Roughly a month’s worth of the 2024 season is now in the books. The American League East looks great. The Brewers and Guardians are standing up for the Central divisions. The White Sox can only beat the Rays, and the Astros somehow can’t beat anyone. Enough time has passed that I feel confident saying all of those things. On the other hand, it still feels too early to be certain about which players are over- or under-performing. But that doesn’t mean our opinions can’t change a bit. There’s enough data to make some educated guesses, so let’s put on our speculation caps. Here are four players — two hitters and two pitchers — who have risen in my estimation over the last few weeks. Tomorrow, I’ll follow up with four players who have gone the other way.

Elly De La Cruz, SS, Cincinnati Reds
I already thought De La Cruz had the potential to be one of the best players in baseball before the season started. Quite reasonably, though, I was worried about the downsides. A guy who struck out 33.7% of the time last year is always risky, and that’s particularly true given how he did it. He swung more often than league average at balls and less often than average at strikes; he also made less contact than average. You can have one of those three things be true, or maybe even two of three if you make up for it elsewhere, but three of three? Yikes. Read the rest of this entry »

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things, my weekly column that highlights strange and often delightful happenings from the last week of baseball. My own baseball watching was a bit stilted this week, for the best possible reason. I went to three Giants games, an exciting event made possible by cheap ticket deals, a friend’s birthday, and some last minute cancellations of non-baseball weekend plans. Two of those games were pretty awful; Blake Snell got shelled Friday night, and then Blake Snell’s replacements got shelled Wednesday afternoon.

The good news is, there’s still *so much* good baseball going on all the time that I had plenty in the tank to write about. You don’t have to look too far to find things to like about baseball these days. We’ve got new holidays, old AL Central rivals, stadium gimmicks, and pure unadulterated velocity. As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column, Ten Things (Zach inspired Will Leitch to start his own Five Things column over at MLB.com, in fact). Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday night, the Orioles beat the Angels to vault into a tie for first place in the AL East at 16-8. That tie was short-lived; the Yankees beat the A’s a few hours later to reclaim first for themselves. Meanwhile, the Red Sox beat the Guardians to move to 14-11, the last-place Rays beat the Tigers to get back to .500, and the Blue Jays lost a squeaker to the Royals. It was a good day for the AL East, but what else is new?

Through 93 games of non-divisional play, the AL East teams have accumulated a 57-36 record, a .613 winning percentage. That would be a 99-win pace across a 162-game schedule. They’re tearing the league to shreds. That led me to wonder: Just how good is this start, and what happened to the previous divisions to start this hot?

To solve this problem, I decided to look back through history for inter-divisional records from across the league, because by definition intra-divisional records work out to .500. I started in 1998, the first year with 30 teams, and went from there. But that’s not sufficient, of course. If the East keeps this record up throughout the year, it will end up with the best winning percentage of the 30-team era. But its teams probably won’t keep the pace up. It’s a lot easier to post a .600 winning percentage over 93 games than over the 550 they’ll rack up by season’s end. The best full-season non-divisional winning percentage over that time was .595 by the AL West in 2001, and the Mariners tying the single-season wins record had a lot to do with that.

To account for that, you have to stop your count earlier in the season. Through the same date last year, for example, the AL East had played 81 non-divisional games. Outrageously, its teams had won 57 of those as well, a .704 winning percentage that’s the best, through games of April 24, of any division over this time frame.

Using the exact day isn’t perfect either, though. Through April 24 of 2004, AL East teams had played 18 non-divisional games thanks to a late start to the season. In 1998, they’d already played 95. Still, that provides us an interesting initial benchmark. The .613 clip that the division is currently playing at is a 93rd-percentile outcome, 11th-best over the last 26 years (I’ve excluded 2020 from this analysis for obvious reasons).
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C’mon now. You don’t really believe in Reed Garrett. Honestly, you might not even know who he is unless you’re a Mets fan or really into interchangeable middle relievers. Garrett debuted for the Tigers in 2019, tossing 15.1 forgettable innings. He departed for Japan and pitched for the Seibu Lions for two years, where he was good but not great. Upon returning to the states, he delivered more of the same: nine bad major league innings for the Nats in 2022, 20 split between the Orioles and Mets in 2023, and plenty of minor league time mixed in.

Some of that minor league time was fairly good. Garrett struck out 28% of opponents while pitching for the Norfolk Tides, the Triple-A affiliate of the Orioles, in 2023, though he walked 10% there and 14.5% in his time with the Mets. He posted a 1.59 ERA there, too, though it came with an unsustainable 91.9% left-on-base rate. He even looked fairly decent for the Nats in Triple-A in 2022, recording a 3.04 ERA in 47.1 innings with a 27% strikeout rate. We listed him on our Positional Power Ranking bullpen preview — as the 11th reliever out of New York’s bullpen, with a projected ERA of 4.75.

Garrett has thrown only 10.2 innings since then, which doesn’t sound like enough to change opinions of anyone. But my, oh my, have they been good innings. Let me just put it this way: We now project his ERA the rest of the way at 4.07, a drop of nearly three quarters of a run. Imagine how good someone has to be in less than 11 innings to outweigh their entire career up to that point. Garrett has faced only 41 batters this year; 21 of them have struck out. Ah, yeah, that’ll do it.
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On Saturday, Tyler Stephenson stepped to the plate in the bottom of the first with the bases loaded. He got a pitch to hit from Angels starter Patrick Sandoval, a middle-high sinker. Stephenson was late on it, but he’s strong enough that he managed to muscle it over the right field fence anyway for an opposite field grand slam.

Stephenson is off to a slow-ish start this year. In 18 games and 58 plate appearances, he’s batting .200/.293/.420. But a closer look reveals that he’s been the victim of some atrociously bad luck. Nearly a quarter of his batted balls have been barrels, or batted balls that are struck hard enough, and at beneficial enough angles that they produce extra-base hits more often than not. Stephenson is 229th in plate appearances and 12th in barrels leaguewide.

There’s more good news on the Stephenson front. Last season, he struck out 26.1% of the time and ran the highest swinging strike rate of his career. He’s always had a fairly good batting eye, but he made less contact than ever and paid for it in strikeouts. It’s still early this year, of course, but he’s making much more contact per swing and swinging less often. He’s walking more than ever, and his strikeouts have ticked back down to a more manageable 24.1%, though in only 58 plate appearances there’s plenty of uncertainty still.

Why am I bringing this up? Because Stephenson leads the majors in whomps per whiff, and looking at that leaderboard is helping me understand who’s starting the 2024 season hot. As a refresher, this very simple stat is a ratio of barrels to whiffs. It’s a crude but effective way of measuring the power/contact tradeoff, and the best five hitters of the Statcast era by this metric are, in order: Yordan Alvarez, David Ortiz, Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, and Juan Soto. I have to admit, I didn’t expect Stephenson at the top of the 2024 leaderboard. But even with him there, this looks like a compilation of the very best hitters in baseball this year, plus a few intriguing interlopers:

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things, where I highlight some strange and amusing happenings from the last week. We’re getting into the rhythm of the season now; 20 games in, you start to get a feel for how watching your team will feel this year. Are they going to be exasperating? Do they look like a fun group? Have a few new players completely changed the vibe from last year? Are they hitting so many homers that they had to make a new dong bong homer hose?

That’s part of the fun of watching baseball, in my opinion. Playoff odds are one thing, but how you feel watching your guys get from point A to point B matters a lot more in the long run. If you’re reading this article, I’m willing to bet that you’re watching dozens of hours of baseball throughout the year – perhaps even hundreds. The playoffs for your team might last 15 hours of game time. The little things are the point, and there were some great little things this week. As always, I’d like to thank Zach Lowe, whose basketball column inspired this one in both name and content. Let’s get going.
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I feel pretty confident in saying that I wasn’t alone in my excitement about the Cardinals starting the year with Victor Scott II on the roster. Good center field defense is incredibly fun. Stolen bases are incredibly fun. Scott stole 94 bases in the minors last year and looks like he might be a truly special defender thanks to his blazing footspeed (first in the majors, narrowly ahead of Trea Turner). Sure, he’d only gotten as far as Double-A, but injuries made his call-up at least defensible, and I wanted to see what he could do.

The results are now in: Scott isn’t ready for the majors just yet. The Cardinals have played 19 games, and Scott has appeared in all of them, three times as a defensive replacement, including yesterday. He’s racked up 62 plate appearances. He’s been quite bad in those plate appearances. That’s no knock on Scott, just to be clear. He’s a 23-year-old entering his third professional season. He’s only on the squad in the first place because a number of things went wrong higher up the depth chart. But the way the Cards have managed his playing time is so strange that I feel compelled to look into what’s gone wrong and why nothing has changed.

Scott’s speed has been exactly as advertised — he’s swiped two bags without getting caught — but the rest of his game hasn’t worked. He’s hitting a ghastly .089/.145/.143, good for a -15 wRC+ that’s comfortably last in baseball. He hasn’t made up for it with otherworldly defense; it’s too early for these metrics to stabilize, but every advanced system thinks he’s been below average. Statcast credits it to his below-average reaction time, which makes sense given how fast he is underway. Read the rest of this entry »

For four years, Craig Kimbrel was the best reliever in baseball. He wasn’t arguably the best reliever in baseball, or tied for the best; he was just the best. From 2011 through 2014, he compiled a 1.51 ERA with a 1.52 FIP. He struck out 42% of opposing hitters. He allowed a measly .269 BABIP, and didn’t give up home runs either. He averaged more than 65 innings a year and racked up 185 saves as the foregone conclusion of any game that Atlanta led going into the ninth inning.

For the next four years, he was merely a very good reliever – 2.47 ERA, 2.49 FIP, 41% strikeout rate. He started walking more batters and allowing more home runs. He was 30 years old in 2018, and the path forward felt murky. He signed with the Cubs in June of 2019 after a qualifying offer depressed his market, and he was downright abysmal. In 2019 and 2020 combined, he racked up a 6.00 ERA, a 6.29 FIP, and a ghastly 14.6% walk rate to go with 2.75 homers per nine innings. You know the story arc from there, more or less; that run signaled the end of his dominance, and even with occasional flashes of brilliance in the intervening three years, he was back to just a nice arm instead of an unconquerable monster.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of a Craig Kimbrel retrospective, because at his peak he felt so different from the rest of the league, with the wild strikeout rates and the misprint-looking ERA. Mariano Rivera never had a four-year stretch as good as Kimbrel’s, even though he obviously had far greater longevity. I can’t remember who invented it, but Kimbrel even inspired a new junk statistic: a Kimbrel is a game where a pitcher records a negative FIP. That was his specialty; it requires at least two strikeouts, no walks, and no homers over an inning of work. Games like that just felt inevitable at his best. Read the rest of this entry »