Chandler Simpson is fast. Being fast is kind of his whole deal. As a minor leaguer in 2024, Simpson stole 104 bases in 110 games. As a rookie in 2025, he stole 44 bases in 109 games. Then he stole 14 in his first 40 games of this season. If you watched Monday night’s nationally televised game between the Rays and the Dodgers, none of this is news to you. Simpson entered as a pinch-runner during a pivotal moment, and his presence instantly altered the gravity of the entire broadcast. ESPN’s cameras never left him, the commentators never stopped talking about him, and the Dodgers were so preoccupied with him that they barely had any focus to spare for the batters who came to the plate while he was on base. But Simpson never stole a base, and that’s likely not news to you either.

Simpson’s last steal came on May 11. That’s 28 games and more than a month ago. Over that time he’s been thrown out four times. On June 4, Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times wrote an excellent article breaking down the circumstances behind the drought. Topkin used his own observations alongside first-hand explanations from Simpson, teammate Cedric Mullins, manager Kevin Cash, and first base/baserunning/outfield coach Corey Dickerson. Topkin noted first that Simpson has had fewer opportunities because he’s slumping at the plate. Since May 20, he’s running a .227 on-base percentage, the fourth-lowest mark among qualified players. Next, Topkin pointed out that Simpson’s downturn has roughly coincided with a downturn in Tampa Bay’s fortunes. The Rays have fallen behind early in games, putting them in situations where it doesn’t make as much sense to risk outs on stolen base attempts. Simpson and the rest of the Rays, though, were less focused on the circumstances and more focused on the intent of the opposition.

“I think the reason he’s in that funk right now is that teams have made a really impressive adjustment against him,” manager Kevin Cash told Topkin. “Every team we see, they were mindful. Now, they’re that much more mindful. We’re seeing pitchers alter their deliveries.”

Asked what opponents are doing to keep him tethered to the base, Simpson answered, “Everything. They’ve been pulling everything out. Slide-step (deliveries), quicker moves, pitchouts, random perfect throws on the money.” Monday night’s game provided an excellent example. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 7
In my brief glimpses of baseball today, I watched Oneil Cruz work a walk off Paul Sewald in Arizona, as well as the final three outs of the Mets’ loss to the Rockies. Cruz really worked the walk, which was fun to see. It was an eight-pitch plate appearance. Sewald missed well inside with the first pitch. Ahead in the count, Cruz was sitting fastball, so when Sewald located a sweeper in the bottom part of the zone, he took it for a strike without batting an eye. Then Sewald made a huge mistake, leaving a sweeper in the dead center of the zone. But Cruz was again looking for a fastball, and this time, he thought he saw it. He unleashed a mighty cut, so far in front of the ball that he didn’t even bother trying to slow his swing down in order to salvage some kind of contact.

The count was 1-2 and the rest seemed academic. Cruz came into the game with a 34% strikeout rate. So did Sewald. Put it all together, and – forgive me if my math is a little fuzzy here – this situation seemed like it would end in a strikeout approximately 240% of the time. But Cruz managed to lay off a backdoor sweeper that missed the corner by an inch or so. It was the one really great take of the plate appearance. Two-two. Sewald got him to chase a fastball way upstairs (and way upstairs on Oneil Cruz means up near the press box), but Cruz just barely got a piece. Sewald missed wide with another slider to make the count full, and then Cruz got another little piece of another high fastball, this one located perfectly at the top of the zone. It was the best swing of the plate appearance, and when Sewald missed well wide on the third 3-2 pitch, Cruz had really earned his way to first. He doesn’t have the greatest eye in the world – three of these balls were very easy takes, and one of his swings was on a ball nearly a foot above the zone – but what more can you ask than a patient approach early on, one good take, one good foul, and an aggressive swing when he thinks he sees his pitch?

In Colorado, Antonio Senzatela did his best to make a 6-2 game interesting, walking the leadoff batter and allowing a bloop single to the second hitter. Then he settled down, striking out Francisco Alvarez on four pitches and MJ Melendez on three, before inducing a weak popout from Vidal Bruján. Melendez is now down to a 79 wRC+ on the season and Bruján has a career wRC+ of 54. These cannot be the hitters the Mets want coming to the plate in big situations, but that’s not my main focus as I watch the inning unfold. My main focus is on the girl in the pink puffer jacket behind the right-handed batter’s box, and her focus is on trying to figure out how to wipe her hands with a napkin:

Baseball really does have something for everyone. Truthfully, though, I’m vamping here. None of this is what I need to talk to you about. I mean, sure, I enjoy watching Oneil Cruz do just about anything, and it’s always fun to watch somebody learn about the magic of napkins, but we need to talk about something more important.

It’s two in the morning and I’m feeding my daughter. I’m typing this on my phone with one hand because I just noticed that her pajamas feature squat, heavy-set little mice playing musical instruments in some sort of mouse marching band. I think they’re wearing berets, because, I think, they’re French mice. They’re lined up in twos and threes playing a tuba or a trumpet or a drum or a tambourine. One even seems to be playing a lute, and now that I’m looking closely, I see a triangle, maracas, an accordion, and one mouse who just seems to be doing gymnastics. These mice are definitely French. But what gets me is that there’s one mouse playing a saxophone. That, my friends, is a bridge too far:

If you want me to believe there’s a mouse playing a tiny trumpet, making a tiny embouchure with its tiny little mouse snout, and tootling out a trebly “When the Saints Go Marching In,” then sure, what the hell, I can hang in there with you. I can even swallow the idea of a mouse playing the lute with its weird mouse paws. But I refuse to believe that mice are playing reed instruments. Do you know how hard it is to play the saxophone? And who is making these microscopic reeds? You want me to believe that the mouse is carefully wetting the reed just the right amount before clamping it back into place and launching into the solo from “Born to Run?” I’m out! You have officially lost me. This world you’ve created is structurally unsound, and it will collapse under its own obscene weight:

At the beginning of each procession is a mouse holding what is almost certainly a banner, but there’s a 10% chance that it is not a banner and is, in fact, a giant, crooked scythe. I like that possibility better. This isn’t a marching band after all. This is Death coming to bear his next victim to the mouse netherworld. And in the Mouse World, Death is dressed like a mime and accompanied by his friend Gary, who is going through a messy divorce right now and really having a time of it. One night, a gruff mouse driving a beat-up van unceremoniously dumped a huge pile of bric-a-brac from what was formerly a joint storage unit in Gary’s driveway, and as he picked through the wreckage of his freshly-shuttered past life, Gary uncovered the alto sax he used to play in high school. Gary couldn’t afford a convertible or a hair transplant, so he threw himself into his rusty old sax with everything he had, then convinced his buddy Death that maybe the journey to the afterlife deserved the class and dignity of some smooth jazz. It is not going well.

Derek Jr. is very much asleep now, so please excuse me while I deposit her and her mouse army in the crib and try for a bit more sleep. Thank you for reading FanGraphs.

Last week, the illustrious Ben Clemens wrote about the state of the bunt, because the state of the bunt, as it turns out, is strong. Hitters are bunting more often, picking their spots better, and finding greater success. It’s a bunting renaissance. He didn’t appear in Ben’s article, but Milwaukee’s David Hamilton is at the forefront, leading the league with 10 bunt hits and 23 total bunts. It’s just the 12th time this decade a player has reached 23 bunts in a season, and we’re only halfway through June! Ben noted that 74.1% of bunts have been successful – meaning the bunt resulted in either a hit, an error on the defense, or a sacrifice – the highest mark in the universal DH era. With so much bunt in the air (and on the ground), I got to wondering how pitchers can fight back.

The first line of defense is to alter your positioning. You bring your third baseman in, play the corners in, put on the wheel play. But I wanted to come at it from another angle. If you’re a pitcher, and you want to make sure the batter at the plate doesn’t get a successful bunt down, what can you do? The two biggest things you can control are your pitch type and location. I dug into the Statcast data on bunts and attempted bunts over the past 18 years. This is not earthshaking research, and some of what I found is fairly intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it laid out, and I definitely haven’t seen any numbers behind it. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 6
The exhaustion has finally hit.

This might sound odd, but I was never all that worried about the exhaustion. I‘ve suffered from insomnia since I was 18, and it has darkened every corner of my adult life. My first job out of college was as a marketing assistant at a law firm. Once, after a particularly rough stretch of sleepless nights, an associate came into my office (a closet that I shared with a janitor) to assign me some work. After one look at my ravaged face, a knowing grin spread across his. He clearly had more fun than I did when he was 23, and he assumed that I’d been out all night partying. “I remember those days,” he said wistfully. Imagining the debauchery that could have left me so haggard was bringing him so much joy that I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. Not only had I not gone out and painted the town red last night, I had gone to bed before the sun had even gone down, hoping that if I stayed in bed for 12 hours, maybe I could scrape together eight hours of sleep in bits and pieces. Needless to say, it hadn’t worked.

All of this is to say that the exhaustion is crushing, but I feel like I’m about as accustomed to it as you can get. Earlier this year, after I suffered a particularly rough night, my wife would sometimes say, “We need to figure out your sleep before the baby comes.” I disagreed. I figured that I’d be so very tired that it wouldn’t matter. I’d travel so far into that undiscovered country that even the exhaustion wouldn’t be able to tag along, and I’d just pass out whenever the opportunity presented itself. That’s pretty much what happened — for the first month anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many baseball nerds, I have been itching to get my sweaty hands on enough ABS challenge data to draw some really strong conclusions. Unfortunately, it’s early in the season and challenges happen so rarely that we don’t have much to go on just yet. But you know what they say about idle hands. I am impatient, and I have been devising devilish ways to dodge the damnable data deficit. I’d like to show you one of them. Today we’re bundling.

Here’s what I did. I went to Statcast’s framing leaderboard and I bundled catchers by their strengths and weaknesses at framing pitches in certain locations. Fortunately, catchers are easy to bundle, because they’re already predisposed toward scrunching themselves into tiny little balls. Finding catchers with similar tendencies allowed me to work in the aggregate, searching for patterns in a more robust dataset. I won’t bore you with my methodology, but it’s not much more advanced than scrolling the leaderboard looking for catchers whose framing runs number is red in one zone but blue in another zone. I ended up with four groups:

• Catchers who are significantly better framers at the top of the zone than the bottom of the zone.
• Catchers who are significantly better framers at the bottom of the zone than the top of the zone.
• Catchers who are significantly better framers on their glove side than their arm side.
• Catchers who are significantly better framers on their arm side than their glove side.

Each group had around 10 members, and there was some overlap. For example, Patrick Bailey is in the Top Framers and the Glove Side Framers. A few catchers were too good to be in any of the groups, like Brandon Valenzuela. A lot more catchers were too bad or average to be in any of them, like Tyler Stephenson. Feel free to skip this part, but just in case anybody’s curious, these are the four groups:

Once my catchers were nice and bundled, I calculated their success rate on challenges both in the location where they’re good at framing and the location where they’re bad. Then I compared those rates to the rates of the catchers who were their polar opposites. I also calculated the average location of the pitches they challenged, in order to get a sense of how different the pitches they challenged really were.

Before we get into the data, let’s think about some possible results and about how we might end up there. The first possibility is that the differences aren’t that big. Just because you’re better at framing in one spot doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be better or worse at challenging there. This challenging stuff is so new that we’re not sure what’s what.

The second possibility is that catchers will be good at challenging in the spots where they’re good at framing. It’s certainly not inconceivable. Maybe you handle those pitches better because you see them better, or you’re better prepared for them, or you know that area of the zone well, so you have a better sense of where the edge is.

The last possibility is the opposite, that catchers will be better at challenging in spots where they’re worse at framing. I can think of a couple explanations for that. The first is that they’ll have juicier pitches to challenge. If you’re bad at framing, say, pitches at the top of the zone, you’re probably getting stuck with a lot of bad calls up there, which leaves you with better opportunities for challenges. We can also come at this from the other angle. Maybe when you’re good at framing in one spot, you feel like all pitches in that spot look really good, so you challenge too frequently. I found something similar when I looked at which parks have the best batter’s eyes. When hitters can see the ball well, their plate discipline doesn’t get better as you’d expect; they get more aggressive because more pitches look good to them.

So those are the possibilities. Let’s see what the data says. We’ll start with catchers who are better on one side of the plate. (Since all catchers throw right-handed, I’ll refer to the third base side of home plate, the inside corner to right-handed batters, as their glove side, and the first base side as their arm side.) The columns below show success rate, and they show the average horizontal location of the pitches challenged, measured in inches from the center of home plate.

Well, the third possibility looks like the right one. Catchers run success rates that are 10 percentage points higher on the side where they’re bad at framing. They’re challenging pitches that are either 0.3 or 0.4 inches closer to the center of the plate.

Now let’s move to the top and bottom of the zone. The columns show success rate on challenges and the average height of the pitches in feet.

Yup, it’s more of the same here. The catchers who are better at framing at one end of the zone are about 10 percentage points worse on challenges in that location. You might notice that the gaps are a bit bigger here, 12 percentage points and 0.7 inches at the top, but only nine percentage points and 0.2 inches at the bottom. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because the top of the zone is more variable anyway. As I wrote a couple years ago, the knees of short and tall players are much closer in height than their shoulders.

As you can see, the overall success rates are just about identical, and once again, that holds true across the league. The league-wide success rates on challenges at the top and bottom of the zone are nearly identical, just a hair under 59%.

I know this is basic stuff and some of it is fairly intuitive, but I think it already gives us some actionable information. For example, you might also have noticed from the first table that success rates are generally higher on the glove side than the arm side. That actually holds across the entire league. So far this season, catchers are running success rates of 63% on the glove side and 59% on the arm side. Unless you’re a member of our special Glove Side Framers group, you should be more aggressive at challenging pitches to your glove side. That’s all I’ve got right now, but I’ll keep thinking of ways to slice the data.

In the summer of 1872, Martin Malone pitched three complete games in three days for the Brooklyn Eckfords of the National Association. In today’s game, a pitcher who threw three complete games in three days would be hailed as something of a miracle, but Malone’s accomplishment loses a bit of its luster when you consider the context of the era. According to the numbers in our database, starters went the distance 83% of the time that season. Another piece of context scrapes the rest of the shine off with a machete: Over his three games, Malone allowed 86 runs on 96 hits. You will not be shocked to learn that he went 0-3.

Nineteenth century record-keeping being what it is, those are Malone’s only three games in our database, and for several reasons, that’s not quite fair. First, those three games don’t represent anything like a complete picture of his total performance. Malone first suited up for the Eckfords five years earlier. “It is surprising that all of Malone’s vital statistics remain undiscovered,” wrote David Nemec in Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, “for he seems to have been an integral part of the Brooklyn baseball scene for more than a decade.”

Next, Malone’s pitching may not have turned out well, but he did go 5-for-16 with a walk, for a .313 batting average and 115 wRC+ at the plate. Last and most important, it’s hard to say how much credit Malone really deserves for all the runs he gave up. He only allowed one home run. He didn’t walk anybody and he didn’t strike anybody out. He did what so many pitchers have been implored to do over the course of baseball history: He let the offense put the ball in play and trusted the defense behind him. It was a catastrophic mistake. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 1
During the undocumented morass of the first two weeks of Derek Jr.’s life, my computer died. Allow me rephrase that: We murdered my computer. At some point one delirious night, I sat on the ottoman in our living room only to jump up in shock with sodden, clingy pants. The ottoman was sopping wet. We never figured out how it got that way. That’s a decent metaphor for the experience of having a brand new baby. A piece of furniture was totally soaked – I mean 100% saturated; it must have contained half a gallon of water – and we literally had no idea how it got that way. We still don’t. Later that night, my computer wouldn’t turn on, and I put two and two together. It must have been sitting on the ottoman at some point. It must be dead now. The Apple store confirmed it. The computer was dead. Cause of death: Drowning.

It was lucky that the computer died at a time when I didn’t have to work, but it was still a catastrophic situation. The technician at the store was not at all sanguine about my chances of recovering the contents of the computer, and one of the many things that I had neglected in the frenzy of getting ready for a baby was backing up my hard drive. I had just offloaded onto that hard drive roughly 90% of the pictures from my camera roll in order to make room for baby pictures. I’d be losing a million health insurance forms from the pregnancy and God knows how many other important documents. The one that hurt the most, though, is that I had dozens and dozens of songs in various stages of completion. I have been working on a bunch of records at once, and I have a ton of older, unreleased songs and projects sitting around and waiting for the right situation. It was painful to even think about the sheer tonnage of lyrics, chords, artwork, voice memos, demos, and fully-recorded songs trapped on my pickled computer.

It took three weeks and three different computer shops, but I found out yesterday that the data has been recovered! It’s saved! Are there any baseball songs among the masses that just found salvation? Why don’t you ask this demo that I recorded in 2016 and which I was probably saving for a compilation of outtakes:

I head in to Manhattan to pick up an external hard drive containing my recovered data. The technician at the store is watching the Yankees pregame show on his computer. We chat about the AL East as he waits for someone from the backroom to bring out the hard drive. The Yankees are looking unbeatable in a division that’s looking much worse than expected, and Ben Rice and Cam Schlittler look like they’re going to be pinstripe-clad stars for a long time. But the party’s almost over. The owner of the shop walks out of the backroom instead. He tries to keep it under wraps because there’s a customer present, but he’s clearly furious that his employee is watching sports on the job. I wish I could’ve done something to keep this guy from getting in trouble, but it all happened so fast.

Regardless, it’s a huge day. It’s officially May, so we’re finally allowed to go crazy over what’s been going on, and a lot has been going on. Yordan Alvarez leads all position players in WAR. Maybe this will be the year he finally puts together a healthy season and snags an MVP, but the Astros, already nine games below .500, could cost him that shot. Rookie shortstops Kevin McGonigle and JJ Wetherholt are second and third. Rice and Elly De La Cruz, two young players who are hugely exciting for hugely different reasons, are fourth and fifth. Perhaps most improbable of all, Mike Trout is looking like Mike Trout again in sixth place.

To celebrate the miracle of the hard drive, here’s one more song that got saved. It’s from a new children’s album that I was really, really hoping to have finished before Derek Jr. arrived. I didn’t quite make it, and God knows when I’ll get to finish it now that she’s here. It’s really frustrating. I think this batch of songs contains some of the most fun stuff I’ve ever written, and it’s going to sit around for months at the very least, just waiting either for me to finally record the last few songs or for another computer disaster. Anyway, this is the one my wife likes best:

May 2
I should start by explaining that I am already close to broken before Derek Jr. wakes. I haven’t gotten much sleep recently. It has been a rough day. And night. She hasn’t slept as much as she needs to. At one point, I change her diaper five times in one hour. She’s ravenously hungry, so hungry that at one point we give in and feed her more than her stomach can handle. It’s a rookie mistake and it goes exactly how you’d expect. She finally goes to sleep, only to wake up a short time later because she’s spit up in her crib.

She goes down again, but awakes at 11:30 PM screaming for food. I change her diaper and haul her writhing body to the kitchen to retrieve a bottle from the fridge. The only game still going is the Mets and the Angels in Anaheim. We catch the top of the seventh as she eats (with interruptions for two more diaper changes, naturally). The Angels are up 3-1 thanks to a dominant performance from Reid Detmers, and Kurt Suzuki handles the situation like the old-school catcher he is. He rides the hot hand and leaves his ace out there for the seventh. (I guess Reid Detmers is an ace now. Maybe?) It’s a rookie mistake and it goes exactly how you’d expect. Double, single, sac fly. Another single and the game is tied. Two more singles and the bases are loaded. Suzuki finally decides that maybe Detmers isn’t his ace after all.

That’s all I remember, but Sam Bachman apparently wriggled out of the jam with a groundout and a strikeout, and the Angels eventually walked it off in the 10th on a single from Oswald Peraza. Presumably, Derek Jr. and I got some sleep somewhere in there too.

As is so often the case, I don’t have pictures of the hard times in the dead of night when my only companions are Derek Jr. and the pressing awareness of all the sleep that’s slowly slipping away. It’s too dark for pictures, and besides, no matter what camera settings I use, the pressing awareness of disappearing sleep doesn’t show up in photos. What I do have is pictures from the daytime, when everything is light and breezy:

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

April 25
Sometimes my daughter will be sleeping peacefully in my arms looking for all the world like God’s one perfect creation, and then she’ll crack her eyelids open for a moment, and during that moment, through the tiny crack, I can just barely make out her eyeballs rolling all the way back in her head like she’s possessed by a demon. It’s so disturbing. I swear it’s like I’m watching her soul being ripped from her body. When I mention this to my wife, she tells me that she finds the eye thing adorable.

Kyle Backhus closed out an 8-5, extra-inning win for the Phillies today. He didn’t get the save, though, because the score was 8-4 when he entered the game. Backhus is an extremely fun player and not just because of the name. He’s fun to watch. He’s a classic lefty sidearmer and he accentuates that by setting up angled toward first base, presumably to add some crossfire deception to his delivery. As you’d expect from a sidearmer, he’s a sinker-slider guy with an east-west movement profile and the occasional changeup. That sweeping slider looks great on TV, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t sweep eastward as much as you’d expect it to. It needs to end up in Philly, but it only makes it as far as Pittsburgh, a deficiency that’s likely the reason his ERA starts with a four instead of a three.

More importantly, Baseball Reference doesn’t list a single nickname for Backhus, which seems borderline impossible because, you see, his name is Kyle Backhus. Somebody whose brain is functioning at something approaching full capacity, please get on this. Kyle Backhus deserves a cool nickname.

April 26
Lest yesterday’s entry impart the mistaken impression that I’m unwilling or unable to generate a sobriquet, behold a list of nicknames by which I have addressed my daughter while changing her diaper:

• Big Dumper
• Little Dumper
• My Sweet Lady
• Mini Pooper
• Winnie Pooper
• Farty McCry
• Milky Cabrera
• Kody Funderburk
• Kody Thunderburp
• Why are you smiling like that
• Oh God please don’t not now
• No no no no
• Jesus it’s everywhere
• Well I guess it’s bathtime
• Dr. Pooper
• C. Trent Goes-in-Pants

April 27
Transcript of my wife changing Derek Jr.’s diaper:

“I can’t believe I have to do this.”

“Oh my God.”

“It’s not that bad… but it’s not that good.”

“The relief she feels.”

“My God, her legs are so fat.”

“Derek Jr., I’m so proud of you.”

“It wasn’t that big. It was just very… everywhere.”

“She’s thrilled right now. I’ve never seen her happier.”

April 29
It’s 3:30 PM and I just put Derek Jr. down for a nap and turned on the Twins-Mariners game. Royce Lewis is up for the Twins in the bottom of the seventh, and Byron Buxton has edged so far away from the on-deck circle to get a better look at pitcher Eduard Bazardo that he’s very nearly directly behind home plate. No one seems to notice, but he’s apparently been doing this all game long. During the fourth inning, Buxton was practicing his snow shoveling back there.

I guess that’s what happens when you spend your whole career in Minnesota. It doesn’t help Buxton all that much. He grounds into a fielder’s choice and the Mariners pull Bazardo.

We just got back from the one month pediatrician visit. It was smooth sailing, and the percentile charts confirm what we’d been feeling: Derek Jr. is growing like crazy. “The only thing I want to ask,” says the pediatrician, “is whether she’s starting making eye contact with you.” The question catches me off guard. It’s true. Just in the last couple days, she’d started looking me right in the eye while I fed her. I’d registered it, but I’m so focused on just surviving right that I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that this was an entirely new development. Our baby now looks right into our eyes. It’s nuts that I didn’t think about this before the doctor asked. I am literally writing a journal about all of the things I notice about this baby! Turns out she’s right on schedule. She gets a clean bill of health, and we’re informed that she’s now allowed to sleep uninterrupted for up to seven hours if she can manage it. What a world that would be.

April 30
April is almost over and things are getting real. In the baseball world that means consequences for managers. Alex Cora and Rob Thomson just lost their jobs after ugly starts. Carlos Mendoza must be waking up in a cold sweat a couple times a night. Things are getting real in our house, too, and that means a few things. First, it means that we’re getting to understand Derek Jr. better. We’re better at knowing how and how much to feed her, which turns into better sleep and a happier baby. It seems like so much of my job right now is picking up on cues, reading her face and her sounds and her body language. We’re figuring out what bothers her — bright lights, how hard the changing pad is against the back of her head, laying supine too soon after eating, it’s a long list — and what soothes her.

Things are also getting real in the sense that Derek Jr. is growing. Rapidly. All of a sudden, her newborn clothes no longer fit. And when I say all of a sudden, I mean that it literally happened two days ago. Three days ago they fit; yesterday they didn’t. She’s now onto the next size up. The past two mornings, we went through her clothes, holding up onesie after onesie — some of which she wore only a few days ago! — and laughing at how absurd it would be to try to squeeze her into them now. Some clothes she never even had time to wear once. Sadly, we have no unworn baby shoes to give away, because — and if you should run into Ernest Hemingway, please tell him this — babies aren’t supposed to wear shoes, buddy. Shoes can hinder the development of their feet. Your six-word story is structurally flawed, Mr. Nobel Laureate. On the bright side, it does mean that Derek Jr. is now big enough to wear this killer onesie that David Appelman sent.

Derek Jr. is already so different from the baby we met at the hospital, and she will never be that baby again. When she was first born, she was such a monkey. She hooted and clung to my wife with her long, spindly limbs. Now she’s a little bowling ball, and I’m sure she’ll be something else soon enough. In the afternoon, I settle her down for a nap. We’re old pros at this now. It goes like clockwork, except the larger onesie we put on her isn’t very flexible, so it makes her upset when it goes over her head. We probably won’t use this one again. Another lesson learned: Stretchy clothes make everybody’s life easier.

I turn on the Twins-Mariners game, but I struggle to get into it. Two years ago, an absurd series of events led me to fall in love with the Twins. I wrote an article about Edouard Julian and recorded a song to go with it. The song found its way into the locker room, and so did I. I met players and coaches, played the song while sitting next to Julien, got a sincerely moving embrace from Twins fans, and learned about the unbelievably fantastic Minnesota State Fair. (Seriously, everybody out there, you have to go to the Minnesota State Fair. It’s the best.) It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and I knew that it would make me a Twins fan for life. But after last summer’s fire sale, nearly everybody I interacted with, from the GM to the coaches to the players, has moved elsewhere. I still love the Twins, but it’s different. They’re no longer the team I fell in love with, and it happened so fast.

While we’re likening the Twins to my daughter, I should mention that actually I lobbied to name her the opposite of Twins. I was mostly joking, but I wanted to name her Singleton, which is a word I learned from the form we had to fill out before each sonogram. You had to check the box next to either Singleton, Twins, or Triplets. It’s such a delightful word. I love the way it scans. Every time we went to the imaging place, I’d make my pitch for Singleton, and every time, my wife would confirm that her preference for a normal, human name still held sway. Then I’d use the coffee machine in the waiting room to make a decaf coffee, which is the thing I miss most about working in an office by far. I don’t need the coffee, even. I just like to hear the machine kachunk its way through the process. Without fail, the sonogram technician would call my wife’s name the moment I pressed brew, so I’d end up scurrying down the hall trying to catch up with them without moving so fast that I sloshed hot almost coffee down my wrist.

Then we’d get a peek at Derek Jr., tensing every muscle in our bodies at the beginning, then unclenching in stairstep fashion as the technician informed us, one anatomical feature at a time, that everything looked fine. It was worth the apprehension, of course, because we got to see the baby. My wife called the sonograms FaceTiming the baby. They print out pictures for you, too, and not just one like you see in the movies, but lots of pictures at every sonogram. Whole body pictures, pictures of her adorable little feet, and even ghoulish pictures of the beginnings of her face. Our refrigerator is still covered in them. God, we loved that blurry baby-esque phantasm. At some point, we’ll have to move those printouts over to a memory box and start covering the fridge in pictures where she doesn’t look like a poltergeist. But not yet.

Daulton Varsho is a tinkerer. In each of his seasons with the Blue Jays, either SportsNet’s Arden Zwelling, SportsNet’s Shi Davidi, or both have written an article detailing a swing change – except in 2024, when Zwelling noted that for once, Varsho was going to finally try (gasp!) not tinkering with his swing.

Despite all the adjustments, Varsho remained the same kind of hitter. He had a super steep swing that was seemingly tailor made for today’s lift-and-pull focused game. He whiffed a lot and didn’t hit the ball particularly hard, but when he did square it up, he ripped it into the right field bleachers. That’s a recipe for a lot of variance – the lows involve scads of strikeouts and the highs involve heaps of homers – so it wasn’t surprising that his first three seasons with the Blue Jays saw one average season at the plate, one below-average season, and one above-average season. Although injuries limited him to just 71 games in 2025, Varsho put up a career-best 123 wRC+ and slugged 20 homers. Over a full season, that’s a 46-homer pace! If ever there was a time to stand pat, this was it, right? Right!? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Jake Mailhot wrote about the complete overhaul that has turned Keibert Ruiz from one of the worst players in baseball to, as of now, the 12th-best catcher in the game according to WAR. I’m particularly jazzed about this success story because I wrote about Ruiz’s chance to do something like this last year. It’s not often you come across a six-year veteran with a wRC+ of 65 and see real potential for improvement, but Ruiz was demonstrating some gifts that sure seemed like they could start bringing some value.

In an article about players who pull the ball significantly more often specifically when they square it up, I noted that Ruiz ran some of the highest pull and contact rates in the game, up with José Ramírez, Alex Bregman, and Isaac Paredes. He didn’t fit in with that group, though, because he mainly used those great contact skills to pull weak grounders. I figured that he was caught in between. He might be able to find success following the path of Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan, using his contact skills to wait back and shoot line drives the other way, or he could follow the lifter-pullers and start trying to do some actual damage with all that pull-side contact. The Nationals chose the latter path, increasing his bat speed and encouraging him to do damage, and it sure seems like it’s working so far.

Jake’s article went hand in glove with a deep dive from The Athletic’s Spencer Nusbaum that described the all-hands-on-deck nature of the turnaround: “This season, the Nationals have started to implement ‘player plan’ meetings, an individual gathering with every member of the roster every six weeks. First, they tell players how they’re being evaluated by the organization. Then, they talk through a plan to tweak their routines accordingly.”

Between executives, coaches, and trainers, Nusbaum reported, these individual player meetings have nearly 20 people in them. His article also mentioned the specific areas of improvement the Nationals identified for Jacob Young, Curtis Mead, José Tena, and Luis García Jr. Today, we’re going to talk about Nasim Nuñez, who went unmentioned in the article and is one of the few Nationals hitters who isn’t having a career year.

Nuñez is a 25-year-old switch-hitting middle infielder. This is his third major league season, and it will be his first full one. To some degree, things are going as expected for him. In 2024, Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice wrote that Nuñez possessed “virtually no power,” but predicted a “John McDonald-esque career” based on “his incredible hands, range, athleticism, and infield versatility.” Last year, Ben Clemens echoed that sentiment, calling Nuñez “the platonic ideal of the light-hitting utility infielder.” This season, Nuñez is getting everyday reps at second base with occasional days at shortstop. He possesses blistering speed, and that part of his game is going great. He leads the majors with 22 stolen bases and his 3.4 baserunning runs rank fifth. He’s also running a tidy 11% walk rate thanks to good plate discipline and a league-average contact rate. Lastly, his defense isn’t lighting up the advanced metrics just yet, but it is grading out as solidly above average.

That’s it. Those are the things that are going right for Nuñez, and if he were posting something approaching the 93 wRC+ he put up across the 90 games of his career entering this year, they would be enough to make him an above-average second baseman. Great baserunning and middle infield defense along with a good walk rate really should really be enough. Unfortunately, the rest of Nuñez’s offensive profile is dragging him way, way down. He is batting .193 with a 50 wRC+, second worst among all qualified hitters. I made a list of 12 categories where Nuñez ranks in the bottom octile of all qualified players, and another list of 10 categories where he ranks dead last, but I think just telling you about the two lists is enough to get the point across. He has looked like the worst hitter in baseball, and as a result, he’s been sub-replacement level so far this season.

As you’d expect for anybody hitting this badly over a relatively short sample, Nuñez has been the victim of some bad luck. His .270 xwOBA, execrable though it is, is still 30 points above his actual wOBA. Likewise, his DRC+ of 84, while dreadful, at least pushes him up out of the bottom 30 among qualified hitters. Still, a lack of power is the main thing dragging Nuñez down, and it’s hard to argue that he’s getting jobbed in that department. He is at or near the bottom of the league in every exit velocity metric. He has not yet homered. He has not yet notched a barrel. He’s last among all qualified hitters in both doubles and triples. In fact, I put all of his extra-base hits in the GIF below. Anytime you can put a player’s entire highlight reel for two months of a season into a single GIF, that’s definitely a bad sign.

That’s right. Nuñez has two doubles and both of them were hustle doubles. The one and only time this season he has hit the ball past the defense, it was on a fly ball with a 60% catch probability. Luckily Nuñez hit it toward Matt Wallner, whose -9 defensive runs saved rank last among right fielders. A decent right fielder catches that ball, and most non-Wallner right fielders avoid misplaying it into a triple.

Nuñez’s slugging percentage is 50 points below his expected slugging level, but that’s almost entirely because of singles not falling in. He’s hit just four balls this season with an expected slugging percentage above 1.000. One was the first double in the GIF above, where he lined the ball toward (but not all the way into) the right field corner against the Brewers. Three were little bloopers that always go for singles and occasionally get stretched into doubles. This is the ball with the highest expected slugging percentage he’s hit all year.

It’s also the hardest-hit ball he has hit all year, but it is the most routine single in the world. You’d expect a speedster like Nuñez to be getting lots of hustle doubles, so is it possible that he’s just been unlucky on that front, getting thrown out trying to stretch singles into doubles? That ain’t it either. He’s only been cut down once trying to advance to second on a single, and amazingly, it was on a freak bunt play where the Brewers tried their best to throw the ball away but were foiled by the wayward torso of the umpire:

So why am I spending so much time showing you that a player we all expected to be light on power is, in fact, light on power? First, because things are so extreme that Nuñez is in danger of making some dubious history. He has an isolated slugging percentage of .023. You won’t be shocked to learn that it’s the lowest mark among all qualified players, but you might be surprised to learn that the next-lowest ISO is more than double Nuñez’s mark. (You might also be surprised to learn that it belongs to Fernando Tatis Jr. What a world.)

Nuñez isn’t just failing to slug, but he’s also been historically bad at it. Among qualified AL/NL position players since 1901, Nasim this year is currently tied for the ninth-lowest single-season ISO, and he has the third-lowest single-season slugging percentage. Of course, the game is very different now, and the names around Nuñez at the bottom of these leaderboards are nearly all from the turn of the last century. (You can tell because the first names include Spike, Spook, Patsy, Rollie, and, of course, Goat.) If we look at plus stats in order to compare Nuñez to the league average for historical context he drops even lower. His 15 ISO+ and 55 SLG+ are the very lowest. In AL/NL history. Since 1901.

Now, it’s not quite fair to compare Nuñez to full-season marks. We’re catching him over a shorter, noisier sample. It’s a long season, and he’s sure to pick up the pace some. He’ll hit better and he’ll get luckier, if for no other reason than that he couldn’t get much worse. But even if we just look at partial seasons from this century, Stathead tells us that only 14 players have ever run a slugging percentage this low over a span of 50 games and at least 190 plate appearances.

My goal in writing this article was not to drag a player who’s having a rough season and who only has 244 career plate appearances under his belt. I really like Nuñez’s game. His true talent level isn’t this low, and even if it were, he could still be a useful player. He’s always been better-suited for a utility role, and on a better team, that’s what he’d be. He’d get to rack up value as a pinch-runner, show off his glove, minimize the percentage of his overall value that came at the plate, and specifically minimize his time facing right-handed pitching. The Nationals are, very understandably, playing Nuñez in front of Jorbit Vivas and José Tena, whose bats aren’t much better and who don’t possess Nuñez’s glove or speed. But I still think Nuñez could be better.

As I hinted at in the previous paragraph, he has some serious splits. Over his short career, he’s got a 42 wRC+ hitting left-handed and a 120 mark batting righty. This season, those marks are 23 and 110. Even in this dreadful, dreadful season, Nuñez has been a legitimately good hitter from the right side. His bat speed is two ticks higher from the right side, his exit velocity is more than three ticks higher, and his strikeout rate is a full seven points lower. It’s very tempting to look at his profile and wonder whether he’s just miscast as a switch-hitter, but I don’t want to go that far. For one, I don’t know him nearly as well as the Nationals do, and they’ve had three years to consider that option. For another, according to Statcast, he actually put up a higher wOBA as a lefty in the minors (at least when the fancy cameras were watching). What I will say is that Nuñez needs to figure out how to unlock his left-handed swing.

I have no idea what the Nationals told Nuñez to work on during his player plan meeting. It’s hard for me to imagine they gave him the same Do Damage advice they gave to Ruiz, Young, and García. Nuñez is 5-foot-8 and he’s never given the faintest sign that he possesses the ability to hit for power. Then again, his average bat speed even in this powerless year is higher than Ruiz’s was last year, and he outhomered Ruiz last year despite playing in 19 fewer games. Maybe swinging hard is good advice for everybody.