On Sunday, the Angels made 22-year-old James Wood the first player to receive four intentional walks in a single game since Barry Bonds in 2004. You could argue the plan worked, too, as Wood came up with at least one runner in scoring position all four times, and the only one of those runners to score did so on a bizarre, inning-ending double play. If the Angels’ goal was to avoid the big inning, then they nailed it. If their goal was to win the game, well, hope springs eternal; the Nationals won, 7-4, in 11 innings. The obvious takeaway is the 6’7” Wood is a terrifying talent, but just as obvious is how out of step with current baseball thinking – or really any baseball thinking – this move was.

Wood is having an incredible season, launching 22 home runs, walking 14.5% of the time, and batting .283. His 156 wRC+ makes him the eighth-best hitter in the game this season and a genuine contender for the National League MVP. However, it’s impossible to argue that he’s in Bonds territory. Bonds earned four IBBs four different times that year. He was in the midst of his fifth straight 45-homer season and 13th straight 30-homer campaign. He held the single-season home run record and was closing in on the all-time one. He put up a 233 wRC+ en route to an absurd 11.9 WAR in 2004. He was in his own league. Moreover, the game has progressed in its thinking since 2004, and it’s now widely understood that an intentional walk is rarely the smart move.

Stathead, which uses Retrosheet data from back before intentional walks were an official stat, lists 12 instances in which a player received at least four intentional walks in a game. This John Schwartz article from the 1980 Baseball Research Journal can teach you even more about the earlier history of the IBB, including the contention that Mel Ott received five intentional passes during the second game of a doubleheader on October 5, 1929 (though Retrosheet only lists three of Ott’s five walks that day as intentional). So this is an extraordinarily rare feat, and fully a third of the times it has happened in baseball history, it was specifically happening to Bonds in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »

So there’s this thing called the old man test. It’s been around for at least five or six years, but it’s making the rounds on the Internet again. The idea is simple enough. You have to put on your socks and shoes without letting your feet touch the ground as you do so. You raise your left foot and keep it in the air while you reach down to the ground to grab your sock, put it on, reach down to the ground to grab your shoe, put it on, and tie it, then you do the same thing with your right foot. It tests your balance, strength, flexibility, and all those other things bodies are supposed to have. If you fail the test, then you’re an old man, I guess? Maybe you instantly turn into an old man? Maybe a healthy old man just appears right outside your window to point and laugh at you? That part’s less clear.

I tend to buy into the idea that the old man test is measuring something important, just because whenever I’ve had to do physical therapy, I’ve been forced to do a lot of one-legged exercises. If you’ve ever been in physical therapy, I bet you’ve had to do them too. There’s nothing physical therapists love more than turning up the difficulty level of an otherwise simple exercise by forcing you to do it while standing on one leg. Once you get good at doing it one-legged, they’ll make you stand on a bouncy ball or something, and if you nail that, they’ll literally just start shoving you to make it even harder. Truly, no one on earth is hornier for balance than physical therapists.

I bring all this up because I noticed something fun about Steven Kwan while playing around with Baseball Savant’s batting stance graphics the other day. The graphics take after ballroom dancing diagrams of old, showing fun little footprints for each player at three points: their resting batting stance, when the pitcher releases the ball, and when their bat actually intercepts the ball. Here’s Kwan’s 2024 graphic:

Kwan has one of the narrowest batting stances in the game, so his front foot moves out toward the mound quite a bit, but aside from that, nothing about it stands out all that much. He’s a little guy with a little stance, film at 11. But this is the calm before the storm. Here’s the same graphic for this month. Keep your eye on the blue footprint:

I was so confused when I watched this. Is Steven Kwan actually stepping on home plate as the pitcher releases the ball? It seemed like something I would’ve noticed before, but there was that blue footprint, right on top of home plate, clear as day. How could anyone start a swing with their body so closed off? And is it even legal to step on home plate in the middle of your swing? That definitely seems like it would be illegal. I pulled up the rulebook and started looking before I realized what was actually going on. If you’re familiar with Kwan’s swing, I’m sure you already know the answer, and it brings us back to the old man test.

Kwan doesn’t step on home plate, but he has one of the game’s most dramatic leg kicks, and right in the middle of it, he dangles his foot directly over the plate. There’s no way to indicate in a two-dimensional diagram that his foot is 18 inches off the ground. Sometimes, and I’m not exaggerating here, Kwan’s entire foot is inside the strike zone while the ball is already on its way to home plate. No batter has ever come closer to tying their shoe in the middle of a pitch:

I went back to Baseball Savant and watched every single qualified player’s batting stance diagram, hundreds of cleats dancing across the batter’s boxes, black to blue to red. I would very roughly estimate that half of today’s hitters don’t move their front foot all that much, but that still leaves scores and scores of players with dramatic leg kicks, their blue front feet moving every which direction. None of those players does what Kwan does. None of them does anything remotely resembling what Kwan does. When batting from the right side, Ozzie Albies does place most of his left foot outside the batter’s box, but that’s mostly because he sets up five inches closer to the plate than Kwan does, and his foot is still nowhere near home plate. Nobody’s diagram looks like Kwan’s because nobody’s leg kick looks like Kwan’s.

Here’s Kwan’s secret. He doesn’t just have a leg kick. He has a leg kick, and then, right in the middle of it, he has second leg kick. It’s a double kick. A normal leg kick just involves lifting your foot off the ground, and it’s maybe worth noting that this is a bit of a misnomer. Everywhere outside the baseball diamond, there’s a difference between raising your leg and kicking. In baseball, they’re one and the same. Regardless, Kwan does that, pulling his knee straight up until his femur is parallel with the ground, but he’s just getting going. At that point, he kicks his foot forward toward home plate and sweeps it out toward the pitcher in a circular motion as he puts it down:

Kwan has a leg kick, and then he has a foot kick. It would not be at all unfair to say that he puts his right foot in and shakes it all about. It’s an impressive display of balance, and so far as I can tell, it’s unique. I didn’t just watch all the diagrams. I watched the swings of every player I could think of who has a big leg kick. I watched YouTube videos that compiled huge leg kicks of the past. The closest leg kicks I could find belonged to Alek Thomas and Gary Sánchez, both of whom move their front foot while they get into their swing, but they’re far from doing a double kick. No one else does this.

Kwan didn’t start executing the double kick all at once. It seems like it’s been coming on for a while now. When he was drafted out of Oregon State in 2018, Kwan had a small, controlled leg kick, with no double kick in sight. I can’t find any video of him from the next two years, but he started 2021 with the very beginnings of a double kick:

It’s very subtle in the video above. By the time Kwan debuted in 2022, the double kick was there to stay, but it’s still evolving. As he told the MLB Network during spring training, he went into the 2024 season looking to impact the ball harder, and that meant a more aggressive leg kick. “Before, I’d get up and then I would just put it right back down,” he said. “So then my hands are able to work and I can manipulate the bat as I need to. But last year, I tried to – hitter leverage, early in the count – really try to get that stride out, and now I’m going out to get it. I can stay in the legs, and then now I can stay slotted, catch it out a little more in front.” The funny thing is that in the video, even as Kwan demonstrated the leg kick (which he called a leg lift), he wasn’t doing the double kick. He may not even know he’s doing it. It’s only in the heat of the game that the double kick happens.

This focus on going out and meeting the ball earlier is likely the reason it only started showing up on the Baseball Savant diagram this season. It has to do with his timing. This year, the second kick actually seems like it’s not quite bringing his foot as far forward or as high, but it’s also quicker. If Statcast could show us its full path, it would likely look nearly identical to the 2024 or 2023 path, but it’s only showing us its position at the moment the ball is released. At that point, Kwan is further along, so his foot is already over the plate. He’s also getting his foot down a fraction of a second earlier, and it’s possible that getting started that little bit earlier is part of the reason he’s running a career-low opposite field rate.

Watch any baseball game and you’ll see 18 different hitters with 18 different timing mechanisms. Nobody’s exactly the same, but they tend to fall in a couple of categories. There are players with quiet feet, players with toe taps, and players with leg kicks. Those leg kicks take their feet in pretty much every direction. Some players lift their leg straight up, some pull their foot way back as a cocking mechanism, some use the leg kick to true up a very open stance, some start narrow and push their foot toward the pitcher. But Kwan is the only one who just dangles his foot there, then kicks it out into the strike zone before he attacks the pitch. It’s a feat of ingenuity as well as a feat of balance. At the very least, he should be every physical therapist’s favorite player.

Nico Hoerner hit a home run on Tuesday. It wasn’t exactly a tape measure shot – the ball left his bat at 97 mph and traveled a projected 364 feet, making it 31 feet shorter and nearly 8 mph softer than the average home run this season – but he certainly got all of it. Plenty of players have hit even softer and shorter homers. It was mostly noticeable because it was Hoerner’s first home run of the season.

Among qualified players, Hoerner ranks in the bottom 10 in hard-hit rate, barrel rate, and both max and 90th-percentile exit velocity. He’s a contact hitter, not a power hitter, and it works just fine. He’s running a 102 wRC+ this season, a mark he’s bettered in each of the last four seasons. Still, he’s hit at least seven home runs in each of the last three seasons, and he was due to get on the board at some point. You can’t say the same for Xavier Edwards.

Over three partial seasons in Miami, the 25-year-old Edwards has hit just one home run in 678 plate appearances. He’s the only qualified player this season with a barrel rate of 0% — that is to say he has not yet hit a barrel over his 291 plate appearances and 216 batted balls. I bring all this up because Hoerner’s home run leaves Edwards as the only player who currently has enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title without a single home run. He’s the only player on pace to join an increasingly exclusive fraternity: The Homerless Qualifier Club.

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The Mets are not the fastest team in baseball. Wait, let’s be more specific. With an average sprint speed of 26.9 feet per second, the Mets are the second-slowest team in baseball. When their baserunning makes the news, it’s rarely for a good reason. Maybe they’re costing themselves hits and extra bases by failing to hustle out of the box, or maybe they’re running the bases in the wrong direction altogether. Either way, you could be forgiven for thinking that baserunning is costing the Mets runs after seeing something like this:

In fact, the Mets have been the 10th-best baserunning team in baseball according to our baserunning metrics, seventh best according to Statcast, and 11th best according to Baseball Prospectus. What makes this contrast even more fun is that in addition to being slow, they haven’t been amazing at taking the extra base either. BP ranks them 15th on that front, while Statcast has them all the way down at 26th. They go for the extra base as often as you expect them to, but they succeed at a below-average rate. For all the sabermetric angst about how being a valuable baserunner is more than simply piling up stolen bases, the Mets are, in fact, accruing all their baserunning value by stealing bases. But they’re still not stealing all that many bases.

The Mets’ 72 stolen base attempts are tied for the 17th most in baseball, and their 62 steals put them in a three-way tie for 11th. I’m sure you see where I’m going here. All this value is coming from efficiency; the Mets are converting 86.1% of their stolen base attempts — the highest rate in baseball this season, and the eighth highest ever recorded. That’s right: The second-slowest team in the league is running the eighth-highest stole base rate of all time.

I don’t mean to be too dramatic here. I know the Mets are on an all-time top-10 list, but that’s to be expected. The league recently introduced rules that made basestealing much easier. They’re only one spot above the Cubs, who have been way more prolific on the bases, and fully half the teams in the top 10 are from the past three seasons. Still, I want to note a couple things about this list. The Cubs are the sixth-fastest team in baseball this year. Pete Crow-Armstrong, a top-15 player in terms of average sprint speed, has stolen more than a quarter of their bases. It’s not shocking that they’re up there. Further, the Mets appear on this list twice. In 2023, they were safe 88.7% of the time, the second-highest mark ever. The 2024 Mets rank 27th. Over the past three seasons, the Mets lead baseball with an 85.9% success rate, 2.5 points above the Phillies in second place. There really is something going on in Queens, and clearly, it’s not particularly dependent on speed.

Just to be sure about that last part, I ran some numbers. Like all teams, the Mets have their faster baserunners doing more stealing than their slower baserunners. I considered the possibility that they’re just only letting their faster players try to steal, but that’s not it. If you prorate team speed by the stolen base attempts of each player, their sprint speed moves up to 27.7 feet per second, which moves them from 29th all the way up to 25th. The Mets are just great at stealing bases.

I would really love to believe all of this is related to the team’s baserunning mantra, “Let’s Boogie,” coined by first base coach and run game coordinator Antoan Richardson. The Mets have been singing his praises over the past two seasons, but that is not particularly surprising. Light coaching hagiography is a staple of spring training coverage. Still, in this case, I am at least slightly inclined to believe the hype. “He’s one of the best I’ve ever been around,” said Juan Soto in April. “He’s really good at that – checking on pitchers, what they do and how we can jump at it, when we can be more relaxed. I’ve trusted him twice and got it twice. So I feel like he knows what he’s talking about.” Soto is on pace for a career-high of 18 steals despite being the third-slowest outfielder in baseball (minimum 10 competitive runs).

It’s not just that Soto has increased his stolen base total so dramatically. It’s what I saw when I watched all of his steals this season. I recommend you keep the sound on, but even if you don’t, it is very easy to see what’s happening here.

The common thread is Soto got enormous jumps. The catcher didn’t bother to throw the ball in half of these clips. The only time it seemed like there might actually be a play was when he ran on the Blue Jays battery of Yariel Rodríguez and Alejandro Kirk. Rodríguez grades out as above average at controlling the running game, and Kirk is one of the best catchers in the game at that particular skill. Soto is slow enough that he needed every bit of his big jump. There’s no universe in which he runs here unless he is certain he has something on Rodríguez.

The same thing goes for Francisco Lindor, who is currently on pace for 26 steals even though his sprint speed ranks slightly below the league average for the first time in his career.

Just like Soto, Lindor is getting enormous jumps. He has the pitcher’s timing down cold. Sometimes he takes off before the broadcast even cuts to the pitcher! The Mets are stealing bases in all the right spots, and you can see it in the numbers. Baseball Savant keeps detailed measurements of both primary and secondary leads, and most of the time, the Mets are among the most conservative teams in baseball. At just 11.2 feet, their primary leads rank 28th. Their secondary leads rank 17th, but when you combine them with the extremely short primary leads, by the time the pitcher has released the ball, they’ve traveled an average of 14.8 feet, the fourth-lowest mark in the game. But those are just the overall numbers.

Things are completely different when the Mets are stealing. They’re very nearly the most brazen team in the league. Both their primary and secondary leads rank second in baseball. They end up 25.9 feet off the bag by the time the pitcher releases the ball, trailing the first-place Padres by just under two inches. No team has a bigger gap between their average lead and their we’re-about-to-steal lead than the Mets. In fact, the difference is 11.1 inches, and no team is within even a foot of that mark.

Because the Mets aren’t getting picked off or caught stealing, we can see they’re making great decisions about when to steal. And because they’re getting huger leads and even huger jumps, we can see they’re extraordinarily confident in those decisions. To be clear, not every player on the team is getting monster jumps. Luisangel Acuña has elite speed, and he’s relied on it to go 11-for-12 in stolen base attempts even without enormous jumps. Still, the Mets really do seem to know when to go, and that comes down to coaching and preparation. Before you boogie, you’ve got to study.

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 »