Tim Anderson’s game has always been a high-wire act. He never walks, he chases constantly, he’s completely BABIP-dependent and allergic to hitting the ball in the air, and his defense at shortstop has never quite been great enough to cover for a down year at the plate. Over the last four seasons, as projection systems crunched the underlying numbers and predicted that he’d plummet to the earth, Anderson refused to look down, putting up a 123 wRC+ and 13.6 WAR. Factoring in the time he lost to injuries and a global pandemic, that’s a 4.1-win pace per 500 PAs, or a 5.9-win pace per 162 games. Despite all the time he missed, Anderson was the 27th-most valuable position player in baseball over that span; only one of the 26 players ahead of him appeared in fewer games.

Anderson’s ability to shoot singles into right field and spray line drives across the entire diamond won him a batting title and a Silver Slugger, and earned him berths in the World Baseball Classic and two All-Star Games. It also made him fun to watch, a throwback who put the ball in play and used his legs, but also had the pop to blow a game wide open.

This season, the wire has snapped. The homerless Anderson has been worth -0.9 WAR, and his 49 wRC+ is the worst among all qualified players. After running a .347 BABIP last year, right at his career average, Anderson’s BABIP is .294. Maybe gravity was always going to kick in this fast when Anderson’s Wile E. Coyote routine stopped working, but it feels awfully sudden for a player who put up a 110 wRC+ just last year:

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Before this season, Nick Madrigal had spent just one inning at third base. It was in a showcase game; he was a high schooler. Madrigal played a fair bit of shortstop at Oregon State, but he has always primarily been a second baseman. Then in December, the Cubs signed Dansby Swanson, bumping Nico Hoerner over to second and Madrigal into a utility role.

Madrigal took the change in stride. He started a long toss regimen to improve his arm strength, and said all the right things to the press:

Bench coach Andy Green even flew out to Arizona to spend a week helping him get up to speed at the hot corner. All of that work seems to have paid off. So far this season, Madrigal has spent 53 innings at second and 303.2 at third. As a third baseman, DRS and OAA both have him at +4, DRP has him at +1.1, and UZR has him at -0.1. Again, that’s after exactly playing exactly one inning at the position when he was a teenager.

It looks like Madrigal’s regular playing time at third is coming to an end, though. Patrick Wisdom is returning from the IL, and Madrigal just started his own IL stint due to a right hamstring strain. It’s a disheartening development for many reasons: Because he needed season-ending surgery on that same hamstring in 2021; because it makes his spot on the Cubs’ roster even more precarious; because he was on pace to have the most productive season of his young career; and because he does something really fun when he plays third base. I’ve been struggling with how to put it into words, so before I make my attempt, let’s see if you can spot it for yourself.

I don’t have a good sense of whether or not you’ll notice what I want you to notice. Maybe you saw it right away. Maybe you’re a Cubs fan and you already noticed it earlier this year. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that you don’t notice until someone points it out, and then you can never not notice it. To make it a little easier, I combined two frames from that clip: I took the moment when Madrigal fielded the ball, then I added the moment when he threw it over to first.

Those two Nick Madrigals are in very, very different places. The first one is fielding the ball in a normal position roughly 15 feet behind the bag. Somehow the second one is way over on the right, about to make his throw with a foot on the infield grass. That’s a whole lot of infield to traverse right in the middle of a routine groundout. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes there’s a difference between returning and being back. After tearing his right ACL in July of 2021, Ronald Acuña Jr. returned on April 28, 2022. He put up a solid 2.1 WAR over 119 games, a 2.9-win pace. Think of him as Paul McCartney in 1970, releasing the solid but uninspiring McCartney on the heels of a regrettable rupture. This year, Acuña is back. He’s Paul McCartney in 1971, authoring an all-time classic in Ram. Please don’t examine this metaphor any further because it can’t stand up to scrutiny (but please give Ram a listen because it can).

Acuña has put up 4.9 WAR and a 166 wRC+ and racked up outfield assists on throws beautiful enough to make an angel cry (or a Cardinal, or a Padre).

Acuña is slashing .335/.412./.589, and for what it’s worth, his 166 wRC+ might be the result of a bit of bad luck. His .459 xwOBA is 34 points higher than his actual wOBA. It’s also the highest in the league, even higher than You Know Who. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if this happens to my colleagues, but I get attached to the players I write about. I can’t help it. Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “Things separate from their stories have no meaning,” and I’ve found that learning a player’s story, even if it’s just the story of why they need to lay off the slider, is enough to imbue them with an extra layer of meaning. Last year, I wrote about Jose Altuve after both the ALDS and the ALCS. It made me feel more connected to him, and during the World Series, whenever he came to the plate when my fiancée was in the room, I’d say, “That’s my little guy!” I really said that (and she really married me anyway).

Back in spring training, I wrote up our Positional Power Rankings for third base. It was a real crash course. We had projections for 149 different third basemen, and I needed to learn enough about each of them to articulate an opinion on what they’d do this year and why. I learned a lot about what I value when it comes to player performance. The exercise also informed the way I’ve watched the game this year. Diving deep into a league of third basemen, I formed attachments to all these players, especially the young ones, as I read prospect evaluations and beat reports and thought about their potential. Now that we’re nearing the halfway mark, here’s an update on the rookies I’ve been rooting for. Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s what happened. I was watching the MLB game highlights of Tuesday’s Marlins-Blue Jays matchup. I like MLB’s game highlights; in order to keep all the quick cuts from feeling disjointed, they kind of just plop some music on top everything unceremoniously, and sometimes the music can really color your perception of the game. This Mets-Padres game from April is a great example. It was a nailbiter, but it lost some of its nerve-wracking heft thanks to a soundtrack that’s a cross between John Coltrane, Kool & The Gang, and Super Mario 3.

Two on, two out, bottom of the ninth, and it sounds like the monologue is about to start on Saturday Night Live. Anyway, I was watching Tuesday’s Marlins-Jays highlights (the soundtrack for which sounds like The Living End on their union-mandated lunch break), and I noticed this single from Luis Arraez.

Normally, a single from Arraez is about the least remarkable thing in baseball. He is the game’s preeminent singles hitter (and depending on your worldview, perhaps the game’s preeminent hitter, period). What caught my eye was how quickly Daulton Varsho managed to cut this ball off, considering that Arraez slashed it just a foot inside the left field line. Varsho gets fantastic jumps, but I figured he also had to be playing extremely shallow. It occurred to me that maybe every outfielder is playing right on top of Arraez this year, seeing as dumping liners right in front of the outfielders for singles is his superpower. Read the rest of this entry »

If we’ve written it once, we’ve written it a hundred times: Pirates third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes is a solid player, but if he could just figure out how to hit the ball in the air, he’d be a star. Well, here we are in June 2023, and it appears that Hayes has finally started elevating the ball some.

For the second season in a row, Hayes has knocked at least five percentage points off his groundball rate, increased his hard-hit rate and average exit velocity, and more than doubled his launch angle. And for the second season in a row, his overall performance at the plate has stayed almost exactly the same. Let me say this very clearly: We were wrong. We are so sorry. We will work to do better in the future. Let’s take a look at what exactly Hayes has been doing to make liars out of us. Read the rest of this entry »

I think people tend to overestimate their ability to avoid disappointment. We try to temper our excitement so that we won’t feel let down when something goes wrong, but it doesn’t really work. The bad times are always going to hurt. More importantly, tempering your excitement can limit the joy you experience when things finally go right. Nothing strangles happiness in the cradle like that little voice in your head that keeps whispering, “It’s probably going to fall apart.”

I’m not saying we should all be walking around puffed up with unfounded optimism. I just think that some things warrant excitement, that we should trust ourselves to recognize them, and that we should allow ourselves to enjoy them fully. To borrow a line, I think you ought to follow your heart. That’s all I ever thought about anything.

Last year, over 32 games and 115 plate appearances, a 21-year-old Corbin Carroll put up a wRC+ of 130. Excelling in the outfield and on the basepaths as well allowed him to rack up 1.4 WAR. That’s a 7-win pace. He wasn’t perfect: his walk and strikeout rates were nothing to write home about, and while his .358 wOBA said Alex Bregman, his .293 xwOBA said Raimel Tapia. But in all, it was enough to make Carroll our No. 2 prospect in baseball, net him a downright effervescent ZiPS projection and an eight-year, $111 million contract extension, and establish him as our staff’s runaway favorite for NL Rookie of the Year. Corbin Carroll in 2022 was a first date where you’re talking and laughing and then all of a sudden you look at your watch and realize five hours have passed. He was worth getting excited about. Read the rest of this entry »

The calendar just flipped over to June, and somehow we have yet to write even one article about the best position player in all of baseball this season. Not that it’s a surprise; nothing about the best position player in all of baseball is a surprise.

If you Google “Freddie Freeman” and “killer,” in just the first page of results, you’ll find references to Freeman as a Nats killer, a Braves killer, a Mets killer, a Phillies killer, and a Cubs killer. (If you don’t use the quotation marks, you’ll get references to Freeman as a Mets killer and a Nats killer, plus a bunch of headlines about an actual murderer.) But here’s the thing: if you look at Freeman’s performance against every team in baseball and rank them by wOBA, only one of those five teams is even in the top 12. It feels personal no matter who you root for, but Freeman is just an everybody killer. It’s a conundrum straight out of Catch-22.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”

(The Braves are the one team that’s actually in the top 12; they’re number four. Freeman has a .361 average and a 206 wRC+ against them, and for obvious reasons he may actually want to kill them.) Read the rest of this entry »

You know what’s important? Pitches. Almost all of the big stuff that happens on a baseball diamond starts with the pitcher pitching. Even Babe Ruth never once hit a home run without somebody throwing a pitch first.

Now that we’re more than a quarter of the way through the 2023 season, let’s take a look at the pitches. Specifically, we’re going to take a look at long-term trends, and talk about the ways in which this year has (or hasn’t) followed them. As such, I need you to prepare yourself for a whole lot of line graphs. In fact, just to drive home how many line graphs are in this article, here’s a bar graph:

Last week we ran 26 regular articles, in addition to chats, podcasts, prospect lists, and power rankings. We’re pretty busy. There were fewer line graphs in those 26 articles than there are in the next couple thousand words.

You know what? Seeing as the only bar graph in the past week is the one you just saw, maybe we should also give a quick update to our little guy.

Much better. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you, but I was very excited about the Blue Jays’ outfield coming into this season. In December, the team signed veteran defensive wizard Kevin Kiermaier to take over in center field, pushing incumbent George Springer to right. Just a few weeks later, they sent catcher Gabriel Moreno to the Diamondbacks so that young defensive wizard and all-around rising star Daulton Varsho could play left. If you’re keeping score at home, that makes one George Springer and two defensive wizards. Most teams don’t have two defensive wizards. There just aren’t that many wizards running around, and the ones who play baseball tend to prefer the infield. The Blue Jays had three center fielders, two of whom were well-respected veterans with long track records on successful teams, two of whom were coming off four-win seasons, and two of whom could reasonably claim to be, when healthy, the best defensive outfielder in all of baseball. That’s a pretty exciting Venn diagram.

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