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 »

One of the great truisms of modern baseball is that good teams can churn out good relievers at will. The Rays, Dodgers, and Astros do it every year. The Yankees develop so many pitching prospects that they’ve created a side hustle trading them for help elsewhere. The Guardians, Brewers, and Mariners are no slouches. The next dominant reliever on those squads might not be in the majors yet or even on people’s prospect radar.

You can add the Orioles to that list. Last year, Jorge López broke out and netted them four players in trade, while Félix Bautista also broke out and is now the closer. It gets better than that, though – one of the players the Orioles got back in the López trade is Yennier Cano, who hardly seemed like a marquee addition. Already 28 and with only 13.2 (bad) major league innings to his name, he looked like an up-and-down reliever if you’re an optimist. He was 38th on our list of the top 38 Orioles prospects before the year started. Hey, at least he was listed!

Yeah, uh, about that. In an admittedly tiny seven innings of major league work this year, Cano has posted otherworldly numbers. He’s struck out nine of the 20 batters he’s faced, hasn’t walked anyone, and hasn’t even allowed a hit. For what it’s worth, he also pitched three scoreless innings in Triple-A before being called up. It looks like the Orioles have done it again. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start this article with a bold claim: Wander Franco’s first two seasons in the majors were a disappointment. That’s a startling assertion, even if it might not seem that way at first. Franco hit .282/.337/.439, good for a 121 wRC+, while playing league average defense at shortstop; he was 20 years old for the first of those seasons. He played at a 4.3 WAR per 600 PA clip, which the FanGraphs glossary helpfully notes is an All-Star level. That’s all true. For the best prospect of the past decade, though, it still feels like a letdown.

The real thing that has betrayed Franco is playing time. First for nebulous service time reasons, then due to injury, his first two seasons in the majors were both as brief as they were scintillating. He appeared in 70 games in 2021 and 83 in 2022. His counting stats weren’t exactly imposing: 13 homers, 10 steals, and a mere 72 RBI if you’re playing fantasy baseball. I acknowledge that considering that performance a disappointment is grading on a curve, but when you’re as good and hyped as Franco is, that comes with the territory.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s time for the good news: that perception is as stale as the sourdough I bought last Wednesday and didn’t finish (hey, there’s a good bagel shop nearby, and I’m only human). Franco isn’t a young up-and-comer this year. He’s a bona fide star, one of the best hitters in baseball so far and the best player on the best team. It’s only a matter of time before your marginally-baseball-following friends start asking you if you’ve heard about this Wander guy. So allow me to present a gift to you as a baseball fan who wants to sound smart to their friends, a guide to why Franco is one of the best players in baseball and what he changed to get there. Read the rest of this entry »