The worst-case scenario for Hunter Greene’s elbow has come to pass. The ace right-hander had Tommy John surgery on Thursday, ending his 2026 season and almost certainly knocking him out for the entire 2027 season, too. This was Greene’s second elbow procedure this season; a previous arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies delayed his seasonal debut until Independence Day. Greene’s 2026 season wraps up with a 6.83 ERA, but a better 3.55 FIP over 27 2/3 innings in five starts. This is a full Tommy John revision — Greene previously had Tommy John surgery in 2019 — and not the internal brace procedure that tends to have a quicker recovery.

Suffice it to say, this is a major blow for both Greene and the Cincinnati Reds. For Greene, it’s the latest (and scariest) injury setback in a professional career that has never seen him throw enough innings to qualify for an ERA title. There comes a point at which one starts to wonder if he has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, the point where teams now can’t realistically tell themselves that they can keep him healthy as a starting pitcher. His fastball-splitter-slider repertoire would almost certainly play nicely in relief, though he’ll be hard-pressed to make the same impact as a closer as he could as a legitimate frontline starter. Read the rest of this entry »

Darrin Jackson is 62 years young and in his 26th season as a broadcast analyst for the Chicago White Sox. Currently paired with Len Kasper in the radio booth, the erstwhile MLB outfielder is equally adept at breaking down plays and sharing entertaining anecdotes. Much for the latter reason, he is a fantastic fit for our Challenging Career Quiz series, which now runs 11 deep and most recently featured Baltimore Orioles legend Jim Palmer.

Jackson’s playing career comes nowhere close to rivaling Palmer’s, although he did have his fair share of success. Suiting up for seven clubs — including both of Chicago’s — over a dozen seasons, Jackson was at his best in San Diego. Across the 1991-1992 campaigns, the right-handed swinger swatted 38 home runs as a Friar while logging a 99 wRC+ and 8.5 WAR. Filling a platoon role for much of his big league tenure, Jackson retired with 676 hits, including 80 round-trippers, over 2,816 plate appearances.

Which pitcher did he face the most times? That proved to be an easy question, as Jackson correctly guessed Tom Glavine with little hesitation. When I informed Jackson that the southpaw was also the pitcher against whom he’d garnered the most hits, he offered an unsurprising recollection of Glavine. As most fans know, the Hall of Famer had a well-earned reputation for getting strikes just off the plate.

“Facing him was never a fun practice, mainly because umpires had their own strike zones back then,” said Jackson, who went 11-for-44 with a pair of home runs and one walk versus Glavine. “He knew how to abuse that strike zone by working away, away, down and away, down and away. He would get you diving across the plate, looking in that zone, and the next thing you knew, he’d be throwing a two-seam fastball on the inside corner to freeze you for strike three. I probably got rung up looking by him more than anyone else I faced, because of that exact way of pitching. It drove me crazy. Even though you said I had a bunch of hits, I never liked facing him. He was just too smart and too good.” Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

June 5
It’s 3:00 PM, and I throw on yesterday’s highlights while giving Derek Jr. her third meal of the day. This is a bit of a luxury. She’ll soon be big enough to look around and see the TV while I’m feeding her. I should enjoy this opportunity while I can.

Two things stand out in the highlights. First, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Willson Contreras, and Ketel Marte all pulled home runs right down the line, but the three homers could not have been more different.

Contreras’s homer followed a classic archetype. Andrew Kittredge busted him with a fastball in on his hands, so Contreras got quick and short. He pulled his hands in and turned on the ball, launching it 402 feet and into the light standard atop the Green Monster. Marte’s homer looked familiar too, though we’re used to seeing it from left-handed batters, and he was batting righty. Tanner Scott attacked him with a fastball low and in, and Marte dropped his bat head on the ball, sent it over the bullpen, and finished with his hands up high for a walk-off homer. Crow-Armstrong followed a wilder path. He fell behind J.T. Ginn, 0-2, so Ginn tried to finish him off with a slider low and away. It wasn’t a terrible location, but Ginn no doubt hoped that it would get closer to the corner, probably even out of the zone away or low. Crow-Armstrong went out and got the ball, outside corner be damned, and hooked a low liner all the way over the right field fence. There was nothing textbook about it, but somehow the ball left the bat at 110 mph.

My takeaway is that there are a lot of ways to get the same thing done. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot anyway. My wife and I have our own very different ways of feeding, soothing, and putting Derek Jr. to sleep. We even hold her differently. We’ve read a million times that babies thrive on routine, especially when it comes to bedtime, but also, we’re different people whose brains and bodies work differently. I don’t really know how to square all of this. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the second installment of “Wait, What?!,” a series in which I dive deep on some of the prospects whose performance has most surprised me this season.

He had me at “Italian.”

At the outset of the pandemic, my wife encouraged me to join along as she learned Italian. After months of resistance, I finally caved. The first word I learned was ragazzo, which means “boy.” The plural form (ragazzi) came not long after, at which point I was able to translate the name of the pizza joint I’d often stumbled into at 3 AM back in college. All of 90 seconds into studying, I was hooked. I quickly exhausted a couple of online courses and soon, in a sort of modern day, language-themed pen pal arrangement, I connected with a few Italians online, which improved my language skills dramatically. This will be my last article here before I take a two week trip to Italy to see those friends. As far as I know, I don’t have a hint of Italian heritage, but that hasn’t prevented me from becoming a proud Italophile.

So, when an Angels source sidled up next to me on the backfields a few months ago and started talking excitedly about a Milanese lefty they’d signed out of indy ball, I stopped paying attention before he got to the part about the upper-90s fastball and wipeout slider. Read the rest of this entry »

I might have a thing for guys who throw a lot of different fastballs. Earlier this week, I looked into Drew Rasmussen’s novel approach to pitching: just make the entire arsenal out of fastballs. Rasmussen used to mix four-seamers and cutters, but then he added a sinker and kicked things up a notch. The multi-fastball approach has swept baseball in recent years, in fact, to the point where pitchers with only one option in their toolkit now stand out to me. But I think I’ve seen a new variation. Ben Joyce throws two fastballs, and one of them is an offspeed pitch.

You probably think of Joyce as one of the hardest throwers in baseball, if you think of him at all. He was a standout at Tennessee, showing big league velocity while closing games for the Vols. He threw a pitch 105.5 mph in 2024, still one of the five fastest pitches recorded in the Statcast era. He’s always been a little wild. He reaches back for everything he possibly has. It’s the kind of profile that makes you wonder what he’s going to pair with that absurd fastball.

In 2024, Joyce started experimenting with a splinker, a splitter/sinker hybrid. He turned to that pitch partway through the year after discussing sinker grips with some of the other Angels pitchers, and he spent a lot of that season playing with the different ways he could throw it. It was very much still a work in progress – he changed the shape and velocity of it quite a lot as he learned the grip – but adding something that sat between his fastball and slider was a great success, so much so that Michael Baumann blogged about his two fastballs way back in January 2025. Then Joyce got hurt five games into the year, had shoulder surgery, and missed the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, please visit our Patreon.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest apparent change in the baseball’s behavior (this time it seems to be deader) and, in a tribute to Tommy John (11:35), retrace the timeline of his trailblazing surgery and his return to a major league mound 50 years ago through contemporaneous accounts and quotes. Then (55:58) they bring on top-tier Patreon supporter Jamie Verbrugge to discuss his podcast and baseball backgrounds before answering listener emails (1:05:02) about the upper bounds of a cup of coffee, a really entertaining but trophy-less season vs. a really boring championship season, an undercover baseball robot, whether Jefry Yan would celebrate a strikeout on an overturned ball call, whether fans are suggestible enough to be fooled by fake home run distances, an ultimate frisbee-style integrity rule for baseball, the value of Ron Washington, and the advisability of bringing the infield in, followed by Stat Blasts (2:01:49) about Pete Crow-Armstrong leading his league in offense and defense, every team in a divison having the same recent record, team games with high matching run, hit, and walk totals, pitchers who got a win, a loss, and a save in a single three-game series, team games with streaks of the same start to each offensive inning, bullpens where one pitcher out-WARed all the others combined, and strikeout-free shutouts.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Sheehan on the ball
Link to Savant drag dashboard
Link to earlier ball analysis 1
Link to earlier ball analysis 2
Link to John’s statement
Link to MLB.com on John’s statement
Link to Reuters on John’s illness
Link to Tommy John wiki
Link to Frank Jobe wiki
Link to Jaffe on John
Link to career IP leaders
Link to Grant on Posey/Avila
Link to NanoNeedle article
Link to Maness repair article
Link to TJ timeline links
Link to TJS database
Link to Strom surgery article
Link to Bordley surgery article 1
Link to Bordley surgery article 2
Link to Ben’s baseball/America course
Link to Ben C. on Skubal and Detroit
Link to Dickson on “cup of coffee”
Link to Asimov’s Robot series
Link to Super Baseball 2020
Link to Baseball Highlights 2045
Link to Data smell Reddit thread
Link to Skenes photos
Link to Yan game video
Link to Yan box score
Link to Yan Savant search
Link to ultimate’s integrity rule
Link to Arraez/Washington article
Link to article on Wash in 2027
Link to SIS infield-in study
Link to Ben on shifting vs. RHB
Link to Stirnweiss SABR bio
Link to PCA/Snuffy Blast spreadsheet
Link to AL Central streaks image
Link to 13-13-13 Stathead query
Link to win/loss/save spreadsheet
Link to leadoff streaks info
Link to 2026 Guardians relievers
Link to bullpen WAR gaps spreadsheet
Link to Tigers-Guardians gamer
Link to zero-K, zero-run games
Link to listener emails database
Link to MLB All-Century Team
Link to BNS Jays play podcast

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The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.

That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.

Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it.
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If you’ve visited our splits leaderboards or the player page splits or splits tool in the last few days, you’ve probably noticed a change. And you’d be right to have noticed! Our development team just deployed our upgraded splits, and I’ve been tasked with running through the changes. Here’s a top-level summary before I dive deeper:

Splits Page on the Player Pages

• We’ve added nine new stat groups to the splits page, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
• We’ve changed the UI to include a stat group selector at the top of the splits page to accommodate the addition of more stats. If you want to see stats that appear in Advanced, Batted Ball, or our new stat groups, you’ll simply click on those options instead of scrolling down.

Splits Leaderboards and Player Page Splits Tool

• We’ve added the same new stat groups we added to the player page splits, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
• We’ve refreshed the UI using our modern interface, making it responsive to user interaction.
• We’ve integrated the page with our updated Custom Teams feature. Please note, this integration is only available on the splits leaderboards.

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