corner and the trade deadline looming, the teams on the fringes of the postseason picture need to figure out if they’re truly contenders or if they need to start looking toward the future.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using 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 solution 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 of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday against the Mets, Chris Sale nearly went the distance for the first time in over six years. Now he’s been sidelined — an all-too-familiar occurrence in recent years — thanks to a freak injury, a fractured rib cage suffered while making an acrobatic defensive play. His loss interrupts a strong follow-up to his first Cy Young-winning season and a stretch in which the Braves have tried to dig themselves out of their early-season hole.

At Truist Park, Sale shut out the Mets on four hits through the first eight innings, needing just 102 pitches. With a 5-0 lead, manager Brian Snitker sent his ace back out for the ninth, giving him a shot at his first shutout since June 5, 2019, when he spun a three-hitter for the Red Sox against the Royals. Facing Juan Soto to lead off the inning, Sale ran the count full, then induced the slugger to hit a soft chopper to the right side of the infield. The 36-year-old lefty dove for the ball halfway between the mound and first base, landed on his left side while stopping it, and recovered to throw to first from his knees. It was an impressive play, if not an entirely necessary one given the score and the possibility that second baseman Ozzie Albies could have thrown out the none-too-fleet-footed Soto. “Do you think he wants this complete game?” marveled play-by-play broadcaster Brandon Gaudin.

With the adrenaline pumping, Sale didn’t show any sign of injury. He followed up his diving play by striking out Pete Alonso, blowing a 96-mph four-seamer by him for his sixth punchout of the night. He was one strike away from finishing when Brandon Nimmo blooped a single into left field on his 116th pitch of the night. Not wanting to push the matter any further — Sale hadn’t gone past 116 pitches since August 19, 2017, and no pitcher this season has gone past 117 — Snitker brought in closer Raisel Iglesias, who needed just two pitches to close out the game by retiring Luis Torrens on a grounder. Read the rest of this entry »