In pitching, there’s a fundamental tension between the two best results you can obtain: strikeouts and grounders. Strikeouts are obviously the best, but grounders are incredible too. Batters put up a .232 wOBA when they hit the ball on the ground, as compared to .462 in the air (popups are another category of good batted ball, but I’m lumping them in with aerial contact today for simplicity’s sake). The thing is, the pitches that induce strikeouts tend not to induce grounders, and vice versa. Sinkers don’t miss bats, and four-seamers don’t keep the ball on the ground. It’s quite the bind.

There are, of course, pitchers who can do both. Nolan McLean springs to mind. There’s peak Zack Britton, Framber Valdez at his curve-spinning best, some good Cristopher Sánchez games perhaps. For the most part, though, it’s really hard to do both. I came up with a simple rule to measure how good pitchers were at it last year: divide grounders by two, add strikeouts, subtract walks, and divide by total batters faced. Aroldis Chapman, Jhoan Duran, and Andrew Kittredge paced the league in it last year, with Shohei Ohtani and Mason Miller rounding out the top five. Those guys were all incredibly effective.

It’s early in the season, of course, but do you know who’s leading baseball in this ratio in 2026? Well, it’s Mason Miller. Oops. I guess breaking baseball will do that. If you’re striking out 70% of the guys you face, of course you’ll lead this measure. But the only other player above 50%? That’d be Riley O’Brien, the new Cardinals closer, who has been one of the best stories in baseball so far this year. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

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Another week, another delightful slate of games, which can only mean one thing: It’s time for another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. One of my favorite parts of the early season is rediscovering the small pleasures of watching baseball that I’ve forgotten over the winter. I don’t mean watching Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge play. That’s obviously very enjoyable, but it’s not something I forget about in the offseason. But the feel of the game, the look on players’ faces when something unexpected happens, the pure happiness I get from seeing a bunch of grown-ups throw a ball around for a job? I only have that experience when the games are on, and the feeling is strongest after a prolonged absence. So no stars today, just stuff I watched that gave me a happy (or, in one case, angry) feeling. As always, a shout out to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, who popularized this article format in his seminal basketball column. And a programming note: Five Things won’t be appearing every week this season, to help balance out my workload and allow me to work on other projects here at the site. I’ll likely be off next week – unless the baseball I watch this weekend is just too enjoyable not to write about.

1. Late-Night Hijinks
I associate West Coast games with wackiness. It’s likely because I grew up out East, and was usually halfway asleep and fully loopy when I turned on late-night baseball (or late-night any sport, really; I have fond memories of silly Pac 10 football games at 1 a.m.). But there’s something thrilling about the last game of the day’s slate going into extra innings, whether you live in Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. Last week, the Padres and Rockies did their best to deliver. Read the rest of this entry »

Entering the 2023 season, Taj Bradley was the no. 36 prospect in baseball, a 22-year-old ace who overmatched his opponents to such a degree that he forced himself to the majors for the back half of the year.

In 2025, Taj Bradley was traded straight up for Griffin Jax, a 31-year-old reliever who has accrued exactly zero wins above replacement for the Rays since that trade.

In 2026, Taj Bradley has been one of the best pitchers in the major leagues.

That’s some roller coaster. And while my first instinct is to take Bradley’s first four starts with a giant grain of salt, this isn’t your average “random dude has good stretch” story. Bradley truly is one of the most dynamic pitchers in the world. He’s electric on the mound. He wasn’t a 55-FV prospect by accident. So let’s take a look at what he’s changed, what he hasn’t changed, and whether this recent run of dominance looks like the portent of a new skill level or just a blip on the graph. Read the rest of this entry »

The normal flow of a baseball season inevitably includes injuries. The dog days of summer usually come with a star or two on the shelf. It’s a long year, and roster depth matters more and more as the months advance. But sometimes, injuries don’t occur at predictable intervals. Sometimes it’s April 14 and half your roster is on the IL. Just ask the Astros.

On Monday, Houston placed Tatsuya Imai and Jeremy Peña on the IL. That followed two moves from last Friday, when Cristian Javier and Jake Meyers both hit the IL. Five days before that, staff ace Hunter Brown landed on the IL himself with a shoulder strain that will keep him from throwing for at least two weeks, and likely prevent him from appearing for far longer than that. And that’s just the in-season injuries. Josh Hader, Zach Dezenzo, Bennett Sousa, and Nate Pearson all started the year on the IL. Brandon Walter, Ronel Blanco, and Hayden Wesneski are still working their way back from elbow injuries sustained in 2025. That’s 12 players on the IL if you’re counting at home, and a number of stars among them.

It’s not like every injury matters the same. Pearson has never appeared for the Astros and has a negative career WAR. Dezenzo is a fifth outfielder. The core missing names for Houston are Brown, Imai, Peña, Hader, Javier, and, to a lesser extent, Meyers. If the Astros can’t replace the production from those five, all of whom are key parts of their roster, 2026 will be a long year. So let’s consider how each affects Houston’s prognosis in isolation, and then consider them all in concert.

Peña’s injury is the one the Astros are best-equipped to deal with. Thanks to last season’s Carlos Correa trade and a quiet offseason, Houston came into this year with an infield logjam. Peña, Correa, Isaac Paredes, and Jose Altuve gave the team four good players for only three spots. None could reliably flex to DH because of the presence of Yordan Alvarez. Altuve spent some time in the outfield last year, even before Correa arrived. Read the rest of this entry »

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My puny mortal brain is having trouble making sense of the numbers coming out of San Diego right now. It’s an uncanny valley thing. Mason Miller’s statistics just don’t quite seem like they’re numbers that you can put up in the majors. Oh, they’re all in the right columns. They’re not impossible or anything. It’s just that no one else has numbers that look quite like this, and even more so than that, if you think about what they all mean together, it doesn’t seem like the performance they describe can possibly be real.

Let’s start with the most striking statistic: 19 strikeouts in 24 batters faced. That 79.2% strikeout rate is obviously technically feasible, but I keep saying it in my head and it keeps not making sense. I look at strikeout rates a lot, particularly early in the season. But even for very good pitchers, they tend to top out around 40%, maybe 50% if they’re performing especially well. I can fit those numbers into my head. That means that about half the batters they face are going to strike out – easy enough. Face four batters in an inning? Two punchouts.

But 79% doesn’t work so easily. In a four-batter inning, that’s three strikeouts! But you don’t get a lot of four-batter innings if you’re striking out three batters an inning. Another way of thinking about that: Batters reach base safely about 40% of the time when they don’t strike out. But if they’re striking out 80% of the time, they’re already making outs in 80% of their plate appearances right off the top, and then add another 12% from in-play outs (60% times 20%). That’s an out rate of 92%! I can’t wrap my head around 92% outs. That’s the ratio of outs in your average two-hit complete game. But your average two-hit complete game includes a ton of batted-ball luck. Miller’s dominance doesn’t involve a lot of batted-ball luck – or a lot of batted balls.

That leads me to my next point of cognitive dissonance: all the swinging strikes. Right now, Miller is running a 39.6% swinging-strike rate on his slider. That means that batters swing at – and miss – 39.6% of the sliders he throws them. But they only swing half the time! That means they’re coming up empty 79.2% of the time when they offer at that pitch. Likewise, his four-seam fastball carries a 24.4% swinging-strike rate, off of a 43.5% whiff rate. These numbers are all ludicrous if you stop to think about them. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to a new season of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. After a slow, veteran-who-signed-late-this-spring style warmup to the year, it’s time for another dive into the little details that catch my eye each week. It’s the perfect time of year for it. Beautiful weather, early-season optimism, overheard conversations about who should bat third and who’s a bum – it all fuses together to make this one of my favorite parts of the baseball calendar. And even though the WBC whetted my appetite for the spectacular somewhat, there’s really no replacing major league games for the sheer variety of entertainment. I’m sure that Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose old NBA column format I’ve borrowed, would say the same thing about the basketball regular season. Let’s talk baseball.

1. Ricochets
If you share my baseball consumption habits, it might seem like every weekday offers a Royals game, a Guardians game, or a Royals-Guardians game. And I love it! I’ll take any excuse to watch Maikel Garcia continue his ascent from contact hitter to do-it-all superstar, a kind of modern-day José Ramírez. And I get to watch the actual José Ramírez too? And Bobby Witt Jr.? And Steven Kwan, Vinnie Pasquantino, Bo Naylor, and old favorite Michael Wacha? Both of these teams are sneaky fun, and their series this week didn’t disappoint. Witt might be having a slow start on offense, but he’s still a defensive genius:

Lots of shortstops – pretty much every other shortstop, even – would get only one out, somewhere, on that play. But two?! Ludicrous. When Garcia’s lunging attempt caromed toward Witt, he turned from interested observer to protagonist so smoothly that it looked like he was planning on doing it the whole time. It started with his feet. Instead of charging the ricochet, Witt timed his steps to hop to a stop and get his body in as good a throwing position as he could:

Read the rest of this entry »