“You told me to flump off,” said umpire Derek Thomas. He pulled home plate duty for Monday’s game between the Cardinals and the Pirates, and it turned out to be a tough assignment. In the bottom of the seventh, Thomas rang up designated hitter Willson Contreras on a called strike three. He didn’t like what he heard as Contreras walked back to the dugout, so he ran him too. The flabbergasted Contreras asked why he’d been ejected, then raced back toward home plate and asked Thomas to repeat himself. The debate that ensued was short but spirited, and packed with dazzling rhetorical flourishes.

“You told me to flump off,” Thomas said again before turning to manager Oliver Marmol. “He told me to flump off.”

“No,” said Contreras. “I did not. I did not.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I did not.”

“Yes, you did.”

Diplomatic relations finally reached their breaking point. Contreras decided that if he was going to be punished for telling Thomas to flump off, he might as well get his money’s worth. He told him to flump off with gusto. “How is that?” he shouted. He repeated himself again and again, exploring various intonations while ratcheting up the intensity to make sure the message sank in fully. It was a powerhouse performance. Inspired, Marmol told Thomas where to flump as well. At that point, a less resolute individual probably would’ve just flumped off.

Contreras threw his helmet, then his bat, which ended up hitting a coach. The pièce de résistance came in the form of a large pail of Hi-Chew, which Contreras retrieved from the dugout and tossed onto the field:

Watching all this, I couldn’t help but be amazed. They have Hi-Chew in the dugout! Did you know they have Hi-Chew in the dugout? I watch a fair amount of baseball, and I definitely did not. For the uninitiated, Hi-Chew is Japanese candy that comes in a wide variety of fruit flavors. I love Hi-Chew. Everyone loves Hi-Chew. But it’s candy. It’s not bubble gum, which has storied history in baseball and may even improve athletic performance. And it’s not sunflower seeds, which have their own storied history, not to mention protein and electrolytes that confer their own plausible nutritional benefits. It’s just regular candy.

Every year or two, we get a few articles oohing and aahing at the state of nutrition for professional athletes. I will confess that I eat these articles up. I love them all. A catalog of the new, healthy snacks in the dugout? Don’t mind if I do. A deep-dive into the NBA’s love affair with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? I’ll take a dozen. Puff pieces about the Marlins nutrition team, the Angels dietitian, the Twins dietitians, a minor league dietitian, or the Mets kitchen staff? Keep ‘em coming. Every one of these articles makes me want to be a major leaguer, starting my day with a protein shake designed to suit my exact metabolic needs, drinking tart cherry juice to aid my recovery, and eating healthy meals that are also delicious because they’re designed and prepared by world-class professionals. I’d also get to enjoy the odd bit of cotton candy:

That part’s actually important. All of the cooks, dietitians and nutritionists interviewed in these articles go out of their way to acknowledge that they’re fine with the occasional treat. They don’t want to be the junk food police, and athletes burn through so much energy between practice, warmups, workouts, and the actual games that they have absurdly high caloric needs anyway. (Left unsaid in most of these articles is the fact that these are hyper-athletic 20-somethings who could probably subsist on a diet of Cocoa Puffs anyway, even if it wouldn’t necessarily optimize performance.) Instead, they detail the many ways they’ve replaced junk with healthy options. Energy comes from sources like fruit, nuts, string cheese, and jerky. Cookies are out; Honey Stinger stroopwafels are in. Nutri-Grain bars, which are essentially a prayer to the god of Type 2 Diabetes, have been replaced by Rx Bars. And so on. With so many lesser evils available, players can indulge without wrecking their carefully-calibrated dietary regimens.

All of this makes sense. None of it is compatible with the big, surprisingly aerodynamic tub of Hi-Chew in the St. Louis dugout. There’s no decades-long history here. Hi-Chew is just a big cube of glucose. I’m going to pull a few quotes from the articles I linked to above, but I’ve doctored them just a little bit. It’s subtle, but see if you can tell what I changed.

“Everything in our clubhouse is geared toward helping promote recovery and reduce inflammation. We try to stick to snacks and foods with good nutrition. That’s why we provide Hi-Chew, which is 61% sugar and 10% fat. What’s the other 29%? I shudder to think.”

…

“How do we get the right energy in them in order to optimize their performance during the game? Also, how do we dispose of this giant tub of Hi-Chew my uncle gave me for my birthday?”

…

“Obviously, not feeding your body with the right stuff is not going to be able to help you maintain your body and your energy levels throughout the whole year, because it’s a long year. Except for Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew is fine.”

This article is not about how Hi-Chew got in the dugout. That article has already been written more than once. The story goes that as the least-tenured reliever on the Red Sox in 2012, Japanese-born Junichi Tazawa was in charge of keeping the bullpen stocked with gum. He added his own supply of Hi-Chew, which proved so popular that he couldn’t find enough to keep up with clubhouse demand. He asked the manufacturer if he could buy in bulk. Instead, the manufacturer sent it for free, then started sponsoring teams. There are big tubs of Hi-Chew in dugouts around the league because the players like it, but mostly because Hi-Chew pays for that privilege. I imagine they’re preparing to send Contreras the world’s sweetest care package in exchange for all the free publicity.

No, this article is my attempt to find out what’s actually being eaten in major league dugouts. Hi-Chew can’t be the only transgressor that somehow failed to come up in the dozens of empty-calorie articles about big league nutrition that I’ve consumed over the years. Here I should confess that this is a subject near to my heart. I was a ravenous child. I ate seeds and chewed gum during baseball games when I was younger. By middle school, I was loading boxfuls of Pop-Tarts and Fruit by the Foot in my bag at the beginning of each week. My spikes would inevitably crush the Pop-Tarts and shred their thin foil wrappers. By the end of the season, my bag would be covered in a fine, inch-deep mélange of dirt, pastry crumbs, and brown sugar filling. It smelled heavenly.

I used a brute force research methodology, hunting for sweets through thousands of photo service pictures of dugouts, bullpens, Dubble Bubble celebrations, and Gatorade baths. The hit rate was infinitesimal. Unless they’re taking a few establishing shots of gum and sunflower seeds during spring training, there’s no reason for photographers to waste their time on the snacks in the dugout. The pictures I found were usually candids, players who happened to be photographed holding a bag of seeds, dumping snacks on the player who just hit a walk-off, resting in front of the Hi-Chew tub, or digging through it looking for a very specific flavor. Behold:

I found enough pictures of Dubble Bubble and sunflower seeds to make your head spin, though that big pail of Dubble Bubble in the dugout has changed with the times too. The next time you see a player hit a walk-off homer and receive a Dubble Bubble shower, keep an eye on the individual pieces of gum. If they’re wrapped in paper with the ends twisted, that’s regular gum, but if it’s in a plastic wrapper, that’s the sugar-free version. The Orioles also stock Dubble Bubble gumballs, along with the largest bucket of Hi-Chew in the entire league. Contreras would’ve thrown out his back trying to toss this monster:

It’s hard to account for the ubiquity of Dubble Bubble. It’s not the official gum of Major League Baseball. So far as I can tell, Bubble Yum is the only gum that has ever borne that distinction, taking the mantle in 1998 and presumably setting it back down again at some point in the past couple decades. And it can’t be because Dubble Bubble is a pleasure to chew. If you’ll allow me to editorialize for a moment, Dubble Bubble is trash. It tastes sugary and delicious for approximately two and a half seconds, and then it turns into a tough, bitter lump in your mouth. It’s as poorly suited for blowing bubbles as it is for human consumption. (According to a 2017 Mercury News article by Andrew Baggerly, the trick to creating a wad that produces impressive bubbles is to mix the regular and sugar free versions.)

I saw more pictures of sunflower seeds than any other dugout snack. However, I was surprised not to see any David brand seeds. David was once the official sunflower seed of MLB. It provided seeds to teams for many years, and it also seemed to be the only game in town. No longer. The brand Giants is now ubiquitous. Apparently, Giants became the official sunflower seed of the Twins in 2004, and visiting players were so taken with them that other teams started ordering them too. Giants took the league by storm, but amazingly, it would take another 11 years before it became the official sunflower seed of the San Francisco Giants. According to a 2019 article, Giants ships two or three pallets of seeds to every major league stadium each year. Why were visiting players so into Giants sunflower seeds? Because they are actually giant. They’re bigger than normal sunflower seeds, and apparently that’s a desirable trait. It also provides the delightfully rare case of a giant David taking down a goliath named David.

Here’s Hunter Greene comparing two bags of seeds. In his right hand are roasted and salted pumpkin seeds. In his left are salt and pepper sunflower seeds with grilled steak seasoning:

What makes this picture fun is that Greene is very clearly comparing the nutrition facts on the back of the bags, and he’s doing so with the help of Ashley Meuser, Cincinnati’s director of major league nutrition. I imagine if you grabbed someone off the street in 1970 and asked them what a major league nutrition director does, this is exactly what they’d picture.

I did find plenty of pictures of honest-to-goodness healthy snacks. We’ve got an apple and a smoothie in an adorable little smoothie pouch:

And we’ve got bananas. We’ve got lots of bananas. Oneil Cruz’s giant hand absolutely dwarfs this banana, but he nonetheless looks as if he’s about to launch into a soliloquy about its virtues as snack:

What could be more wholesome than that? And just look how happy Adam Engel is to be eating this banana. Surely that’s not the facial expression of a man who wishes it were still acceptable for a professional ballplayer to crush a hoagie between innings:

I also found some pictures of those healthy-ish stroopwafels, but that’s where the health foods stopped. Here’s Alec Marsh eating a salted caramel Honey Stinger stroopwafel (Honey Stinger calls them “energy waffles”) between innings during a game last May. But take a look at what’s in the bin in the foreground:

There’s a blue bag of seeds of course, but does that yellow package behind it look at all familiar? I am genuinely embarrassed to say that I instantly recognized what it was. That might not say anything good about me. Computer, enhance!

That’s right. That is a family size bag of Sour Patch Kids. Despite their atrocious taste in gum, major leaguers really know their gummy candies. Also, your eyes are not deceiving you. The back of the package really does encourage you to bake cookies with Sour Patch Kids in them. Even contemplating such a revolting concoction is an affront to the senses, and despite what the package shouts in all caps, it absolutely is not a thing.

Our last batch of pictures comes courtesy of the 2023 Phillies, which shouldn’t be all that surprising, as they were one of the loudest, most fun teams in recent memory. Here’s Jake Cave chowing down on another salted caramel stroopwafel at the urging of Brandon Marsh. While his teammates gave postgame interviews, Marsh made a habit of being the one to dump alarming combinations of foods and beverages on them. He would then pressure them into eating an often-soggy snack, all while the interview was still going on. It was usually easier to give in and eat the thing than to fend off Marsh while on live television:

During Cave’s interview, Alec Bohm heaved handfuls of sunflower seeds at him from the dugout. Someone else lobbed a steady stream of Dubble Bubble at his head. Marsh and Bryson Stott crept behind Cave holding two paper cups each. Marsh held the stroopwafel between his teeth. After he and Sott emptied their cups, and Bohm chipped in a perfectly timed long-distance pumpkin seed strike, he ripped the wrapper open. “Here’s a Honey Stinger,” he said, proffering it to Cave. “You have to eat it.” This picture was taken the moment Cave took a bite, and you can see how happy it made Marsh. But what I really want you to notice Cave’s hat. Marsh dumped water, while Stott dumped solids. You can see the inescapable Dubble Bubble, but I also spy a rainbow, a blue moon, a red ballon, and a green clover. The Phillies have Lucky Charms in the clubhouse! And that’s not all.

Here’s Trea Turner 10 days later, on the receiving end of gum, water, dried mango from Whole Foods, Lucky Charms, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch:

As someone who has literally recorded an entire album about the monster cereals, I was genuinely taken aback by this picture. There is a big gap between having some candy available in the dugout and stocking multiple sugar cereals in the clubhouse. Candy can be an occasional indulgence. Having both Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch on hand is something else entirely. I have no idea whether the Phillies are a little laxer in the kitchen or whether they’re the only team whose sugar cereal habit we know about because they’re the only ones raiding the pantry every time they celebrate a win. Either way, it’s possible that big league clubhouses aren’t exactly the high-performance cathedrals that they’re made out to be.

I never would not have expected Cinnamon Toast Crunch to be anywhere near a major league baseball team. It’s genuinely hard to think of something that could be worse for a human body. Even as a child, you felt like you were getting away with something when you had Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast. Or at least you felt that way until 10:30 AM rolled around and the sugar crash kicked in. It doesn’t stop at Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, either. After a victory a few weeks later, Marsh and Stott dumped a cooler of Gatorade on Turner, then Stott handed him a stick of beef jerky.

“It’s wagyu,” said Marsh. “It’s wagyu. Eat it!”

“I’m not eating that,” Turner replied. “That looks terrible. It’s wet.”

“It’s wagyu,” said Marsh.

After the celebration ended, photographer Bill Streicher had the presence of mind to capture a shot of the unholy accumulation of makeshift confetti that had rained down on Turner and settled into the dirt like a pop art depiction of the night sky:

You can see crushed ice, various Dubble Bubble flavors, the wagyu wrapper, and a packet of energy gel. You can see cookies-and-cream flavored Made Good granola minis, a classic example of the replace-something-terrible-with-something-not-so-bad approach. But you can also see a Cinnamon Toast Crunch breakfast bar. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but allow me to say the most damning thing I possibly can about it: This is the kind of thing I would’ve put in my baseball bag as a high schooler. It’s basically a brick of loose Cinnamon Toast Crunch squares that have been glued together with sugar. There’s nothing less healthy that it could have possibly replaced, except maybe an actual brick, but apparently it’s part of a complete breakfast over in Philadelphia.

You might also notice some green and brown rectangles in that picture. Those are sugar and stevia packets, the kind you’d put in your coffee. Unsurprisingly, the people who get the most joy out of dumping comestibles on their teammates also get a lot of joy out of making whatever they’re dumping both as eclectic and as gross as possible. Here’s MJ Melendez emptying an entire coffee urn into a cooler of Powerade that will soon unleash its repulsive contents on the Royal unfortunate enough to have been the star of the game:

I still love those those puff pieces about the nutritional advances in the big leagues. I will always love them, and I genuinely believe that the nutritionists, dietitians, and chefs involved do great work. They have dragged the game past the days of between-innings hot dogs. I’m just as certain that the vast majority of players put a huge amount of thought into how they fuel themselves. Still, it’s nice to know that in addition to all the healthier options, you can also walk into a clubhouse and get your fill of the very worst the culinary-industrial complex has to offer. Besides, it could be worse. They could start feeding the players Sour Patch Kids cookies.

Pardon me, but have you by any chance seen second base? It can usually be found over in that large patch of dirt, but I seem to have mislaid it. Second base. It’s the second of the bases. I could have sworn I left it right there. Amid the dirt. You turn your back for one second. Maybe I should retrace my steps. Here’s what happened.

It was the bottom of the ninth. One out, runners on first and second. Fernando Tatis Jr. came to the plate. That’s the white pentagon in the ground over there. When a strapping slugger comes to the plate, I have to take a walk. Out of respect for his prodigious power, I bid farewell to my traditional post alongside third base and I sojourn a half dozen steps in a northerly direction, toward the outfield. Sometimes I carry a generous scoop of trail mix in my back pocket for such journeys. Tonight I went without, and maybe that’s what did me in. Low blood sugar can wreak havoc on your sense of direction. Read the rest of this entry »

By all rights, this should be a lost season for Daulton Varsho. The Toronto center fielder missed the first month of 2025 while rehabbing from offseason rotator cuff surgery. He started his year with a seven-game minor league rehab stint during which he batted .129 with no walks and no extra-base hits, good for a wRC+ of -29. Varsho got one month in Toronto, and then a strained hamstring stole another two months from him. After seven more games in the minors, Varsho returned on August 1 and now has 20 more games under his belt. So just to recap, Varsho’s season has gone: rehab for a month, play for a month, injured for two months, play for another month. He’s seen a grand total of 44 games of action.

That’s not exactly enough time to get your bearings, especially after a major surgery. At least, that wouldn’t be enough time for most people. Varsho is putting up the best numbers of his career. He’d never topped a wRC+ of 106 in a single season, but he’s currently at 127. He’s already posted 1.5 WAR, and although he can only get into a maximum of 74 games, he’s almost certain to put up the third-most WAR of his career. What makes all this even wilder is that Varsho only heated up during this most recent stint. He ran a 102 wRC+ before the hamstring injury, and he’s at 161 since he returned. As the cliché goes, getting Varsho back from the IL was Toronto’s best trade deadline acquisition. In fact, on a per-PA basis, Varsho has been a top-25 position player, on pace for 4.3 WAR over a normal, 150-game season.

So what is Varsho doing differently in this weird, bifurcated season? I’ll go over a few changes later on, but honestly, not that much. He’s just being himself, but his traits have been intensified over this short timeframe. Varsho has always been an extreme lift-and-pull hitter with a very steep swing. He piles up home runs and strikeouts, and he runs low BABIPs despite his speed because of that homer-or-bust approach. This season, he’s striking out more than ever, hitting more homers than ever, and running a career-low BABIP. Varsho has always been one of the game’s true elite outfielders despite below-average arm strength. This season, he’s putting up bonkers defensive numbers even though his arm has been one of the weakest in baseball so far. It’s like we got the from-concentrate version of Daulton Varsho, but somebody forgot to add water. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, you don’t really have to squeeze your glove when you catch the ball. At least, you don’t have to think about squeezing it. It’s an instinctual thing, and while it’s different if you’re a catcher, the whole point of the glove is to corral the baseball. It was designed just for that. The ball tends to stick in there.

That’s most of the time. Sometimes you really do have to think about squeezing the ball, though. Sometimes there’s geometry involved. I love the geometry.

I love thinking about the angles. How do I position myself so I can catch this throw and apply the tag in one motion? Should I wait on this ball, or should I circle around it so I can charge it and field it on a short hop? At what point do I give up on picking this throw and step back to catch it on the long hop? Read the rest of this entry »

We spend a lot of time here at FanGraphs writing about breakouts. A player who’s suddenly figured it out represents both an exciting piece of news and a chance to dive into the nuances of pitching or hitting. Reading and writing about that subject so often makes you pick up on certain patterns. Today, our subject is Mets infielder Brett Baty, who hasn’t played enough to qualify and who hasn’t broken out in a big way, yet who is fascinating because his breakout doesn’t quite match the patterns we’re used to seeing.

A former 55 FV prospect who ranked 19th on our 2023 Top 100 list, Baty came into the season with a 71 wRC+ over three seasons and 602 total plate appearances. He’s 25, and he’s had an up-and-down career, mashing his way up the Mets system and then struggling upon his promotion to Flushing. He’s got an .889 OPS in the minors and .654 in the majors. If you were to ask a Mets fan what Baty needed to do in order to succeed this season, they probably would have said he needed to put the ball in the air more and he needed to stop striking out so much.

Over 326 plate appearances this season entering play Thursday, Baty has 15 home runs, matching his career total from the start of the year, and a 107 wRC+. These are huge improvements. But he’s done that despite continuing to strike out too much and running a career-low launch angle. That’s not the only mystery. Baty is hitting the ball harder, going from an average exit velocity of 88.8 mph from 2022-24 to 90.8 mph in 2025. Adding two ticks of EV is huge. His hard-hit rate has also jumped from 40% to nearly 47%. But once again, his increased contact quality doesn’t fit the patterns we’re used to seeing. Read the rest of this entry »

We thought we knew what to expect from Maikel Garcia. Coming into his third full season in the majors, the Royals third baseman had a career wRC+ of 77, but thanks to his 17 OAA, he’d put up 3.4 WAR. That added up to a story as old as time – or at least as old as Ke’Bryan Hayes – a good-not-great, all-glove everyday third baseman. This season, Garcia is blowing up that narrative.

Garcia came up as a shortstop, but with Bobby Witt Jr. set to lock that position down for the next decade or two, he quickly settled in as one of the best defensive third basemen in the game. As for the bat, well, he didn’t chase, he made tons of contact, and he hit the ball hard. He just couldn’t get it in the air. A total of 303 batters made at least 1,000 plate appearances between 2021 and 2024. Garcia’s 45.7% hard-hit rate ranked 60th among them, but his average launch angle of 6.2 degrees ranked 285th. As a result, his .344 slugging percentage ranked 293rd. The package worked, especially after Garcia became one of the best baserunners in the game in 2024, but it was hard to look at him without fixating on that one big thing he couldn’t seem to do.

Hayes is just three years older than Garcia, but after spending so much time waiting for him to start lifting the ball, maybe it was a little too easy to write off Garcia’s offensive potential too. The high groundball rate wasn’t his only flaw. Garcia didn’t just have a low chase rate; he was one of the most passive players in all of baseball. With little fear that he’d swing at all, much less somehow turn a groundball into a home run, pitchers absolutely pounded the zone, racking up called strikes and keeping Garcia from turning all that patience into walks. Then 2025 happened. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the sound of a batter not getting hit by a pitch? I ask because as hit-by-pitch rates climbed over the years (and kept climbing), we writers have made lots of noise about them. In 2007, Steve Treder published an article called “The HBP Explosion (That Almost Nobody Seems to Have Noticed)” in The Hardball Times. After that, everybody noticed. We’ve seen articles about rising hit-by-pitch rates here at FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, the Baseball Research Journal, MLB.com, The Athletic, SportsNet, FiveThirtyEight, the Wall Street Journal — even the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine. The venerable Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus has been writing about it (and writing about it and writing about) ever since he was the promising Rob Mains of the FanGraphs Community Blog. Tom Verducci wrote about the “hit-by-pitch epidemic” for Sports Illustrated in 2021, then wrote a different article with a nearly identical title just two months ago. There’s good reason for all this noise, and in order to show it to you, I’ll reproduce the graph Devan Fink made when he wrote about this topic in 2018:

Hit-by-pitches have been rising since the early 1980s, and despite a decline in the 1970s, you could argue that they’ve been rising ever since World War II. Devan’s graph ends in 2018, but the numbers kept on going up — for a while, anyway. Here’s a graph that shows the HBP rate in recent years. After a couple decades of sounding the HBP alarm, it’s time for us to unring that bell (which I assume, without having looked it up, is an easy thing to do):

Congratulations everybody, we’ve done it! We’ve ended the epidemic. The HBP rate has fallen in four of the last five seasons. It’s safe to leave your home again. You can enter a public space without fear that you’ll be bombarded with stray baseballs. Rob Mains can finally take a vacation. Tom Verducci can finally take a deep breath. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in late June, I wrote about something weird happening in Flushing. In spite of being slow, and in spite of not being great at the other parts of baserunning, the Mets were threatening to become the most efficient base-stealing team of all time.

Well, exactly seven weeks later, the Mets are still slow. According to Statcast, they’ve got an average sprint speed of 27 feet per second, which puts them in a five-way tie for the slowest team in baseball. And they are also still not good at taking the extra base: Statcast ranks them 20th, while Baseball Prospectus has them at 15th. But if you’ve been watching the Mets for the last couple months, you know very well that they can still steal bases.

This week, I took another look at the numbers because a reader named Kevin submitted a mailbag question about Juan Soto’s newfound proclivity for stealing bases. We’ll get to Soto a bit later, but let’s start with the team as a whole. I wrote that article on June 26. At the time, the Mets had 62 stolen bases, which ranked 11th in the majors, and they’d been caught just 10 times. That was a lot of baseball ago, so now seems like a good time to give you an update. The Mets have 93 stolen bases, the 11th-most swipes in the game, and they’ve been caught just 10 times. They haven’t been caught since June 17! They’re 34 for their last 34! Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t written much about Vladimir Guerrero Jr. since he signed his half-billion-dollar contract extension back in April. That’s understandable, in that we tend to write about new and exciting developments. Of course, the downside of that is sometimes it can lead us to neglect exciting players who aren’t necessarily doing anything new. On the surface, Guerrero very much falls into that category. He’s having a typical Vladimir Guerrero Jr. season.

Those numbers are nearly identical! Guerrero is doing his thing, which consists of hitting the ball hard, hitting it on the ground, and putting up an overall batting line that should nab him a smattering of MVP votes. The Blue Jays promised Guerrero all the money in Canada in the hope that he would just keep on being himself for the next decade and a half, and he’s off to a great start. Just 14 more seasons like this to go. He’s on pace for 5.0 WAR, the third-best mark of his career. That’s certainly worth writing about, especially when Guerrero is doing it for the team with the best record in the American League. But also, I mostly want to write about this new thing he’s doing.

Here’s the new thing: Guerrero has stopped swinging. Not entirely – that would be silly – but he’s dropped his overall swing rate from 48.5% in 2024 all the way to 40.9% in 2025. That’s the third-largest decrease among all qualified players. It represents a huge departure for Guerrero (and an even bigger departure from the ways of his swing-happy father). Read the rest of this entry »

I owe Luke Keaschall an apology. Last night, the 22-year-old second baseman put up the first oh-fer of his brief and brilliant major league career, the predictable result of my decision to write about him today. In the series opener in the Bronx, the Yankees beat the Twins, 6-2, and Keaschall watched from the on-deck circle with an 11-game hitting streak on the line as Ryan Jeffers struck out to end the game. This is my fault. I knew that by pitching an article about Keaschall, I was condemning him to this fate. I really do feel bad about jinxing him, but it was time to highlight just how impressive his start has been. Keaschall will turn 23 on Friday, which makes him exactly three years older than FanGraphs.

Permit me to exclude Monday’s stats momentarily for the sake of painting a picture. Through the first 12 games of his career, Keaschall ran a 234 wRC+, slashing .415/.500/.707, homering twice, and stealing five bases. He’s one of just 10 players in the last 30 years – a list that also includes his manager, Rocco Baldelli – to start his career with an 11-game hitting streak. Keaschall also started his career with a 12-game on-base streak. Yes, that is possible; I’ll explain in a moment. With a nice round 1.0 WAR (which dropped to 0.9 on Monday; again, I’m so sorry, Luke), he ranks eighth among Minnesota’s position players. He has five multi-hit games. He was just named AL Player of the Week in his second week as a big leaguer. On Sunday, he achieved his first three-hit game with a walk-off homer against the Royals in the 11th inning. Read the rest of this entry »