Last year, as you might have heard, the Guardians cracked the code. I say “you might have heard,” but let’s be honest: you heard. You couldn’t walk five feet without someone telling you that contact was in, that this team of genius mavericks had turned baseball on its ear by finding players who don’t fit the modern-day ideal. What dummies, those other teams! All you have to do is not strike out, and then baseball is easy. Why didn’t anyone else try this plan before?

Good news! The Guardians have continued their no-strikeout ways this year; they’re fourth in baseball in strikeout rate (lower is better), striking out only 20.3% of the time. But bad news! They stink. Their offense is hitting an aggregate .224/.301/.330, good for a 75 wRC+, the worst mark in baseball. The Athletics are in the middle of recreating the plot of Major League, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. The Nationals traded everyone who wasn’t nailed down, then traded the nails they had left over, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. They’re comfortably worse than everyone offensively; the Tigers are in 29th place, and they’re six points of wRC+ better. Only the Tigers and Marlins, who combine awful offense with awful baserunning, have scored fewer runs.

What gives? To some extent, this is about overhype. The Guardians had the lowest strikeout rate in baseball last year, but it’s not like they lit the world on fire offensively. They produced a 99 wRC+, which is below average (that’s how it works), and scored 698 runs, 15th in baseball. That’s despite playing a lot of games against the Royals, White Sox, and Tigers, who were all bad pitching teams. They did that with Andrés Giménez putting up a 140 wRC+ and Oscar Gonzalez coming out of nowhere to hit .296/.327/.461 over nearly 400 plate appearances. To put it mildly, those two haven’t backed up their performances this year. Read the rest of this entry »

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The 2023 season represents a golden opportunity for the Brewers. Their long-time tormenters, the Cardinals, can’t get out of their own way. The Cubs aren’t quite ready for prime time yet. The Pirates are an awesome story, but they’re light on impact players; this feels more like a feel-good warmup for the future than their year to shine. But the Brewers have problems of their own: their vaunted starting pitching has let them down to start the year.

You might assume I’m talking about the shaky back of the rotation; after all, the Brewers have been built around Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, and Freddy Peralta for years now. But Wade Miley is holding up his end of the bargain, and even Colin Rea and Eric Lauer have turned in mid-4s ERAs — hardly a disaster. Instead, the problems have come at the very top: Woodruff is out indefinitely with a shoulder injury, and Burnes simply doesn’t look like himself this year.

Over the past three seasons, Burnes had established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball. He has outrageous strikeout stuff; his 33.4% strikeout rate over those three years was 0.1 percentage points off of the best mark in baseball for a qualified starter. He mastered his command in the past two seasons, turning in back-to-back years of excellent walk rates. He even added durability, topping 200 innings in 2022, the first time in his career he’d even exceeded 170.

What’s gone wrong this year? A little bit of everything, to be honest. He’s walking more batters. His strikeouts have gone missing in action. His velocity is down across the board, as are his swinging-strike and chase rates. He’s giving up more contact than ever before, and “ever before” encompasses the 2019 season, when he ran up an 8.82 ERA and 6.09 FIP and got sent to the bullpen. In sum, he’s pitched to a 3.86 ERA and 4.34 FIP this year, quite the letdown after his last three years produced a 2.62 ERA and 2.40 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Cinco de Mayo, and welcome to another edition of five things I liked or didn’t like in baseball this week. As I’ll surely note until the heat death of the universe, I got the idea for this column from Zach Lowe, who writes my favorite basketball column with the same conceit. This week’s edition has a little bit of everything.

1. Tampa Bay’s Perpetual Green Light

I’m going to show you the start of a play:

Now, here’s the deal: without the benefit of an error, the runner on third scored on this play. The runner on first advanced safely to second. How? The power of aggression and a heaping helping of Randy Arozarena realizing no one is covering second base, that’s how:

Poor Lucas Giolito saw it all, but like Cassandra, no one listened to him. The last-second point towards home plate is heartbreakingly pointless. Read the rest of this entry »

In the beginning, there was nothing. Wait, no, that’s not right — in the beginning, there was Tommy Pham. Yeah, now we’re talking. In the beginning there was Tommy Pham. Then John Mozeliak said, “Let there be a trade,” and Pham decamped for Tampa Bay, San Diego, Cincinnati, Boston, and eventually New York. In exchange, the Cardinals got a sampler platter of minor prospects: Justin Williams, Roel Ramírez, and Génesis Cabrera.

Williams and Ramírez are long gone from the St. Louis organization, but Cabrera is still going strong. That might have oversold it coming into the year — in 157.1 innings across 142 games, Cabrera had compiled a 3.95 ERA, 4.32 FIP, and 0.4 fWAR. That’s hardly an imposing line, but the Cardinals hardly had an imposing bullpen, so he fit solidly into the middle of that group heading into 2023.

He’s only pitched 11 times in 2023, but those 11 times have been revelatory. Nineteen of the 45 opponents he’s faced have struck out. Only three have walked. That’s no fluke, either; he’s so deceptive and so hard to square up that he’s recorded more called or swinging strikes than he has balls this year, by a count of 68 to 60.

That’s a huge divergence from Cabrera’s earlier career, when he struggled with both his command and with missing bats. From 2019 to 2022, he racked up 260 more called balls than called and swinging strikes. You can think of that gap as a crude measure of how much a pitcher can attack the zone or entice hitters to leave the zone without giving up too much contact. If you simply pound the strike zone with so-so stuff, you won’t get many called or swinging strikes. If you nibble ineffectually, you’ll run up a huge tally of called balls.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper is back. One hundred and sixty days ago — less than six months! — he had Tommy John surgery, repairing a torn elbow ligament he suffered last April. NBC Sports Philadelphia, who you’d think would have a good read on the situation, published an optimistic headline with an aggressive timetable: Harper could be swinging by mid-May and playing in major league games by the All Star break. It’s May 3 today.

Suffice to say that 160 days isn’t a lot of time. I have perishable goods in my fridge that might have been there when Harper went under the knife. As Jay Cuda noted, the White Sox hadn’t won two straight games all season (until last night) since Harper got a shiny (well, probably not literally) new ligament to replace his old one. That’s not how these timetables work.

Tommy John surgery makes players disappear for a while. They come back to a team that looks similar but not identical to the one they left behind. That’s technically true of the Phillies — Trea Turner is reprising his old role as Harper’s sidekick, Taijuan Walker is new in town, and the bullpen has turned over — but it still feels more or less like the team Harper left. A Philadelphia sports fan who was busy on Opening Day could tune into a Phillies game after the 76ers’ season is over and get confused. “Hey, wasn’t Harper getting TJ? What’s he doing in the lineup?” Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago, no one would have believed you if you told them that Brandon Nimmo would get $162 million in free agency. That hustling guy on the Mets? How many millions? I don’t know whether it’s the try-hard-ness or the walk-heavy shape of his production, but his rise to prominence and subsequent nine-figure payday elicited more “wow he got what?” responses and raised eyebrows than any marquee free agent in recent history, save possibly Xander Bogaerts’ deal with the Padres. Well, the joke’s on those eyebrow raisers, because Nimmo is one of the best players in baseball this year, and he’s doing it by being as Nimmo as he’s ever been.

What does that mean? I’m glad you asked. For me, the core Nimmo skillset is getting on base without putting the ball in play. He might do it by walking. He might do it by wearing one on the elbow (or, let’s be realistic, elbow pad). However he handles it, though, his most consistent and bankable skill is juicing up the bases for the Mets’ bashers and boppers to drive him home.

In that sense, this season is just business as usual:

All those free bases add up. Nimmo got a cup of coffee in the majors in 2016, but his first real playing time was in 2017. Since then, he’s seventh in baseball in on-base percentage, just behind plate discipline legend Joey Votto. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of five things that I liked (or didn’t like) in baseball this week. I got the idea for this column from Zach Lowe, who writes my favorite basketball column with the same conceit. This week’s edition is highlighted by superstars being superstars, pitchers trying everything they can to keep evolving, and, of course, my two favorite topics: bunts and errors. Let’s get to it.

1. Jacob deGrom’s Cold Fury
Order has been restored – Jacob deGrom is back from injury and is once again the best pitcher in baseball. After an Opening Day hiccup, he looks a lot like he did the last time he was terrifying opposing hitters: upper-90s fastball, wipeout slider, and pinpoint command that makes the whole thing feel vaguely unfair. In his past three outings, one of which was shortened thanks to a mini injury scare, he has 25 strikeouts and one walk. Even if you don’t want to separate it that way, he has 43 strikeouts and three walks on the year. It’s outrageous. Read the rest of this entry »

José Berríos has gotten shelled this year. Through five starts, he’s allowed 17 runs, 15 of them earned, good for a 4.71 ERA. Per our calculation of RA9-WAR, that means Berríos has been almost exactly replacement level, worth 0.1 wins above replacement so far this season. That follows last year’s debacle, when he was worth 0.2 wins below replacement by the same calculation. For a guy the Jays saw as their long-term ace a few years ago, it’s been a precipitous fall.

José Berríos has been lights out this year. He’s striking out 26.1% of his opponents and walking only 4.3%. That 21.7% gap between strikeout and walk rates is 15th among starters this year, just ahead of Gerrit Cole, who you’ve maybe heard of. It’s not just strikeouts and walks, either: Berríos has allowed only a single home run all year. He sports a 2.32 FIP. By our calculation of FIP-based WAR, he’s the eighth-best starter in baseball this season, just a hair behind Shohei Ohtani.

That gap between ERA and FIP is, to put it mildly, extreme. It’s the second-largest gap in baseball behind Nathan Eovaldi, who’s allowing a .413 BABIP so far this year – oof. What gives with Berríos? Let’s investigate and see which side feels more like the truth. Read the rest of this entry »