Over the weekend, the Red Sox decided to go for it. They traded exciting young pitcher Connelly Early to Washington in exchange for less-exciting, less-young, but playing-very-well-right-now infielder Curtis Mead. The move elicited strong reactions. Early is a genuinely promising lefty starter who will be under team control until 2032. Mead is only one year older with one less year of team control. He’s had a wonderful breakout season at the plate, and his offensive profile fits Fenway Park beautifully. But he’s a poor defender whose track record of success at the plate is extremely short. Even Boston’s chief baseball officer Craig Breslow went out of his way to spell out exactly why the team pulled the trigger, telling reporters, “Our goal wasn’t to win the trade. It was to make the team better.”

I had my own strong reaction to the deal, but that was mainly because I really wanted to be the one to write it up so I could title the article, “Red Sox Go For It Now by Giving Up Early.” But the reactions to the deal are now more or less irrelevant. Mead did make the team better, but for a very, very short time. He struck out in his first plate appearance with the Red Sox, then got hit by a pitch and broke his wrist in his second. According to Baseball Prospectus’ Recovery Dashboard, the average recovery time for a fractured wrist is 52 days and the median is 47. Mead may or may not return before the regular season ends, but he’s certainly not going to be powering the Red Sox down the stretch, and they’re already out looking for more infield help.

You have to feel for Mead. He was in the midst of a true breakout season. After putting up a combined 0.1 WAR in his first three major league seasons, he was already at 1.6 this year. He was traded to a contender that also happened to be the hottest team in baseball. What an exciting time for the 25-year-old, and then one pitch took it all away.

You can also imagine how Boston’s front office must feel after putting in all the work to make this trade happen. Breslow stuck his neck out for this high-risk, win-now move, and just like that, it’s gone. I don’t think there’s much I could do to cheer up Mead right now, but I can take a crack at cheering up Breslow. I’d like to remind him that although this may seem like the worst case scenario for his bold challenge trade, things could have gone much, much worse. In order to see that, you just have to look at things like a chief baseball officer, removing the human element and focusing solely on pure, unadulterated on-field production. Let’s lift our spirits by acting like soulless robots. Read the rest of this entry »

For one day, the Marlins were probably going to make the playoffs. On July 8, after they’d shut out the Mariners, 2-0, our Playoff Odds gave the Fish a 51.5% chance of playing in October. It was the first time they’d crested 50% since 2023.

They had just swept the A’s in West Sacramento and were about to finish sweeping the Mariners at home. Crank, crank, crank, crank, crank went the roller coaster. With the final win against Seattle, the Marlins had won 16 out of 20, tied for the best 20-game span in franchise history. The six-game winning streak that closed that span put them 10 games above .500, at 52-42. Crank, crank, crank. They were tied with the Phillies for the second and third Wild Card spots. They were three full games ahead of the Cardinals in fourth place. Not only were the Marlins going to hold onto Sandy Alcantara at the deadline, wrote Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, but they were going to be buyers for the first time in Peter Bendix’s three years at the helm, “barring” — crank — “an utter” — crank — “collapse.” Then the Playoff Odds took a stomach-churning plunge. It was the opposite of the famous Sarah Langs Whee! It was an Eeew, and it was gross indeed.

The Marlins lost their next 12 games. Last night, after coming within an eyelash of unlucky 13, they finally broke the streak with a win. They blew a three-run lead to the Phillies in the sixth inning and went into the bottom of the ninth down two. But they came back to walk it off on a bases loaded single from Griffin Conine. 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 23
Today marks my first time leaving the house for more than an hour or two since Derek Jr. was born. I’ve got band practice, and then the band is going out to a bar to watch the game. I don’t tell anyone, but I’m so out of the loop these days that I have no idea what game everyone is talking about. The timing couldn’t be worse, and that turns out to be the theme of the evening.

I feed Derek Jr. and put her down for a nap right before I head out, but she wakes up with horrible stomach trouble as soon as I leave. Band practice is two hours long, and my wife spends the entire time soothing Derek Jr. Band practice is a delight, as always. It’s extraordinarily loose. I haven’t touched a guitar in months, but nobody else has been practicing either, and it’s not like we need to be ready for a show or anything, so nobody minds much when a song goes off the rails. 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 21
So Jose Siri made the coolest play I’ve seen in a while. He’s on the Angels now, a fact I had missed entirely, even though I now realize I saw him pinch-running against the A’s just two nights ago. When you think about Jose Siri, you think of great center field defense (and one million strikeouts), but that great center field defense usually comes in the form of great jumps and fantastic athletic catches. Tonight, however, he racked up an out with a combination of savvy and a perfect, powerful throw. A’s right fielder Carlos Cortes hit a routine single back up the middle. There was nothing notable about that whatsoever, but the Angels must have a scouting report that says Cortes likes to take aggressive turns when he singles. Whoever wrote it deserves a raise.

Siri played the ball normally right up until the moment when he didn’t. He intercepted it at a slow jog. It looked like he wasn’t taking the threat of Cortes going for a double seriously, but what he was actually doing was baiting Cortes, while also allowing the slow route to let him field the ball with his momentum still pushing him to his left, toward first base. That way, when he came up firing behind Cortes, he was able to got everything he had behind the throw. First baseman Nolan Schanuel was clearly in on it too. He lurked in foul territory, out of view of both Cortes and the first base coach so as to avoid arousing any suspicion, then popped back onto the field in time to catch the throw and apply the tag.

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Last month, Ben Clemens declared 2026 to be The Year of the Bunt. “Bunts are making a comeback,” he wrote, and then he backed that contention up with numbers and graphs and such, because while the FanGraphs style guide doesn’t have a hard target for words per article, we’re generally expected to use more than five. Ben was right, of course. That’s what the graphs and the words were for. Bunts have gone from 0.7% of plate appearances in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026. We’re talking about very small numbers here, but that’s still a year-over-year increase of nearly 23%.

Not only are teams bunting more often, but they’re also bunting in optimal situations and laying them down more successfully. This year’s bunts have a .533 batting average, compared to .468 last year. Unsuccessful bunts, which result in neither a hit nor a sacrifice, are down from 22% to 19%. According to Baseball Savant’s Run Values, last year’s bunts were worth 13 runs. This season’s bunts are already at 50 runs, and we’ve still got a couple months left! Over the winter, the whole league seems to have finally figured how and when to bunt. But not the Detroit Tigers.

The Tigers have laid down eight bunts this year. Eight. That works out to just under one bunt every 12.5 games. In this article, I will show you all eight of them. It will not take long. The Tigers have more triples than bunts. The Rays have bunted 10 times more than the Tigers. Every team except the Phillies has bunted at least twice as often as the Tigers. Twenty different individual players have bunted more than the Tigers. The Tigers recognize The Year of the Bunt as a fad, and they want no part of such ephemeral frivolities. They didn’t attempt to bunt for the first time until May 4, their 36th game of the season. It, uh, did not go well.

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You know the joke. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” asks the interviewer. Mitch Hedberg has the perfect answer. “Celebrating the five-year anniversary of you asking me this question.” Mike Elias and the Orioles sure seem to have their own five-year plan, and they fleshed it out on Sunday, signing right-hander Kyle Bradish to a five-year, $90 million extension. The deal buys out the starter’s final two years of arbitration, along with three free agent years, keeping him in orange and black until his age-35 season in 2031. Bradish is making $3.55 million in arbitration this season, and he’ll make $10 million when the new deal kicks in next year. He’ll get a $3 million raise in 2028, then get $1 million added to his annual raise in each subsequent season. So he’ll make $10 million in 2027, then 13, then 17, then 22, then 28 in 2031. It’s a classic example of linear growth rather than exponential, and it should help Bradish stay a step ahead of inflation. According to The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, it’s also the largest deal for a pitcher in franchise history.

Bradish has a 3.50 ERA and a 3.62 FIP for his career, but there’s still room for some uncertainty in his profile. He debuted in 2022 and put up ugly numbers across 23 starts, running a 4.90 ERA and a 4.46 FIP. He broke out in 2023, going 12-7 with a 2.83 ERA and a 3.27 FIP. The underlying numbers weren’t quite so spectacular, as a big component of his improvement was a drop in home run rate that looked unsustainably large. Although Bradish had made more sustainable improvements to his walk, strikeout, and groundball rates, it still would have been fair to expect some regression. Instead, he came out of the gate even better in 2024. His walk rate did indeed regress, but he suppressed homers even further and ratcheted his strikeout rate all the way up to 33%. It was a huge jump, but it lasted just eight starts before the god of ulnar collateral ligaments demanded its tribute.

Bradish returned from Tommy John surgery at the end of August 2025, and he picked up right where he’d left off before the injury. In fact, over his six starts, he struck out more than 37% of the batters he faced. If you combine the two seasons, Bradish threw 71 1/3 innings across 14 starts, posting a 2.65 ERA and a 2.48 FIP. He put up 2.5 WAR in what was essentially half a season. It was legitimate dominance. 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 20
Derek Jr. and I will be on our own for much of the day. My wife is planning on meeting up with a friend for a walk in the park, taking an hour-long call, and then spending a couple hours editing her novel. Things go beautifully at first. Derek Jr. naps for nearly three hours in the morning, during which time I do a little writing myself. I feed and change her when she wakes up, but the effort of having someone else feed and clothe her seems like it’s already tuckered her out. Such is the life of a baby.

I put her right back down to sleep and try to nap in the room with her, but I can’t sleep. My brain is still whirring from the writing I did earlier. So I grab the monitor and take a crack at mixing a children’s song I’ve been working on. It’s the last thing I recorded before Derek Jr. was born. Fittingly, it’s called “I’m Sleepy.” 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 18
The summer after my wife and I moved in together, we had a mouse in our apartment. We set traps everywhere we could think to put them, but no matter what kind of traps or bait I used, the mouse wanted nothing to do with them. After a couple days, I got desperate. I wanted to figure out exactly where the mouse was getting in so that I could close up the gap to keep it out. Failing that, I wanted to figure out where it was going so that I could set traps in the right places. So I propped up an iPad against the arm of the couch with its camera pointed at the kitchen, called it on FaceTime from my laptop, and brought the laptop into the bedroom and closed the door. Then I sat quietly, stared at my kitchen from the other room, and waited for the mouse to show up. Even as I was setting everything up, I recognized it as an act of madness. But it worked.

I didn’t glean much that first day. If I recall correctly, the mouse did eventually show up, but it turned out that the iPad didn’t have a good angle on its movements. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from or where it was going, only that it crossed the kitchen a time or two. Convinced that the concept was sound and the execution could be improved upon, I tried it again the next day. My wife was off work, so I explained that I needed her to hole up in the bedroom with me. She recognized it as an act of madness too, but she found it hilarious. She dubbed it Mouse TV, and she understandably shrieked when the mouse finally showed up. We watched and stifled our laughter as it nosed around the kitchen. It took a couple more days of Mouse TV to figure out where the mouse was coming from, plug the hole, and make sure that the mouse wasn’t coming back. My wife was tickled the whole time. Whereas I felt embarrassed and vaguely unclean about having a rodent in my home, she’d tell the story of Mouse TV to anyone who could listen. It has, somehow, become a fond memory. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, as I watched Luis Arraez, sparkler in hand, chatting with Otto Lopez outside the National League dugout, I couldn’t help but reflect on how he ended up in Philadelphia. This is Arraez’s fourth All-Star selection, but it’s also his first in four years. Although we’re only 90 games into the season, his 3.7 WAR is already a career high. As you surely know, the biggest improvement in his game came with the glove. Michael Rosen put it simply enough back in May, with an article titled “Luis Arraez Is Good at Defense Now.” At the time, Arraez had put up 5 FRV over 30 games. In the ensuing 61 games, he’s accrued another 3 FRV. The pace has slowed down, but he’s still grading out as an excellent defender (though the other defensive metrics admittedly disagree).

Today, however, we’re interested in Arraez’s offensive improvement. Arraez won his first batting title in 2022, and he did more than just put up a high batting average. He also walked more than he struck out, earning a 130 wRC+. He followed it up with a 131 mark in 2023, though he did so in a slightly different fashion. Both his walks and his strikeouts dropped below 6%, but he ran a .362 BABIP, which led to a .354 batting average. Essentially, he leaned way, way into his status as a contact god, and the sky-high BABIP made it all work out beautifully.

But Arraez took things too far. In 2024 and 2025 combined, his walk and strikeout rates fell below 5%, and his .307 BABIP, while above the league average, wasn’t good enough to carry an offensive profile that features no walks and no power. He ran a 107 combined wRC+, and because he was putting up negative value in the other parts of the game, he ended up with just 2.0 WAR. That put his value squarely between an average player and a replacement-level one. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Bryce Harper looked briefly like a villain. I’m sure you know the story by now, so I’ll keep this recap brief. On Thursday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story about a gambler who is suing FanDuel and DraftKings for allegedly using “their products and VIP services to intentionally maximize addiction.” The specific VIP service that turned this into such a big story was a video, branded with the FanDuel logo, in which Harper thanked the fan for his support. The idea that the biggest stars in baseball are secretly recording videos as perquisites to keep deeply indebted gambling addicts hooked on FanDuel understandably outraged many people, but it was an odd story, because Harper was not known to have any affiliation with FanDuel.

The truth was, well, stupid. Harper really doesn’t have any affiliation with FanDuel. A FanDuel employee ordered the video on Cameo, and told Harper what to say. Harper read the script he was given, which included the phrase, “Your host Bryttanni from FanDuel wanted to make sure your Thanksgiving was extra special,” and then the employee slapped a logo on the video. Harper has since released a statement which read, in part, “I did not know FanDuel would do this, I did not consent to it, and FanDuel had no right to do it. Had I known FanDuel’s true intent, I would not have made the video.” That’s about as unequivocal as it gets. Harper said the request was for a personal video, and that “Cameo had a separate category for business video requests, and at the time I did not know this video would be used for commercial purposes.” The statement also included screenshots of the instructions he received through Cameo, script and all. Harper isn’t really the villain here.

It’s not at all surprising that someone who spends their workdays figuring out how to squeeze more money out of people with gambling problems would try to get a video like this made. What’s surprising is that they were actually able to do it. In this article, I’m going to ask and answer several smaller questions about the relationship between Cameo and baseball. I’m doing so to compensate for the fact that I have no way of answering the really big question that’s staring us right in the face: Why the heck is Bryce Harper on Cameo? Read the rest of this entry »