This all started because I wanted to write about Isaac Paredes. He’s my kind of player, excellent despite all sorts of warning signs that what he’s doing shouldn’t be working. Advanced metrics and in-person scouting assessments are both quite negative on Paredes, and yet he’s batting .255/.354/.503, good for a 140 wRC+, in mid-September. He’s been one of the most valuable players on one of the best teams in baseball. It’s so weird!

But lo and behold, the exact thing I wanted to write about has already been written. Curse you, Esteban Rivera! Well, not actually, of course. Esteban’s writing is great, and it’s also of particular interest to me because he’s so observant of hitting mechanics. But I can’t exactly write an article about how Paredes’ pull-happy tendencies have helped him keep regression at bay when there’s a better article talking about just that already on the site. Read the rest of this entry »

All season, the Rangers have been fighting gravity. They stormed out to a lead in the AL West, but they lost Jacob deGrom in the interim. The Astros lurked not far off the pace. But the Rangers persevered and held their lead until the trade deadline. Reinforcements were on the way! Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Aroldis Chapman — they made more improvements than any other team in the league.

They needed it, too, because Nathan Eovaldi hit the IL the next day. Josh Jung followed not long after. As they slogged through August, the Mariners charged into the AL West race, making it a three-way fracas. No sooner did Eovaldi return than Adolis García succumbed to injury. And now, with the playoffs hanging in the balance and every win at a premium, this:

Right-hander Max Scherzer is expected to miss the remainder of the regular season with a strained teres major — a muscle that connects the scapula to the humerus. Scherzer is, Texas GM Chris Young told reporters, "unlikely" to pitch in the playoffs.

Brutal news for the Rangers.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 13, 2023

What rotten luck. For those of you who aren’t anatomists, the teres major is a muscle in the rear shoulder that gets stressed by pitching. It’s been in the news quite a bit this year, in fact. Justin Verlander missed the first month of the season with a low-grade teres major strain. Triston McKenzie missed the first two months of the season with a strained teres major. John Means’ return from Tommy John surgery was delayed by a teres major injury. None of these injuries have seemed to linger, and none required surgery, but the timeline is unfortunately immutable: there’s no chance of Scherzer making it back for the regular season, and little shot of him pitching in the playoffs either. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you at the start of this: I never quite bought into what Luis Arraez was doing. When he won the batting title last year, I was skeptical. When he was traded from Minnesota to Miami before the season, I loved the Twins’ side of the deal. When he was flirting with a .400 batting average at the All-Star break, I relegated him to Honorable Mention status on our top 50 trade value list. He just perpetually flummoxed me, slapping singles while I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Arraez has been downright putrid of late. He’s been below replacement level since the start of August. He’s batting .262 with a .282 OBP in that span, which is hard to fathom for a guy who is still only striking out 6.7% of the time. This isn’t a victory lap article, though. It won’t last. It can’t last. I don’t believe in this version of Arraez any more than I believed in the .400 hitter from June.

In trying to solve this mystery, I let other people guide me. Honestly, I’m not the person to figure out what Arraez is doing wrong, because I never quite understood what he was doing right. So instead, I read a bunch of articles about the good times. Then I looked to see whether Arraez had stopped doing the things that had so recently made him special. Read the rest of this entry »

You already know the deal with the Blue Jays, so much so that I barely have to mention it. The good players on their team? They’re major league legacies. As kids, they were in major league clubhouses. There are cute pictures of them, chubby-cheeked, watching their famous parents win various accolades. Their major league success was hardly preordained, but let’s just say it didn’t come out of nowhere.

That lazy narrative had already sprung a few leaks, even before this year. Matt Chapman and George Springer don’t quite fit the bill. Kevin Gausman and Jordan Romano don’t either. Cavan Biggio isn’t even a starter. But there’s perhaps no better counter-example than Davis Schneider, the Jays’ newest star. Schneider flew so far under the radar that the metaphor doesn’t work; he was almost subterranean. He was a 28th-round draft pick in 2017, a round that doesn’t exist anymore. He didn’t reach Double-A until the end of the 2022 season. Now he’s the best hitter on the Jays, and in at least a few contrived ways that I’ll endeavor to show you in this article, he might be the best hitter of all time.

I know what you’re thinking. “Really, Ben? The best hitter of all time? He’s not even the best hitter on his own team right now.” To that I say, sure, you might think that. But that’s based on your perception of the future. If we limit our analysis to merely what has happened on the field, no Blue Jays hitter even approaches Schneider’s magnificence. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cubs signed Seiya Suzuki before the 2022 season, it was part of a bold strategy to accelerate their return to contention. They weren’t quite ready for their close up that year, but the general plan was pretty clear: add a few pieces then, tack on more the following season, and aim for a good team sooner rather than later.

Good news! That plan has worked. The Cubs are in playoff position in mid-September, just like they drew it up. They supplemented 2022’s free agency exploits with a double dip last offseason. Cody Bellinger and Dansby Swanson have been right at the forefront of the charge, though Swanson has slumped recently. But for a bit, it looked like Suzuki might not be a part of Chicago’s plans.

He coasted through 2022, a solid righty bat but hardly one of the best hitters in the league. He started off this season in a funk, dealt with injuries, and finally got benched in early August. It was a long fall for someone so heralded, but honestly, you can see what the Cubs were thinking. Through that point in the year, Suzuki was batting .249/.328/.389, good for a 96 wRC+, and striking out a worrisome 25.3% of the time. He’d slumped as the year wore on, to boot; he had a wRC+ of 59 in the months of June and July. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, Labor Day. The weather is perfect (unless you’re in New York), there’s a well-placed day off of work, and playoff races are in full swing. It’s a great overall time for sports — football is starting up, and the US Open is headed toward a thunderous final. If your team isn’t in the hunt for October, it can be easy to tune out; I wouldn’t blame you for going somewhere else for your sporting needs. But don’t worry: you can still get your fix of baseball, so long as you’re willing to consume it in five bite-sized increments. Shout out, as always, to Zach Lowe, who was making lists of NBA things he likes and doesn’t like before it was cool. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the trade deadline. It’s simultaneously one of the most stressful and most fruitful times of year for teams, fans, and writers. I didn’t sleep a lot in the days around the deadline — it seemed like there were always more deals coming down the pike. And yet here I am, a month later, reliving those days. And you’ll probably read it, too, because you want to know who won the deadline. Forget grades and prognostications and promises of future production. Which guys have delivered the most value to their teams so far?

I gathered up the performance of all 63 players who have appeared for a new major league club after being traded at the deadline. I took a liberal approach to defining “deadline” – I included Aroldis Chapman, for example, despite him being traded in the middle of July. I excluded everyone who hasn’t played in the majors, and considered only their statistics on the team they were traded to. Spencer Howard didn’t make the cut because he never appeared for the Yankees, and Paul DeJong’s San Francisco misadventures won’t cost the Blue Jays (though his Toronto misadventures will cost them plenty).

Yes, I know that this isn’t an exact accounting of who did best at the deadline. I’m excluding prospects on purpose. Plenty of people have opined on that, and plenty more will in the years to come as those young players climb the minor league ladder. What I’m interested in is who improved their fate the most right now, in 2023. With half of the post-deadline slate now in the books, we can take a look at which teams’ deadline moves have paid off in aggregate, and which teams would like a mulligan. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think you understand. You probably think you understand, but you don’t understand. Oh, you know that Spencer Strider is a bolt of lightning, a strikeout pitcher so overpowering that he might as well have been created in a lab. You know that he’s having a good season, surely; he’s locked in a tight race for NL Cy Young with Zac Gallen and Blake Snell. You know that he’s the logical continuation of the high-strikeout ace lineage, Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax or Roger Clemens for a new age. But I doubt you grasp how much of an outlier Strider’s 2023 season is, because I didn’t either until I took a closer look.

We have pitch-by-pitch data for every major league game on our leaderboards starting in 2002. That means we can calculate swinging strike rate, the percentage of pitches that result in a swing and a miss, for all of those years. I’ll tell you right off the bat that the single-season leader in this category is Jacob deGrom in 2020. In fact, four of the top five seasons on the list are from 2020; they’re outliers that were likely aided by the inherent randomness of a shortened schedule, in other words. For a rate statistic, that makes sense; the fewer innings you can throw to qualify, the easier it is to put up a wild number. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there. Are you a major league general manager or president of baseball operations? Do you work in a front office role for a playoff-contending team? Do you wish you had another starter, a good closer, or maybe an outfielder? Well, I’ve got great news for you, my friend. Operators are waiting now for your call: the Los Angeles Angels just yelled “Everything must go!” and threw their roster on the waiver wire like a miffed fantasy owner.

More specifically, the Angels placed Lucas Giolito, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López, Dominic Leone, Hunter Renfroe, and Randal Grichuk on waivers. For the next 47 hours, any team in baseball can place a claim on any or all of their services. It’s an unprecedented maneuver that could inject talent into playoff races across the league, and in an unpredictable fashion. If you’re on the fringes, you’ll get the first bite at the apple, but there are so many players here that even some teams currently in playoff position might end up with someone. If you’re looking for more specifics on the waiver process, Jon Becker wrote a nice explainer here.

Let’s talk about the way this works for the Angels first. Coming into yesterday, we projected them for a competitive balance tax payroll of $234,398,925. The first CBT threshold for this year is $233 million. That means they need to save around $1.5 million to duck under that threshold. The players put on waivers are owed around $6.44 million over the remainder of the year, and a similar amount even when CBT tax calculations are applied. The total tax savings will be slightly less than that, because the Rockies are paying a portion of Grichuk’s salary, but assuming most of these players find takers, the Angels will end up below that threshold. Read the rest of this entry »