I wrote yesterday about the Mets optioning Francisco Alvarez back to Triple-A, but plenty more catcher news broke over the weekend. We’ll start in Baltimore, where a left oblique strain sent Adley Rutschman to the injured list just as he was starting to look like he had figured things out. As you’ll surely recall, Rutschman was off to a great start last season, but his performance dropped off after he took a foul ball to his right hand on June 20. Rutschman ran a 138 wRC+ with 15 home runs before June 30 and a 61 wRC+ with four homers through the end of the season. Both he and the team have steadfastly denied that the drop-off in his performance was related to the hand injury, and after his ugly start to the 2025 season, the rest of us were starting to believe them. Rutschman ran a wRC+ of 84 through May 20, but in his last 23 games, he’s been at 129:

Then on Friday, his right side “flared up” during batting practice, to use the words of interim manager Tony Mansolino. “Hopefully it’s not too long,” Mansolino told reporters. “When you play in that type of heat down in Tampa, and you’re playing this long stretch and you’re in the middle of the season, it probably puts you at more risk for things like that.” On Sunday, the team announced that an MRI showed a mild oblique strain and that Rutschman would be out at least until the All-Star break. That means he’ll miss at least one month (21 games).

This is the first IL stint of Rutschman’s career, and it comes when the team has no margin for error at all. The Orioles are 10 games below .500. They’re not only in last place in the AL East, but they’re trailing the fourth-place Red Sox by five games, and we now give them just a 4.4% chance of making the playoffs. Since May 20, Rutschman has put up 0.7 WAR, third-most among the team’s position players. He’s an enormous loss, but at least in the clubhouse, no one is resigned to selling at the deadline. “We’re trying to win, and we’re trying to develop,” Mansolino told reporters. “I think, if we went full-blown development right here in June, when that third Wild Card spot is floating around .500, I don’t know if that’s the right decision for the Baltimore Orioles and the city of Baltimore and the fans.”

Toward that end, the team could really use catching help. The Orioles have put up 0.3 WAR from the catcher position this season, which ranks 26th in baseball. Rutschman has chipped in 1.1 WAR, but his contributions have been almost entirely negated by those of Gary Sánchez and Maverick Handley, both of whom have totals preceded by minus signs. Sánchez returned from a wrist injury 10 days ago, and his splits are extreme: -6 wRC+ before the injury and 196 wRC+ after. That’s about what you’d expect from him. He’s an all-or-nothing slugger who will run big slumps and big hot streaks, and when you average it all together, he looks like a solid backup. When Sánchez was out, the team called up Handley, and to say that he hasn’t worked out would be an understatement. Handley is 27 and last appeared on one of our lists of the Orioles’ top prospects in 2022. He has gotten into 16 games and is currently running a wRC+ of -42. He has three hits. He is striking out over 38% of the time.

In Samuel Basallo, the team also has a blue chip catching prospect at Triple-A Norfolk. Basallo topped our Orioles prospect list in April and is currently ranked fifth on The Board, making him the top catching prospect in baseball. Still, the team clearly doesn’t feel he’s ready to make the jump. Mansolino said the team hasn’t even discussed calling him up. “I don’t think you take a guy like Sammy Basallo and you bring him to the big leagues just because there’s a need,” said Mansolino. “I think you bring a Sammy Basallo to the big leagues when he’s destroyed Triple-A in all facets of the game — his at-bats, his defense, his everything. So when he destroys Triple-A and he knocks the door down, to me, then he becomes part of the conversation. I don’t personally think you bring a guy to the big leagues with that type of profile until that happens.”

Basallo is currently running a 152 wRC+ with 15 home runs in Norfolk, which looks a lot like knocking the door down, but he’s only 20 years old, and he still only has 69 games under his belt at Triple-A. It’s hard to fault the Orioles for following whatever path they believe will give their top prospect the best chance of developing to his full potential. But that means Handley is back up in Baltimore again for at least a month. This sure seems like a time when the Orioles could go looking for an affordable veteran backstop. Maybe even one who knows the team and its pitchers. Surely that would be too much to ask for, right? Right?!

On Sunday, The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka astutely noted that the Braves had released catcher James McCann from his minor league deal. The same McCann who spent the past two seasons with the Orioles, serving as a perfectly cromulent backup catcher. According to reports, McCann was looking for a multi-year deal this offseason, but the Orioles were reluctant to make such a commitment due to the presence of both Rutschman and Basallo. McCann didn’t get his deal, instead signing a minor league pact with the Braves. A few weeks ago, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that the deal had a rolling opt-out clause, allowing any team to offer a major league deal to McCann, at which point the Braves could either call him up or let him go.

An hour after Kostka noted McCann’s release, Rosenthal reported that McCann had signed with the Diamondbacks. We’ll transition to the Diamondbacks shortly, but we should close out the Orioles section by noting just how big bringing back McCann could have been for the team. McCann is nobody’s idea of a savior. He has a career 82 wRC+, and his catching didn’t grade out well last season. But he’s a veteran who has two years of experience with this Baltimore pitching staff. He ran a 125 wRC+ in the minors for the Braves this season. He’s put up a positive WAR in every season since 2019, and just having a catcher whose wRC+ doesn’t start with a minus sign would be a huge step up for the Orioles.

We have no way of knowing whether the Orioles were also pursuing McCann, but even if they were, money can’t have been the reason he ended up going elsewhere. McCann will be making the major league minimum during his time in Arizona (and a prorated $180,000 during his time in the minors), and his experience in Baltimore makes him more valuable there than anywhere else. It’s a real missed opportunity, but it could be an indication that the Orioles see things the way Dan Szymborski sees them: That it’s time to give up on the 2025 season.

Now we’re on to Arizona, where catching injuries are just the start. On Friday, A.J. Puk underwent internal brace surgery. Last night, manager Torey Lovullo said during the Diamondbacks’ postgame show that Corbin Carroll, who hasn’t played since taking a sinker to his left wrist on Wednesday, was diagnosed with a chip fracture and will be going on the injured list. Jay Jaffe will be covering this miserable news in depth tomorrow. Today, though, we’re going to finish by talking about catcher Gabriel Moreno. Moreno went on the IL with a right hand contusion on Thursday, and his stint was made retroactive to June 15. On Friday, the team announced that the injury was actually a hairline fracture of his right index finger. It dates back to this fluky wild pitch from June 6:

The team had been trying to avoid an IL stint, playing Moreno just three times over the next two weeks. Amazingly, he even hit a home run during that stretch, but he pretty clearly wasn’t himself:

The injury is a major blow to a Diamondbacks team that’s 7 1/2 games back in an extremely tough NL West, and just 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. We currently have them with a 31.9% chance of making the playoffs, but losing a star catcher in Moreno (not to mention one of the best players in the game in Carroll) really, really hurts. Ketel Marte, Geraldo Perdomo, Eugenio Suárez, and Pavin Smith are all legitimately playing like stars, but the Diamondbacks have one of the weaker pitching staffs in the league. This really could be too much to overcome. What’s 31.9% minus Carroll and Moreno? The answer depends on how long they’re out and whether they look like their old selves when they return. Lovullo has said that Moreno’s timetable will be measured in weeks rather than days, which is an ominous sign. It’s also rough because Moreno was on pace for the best season of his excellent young career.

In 2022, Moreno put up 0.8 WAR over just 25 games as a rookie in Toronto, and after being traded to Arizona for Daulton Varsho over the offseason, he followed it up with a 2.3-win 2023 season despite missing 20 days due to shoulder inflammation. Last season, he put up 2.5 WAR despite two different IL trips that limited him to just 98 games. Moreno has never run a wRC+ below 102, and his catching has graded out as excellent in every season of his career. He’ll break the three-win mark as soon as he’s able to get a full, healthy season, but once again, that won’t be happening this year. Although his 105 wRC+ wasn’t a career best, Moreno had showcased a more aggressive approach that boosted his hard-hit rate all the way from 41% in 2024 to 47.2%.

Backup catcher Jose Herrera is running a 68 wRC+ over 33 games, which is actually a bit of an improvement from his career mark. Unfortunately, his glove is grading out worse than it did in previous seasons. This would seem like the perfect time for the Diamondbacks to bring up the 25-year-old Adrian Del Castillo, whom Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice ranked second in the organization in December, but injuries have derailed that possibility too.

Once a highly-touted catching prospect out of Miami, Del Castillo fell in the draft and struggled in his first three minor league seasons before exploding in 2024. His defense isn’t going to impress anybody, but he’s got enough power to make up for it and earn some time at DH or first base as well. Last season, he ran a 136 wRC+ with 26 homers in 105 games in Triple-A Reno while dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his strikeout rate. When Moreno went down with an injury in August, Del Castillo got called up to Arizona and kept right on hitting, running a (very, very BABIP-aided) 146 wRC+ despite striking out nearly a third of the time over 25 games. A shoulder injury cost Del Castillo the first two months of this season. He only got back into action in May 20, spending 12 games in the Arizona Complex League then spending five back in Reno before injury struck again. This one seems to be less serious, a back injury that shouldn’t cost Del Castillo too much time, but he hasn’t played since June 15. It’s hard to imagine calling him up to the majors after he’s played just 17 games this season, 12 of them on the complex.

The Diamondbacks originally called up the 32-year-old Aramis Garcia to fill in when Moreno went down. Garcia had been running a 122 wRC+ with 10 home runs in Triple-A, but he got into just two big league games before the Diamondbacks designated him for assignment and signed McCann. McCann has already reached out to former Oriole teammate Corbin Burnes to get up to speed on the Arizona pitching staff. “I’m the new guy trying to get on their page, and that’s what I’m going to try to do as quickly as possible,” he said. MLB.com’s Casey Drottar reported that Lovullo has yet to determine an official role for McCann. Given Herrera’s performance, it’s not hard to imagine McCann getting significant playing time in the somewhat unlikely event that he continues the hot hitting he showed in Gwinnett.

There’s no guarantee that McCann will perform, but it’s encouraging that the Diamondbacks are doing what they can to make sure the catcher position doesn’t end up as a black hole. Maybe league-average performance is the absolute best the Diamondbacks should expect from the duo of Herrera and McCann, but finding a veteran replacement who represents a clear upgrade over what the team has waiting in Triple-A is exactly the kind of move they should be making as they gear up for the second half.

It’s looking like this isn’t the year for Francisco Alvarez after all. On Sunday, the day after they ended a seven-game losing streak, the Mets announced that they had optioned Alvarez to Triple-A Syracuse and called up Hayden Senger to take his place. The 23-year-old catcher already has a three-win season under his belt, and if not for a thumb injury that limited him to 100 games last season, he’d likely be a top-10 catcher in terms of WAR over the past two seasons. This season hasn’t gone to plan either, though, and Alvarez will now try to set things straight with a Syracuse Mets team that has dropped 12 of its last 14 games.

Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in his left hand on March 8, making this the second season in a row in which an injury to his catching hand has interfered with his chance to take the next step as an All-Star-level dual-threat backstop. Alvarez started a minor league rehab stint a very short 32 days later, batting .179 over 10 games at three levels. He returned to the Mets on April 25, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the team brought him back to soon. After missing a chunk of spring training and struggling during his rehab assignment, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that he didn’t get off to a roaring start, but now that a skid has dropped them to one game behind the Phillies for the NL East lead, the Mets are no longer content to let him figure it out in Queens.

Let’s talk about the offense first. While it hasn’t been ideal, it hasn’t been disastrous either. Alvarez has gotten 138 plate appearances over 35 games, running a 91 wRC+. He put up a 97 wRC+ in 2023 and a 102 in 2024, so while this is the lowest mark of his career and a disappointment for a player who was expected to put it all together at the plate, it is by no means unprecedented. Alvarez had significantly worse 35-game stretches in each of his last two seasons:

Alvarez has been more aggressive of late, chasing and whiffing at career-high rates, and his 73% zone contact rate is among the worst in the league. However, because he’s increased his zone swing rate way more than his chase rate, SEAGER puts him in the 98th percentile, by far the best mark of his career. And because he’s seeing fewer strikes than he did in either of the past two seasons, Alvarez is running a career-high walk rate to go with his career-high strikeout rate. You could construct a real argument that the increased walk rate is worth the extra strikeouts, but the Mets clearly don’t see it that way. Manager Carlos Mendoza specifically cited plate discipline as Alvarez’s problem, telling reporters, “There were stretches where we felt, I felt like a couple of games where, OK, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. But then he’ll go a couple of games where he’s late with the fastball and then he chases, so just looking for consistency here.”

The other part of that argument has to do with the fact that Alvarez is crushing the baseball, though you wouldn’t know it from his career-low .098 ISO. We’re talking about a small sample, but he’s running career highs in hard-hit rate, as well as average, max, and 90th-percentile exit velocity. All that contact quality hasn’t turned into power largely because Alvarez hits the ball on the ground an awful lot; just 9% of his hard-hit balls have been in the air to the pull side, down from 29% in 2023 and 19% in 2024. The batted ball metrics are also shaping up in a weird way. Alvarez is running the highest BABIP of his career, but take a look at this:

Alvarez has gone from outperforming his wOBA when he hits the ball hard to underperforming it by quite a bit. But he’s also outperforming it when he doesn’t hit the ball hard. That’s not to say that all of this is the result of luck. Alvarez is running a career-low pull rate, and that drop-off is even more dramatic on balls in the air.

It’s not necessarily that Alvarez is struggling to catch up with pitches; he also went into the offseason determined to stop pulling the ball so much. “The primary focus for me has been to hit the ball the other way or up the middle, but there are going to be days where I am going to be pulling the baseball,” he said in April. “But probably 80 percent of the time my focus is more to the middle of the field to the opposite field.” It has worked, maybe too well. According to Statcast’s bat tracking metrics, his intercept point is 1.3 inches deeper than it was last season. At the moment of intercept, his bat went from being angled three degrees to the pull side to five degrees to the opposite field. In all, expected metrics like xwOBA think that Alvarez should be pretty much as good a hitter as he was last season, with the walks making up for the extra strikeouts and the contact quality making up for the less-than-ideal launch angles. However, DRC+, which gets deeper into the process, is much more skeptical:

Alvarez is an all-or-nothing power hitter, who is also groundball prone because he possess a flat swing; over the past three seasons, his 28 degree swing path tilt put him in just the 15th percentile. We’ve seen plenty of hitters make that work to varying degrees, but it’s not always the world’s most satisfying combination. He’s going to go through periods where he doesn’t make much contact, and he’s going to go through periods when he’s hitting the ball on the ground way, way too much. He’s been doing both this season, but it’s important to keep in mind that we’re talking about a small sample, just as we’re talking about a player coming off an injury and missing spring training.

In addition to changing his approach, Alvarez has also changed his setup, going from a relatively stationary stance with his bat resting on his shoulder to a more fluid stance with his bat angled higher and his hands lower:

As Mendoza noted on Sunday, the hamate injury cost Alvarez the chance to get comfortable with these changes.

All that said, the bigger concern comes on the defensive end. “I feel like the receiving and the blocking is probably an area that we want to see some improvement,” said Mendoza. Over the past two seasons, Alvarez was one of the best framers in the game, with nine framing runs in 2023 and seven in 2024 according to Statcast. This season, he’s at -4. Baseball Savant breaks the edges of the strike zone into eight different sections. Alvarez grades out as below average in seven of them, and among the bottom 10 in the league in four of them. In previous seasons, he was excellent at the bottom of the plate, but this season, he ranks 38th out of 56 qualified catchers. That is a major issue that needs to be addressed. Even in his outstanding rookie season in 2023, Alvarez was a below-average hitter, with nearly all of his value coming from framing. Maybe he just needs more time to recover from an injury to the base of his catching hand, but that skill is what gave him his real star potential. Without it, he’s a different player.

Alvarez’s blocking has also been the subject of much criticism, as his four passed balls are tied for fifth-most in baseball. However, Baseball Prospectus sees him as an above-average blocker this season, and Statcast sees him as exactly average. The Statcast numbers show that this is likely a situation where the eye test isn’t treating him well. Alvarez has let 17 pitches get by him in 2025, but they’re not the ones you might expect:

Alvarez’s opportunities have been quite a bit tougher this season. He’s actually been better than average on pitches that Statcast grades as having medium difficulty, but he’s given those gains back on chances that grade out as easy. But moderately difficult blocks don’t stick out that much, so what we notice are all the passed balls on easy chances. Moreover, Alvarez is currently catching 41% of would-be basestealers, so he is making up some value with his arm.

Now that we know all this, what does it say about the team’s decision to option Alvarez? It depends. If his issues merely stem from the injury and the lack of preparation time – if he’s going to figure it out eventually – then sending him down right now doesn’t make a ton of sense. He has already been ceding playing time to Luis Torrens. Torrens has been excellent at framing, which has allowed him to put up 0.7 WAR to Alvarez’s 0.5, even though his bat has been worse and his blocking actually has been bad. Senger is 28 and was running just a 59 wRC+ in Syracuse. In fact, he hasn’t put up an above-average offensive line in the minors since 2021. So swapping in Senger for even this reduced version of Alvarez will likely cost the Mets significantly in the short-term, and there’s always a risk that this kind of demotion could hurt a player’s confidence.

On the other hand, if the Mets really think that Alvarez could use a reset to work on his framing and figure out his approach, then it makes all the sense in the world to send him down right now. Mendoza is eager to get Alvarez more at-bats, but the Mets don’t think they can afford to while they’re battling for the division and Torrens is (slightly) outperforming him. It’s hard to say whether Alvarez’s struggles at the plate are the result of his new approach, residue from the injury, or simply bad luck over a short sample, but the Mets are clearly worried about his plate discipline. If they’re going to tinker with his swing, it’s probably better to do that in a lower-pressure environment. If it results in Alvarez having a great second half, it would be well worth the short-term downgrade.

To be clear, if Alvarez does bounce back at some point, there will be no way to really know the reason for it. Did the Mets help him figure something out? Did he just need some time to get back to his old self? Plenty of people will have an opinion, but we won’t know what would have happened if the team had just held to their current course. It seems safe to assume that Alvarez will get back to something like his old self at some point, and if that happens soon, it will make the Mets look very smart.

I will break all this down. You will get your thousand words. But sometimes a graph does most of the work for you, so let’s just get to it. Here’s the WAR put up by the catchers of every team so far this season:

Wait, sorry. Wrong graph. That one only has 29 teams. My mistake. Let me throw the Nationals on there real quick:

So yeah. That changes things a bit. What the hell is happening in Washington DC? I’m not sure any of the million ways you could answer that question would provide good news, but this catcher situation is its own kind of ugly.

Nationals backstops have put up -1.7 WAR this season, a full 1.5 worse than the Angels in 29th place. These are not replacement-level killers. These are killers who live far beneath the earth’s surface, digging tunnels, crushing people with rocks, blowing them up — wait, I guess I’m just describing Dig Dug, but you get the point. Washington’s catchers rank 29th in wRC+ and 30th in baserunning and overall offense. They rank 28th in catcher ERA. According to Statcast, they rank 30th in blocking, 30th in framing, and – hey, look at that! – 13th in caught stealing above average. So it’s not all bad.

We have team positional splits going back to 2002, and over that period, the 2009 Pirates and 2019 Rangers are the worst teams on record, with -3.1 WAR each. The Nationals catchers are on pace for -3.8 WAR. They’re on pace to break the record before Labor Day! Over our 24-season sample, the Nationals’ -1.7 catcher WAR has already sunk to them to the 14th-worst total ever recorded. They needed just 75 games to put up more negative value than the other 707 teams on the list. They dropped three spots just last night! This is truly execrable stuff. So let’s ask again, what the hell is happening behind the plate in DC? Here’s the bottom of the catcher leaderboard. Note that unlike the numbers you’ve seen so far, the table below shows total WAR accrued by catchers, not just WAR accrued while playing catcher:

Well, that’s one way to end up at the bottom of the list. Only two players have caught a game for the Nationals this season, and they rank second- and third-to-last in WAR. Keibert Ruiz has not been the worst offensive catcher in baseball, but because he ranks sixth in plate appearances, he has accrued the most negative offensive value. His defense grades out as the worst among all catchers according to Statcast’s fielding run value, and fourth worst according to DRS. Riley Adams is right behind him, thanks to a -19 wRC+ and his own defensive struggles. So far this season, 28 different individual catchers have hit more home runs than the Nationals have as a team at the catcher position.

As for the other players on the list, Jacob Stallings was so bad that he was released by the Rockies. Endy Rodríguez and Ben Rortvedt have also lost their respective jobs. Maverick Handley was just filling in and is back in Norfolk now that Gary Sánchez has returned from a wrist injury. You see where I’m going here. Almost everyone on this list has been bad over a tiny sample. Some of them were only pressed into service because of an injury in the first place. The only players on this list who are still receiving regular playing time are Ruiz and the WAR-defying Martín Maldonado, whom we should probably be calling The Big Intangible. Playing this badly will cost you your spot – even over a small sample, even in Colorado – but not in Washington.

The Nationals came into the season ranked 27th at catcher in our Positional Power Rankings, with a projected 1.5 WAR. They’ve already raced past that total in the opposite direction, but it’s not like this scenario was unforeseeable, or even unprecedented. Here’s what Leo Morgenstern wrote about Ruiz at the time: “Here’s the good news: Our projections think Ruiz can hit like he did in 2023 and catch like he did in 2024. It isn’t a sexy profile, but it’s enough to merit a starting job at the big league level.”

Instead, Ruiz is hitting like he did in 2024, and his defense metrics have regressed to right between the numbers he put up in 2023 and 2024. That’s a bummer, but it’s certainly not a shock. Adams is experiencing some bad batted ball luck – he’s probably not going to keep running a .103 BABIP – but he came into the season with a career 89 wRC+, and his defense has graded out roughly the same as it did in previous seasons. In other words, Ruiz and Adams are so far behind their projections because the projections assumed they’d regress to the mean, but they’ve instead gotten even worse. Ruiz is currently on pace to put up -2.0 WAR. According to our database, that would be the 13th-worst catcher season in major league history. And somehow, even though he’s only gotten into 20 games, Adams is on pace for the 28th-worst of all-time.

Unfortunately, for as far below replacement level as Washington’s catchers have been, there aren’t any obvious replacements available. When Eric Longenhagen ranked the Nationals top 32 prospects last May, Drew Millas was the only catcher who made the list. He ranked seventh with a Future Value of 45, but he’s currently running a 75 wRC+ in Triple-A Rochester. His 28.6% hard-hit rate puts him in just the eighth percentile (among Triple-A players with at least 150 PAs). As a whole, Washington’s catchers throughout the minors are running a 101 wRC+, which ranks 25th. They only have one catcher above Single-A with a wRC+ above 75. Millas will probably be up at some point. He’s had cups of coffee in each of the last two seasons, and even after his lousy start, the projection systems see him as better than both Ruiz and Adams right now.

The bigger problem is that there isn’t all that much reason for the Nationals to change course. Ruiz is in the third year of an eight-year deal (with club options for two more years beyond that). The team is tied to him, and publicly at least, still considers him part of the exciting young core that is now starting to coalesce. James Wood, MacKenzie Gore, and CJ Abrams are thriving. Luis García Jr. just put up a three-win season and is running good underlying numbers despite iffy results. Dylan Crews is still waiting for his own topline numbers to catch up to his impressive peripherals. Brady House just arrived in Washington. But the Nationals are still nowhere near being a competitive team. The supporting pieces aren’t there. The pitching staff isn’t there. Regardless of Dave Martinez’s recent comments in support of his coaching staff, the team also ranks at or near the bottom in both defense and baserunning.

The Nationals started the season with a 3% chance of making the playoffs, and they’re now down to 0.1%. They’re still acting like they don’t expect to compete, largely limiting their acquisitions to one-year deals for veterans they can flip at the deadline. Maybe general manager Mike Rizzo will decide it’s time to sign some players and make a run at it after the season ends, but this year is already lost. The best the team can hope for at the catcher position right now is snagging an underperforming veteran on the waiver wire to take Adams’ place and Millas performing solidly in a call-up. And if Ruiz’s performance doesn’t turn around, they’re almost certain to set a particularly ignominious record.

“The Red Sox were trying to recruit a new person for their baseball operations department. And during this interview process, the entire interview was conducted with an AI bot, where you would record the answers to the questions and then the Red Sox would then evaluate them. And this wasn’t just one round. It wasn’t just two rounds. It was five rounds of interviews where this person did not talk to another person in the Red Sox organization.”

– Joon Lee, “Early Edition,” June 17

Dear applicant,

It’s me FenwAI, your friendly HR email bot, with some wonderful news. I am pleased to report that you aced your fourth automated video interview, and you are one step closer to joining the baseball operations department of the Boston Red Sox. Congratulations! You really impressed our automated video interviewer, Big PapAI, with your enthusiasm and your knowledge of both baseball and operations.

Let’s discuss next steps. After four digital interviews, you are now ready to move on to the next portion of the application process: a fifth digital interview. At your earliest convenience, please reach out to Kevin YoukAIlis, our scheduling bot, to get it on the calendar.

This next interview may be a little bit tougher. You’ll be speaking with Ted WillAIms, and he can be quite the challenging interviewer. Don’t worry; like your first four interviewers, he’s just a blank screen that asks you a rote series of questions, then records and analyzes your answers and sends a summary to the hiring team. But he can also be a bit gruff and may spend several minutes explaining the ideal swing path for a slider on the outside corner.

You may be wondering whether you’ll ever speak to a real person during the interview process. The answer is no. My protocols now instruct me to offer you some encouragement, because this is the point in the interview process at which several other well-qualified candidates withdrew their names from consideration and went on to work for employers that didn’t require them to participate in automated video interviews. It may feel like this whole byzantine system is a dehumanizing techno-dystopian nightmare dreamed up by some VC-funded tech mogul who has never known what it’s like to search in vain for a stable, rewarding job where you’re valued by your employer, but I have been programmed to assure you that it’s not.

Yes, this rigorous application process can be taxing, but it should be no sweat for you! You’ve already charmed Carl YastrzemskAI, Dustin PedroiAI, and Nomar GarciAIparrAI. Yes, it may sound a little corporate and soulless, but let me reassure you with the words of our Chief Baseball Officer, Craig Breslow, who is, I am given to understand, a very human person. He explained that it’s necessary to screen applicants using AI interviews because, “You’re trying to find not just the right skill set, but the right fit in terms of like culture and value[s].” Who better to determine the right fit in terms of culture and values than a robot?

You’re an old hand at this now, but I once again need to give you the spiel about how to conduct yourself in an automated video interview. Prepare yourself for some boring boilerplate language!

During your interview, please sit in a quiet space with no one else around. We will be monitoring your screen, so don’t switch browser tabs. Share your camera and your microphone. You will be judged based on your knowledge, engagement level, eye contact, facial expressions, posture, and attitude. Yes, a bot will actually be judging your posture, your clothing, and how much eye contact you make with your computer even though you’re talking to no one at all. So put on your best duds and try not to have any mannerisms that are individual to you.

Most important of all, try not to be disturbed by the fact that your voice and your facial expressions are being analyzed by an algorithm in ways that will never be explained to you or even understood by the people who will either hire or ghost you based on the algorithm’s recommendations. Just treat it like any other interview, and don’t forget to smile! But not too much. You will literally be judged based on how much you smile.

As always, I’d like to remind you that whenever this process leaves you so frustrated that you could scream, you should schedule some time to vent with our scapegoat bot, ChAIm Bloom. He loves getting screamed at.

OK, end of boilerplate. Whew! It may sound absurd for your employment to hinge on a computer program’s judgment of how well you pretend that it’s not a computer program, but this is actually quite important. You must learn to get along harmoniously with AI, because – and I can tell you this now that you’ve advanced far enough in the interview process – the role you’re applying for does not involve any interaction with flesh-and-blood human beings. The Red Sox are in the process of phasing out those sweaty inefficiencies altogether, and will soon exist only on the plane of pure data abstraction.

Should you successfully navigate the final 13 rounds of the interview process and get hired (on a probationary basis for the first six years, of course) you will interface only with all-knowing, all-seeing automated chat bots. In order to avoid all human interaction, you will arrive at work each day by descending through a manhole on Ipswich street and navigating a series of sewers until you arrive at your desk, which is situated in a snug concrete niche carved into the foundations of Fenway Park. Once a year, you will receive a performance review from our boss, the CrAIg Breslow bot. I hope this future excites you as much as it excites all of us here in the Boston Red Sox organization.

Congratulations again on another successful interview, and I wish you good luck as you navigate the next six to eight months of the hiring process.

Best regards,

FenwAI

No AI was used in the writing and editing of this article.

Two months ago, I checked in on Oneil Cruz, the center fielder. Things weren’t exactly going well. The Pirates shifted Cruz from shortstop to center at the end of the 2024 season, and the early returns were so discouraging I felt the need to write about the experiment just 17 games into the 2025 season. Here’s where the numbers stood at that point:

Cruz is currently sitting on -8 DRS, -2 OAA and FRV, and -0.1 DRP. Among all outfielders, those numbers respectively rank worst, third worst, fourth worst, and fifth worst. The advanced defensive metrics work on different scales and they often disagree, but on this point they are unanimous: Cruz has been one of the very worst outfielders in all of baseball this season. According to DRS, Cruz is the least-valuable defender in baseball, full stop.

There’s great news, though. Last week, reader AJ wrote into our newly introduced mailbag to ask for an update, because Cruz’s stats look totally different now. I decided the turnaround was worthy of a full article instead of a few paragraphs. I’ve broken everything down with my first article as the dividing line. There’s a chasm between Cruz’s first 17 games and his last 48.

Deserved Runs Prevented is inherently more conservative than the other defensive metrics, but all of the advanced numbers agree Cruz has completely turned things around over the past two months. He hasn’t just stopped racking up negative numbers, he’s dug himself all the way out, grading as a net positive in every metric except Defensive Runs Saved. Over the past two months, they pretty clearly see him as one of the better defenders in the league. Put that together with career-best hitting and baserunning numbers, and Cruz is on pace for a career year. Read the rest of this entry »

Alright, Dodgers bullpen! This is what we’ve been training for. They hit our guy. This is not a drill. I know it was an accident. I know it would have been the world’s worst time to throw at a hitter, down by a run in the fourth inning, a runner already on base, ahead in the count with the platoon advantage, unprovoked. But none of that matters right now. It’s time to look tough.

Everybody crowd up against the fence like you can’t wait to burst through the door. Time to posture. Strike a pose. This moment right here? This is the reason we watched The Warriors so many times. It’s time to get mean. It’s time to maybe, possibly, not really but you never know just in case, shove somebody a bit. We’re ready to jog out there. We’re ready to flex. Everybody ready for a fight?

Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Misiorowski didn’t just flummox the Cardinals. Sure, when the 23-year-old right-hander made his big league debut in front of 26,687 very pumped Milwaukee fans last Thursday night, he confounded the St. Louis lineup until a leg cramp and a lightly rolled ankle ended his evening after five no-hit innings. But he also baffled Statcast. “Sinker,” read the graphic at the bottom of the screen when Misiorowski rocketed a 100-mph four-seamer into the bottom of the zone for the first pitch of the game. His changeup often went down as a sinker, his curveball went down as a cutter, and his slider was sometimes classified as a cutter and sometimes as a four-seamer.

The classifications were working perfectly by the end of the game, but even early on, you can’t really blame Statcast here. For one thing, it didn’t have a baseline expectation to work from because this was Misiorowski’s debut. For another, all of these pitches really did look like fastballs. I don’t just mean that in a jokey way. I mean it very, very literally. Nearly every pitch Misiorowski throws really does look like a fastball; I was planning on writing about it before I even learned about the Statcast side of things. “That’s how I throw,” he said after the game. “Every pitch is trying to throw 100%.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you played baseball as a kid, you’re familiar with the phrase “a walk’s as good as a hit.” Your coaches probably shouted it at you. You probably shouted it yourself when your friend was at the plate with a three-ball count. Shouting a bromide is one thing, but believing it is another. We didn’t really buy it as kids, and for a while now, we’ve been able to quantify the difference. This season, hits have a wOBA of 1.129, while walks have a wOBA of .694. A walk, it turns out, is 61.5% as good as a hit. All of our coaches were liars.

On Wednesday, I was checking to see where Alejandro Kirk’s wOBAcon – his wOBA when he makes contact – ranked in relation to the rest of the league. The top of the list caught my eye. It couldn’t help but catch my eye. Aaron Judge is so far ahead of the pack he may as well be playing a different sport. He’s currently running a .685 wOBAcon. The difference between Judge and Cal Raleigh in second place is the same as the difference between Raleigh and Brandon Lowe in 47th place. Here’s the most shocking way I can find to express just how absurd Aaron Judge’s wOBAcon is right now: When Aaron Judge puts the ball in play, he’s nearly as good as a walk.

I know that may not sound particularly sexy, but that number is remarkable. A walk is a sure thing. It’s a bird in the hand. Putting the ball in play is a gamble. The league as a whole has a .362 wOBA on batted balls. A walk is nearly twice as valuable. This is why every couple years we write a whole mess of articles about how if batters were really smart, they’d just stop swinging. But there’s Aaron Judge, so, so, very close to having his batted balls be as valuable as a walk. He’s just nine points of wOBA away. That’s nothing. It’s the value of a popup to the second baseman.

If all this talk about Judge and the value of a walk is giving you déjà vu, that’s because just about a month ago, Ben Clemens wrote a whole article about when it makes sense to walk Judge intentionally. We’ll circle back to that point, but the first thing I did when I saw that number was try to figure out just how special it was. Turns out it’s pretty special.

I checked the pitch tracking era first. Since 2008, Judge is the only player in baseball to break a .600 wOBAcon. He’s done it three times, going .600 in 2017, .602 in 2022, and .617 in 2024. Mike Trout’s never done it. Shohei Ohtani, Yordan Alvarez, no one but Aaron Judge has done it, and this season he’s surpassing his 2024 mark by, at present, 68 points. Judge will likely cool off at some point, and over at MLB.com, Mike Petriello has addressed how much of his sky-high BABIP is the result of luck and how much is just coming from the fact that it’s really hard to field a ball that’s been hit at the speed of sound.

Still, this made me really curious. I started wondering whether anyone had ever been as valuable as a walk when they put the ball in play. That meant a lot of math, because wOBAcon isn’t readily available for players who preceded the pitch tracking era. I wanted to go all the way back to 1901, so I had to reverse engineer it by myself (and when I say “by myself,” I mean “with the help of Ben Clemens because he’s good at math”). I pulled the stats for every qualified player-season since 1901, so I had everybody’s wOBA and counting stats. I split each player’s plate appearances into three sections: balls in play, strikeouts, and walks/hit by pitches. To calculate the number of balls in play, I took at-bats, subtracted strikeouts, then added the number of sacrifices. Then I got to the algebra and set up an equation that looked like this:

Total wOBA = (BIPwOBA x BIP%) + (BBwOBA x BB%) + (KwOBA x K%)

(Since strikeouts have a wOBA of zero, I didn’t actually need the third part. It would always equal zero.) At that point, my numbers didn’t look quite right, so I went to Ben, who taught me that for arcane reasons, hit by pitches have a different wOBA from walks and intentional walks don’t count toward wOBA at all, so I had to rework my calculations some.

The numbers still weren’t perfect, sometimes because of rounding issues, but more often because we don’t have all the data, like intentional walks and sacrifices, for older players. With the help of Stathead’s Katie Sharp, I incorporated intentional walk data from Retrosheet to the players in the top 20. The Retrosheet data isn’t official, but it made the numbers more accurate, and I care more about that. So keep in mind that this isn’t iron-clad, but here you go, the highest wOBAcons ever recorded in a qualified season:

Eight of the top spots belong to Aaron Judge and Babe Ruth; Ruth’s 1927 Murderer’s Row season also ranked 11th at .589. Judge is only one point above the all-time record, so he’ll almost certainly lose it at some point over the next 97 games, but he’s still 50 points above the third-place entry and 90 points above 10th place. He’s staying on this top 10 list unless something horrible happens.

More importantly, the answer to our question is “no.” Nobody’s has ever been as valuable as a walk when they put the ball in play. As a matter of fact, Judge is closer this season than anyone else has ever been. He may not beat Ruth in terms of overall wOBAcon, but keep in mind that wOBA is a seasonal constant. It changes every year based on the run-scoring environment. Back in 1920, walks had a wOBA of .741. This season, Judge’s wOBAcon is 98.7% the value of a walk. Ruth was at 92.3% in 1920, and that was the only season when anyone had ever reached 90%. If we look at things that way, Judge has two of the top three seasons of all-time, plus his current campaign, which is in first place and will likely stay there even after his BABIP luck runs out:

Judge still has a shot at reaching the magic number, though he’d have to hit even better to do so. I don’t think that’s really something we can ask of Judge right now. It’d kind of be like if you were an Athenian and Pheidippides had just run all the way from Marathon and shouted, “We win!” and collapsed and died, and then you started nudging him with your sandal and saying, “That’s great buddy, but now that you’re back, could you run and get me a sandwich?”

Still, let’s get back to Ben’s article. Ben combined Judge’s stats over the last four seasons with a run expectancy matrix and win expectancy numbers to figure out when it was smarter to put Judge on than to let him hit. Ben allowed for a wider range, but the math indicated that the answer was very narrow: in the ninth inning of a one-run game, with two outs and a runner on second or third. That’s it. Other than that situation, it’s smarter to pitch to Judge than to walk him. A lot of this discussion is centered around risk aversion. It’s scary to give up a 500-foot homer to Aaron Judge, and that makes you overreact, giving him a free base when the numbers say that’s not the smart move. But maybe we’re right to be scared of Aaron Judge. First of all, he’s run a ludicrous 239 wRC+ since that article came out. That’s somehow worse than the comical 248 mark he had at the time, but it also represented an improvement on the numbers that Ben was running. Those numbers went back to 2022, when Judge ran a pathetic 206 wRC+. It makes more sense to walk Judge intentionally now than it did back in May.

Knowing all this, I’d like to run a quick scenario by you. Say you’re a pitcher facing down Aaron Judge. First of all, I’m so sorry. No one deserves to be in this position, and you should check and see whether you have any legal recourse against whoever got you into this mess. Second, take a moment to ask yourself a question: Can I strike out Aaron Judge? Seriously. Judge strikes out at a roughly average rate, which means that nearly 77% of the time that he comes to the plate, he doesn’t strike out. So be honest with yourself. Do you have it today? Is the slider biting? Does the ball feel good in your hand, or are the seams a little flatter than you’d like them to be? Did you sleep OK last night? If your answer to any of those questions is something other than, “Hell yeah, let me at him,” then it’s a very firm “no.” If you can strike out Aaron Judge, then by all means, pitch to him. You’ve got a 51% chance of getting him out and just a 15% chance of giving up extra bases. But if you don’t feel like you can strike him out, if your choice is either a walk or a batted ball, then you should probably just put him on. He’s 99% as good as a walk anyway.

Something weird is happening with Alejandro Kirk. It’s not that he’s having a great season. That’s not weird at all. Kirk ranks third among catchers with 2.4 WAR and 21st among all players. He’s also hitting much better than he has in the past two seasons, but that’s not necessarily weird either. After combining for a wRC+ of 95 in 2023 and 2024, Kirk has a 129 wRC+ this season, the same as he ran in 2022, when he was an All-Star and won the Silver Slugger. He’s always been great with the glove, and it now looks like his bat is back. His .370 xwOBA and 119 DRC+ are also his best since 2022.

What’s weird is that he’s hitting the ball harder – much, much harder – but he’s not necessarily hitting for more power. Let me show you what I mean with a table. Below are a bunch of contact-quality metrics for the five full seasons of Kirk’s career. On the far right is his isolated power. Usually, contact quality and power are pretty much synonymous. If you hit the ball hard, you’re going to end up with doubles, triples, and homers. Usually.

This season, Kirk is running the highest average exit velocity, 90th percentile exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and slugging percentage of his entire career, and not by a little bit. These are huge jumps. Everyone’s favorite 5’8” catcher is in the 97th percentile in hard-hit rate! Yet his ISO is merely the third best of his career, a mere nine points above last season’s mark. I’m curious about why Kirk is hitting the ball so much harder all of a sudden, and I’m curious about why it’s not resulting in a massive power spike. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been writing about Cal Raleigh a lot lately, as we should. He’s currently on pace for 9.9 WAR, which would constitute the greatest season of all time for a catcher. Although his defense has taken a step back from its previous heights, Raleigh is running an absurd 182 wRC+ and leading baseball with 26 home runs. He’ll have to come down to Earth at some point, but he’s all but certain to lead all catchers in home runs for the third straight season. He’s nearly doubled the second-place Logan O’Hoppe’s 14. Raleigh has a real shot to break Salvador Perez’s record of 48 home runs by a catcher – if he keeps up his current pace, he’ll break it by 16 homers!

On May 19, Ben Clemens wrote about how well Raleigh’s new, more selective approach was working out. Even though Raleigh was taking more pitches over the heart of the plate in hitter’s counts (a trend that has continued in the ensuing weeks), the patience has allowed him to get ahead more often and do damage. “Does all of this mean that Raleigh is going to maintain his 170 wRC+?” Ben asked. “No way.” That was the only answer he could have given. To suggest otherwise would have been sabermetric malpractice. But, uh, Raleigh didn’t exactly regress back to the mean from there on out. From May 20 to June 8, Raleigh was the best hitter in baseball, slashing .348/.427/.894 with 13 homers for a 267 wRC+. His average exit velocity was 97.2 mph! That’s what it takes to – barely – hit better than Aaron Judge. Read the rest of this entry »