He just ran right into it.
The ball was coming. He chopped his steps to time it up.
And then he just ran right into it anyway
Like a child so focused on when to jump into a game of Double Dutch
That they forget the part where they have to actually jump.
It hit him in the shin, in both shins, bounced off toward the photographers’ well
And the inning was just over.

He’s going to have a bump for a while.
And a baseball right to the shinbone really hurts, even a weakly hit one
That ends the inning and makes everyone wonder what the hell you were thinking.
It sticks around forever and hurts far longer than it ought to.
Those high sanitary socks are no protection at all. They’re nearly nothing.
I remember peeling off my uniform after a particularly sunny game
And finding sunburns in a tiny checkerboard pattern on my calf.

If you didn’t know there were two outs, you’d think
It was a brilliant piece of baserunning.
Bottom six, Jose Altuve leading off second. Runners on first and second.
Bregman chops one to third and Altuve takes a bruise on the shin like a hero
Rather than allow the Blue Jays to turn a double play.
But there are two outs. Jose Altuve is positively — I don’t know what.
I got interrupted as I was writing that line and now I have no idea what
I was going to say that Jose Altuve positively was.

It didn’t actually cost the team very much. If the ball doesn’t hit him,
Then Clement scoops it up for a rushed but easy force out.
The inning’s over either way. Why not run some very literal interference?
Let it slip between your legs and maybe Ernie will do the same.

It’s just that he looked for all the world like he was planning something big,
The way he slowed down to get the timing right,
Spread his arms for balance, kicked his heels up as he ran:
Like he was going to leap dramatically over the bouncing ball;
Like he was going to tumble around it in a diving summersault
That somehow ended up with him hugging the bag safely;
Like he was going to convince the ball to skip between his ankles;
Like he was going to pirouette with such dazzling beauty as it whispered by
That the infielders would be too moved to pay it any mind whatsoever.
And then he just ran into it.

“That is amazing,” says Buck Martinez. “A player of his stature
Somehow lost sight of the baseball.” And, well, that’s pretty funny.
When he gets picked off third two innings later,
Killing his second two-on, two-out situation of the night,
It’s less forgivable, especially for a giant of his tiny stature,
But it’s also much easier to understand.

In the sixth inning, it’s unclear what exactly he’s trying to do,
And that’s why my first thought is to crank up the poetry machine
Where there’s no limit to what can be true at the same time.
Real events can be caused by endless permutations of factors
But those inputs always have to add up to a hundred percent,
Whereas on the page any possibility you raise can be
Equally valid: a hundred hundred-percent-true explanations.

Okay, that’s not true. My first thought is that he looks like Raccoon Mario
From Super Mario Bros. 3, sprinting with his hands out, ready to fly.
I just wish I knew for sure whether his plan failed
Or whether he never actually tried it out in the first place,
Whether all that preamble was ever post-ambled at all.

I was sick the entire month of March. I’m still coughing constantly at times,
Constantly clearing my throat although I have nothing to say.
A few nights ago I made a note to look up the mechanics of throat clearing,
the two-part how of the inhaled ah- and the exhaled -hem.
I tried to look it up, but I couldn’t find anything.

Back when the Orioles signed Craig Kimbrel in December, Michael Baumann wrote something that has been rattling around my brain ever since: “But there are pitchers you need to get you through the regular season, and then there are pitchers who can win in the playoffs. And there is less overlap between the two than you might think.” Michael’s got a point. These days, there are super teams, super terrible teams, and fewer teams than ever in between. A league-average starting pitcher will do just fine most of the time. They’ll beat up on the White Sox and get beat up on by the Dodgers, and the universe will remain balanced. But if you ask a pitching staff without any true standouts to spend a whole playoff series silencing a lineup that starts off Acuña-Albies-Riley-Olson, you’re going to end up scooping them off the mound with a shovel.

This isn’t just the age of stratification; it’s also the age of the arm injury. Last year, both the Dodgers and Braves featured rotations that were among the best in baseball on paper, but real-life injuries proved to be their kryptonite. That’s why the hot new trend among super teams is rotational depth. Here’s what Ben Clemens said when the Braves traded for Chris Sale a few weeks after the Kimbrel deal: “If you’re looking at it exclusively through the lens of how Atlanta will line up in the 2024 playoffs, adding Sale starts to make more sense. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a full season out of him. The Braves are surely aware of that, though, and they have plenty of fifth starter types to fill in for him in the regular season.” Over at Baseball Prospectus, Craig Goldstein had the exact same thought: “the Braves are looking to have Sale healthy and effective at the right time of year, how much he misses on the way there is unlikely to matter much to them.” Read the rest of this entry »

A popup is an automatic out. In 2023, popups had a batting average of just .014, so if we round up, we can say honestly that 99% of them were completely worthless. If you see the ball leave the bat headed straight up in the air, the outcome is essentially predetermined. No other batted ball carries less intrigue. Groundballs may be pariahs in the era of the launch angle revolution, but their .261 batting average meant they were 18 times more likely than popups to end up as hits. Knowing all that, you could be excused for thinking that the popup is the most boring possible way for the ball to be put in play. But I’m going to let you in on something: The popup is secretly the most exciting play in baseball.

You see, what popups lack in suspense, they make up for in drama. That’s because the popup is the play most likely to end up with any and all of the players on the field screaming. Now, in most contexts, screaming isn’t necessarily something you look forward to. Personally, my day-to-day life contains exactly zero screaming, and I prefer to keep it that way. In any given situation, I tend to think of somebody yelling at me as the absolute worst-case scenario. However, the screaming that happens during a popup is fun. No one is screaming to hurt anyone else. Players may scream out of anger, but they also scream in order to be helpful and to keep their teammates safe. When the ball has been popped up, screaming is cooperation. Screaming is friendship. Screaming is love.

As we embark on the 2024 season, it’s best to think of popups like tragic operas. Everyone walks into the theater knowing that things will end badly for the protagonist. They’re not there to find out what will happen, they’re there to be moved by how it happens. Although the end is sad, there is great beauty to be found in the death and shrieking. With that, let’s review the different reasons that players might end up screaming their heads off when the ball gets lifted into the air. I watched every single televised popup that happened during spring training, and then I made supercuts so that we could break them down together. I also included a few choice screams from recent seasons.

Whenever the ball is popped up, it is the solemn duty of every ballplayer to shout “Up!” as loud as humanly possible. This is the law, and it was hammered into me so hard when I was in high school that it became an involuntary response. I’m now 40 years old. I play recreational softball. And still, I cannot help screaming every time someone pops the ball up. No one else does this. It is embarrassing and I am unable to stop. It is less embarrassing when big leaguers do it.

In theory, the goal of this particular scream is to help the catcher. The catcher is busy trying not just to catch the pitch, but to frame it while also managing all of the other responsibilities that come with the position. Unlike everyone else on the field, a ball popped straight up immediately leaves the catcher’s line of sight. Screaming, “Up!” lets them know the location of the ball and warns them that they might have to make a play on it. Occasionally, you can see that catchers really do need the help. They’re capable of looking very confused indeed.

For that reason, and also because they are themselves forbidden from catching popups, pitchers have also been trained to point to the ball when it’s popped up. It is not helpful, but it is, once again, the law. It must be extraordinarily infantilizing for the pitcher, normally the source of all the action, to be reduced to a helpless citizen of Metropolis, shouting, “Look, up in the sky!” I imagine it also feels quite futile, since, throughout the entire history of baseball, exactly zero popups have ever been caught because the pitcher’s index finger helped a fielder locate the ball.

Once it has been established that the ball is, in fact, up, it’s time to decide who will have the honor of catching it. This is determined by way of the democratic process of — you guessed it — even more screaming, just as the founding fathers intended. In theory, there are certain places where one fielder has the right of way, but in practice, the rules are simple: Whoever screams the loudest and the latest gets the ball. The generally accepted parlance is, “I got it.” As Junior Caminero makes clear in the first clip below, “Mía, mía, mía” works just as well for Spanish speakers.

It really is important for the fielders to declare whether or not they’ve got it. To you, it may just sound like grown men shouting at each other, but in baseball, that’s known as communication. If your team fails to communicate, then something like this could happen.

But that’s still not the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is an outfield collision, and it happens all too frequently. Usually, there’s nothing funny about ballfield collisions, but they can have their moments. For example, the legendary band Yo La Tengo got their name from center fielder Richie Ashburn’s futile attempt to avoid outfield collisions with shortstop Elio Chacon when the two played together for the Mets in the early ’60s. Seamus Kerney tells the story in Ashburn’s SABR bio:

The story revolved around the antics of the Spanish-speaking shortstop for the Mets, Elio Chacon, and his penchant for frequent near-collisions with outfielders. This was especially true with Ashburn on short fly balls to center field. Ashburn realized that Chacon did not understand the English warning: “I have it,” so he went to a bilingual Mets player and was told that Chacon would understand the warning in Spanish, yo la tengo; that it meant the fly ball was the center fielder’s to catch. Soon enough a short fly ball was hit and a back-pedaling Chacon veered off, following Ashburn’s admonition in Spanish. What was unexpected was that onrushing, English-only left fielder Frank Thomas completely flattened Ashburn. After pulling his center fielder from the ground, Thomas asked him “What’s a Yellow Tango?”

Sometimes the issue is not who will get the ball, but whether the fielder can get to it safely. If the ball is being buffeted by the wind and your head is craned skyward to track it into foul territory, it can be hard to mind your surroundings. That’s where your teammates can come in, telling you whether or not you have the space to safely make the catch without running into the wall. The preferred verbiage is “Got room! Got room!” Strangely, nobody yells much of anything when you don’t have room. It doesn’t make a ton of sense, as that’s the situation when you’d really need help to keep from crashing into the wall. In theory, nobody should need to be told that they’ve got room. They should just keep going after the ball until they hear a teammate say, “Stop running or you’ll die!”

There’s one more player who can get in on the screaming action, and that’s the batter. In this case, there is no altruistic reason for screaming. It’s just pure catharsis, a way to vent the rage from your body before you explode. Let it out, Jason Heyward. Let it out.

Of course, the players aren’t the only ones who can scream. I have a friend who is physically incapable of going to concert without shouting something at the band between songs. Maybe it’s a joke, or maybe it’s just a big, loud Woooo! There is something inside of him that simply cannot survive those few seconds of silence. For baseball fans with the same condition, the odd interstice when everyone in the stadium is waiting for the ball to finally remember that it’s earthbound is the perfect moment to grab some attention. Usually, they’ll shout that it is in fact they who have got it, but it’s also a time to shine for people blessed with great whistles or anyone who simply loves screaming. In my favorite of the clips that follow, someone who is presumably not familiar with the terminology of the game very clearly tells the fielder, “You’re gonna fumble it.”

In addition to the joy of screaming, popups give you a chance to enjoy the choreography of a baseball game. Because it’s never immediately clear where the ball will land and who will end up with it, the broadcast cuts to the widest shot they have, way up behind home plate. In this rare glimpse of the entire field, you can see all of the infielders, and sometimes all nine fielders, as they move together. There’s beauty in it, and it truly lets you see the way in which defense requires all nine players.

One of my favorite moments comes in the instant before they cut to that camera. It’s vanishingly brief, and it can only take place if a right-handed batter fouls a pitch from a right-handed pitcher down the first base line. When that happens, the pitcher, catcher, and hitter will all move together, following the ball toward first base. First their heads snap up, and then their bodies follow in sort of a synchronized drift. It’s like they’re zombies who suddenly catch the scent of brains wafting over from the south.

That’s the last supercut I’ve got, but before I leave you, I’d like to share with you my dream of the perfect popup. It’s the popup where everyone in the stadium screams: players, fans, umpires, announcers, ushers, even the possums (assuming the game is being played in Oakland). I crunched a lot of tape looking for the perfect popup. I never found it, but I know that it’s out there somewhere.

The perfect popup starts with a pitcher unleashing both the baseball and a max effort grunt. With a mighty cut, the batter sends the ball straight up into the stratosphere, and the catcher, pitcher, and infielders instantly scream the word, “Up!” in perfect unison. The batter barks the F-word in fury, smashing the bat over a beefy thigh. The umpires shout, “Infield fly, batter’s out!” Thunderclouds boom. A swirling thermal pushes the ball hither and yon in the sky, and as it passes over each fielder in turn, each one shouts, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” At first the fans shout gaily that they’ve got it too, but as the ball travels ever skyward in open defiance of gravity, their playful shouts turn into panicked screams. They rend their garments. The batter, no longer jogging half-heartedly toward first, furiously churns around the bases. The ball keeps rising. “Cold beer here,” screams a vendor, completely oblivious to the apocalypse unfolding around him. “Yes, oh God yes,” howls the play-by-play announcer. And then, just like that, the ball decides to start falling. The thunderclouds dissipate. The fans meekly put back on the clothes they’d ripped from their bodies in terror. The third baseman drifts toward the dugout, and after reassurances that he’s got room, he settles under the ball, says once more that he’s got it, and secures it safely in his glove. The batter dives headfirst into home. God weeps.

Earlier today we published the positional power rankings for center field. For the first time since 2013, and for just the third time in the history of the positional power rankings, the Angels are not in the top spot. To put this changing of the guard in perspective, I went back and read all of the entries about Mike Trout and the Angels. This article is not a eulogy. Instead, we are here today to commemorate his greatness. It’s a retrospective of sorts, both of Trout’s peak and our coverage of it, but I would remind you that he’s not yet reached the compiling phase of his Hall of Fame career. In fact, among center fielders, only Aaron Judge is projected for a higher wRC+ than Trout this season. The Angels still rank fourth, despite the fact that Trout is projected to play less center field and more DH this season because Shohei Ohtani is no longer on the team. Trout is only 32, and it would hardly be surprising if he returns to the 160ish wRC+ that both we and the projections have come to expect.

Besides, praising Trout is one of main the reasons I’m writing here at all. I started reading FanGraphs religiously sometime between 2014 and 2016. I had a lot of free time at work, and I spent pretty much all of it doing what you’re doing right now. At some point, we switched from a cubicle farm to an open office. Concerned that everyone would be able to see my computer screen, I remember wondering whether I’d have to quit, or whether I’d be able to devise some way to hide the fact that, rather than working, I was just reading the same green website all day. I never did figure out how to hide it, but it turned out that nobody seemed to mind much. What I loved most of all, what turned me into a moderately knowledgeable baseball person, was reading about Mike Trout.

I know that many people, the sainted Sam Miller chief among them, have done incredible writing about Trout elsewhere. But to me personally, Trout is the player whose career is most tightly intertwined with the story of this site. His ascent as an all-around superstar, along with the agita surrounding the race for the 2013 AL MVP, made him the poster boy for advanced metrics in general and WAR in particular. Here was a player whose greatness was visible, but whose contributions in every facet of the game added up to more than the eye could see and way more than the Triple Crown stats could tell you. And here was a website full of great writers who couldn’t wait to show you — with graphs and GIFs and gags — how to appreciate that greatness and recognize it for yourself. Could Trout end up with the most WAR ever? Could he be as valuable to the Angels as LeBron James was to his team? How much was his production actually worth? How the hell did he hit a home run on this pitch? Or this pitch? Where would he rank according to a brand new stat?

Sometimes my wife does this thing that I love: We’ll just be sitting on the couch making each other laugh, and she’ll stop and say, “We’re so happy.” It’s true. We are so happy. But it’s also obvious enough that you might think there’s no reason to say it. You’d be wrong. We’re not going to be newlyweds forever, and it really is important to appreciate just how good we have it. In 2014, August Fagerstrom expressed that sentiment in the first of what turned into a series of check-ins about Trout’s place in history: “You might be tired of hearing or reading about Mike Trout, but you really shouldn’t be. Don’t take this one for granted… enough can’t be said about him.” A writer’s job is to ask interesting questions. Trout’s greatness has been such that for 12 years now, those questions have often been about the exact same topic. Somehow, the writers here have done an incredible job of finding creative ways to make sure we appreciate it, of fighting what Justin Klugh called “the normalization of Mike Trout’s massive talent.” If David Appelman were to collect the best articles about Trout from the past 10 years and publish them in a book, I’d buy the hell out of it. They changed my life. In fact, here’s one of the very first things I ever wrote for FanGraphs, just a few months before I’d get my first chance at actual baseball writing. Please ignore the superfluous comma.

All of this writing was and still is necessary because Trout has been so good for so long that it can be hard to wrap your arms around his greatness. Julio Rodríguez is a megastar with a mega-contract who finally displaced Trout by starting his career with back-to-back seasons worth 5-plus WAR at ages 21 and 22. But Trout, a year younger than Rodríguez in his rookie season, started out with back-to-back 10-win campaigns, excluding his 40-game cup of coffee as in 2011, his age-19 season. Over each of their first two full seasons, Trout was worth nine more WAR than Rodríguez! He averaged 8.9 WAR during his first eight seasons, then he put up 2.5 WAR in 2020, the equivalent of 6.8 WAR in a full season. In 2019, Angels center fielders were projected 9.2 WAR, more than double our projection for the Brewers, the no. 2 team at the position. That was the median projection, and the Halos fell short only because Trout missed nearly 30 games. It’s bonkers, and again, that’s just the peak. As recently as 2022, he put up 6.0 WAR in 119 games. Last season, the miserable slog that got him dethroned, he still put up the 11th-most WAR among all center fielders despite playing just 82 games, and if you look only at value accrued while playing center, he moves up to seventh, with 3.1 WAR in 79 games. From the very beginning, putting Trout’s career into a comprehensible context has required a healthy dose of ingenuity from our writers. It’s like a diagram of a skyscraper; you need that tiny picture of a human at the bottom just to remind you of what normal human scale looks like.

Speaking of scale, Trout has consistently destroyed the graphs that started appearing with the positional power rankings in 2014. He was blowing the curve not for a high school math class, but for the very best baseball players in the world. Year after year, his bar on the far the left dwarfed every other center fielder in baseball until, gradually, it didn’t.

The positional power rankings started in 2012, just in time for a certain toolsy center fielder to be name-checked as “the uber-prospect Mike Trout.” He was also projected for 100 PAs in left field. The ZiPS projections for Peter Bourjos and Vernon Wells were a little too rosy, but uber-prospect or not, no one could have been prepared for the .326/.399/.564 slash line that Trout put up in his rookie season. As you can tell from the tables, things were a little rough and ready back then. Fun fact: This table also represents the lowest ranking the Angels have ever had in center field.

By 2013, both the projections and the authors of the rankings were ready to crown Trout. On his own, he was projected for 6.8 WAR, nearly a full win above Andrew McCutchen’s Pirates in first place. However, Trout was still projected to spend most of his time in left in order to make room for Bourjos in center. “He’s a star even if his performance figures to take a slight step back following one of the best rookie seasons we’ll ever see,” wrote Mike Axisa. Over in left field, where a partial season from Trout was enough to lift the Angels into second place, Michael Barr called Trout, “The statistical community consensus AL MVP and real-world runner up,” but cautioned that, “it would probably be foolish to project a repeat of one of the greatest offensive performances in recent history.” He was right: Trout wouldn’t repeat his performance; he’d be even better.

In 2014, Jason Collette started his introduction by explaining why the graph looked so weird: “If you’ve been looking at the scale of these charts and wondering why we set the top end of the range to +9 when the best team is usually closer to +6, here’s your answer. Stupid Mike Trout.” He then called Trout, “the best player at his position, nee [sic], the game,” which will never not make me laugh. In 2015, Craig Edwards repeated what by that point had become a refrain: “Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, and it is not particularly close.” In 2016, Trout was simply “the best in the world.” (Also, let’s briefly remember Trout’s projected backups in those seasons: JB Shuck, Collin Cowgill, Craig Gentry, and Rafael Ortega!)

That’s when the player capsules about Trout started changing a bit. By 2017, it wasn’t enough just to acknowledge Trout’s greatness. Some poetry was necessary. “There is no one at his level,” wrote Dave Cameron. “There is no one near his level. There is no one on a level that can see Trout’s level from their level.” Just a year later, Trout had been so good for so long that it was assumed. His dominance had reached its hipster phase, and it was time for some snark. “Just in case you hadn’t thought about it enough recently,” wrote Jeff Sullivan, “Mike Trout is good.” In 2019, Dan Szymborski saved his snark for the question of whether the Angels would ever actually put a winning team around Trout: “It’s not the steak’s fault if someone puts ketchup on it.” Craig Edwards got topical in 2020: “He also wears a mask around others because it is known to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. He truly is an MVP.”

The big shift came in 2021. That was the first time an author considered the possibility that some young star might actually overtake Trout on the rankings. Brendan Gawlowski named five candidates: Luis Robert Jr., Ramón Laureano, Trent Grisham, Kyle Lewis, and Cristian Pache. None of them has topped Trout yet, and when push came to shove, Gawlowski wrote, “One of these years, he’ll slow down but if 2021 is the season, the projections will be as surprised and disappointed as anyone.” By 2022, Ben Clemens gave voice to the reality depicted in the bar graph: “He’s still the king… But after a decade on top, Trout’s hold on the No. 1 spot has loosened.” Ben noted that although the bat was still there, Trout’s issues were durability and defense.

That brings us to 2023, when Michael Baumann went so far as to invite another center fielder into the top tier, calling Trout and Rodríguez “the two clear best center fielders in baseball, and writing, “If anyone were to displace Trout as the premier center fielder in the game, Rodríguez is the most likely candidate.” That day, so long in coming, is finally here.

I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write this article. It was also difficult, because the authors here — one of whom works in the front office of the team that finally wrested the top spot from the Angels — have written so, so many fun things about Mike Trout. I spent hours getting lost in them when I should have been writing. Below are links to every year of the center field positional power rankings, as well as the left field entries from 2012 and 2013. I’d also encourage you to simply explore the blog roll of articles about Trout. Scroll around and click on anything with a title that sounds fun. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, and I’m sure we’ll keep writing fun things about Trout for a long time to come.

2012 (CF) – 2012 (LF) – 2013 (CF) – 2013 (LF) – 2014 – 2015 – 2016 – 2017 – 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 – 2023 – 2024

Earlier today, Leo Morgenstern examined the state of left field. Now we turn our attention to those who roam center.

Well, it’s finally happened. The picture at the top of this page is not an accident. For the first time since 2013, the Angels no longer sit at the top of the center field positional power rankings. Mike Trout has officially been dethroned. It’s not just that Julio Rodríguez has usurped Trout’s role as the High King of All Center Field. Trout isn’t even in the top three. This occasion is momentous enough that I’ve devoted a separate article to Trout’s decade-long reign, but our purposes here, let’s take a look at what this shift says about the state of center field in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

How about this: How about you and I forget for a couple minutes that we’re at FanGraphs, deep in the stat-swamped soul of the sabermetrics community? Let’s just pretend you’re reading an article on a website with a name like SuperCoolBaseballStuff.com. This is not the time to get lost in the weeds. Spring is in the air, and we’re rhapsodizing about the smell of the freshly cut grass. The birds have returned, and they’re waking us up at dawn with their incessant noises. Now is the time to be excited about baseball (and annoyed about the birds), and quite simply, nobody does more exciting stuff on a baseball field than Oneil Cruz and Elly De La Cruz. So let’s keep it simple. Let’s talk about all the superlatives that make the pair so exciting as we race toward the 2024 season.

For the first time, both Cruz and De La Cruz will be in the show at the same time. Cruz was called up for good in June 2022, and he finished the season on a high note, running a 133 wRC+ over the final month. He came into 2023 with the stated goal of a 30-30 season, but in just his ninth game, he fractured his left fibula during a collision at the plate. De La Cruz was called up in June 2023 and promptly went supernova. He ran a 179 wRC+ with eight stolen bases and 10 extra-base hits over his first 16 games, but struggled over the last few months. This year, they’ll be the Opening Day shortstops for their respective teams, and Cruz is on record saying that his ankle feels not just 100%, but 200%, which may very well be a record.

Somehow, the two players are extremely similar while also being completely unprecedented. The similarities start with their surnames, and then there’s the fact that they’re both young, ridiculously tall shortstops who hail from the Dominican Republic and play in the NL Central. The height thing is likely a bigger deal than you realize. Cruz is 6’7” and De La Cruz is 6’5”. According to Stathead, that makes them just the seventh and eighth players ever to be 6’5” or taller and play a single inning of shortstop in, ahem, the bigs. They’re the only ones ever to be regular starters at the position; those other six combined for a total of 113 games at short. You’re not going to believe this, but until Cruz dethroned him, the leader was Michael Morse, with 57 games. The 6’5” Morse, who finished his career with -73.2 total defensive runs, totaled 450 innings at short for the Mariners in 2005, racking up -13 DRS and a UZR/150 of -20.9.

Cruz and De La Cruz have both played in exactly 98 big league games, and their skillsets are nearly identical, as well. They’ve both walked 35 times, struck out 33.7% of the time, and posted batting averages and on-base percentages within two points of one another. Here’s what that similarity looks like courtesy of some cherry-picked Baseball Savant sliders:

Not that it matters much, but 2022 Cruz is on the left and 2023 De La Cruz is on the right. There’s so much red and so much blue. These are insanely fun profiles. Cruz and De La Cruz do everything at 100 miles per hour, except for hitting the baseball, which they do at 120. They run like cheetahs who were genetically modified for maximum speed and then shot out of a cannon. They crush baseballs like PETA-members who just found out that the baseballs were responsible for performing the illegal experiments on those cheetahs. They throw the ball over to first as if they heard you get an extra out if you manage to blast it right through the first baseman’s solar plexus. They whiff like they think they can generate enough wind power to solve the climate crisis all by themselves. They’re boom and bust personified. They’re the middle schoolers who figured out that you could game the typing test by absolutely going for broke, because 150 words per minute minus a 50% error rate still leaves you at 75 words per minute. They’re like basketball played on roller skates. It’s poetry when it works, carnage when it doesn’t, and impossible to turn away from.

As for whether the whole package will work, well that’s trickier. Here are the final grades the two players received from our prospect team upon graduation:

Again, the numbers are very similar, but Cruz, all of two inches taller, has a tougher path defensively. He’s always been capable of making a great play, but he’s never looked like a sure thing at short, in terms of either range or hands, and he didn’t look at home in left field when the Pirates tried him out there in the minors. In 2022, he graded out as a hair above average according to DRS, but the other defensive metrics didn’t love him. As he continues to fill out, he’s less likely to maintain his speed and range. On the other hand, he owns a career 106 wRC+. He managed to cut his chase and whiff rates toward the end of 2022. In the short samples of 12 LiDOM games and nine MLB games, he boasted vastly improved walk and strikeout rates in 2023. Those trends have now held through nine spring training games as well, long enough for Cruz to tie for the MLB lead with five homers.

As Robert Orr demonstrated over at Baseball Prospectus, the switch-hitting De La Cruz made his own plate discipline gains during the 2023 season, going from a 38.8% chase rate in July to 25.7% in September and October. In fact, according to Pitcher List, by the end of the season, his swing decisions were well above average.

Although he ended the season on a low note in terms of performance, De La Cruz actually posted a .334 xwOBA in September and October, his best figure of the season by a wide margin. De La Cruz put up a 24.5% HR/FB in 2023, 10th-highest among qualified players, but that masked the fact that his 53.9% groundball rate was the 11th-highest. It’s possible that chasing less soft stuff below the zone will help him to put more balls in the air going forward. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s possible that he’ll just keep hitting the ball hard enough that he doesn’t need to lift it very often to do damage. Moreover, De La Cruz is better positioned to stick at shortstop. He graded out well according to OAA and UZR, though DRS and DRP were less impressed. Importantly, he’s also just 22, and he has time to improve. Although he put up just an 84 wRC+ last year, his defense and his propensity to take any and every base helped him put up 1.7 WAR in his 98 games.

For both players, the future has some truly massive error bars. They’re just 22 and 25 years old, and they’ve yet to play a full season’s worth of games. With apologies to Michael Morse, there just aren’t many comparable players we can look to for insights on their development. Their tools are so preposterous that their ceiling is somewhere out by the asteroid belt. But their long levers and their unproven eyes could keep them from ever making enough contact to take advantage of all that power. All the same, even if they just manage to stick it out as league-average shortstops, they’ll achieve it by way of some of the most electric, entertaining baseball the world has ever seen. They’ll also be doing it in an era where each 100 mph throw from deep in the hole and each 122 mph rocket off the bat can be tracked and marveled at in all its gaudy splendor. It’s time to get excited.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent too much time staring at the back of the Target Field pitcher’s mound. Like, way, way too much time. I watched hundreds of video clips. I scoured pictures from image services, social media, and satellites. It could have been boring. It probably should have been boring, but I was looking for the answer to a question that I found interesting, and that was enough. At a certain point, I realized I had another interesting question on a subject that should have been even more boring. I’d been staring at the mound for so long that I started wondering about the spiky little mat that pitchers use to scrape the mud out of their spikes. Where did it come from? How long has it been there? Why haven’t I ever actually seen a pitcher use one? How is it possible that I’ve been watching baseball my entire life and never once thought about this thing before? It might be the only object on a baseball field whose name I don’t know. I must have spent more time looking at that white piece of plastic or rubber or whatever-the-hell-it-is than I’ve spent looking at anyone I love, and yet for the life of me, until two weeks ago I don’t think I’d ever spent one second thinking about it. So I started thinking about it.

That spiky little mat is called a cleat cleaner. Because teams often auction off game-used cleat cleaners, you can find some pretty good pictures of them. The ones that get sold are usually from memorable games, like no-hitters, playoff games, or really any game where the cleat cleaner was touched by Shohei Ohtani:

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It’s almost March! It’s time for the weather to feel like it should be changing, only for it to not really change for a couple more weeks. It’s time for the very first baseball of the year. It’s time for massive overreactions to the tiniest sample sizes imaginable. With that in mind, sound the alarm: Spencer Strider threw three curveballs! “What’s that,” you say? “Spencer Strider doesn’t throw a curveball,” you say? Welcome to 2024, my friend, where anything is possible (except for opaque pants, apparently).

Earlier this month, there was some confusion about the pitch, as Strider indicated that he was simply playing with the shape of his slider. However, since then, both he and Brian Snitker have confirmed that the pitch is a curveball. He’s thrown it in live batting practice and in Saturday’s spring training game against the Rays. It’s the second pitch in the video below:

Olson and Strider.

Nice battle. pic.twitter.com/X5F0NXb0ue

— Grant McAuley (@grantmcauley) February 19, 2024

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We will not be breaking new ground today. What you read in this article won’t change the way you understand baseball. However, it might help you to appreciate a few baseball players for who they are, and that strikes me as a noble goal. A couple weeks ago, Ben Clemens introduced Whomps Per Whiff, a stat that divides barrels by whiffs in order to show “how often you absolutely whomp the ball, as compared to how often your swing results in nothing but a tiny gust of air.” It was a remarkably simple way of looking at hitting, and the leaderboard featured some of the best hitters in baseball. It was also a fun article, and I agreed with several of its underlying premises:

• If there’s one thing baseball doesn’t have enough of, it’s statistics.
• Anybody can make up a statistic, as long as they have a dream in their heart and a copy of Microsoft Excel.
• It’s important that those statistics have silly names. That’s why I’ve been lobbying to have people pronounce wRC+ as “Work-Plus,” preferably in a Rihanna voice.
• The word whomp is decidedly fun.

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Well, Mike Rizzo wasn’t joking. At the Washington Nationals’ spring training facility, behind each of the 11 home plates in the bullpen, there are signs posted, and they’re not printed on paper. Somebody in the organization shelled out to have “I don’t care how fast you throw ball four” printed on canvas, in team colors, with a border all around and a logo at the bottom. The grommets at each corner, which allow them to be zip-tied tightly to the fence, probably cost extra. No National will throw a bullpen without seeing those signs for the next month. Whenever the team decides to remove them, somebody is going to have a rough a time cutting through all that thick plastic. It’ll take some doing.

Mike Rizzo was not joking when he said they would have these signs at spring training.

“I don’t care how fast you throw ball four.” pic.twitter.com/tT9x1Pv6yi

— Andrew Golden (@andrewcgolden) February 14, 2024

Rizzo road tested the line at the team’s annual hot stove event in January, and it brought down the house, earning sustained laughter and an applause break. In the absolute most literal sense, he’s right. If a pitch ends up as ball four, who cares how hard it was thrown? You might as well huck it up there underhanded like a cricket bowler. But that’s not really how baseball works. The pitcher doesn’t know beforehand whether the batter is going to swing, so let’s take Rizzo a shade less literally and look at how fastballs perform when they’re thrown in three-ball counts. The graph below shows four-seamers and sinkers, bucketed in one mile per hour increments. I went back and checked the numbers a second time because the line is so straight that the graph looks like it was airbrushed:

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