The first inning was a harbinger. The eighth inning featured an offensive explosion for a team that all too often struggles to score. The Cleveland Guardians plated five runs to break a 1-1 tie and went on to beat a thoroughly frustrated Detroit Tigers team 6-1. The season-saving rally evened the best-of-three Wild Card series at one apiece, setting up a decisive finale for tomorrow afternoon in Cleveland.

The Tigers had their chances. Make that many chances — the first of which came as fans at Progressive Field were just settling into their seats. Parker Meadows pulled a groundball into the four-hole that second baseman Brayan Rocchio could only smother, giving Detroit the first of its 17 baserunners (yes, 17) on the day. Center fielder Chase DeLauter — playing in the first inning of his first big league game — then lost a battle with the sun and wind, dropping a fly ball and giving the Tabbies an early opportunity to open up a lead. Cleveland starter Tanner Bibee survived the little-fault-of-his-own threat. Three strikeouts later, the game went to the home half scoreless.

It didn’t remain scoreless for long. Two batters in, George Valera — a rookie with just 17 major league games under his belt — took Detroit starter Casey Mize deep. It was the first of three Guardians home runs on the day, and while it gave them an early lead, it paled in importance to the two that came later.

One of the game’s biggest plays took place in the fourth inning. With the bases juiced courtesy of a Riley Greene double and a pair of free passes, Javier Báez laced a two-out single to give the Tigers a 2-1 lead… or so it seemed. Zach McKinstry was thrown out trying to go first to third, and the out was recorded just before Dillon Dingler crossed the plate with what would have been the second tally. Initially ruled safe, McKinstry was ultimately determined to be out per video review — this on DeLauter’s first career outfield assist. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cleveland Guardians are playing postseason baseball for the seventh time in the past 10 seasons, and it’s not because of a prolific offense. The low-budget AL Central club doesn’t score a high number of runs, but neither do its opponents. The Guardians allowed the third fewest runs in the junior circuit this year, and only the Houston Astros have been stingier over the past decade. Cleveland’s reputation as a pitching factory is well-earned.

How do Guardians hurlers view the organization’s pitching group, which is fronted at the big league level by pitching coach Carl Willis and includes assistants Brad Goldberg and Joe Torres, as well as bullpen coach Caleb Longshore? I recently asked that question to a quartet of Cleveland pitchers, three of whom are on the current staff, and another who was on the team prior to this summer’s trade deadline.

Before we hear their thoughts, though, it makes sense to touch on the 26-year-old right-hander who is slated to take the mound in this afternoon’s Wild Card Series opener against the Detroit Tigers. I didn’t talk to Gavin Williams about the Guardians pitching group, but I did ask him how his game has grown since we first spoke two years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Narváez has far exceeded expectations this season. Acquired by the Red Sox from the Yankees last winter in exchange for 22-year-old pitching prospect Elmer Rodriguez-Cruz, Narváez went into spring training hoping to earn a job as Boston’s backup catcher. He did much more than that. The 26-year-old backstop went on to claim the starting job, and he heads into the final day of the regular season with 15 home runs and a 97 wRC+ over 446 plate appearances. A plus defender, Narváez has 12 defensive runs saved and 2.7 WAR.

Back in spring training, Alex Cora said something about the still-unproven — just six games of MLB experience — native of Maracay, Venezuela that caught my attention.

“He had a great offseason, playing in winter ball,” the Red Sox manager told a group of reporters, including yours truly. “Learned a lot about the offensive side of it. Very Gleyber-like as far as his swing. He can stay inside the ball and drive it.”

I stored away those quotes, thinking they might be worth revisiting if Narváez were to not only make the team, but also end up contributing with the bat. Six months later, I did just that. Reminding him of what he’d said in Fort Myers, I asked Cora if Narváez still has a Gleyber Torres-like swing. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Harrison is morphing into a different pitcher than the one the Red Sox acquired from the Giants as part of June’s jaw-dropping Rafael Devers deal. That was the plan when Boston brought him on board, as evidenced by the 24-year-old southpaw’s having spent close to three months in Triple-A following the swap. With 182 2/3 big league innings under his belt, the former top-rated prospect in the San Francisco system was sent to Worcester to have his repertoire reconfigured.

His primary weapons remain largely the same. Harrison still attacks hitters with a one-two combo that Eric Longenhagen called “an uphill fastball” and “a big bending breaking ball.” The former is an 94.8-mph heater, while the latter is an 84.2-mph offering that is categorized as a slurve.

And then there are the new additions.

“First and foremost, there is the cutter,” said Harrison, who has made two appearances and allowed one run over nine innings since making his Red Sox debut on September 10. “There is also a sinker that I can mix in to lefties. I have a new changeup grip, as well. Everything else is the same. The four-seam is kind of how I’ve always been identified — and I still have the slurve — so now it’s been about adding the other secondary stuff to protect it.”

Harrison mentioned adding a cutter when I spoke to him early last season, but the pitch never really took hold. Per Baseball Savant, he threw only six of them in 2024. As for the changeup, there have been multiple iterations. After tweaking his original grip last year, he is now a member of the kick change generation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Detroit Tigers are in a dogfight with just six games remaining on the schedule. Not only is their lead in the American League Central down to one game over the Cleveland Guardians — their opponent the next three nights — a Wild Card berth is no sure thing if they don’t hang on to win the division. As my colleague Kiri Oler pointed out just yesterday, while their chances are promising on paper, “the error bars on those odds are huge.” In order to stave off what could reasonably be deemed a collapse, a Tigers team that has lost nine out of their last 10 is badly in need of wins down the stretch.

A trio of pitchers who will help determine Detroit’s fate were the subject of a recent conversation I had with Dan Hubbs. Now the bullpen coach for the Athletics, Hubbs was the Tigers’ director of pitching development in 2019 and 2020, a time in which Tarik Skubal, Casey Mize, and Will Vest were all on the doorstep of the majors. Skubal (who made his major league debut in 2020) is slated to start tonight, while Mize (also 2020) will be on the mound over the weekend, and Vest (2021) has a team-leading 21 saves.

Heading into the 2020 season, Skubal was no. 4 on our Tigers prospect rankings with a 50 FV, Mize was ranked no. 2 with a 60 FV, and Vest was no. 36 with a 35+ FV. How did Hubbs view them then, and what does he see from them — albeit from a distance — five years later? That was what I wanted to know.

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Hubbs on Tarik Skubal:

“With Tarik, it was getting him to command the arm side a little bit more. He was always kind of cross body and ran balls in on guys, and he would pitch up. He’s always had the mindset. I mean, he’s an animal on the mound, and always attacking the strike zone. So, one of the biggest things now is that he commands the arm side. But what has really changed is that he never had the changeup that he has now. That’s taken him to a whole different stratosphere. He throws 100 [mph], then he has this changeup that he can throw against [righties or lefties], interchangeably with his fastball. Read the rest of this entry »

Cade Horton hasn’t simply been one of the best rookie pitchers in MLB this year, he has been one of the better starters in the senior circuit. The 24-year-old Chicago Cubs right-hander has a record of 11-4 to go with a 2.66 ERA and a 3.53 FIP over 115 frames. Moreover, he boasts a 0.93 ERA over his last 11 starts. In Triple-A to begin the season — his Cubs’ debut came on May 10th — Horton is now poised to start for Craig Counsell’s club in October,

My colleague Michael Baumann wrote about the 2022 first-rounder just over a month ago, but given his continued success, and with the postseason looming, another article seemed in order. Already well-informed on his background and arsenal, I asked Horton about the approach he takes with him to the mound.

“I’m a guy that is going to go out there and fill up the zone,” the erstwhile Oklahoma Sooner told me prior to a recent game at Wrigley Field. “I really just try to get outs and put my team in a good position to win. I’m a competitor, so I’m attacking the strike zone.”

Attacking the strike zone is, in many ways, akin to pitching to contact — more of an old-school approach to pitching — whereas in today’s game, chasing swing-and-miss is most often the goal. Given his high-octane heater and overall plus stuff, is he not looking to miss bats? Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Mann’s playing career was coming to a close when he was featured here at FanGraphs in June 2020. A southpaw whose professional experience spanned 17 seasons — including part of 2018 with the Texas Rangers — he was soon to turn from hurler to tutor. Mann served as a pitching coordinator for the KBO’s Lotte Giants in 2021, then spent the next two years as a trainer and pitching coordinator at Driveline. His last two season have been in Miami. Mann joined the Marlins as a pitching strategist in 2024, and this year he is their bullpen coach.

Given his background and expertise, as well as my being intrigued by some of the talented arms on the Miami pitching staff, I made it a point to catch up with Mann when the Marlins visited Fenway Park in mid-August. I wasn’t sure exactly what we’d talk about, but I knew that it would be a good pitching conversation. We ended up focusing on changeups and splitters.

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David Laurila: You just told me that Edward Cabrera has a unique changeup. What makes it stand out?

Brandon Mann: “The most unique part is how hard it is [94.2 mph, per Baseball Savant]. The movement profile is similar to a sinker, although it has a little bit more depth than sinkers in general. It’s really more of the spin. Say he throws a changeup and a sinker and both are 96 [mph]. The movement profiles would be almost identical, but the changeup is going to fall off more because it’s got as much as 600 fewer rpm. That’s super unique.

“I don’t know if the movement gives it justice when you actually see… say it’s three [inches] of induced vertical break and 16 [inches] horizontal — and then he throws a sinker at six and 18. They’re the same velo, and the sinker stays up, but the changeup falls off, and somebody swings and misses at it. A lot of that is the spin component. Again, it’s similar velo, but anywhere from 500 to 600 rpm less spin. Read the rest of this entry »

BOSTON — The Cleveland Guardians drafted Parker Messick 54th overall in 2022, and the decision to do so is looking increasingly shrewd. Since making his major league debut on August 20, the 24-year-old southpaw out of Florida State University has taken the mound five times and fashioned a 1.84 ERA and a 2.50 FIP over 29 1/3 innings. And while his 18.3% strikeout rate in the majors isn’t impressive, Messick fanned 29.1% of batters prior to his call-up, suggesting the strikeout stuff is still to come. When Eric Longenhagen wrote about Messick in late May, he pointed out that the lefty “leads the minors in strikeouts since 2023.”

What makes Messick effective is a combination of factors that belie his pedestrian velocity and lack of an elite breaking ball. As our lead prospect analyst explained when ranking the 50-FV prospect fourth in the Guardians system, “Messick’s 92-mph fastball doesn’t have a ton of carry to it, but it does run uphill and can garner whiffs via its angle.” Eric went on to write that his “changeup is at least plus.”

Messick considers his changeup to be his best pitch.

“I would say that it is,” Messick told me when Cleveland played in Boston earlier this month. “As far as swing-and-miss goes, yeah. When it’s paired right with my other stuff — when I’m tunneling it off of my other pitches — is when it is at its best. It does have some sharp movement down at the end, I guess. It also has just enough speed differential to get that swing-and-miss at the bottom when they’re out in front of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Cam Schlittler was on the doorstep of the big leagues when he led Sunday Notes on the penultimate day of June. Just 10 days later, the 24-year-old right-hander took the mound at Yankee Stadium against the Seattle Mariners and earned a win in his MLB debut. He’s been a presence in New York’s rotation ever since. In 11 starts for the pinstripers, Schlittler has a 3-3 record to go with a 3.05 ERA and a 3.73 FIP over 56 solid innings.

The 98-mph cut-ride fastball that Schlittler addressed in the article has been his most prominent pitch. Thrown at a 56.2% clip, it has elicited a .202 BAA and just a .298 slug. Augmenting the high-octane heater are a quartet of secondaries — none of which is the offering he planned to add to his arsenal this season.

“When I talked to you in the spring, I was working on a splitter,” Schlittler told me at Fenway Park on Friday. “But I just couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t want to go into the season competing with something I wasn’t really comfortable throwing, so I stopped throwing it.”

The 2022 seventh-round pick Northeastern University product began this season in Double-A, where he attacked hitters with the aforementioned fastball, a sweeper, and a curveball. He introduced a cutter — “metrically, it’s kind of in-between a slider and a cutter” — in his final start before being promoted to Triple-A in early June. He’s since added a two-seamer, giving him a pitch he can use to bore in on righties.

Which brings us back to the shelved splitter. Why does the young hurler feel that he wasn’t able to master the pitch? Read the rest of this entry »

Braxton Ashcraft is aiming to join the Pittsburgh Pirates rotation, hopefully as soon as next season. For now, the 25-year-old right-hander is putting up impressive numbers while being used prudently in his first taste of major league action. Since debuting in late May, Ashcraft has made 23 appearances — all but six of which have come out of the bullpen — while logging a 2.47 ERA and a 2.85 FIP over 58 1/3 innings. Moreover, he’s allowed just 49 hits, only two of which have left the yard.

His previous lack of durability is the reason behind the caution. When our 2025 Pirates Top Prospects list came out in the spring — Ashcraft was no. 2 with a 50 FV — Eric Longenhagen wrote that “injuries are an inescapable aspect of Ashcraft’s profile due to his history and the violent nature of his delivery.” Drafted 51st overall in 2018 out of Waco, Texas’ Robinson High School, the righty entered the year having thrown just 235 professional innings, including a career-high 73 frames a year ago. Counting his time in the minors, he is up to 106 2/3 in the current campaign.

His stuff is clearly plus, and not just because his heater averages 96.9 mph. The best of Ashcraft’s five pitches is his slider, which he’s thrown 32.6% of the time to the tune of a .202 batting average allowed and a 30.7% whiff rate. Delivered at 91.8 mph, it was aptly referred to by our lead prospect analyst as the talented young hurler’s bread and butter.

Ashcraft discussed his repertoire, including the angle that makes his pitches so effective, when the Pirates visited Fenway Park at the end of August.

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David Laurila: When I talked to him back in February, Bubba Chandler said that you and he are similar in some respects. Do you agree?

Braxton Ashcraft: “In a lot of ways, yes. I think what drives a lot of our success is leveraging counts. His fastball is a lot different than mine in terms of the perception of hitters; his extension is longer than mine, and obviously the velo is a little bit higher. So is the vert. It’s just a different fastball, one that is pretty unique. Read the rest of this entry »