Something weird is happening with Alejandro Kirk. It’s not that he’s having a great season. That’s not weird at all. Kirk ranks third among catchers with 2.4 WAR and 21st among all players. He’s also hitting much better than he has in the past two seasons, but that’s not necessarily weird either. After combining for a wRC+ of 95 in 2023 and 2024, Kirk has a 129 wRC+ this season, the same as he ran in 2022, when he was an All-Star and won the Silver Slugger. He’s always been great with the glove, and it now looks like his bat is back. His .370 xwOBA and 119 DRC+ are also his best since 2022.

What’s weird is that he’s hitting the ball harder – much, much harder – but he’s not necessarily hitting for more power. Let me show you what I mean with a table. Below are a bunch of contact-quality metrics for the five full seasons of Kirk’s career. On the far right is his isolated power. Usually, contact quality and power are pretty much synonymous. If you hit the ball hard, you’re going to end up with doubles, triples, and homers. Usually.

This season, Kirk is running the highest average exit velocity, 90th percentile exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and slugging percentage of his entire career, and not by a little bit. These are huge jumps. Everyone’s favorite 5’8” catcher is in the 97th percentile in hard-hit rate! Yet his ISO is merely the third best of his career, a mere nine points above last season’s mark. I’m curious about why Kirk is hitting the ball so much harder all of a sudden, and I’m curious about why it’s not resulting in a massive power spike. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been writing about Cal Raleigh a lot lately, as we should. He’s currently on pace for 9.9 WAR, which would constitute the greatest season of all time for a catcher. Although his defense has taken a step back from its previous heights, Raleigh is running an absurd 182 wRC+ and leading baseball with 26 home runs. He’ll have to come down to Earth at some point, but he’s all but certain to lead all catchers in home runs for the third straight season. He’s nearly doubled the second-place Logan O’Hoppe’s 14. Raleigh has a real shot to break Salvador Perez’s record of 48 home runs by a catcher – if he keeps up his current pace, he’ll break it by 16 homers!

On May 19, Ben Clemens wrote about how well Raleigh’s new, more selective approach was working out. Even though Raleigh was taking more pitches over the heart of the plate in hitter’s counts (a trend that has continued in the ensuing weeks), the patience has allowed him to get ahead more often and do damage. “Does all of this mean that Raleigh is going to maintain his 170 wRC+?” Ben asked. “No way.” That was the only answer he could have given. To suggest otherwise would have been sabermetric malpractice. But, uh, Raleigh didn’t exactly regress back to the mean from there on out. From May 20 to June 8, Raleigh was the best hitter in baseball, slashing .348/.427/.894 with 13 homers for a 267 wRC+. His average exit velocity was 97.2 mph! That’s what it takes to – barely – hit better than Aaron Judge. Read the rest of this entry »

The wait is over. On Monday, the Red Sox called up Roman Anthony, the consensus top prospect in baseball. He batted fifth and played right field against the Rays, going 0-for-4 with a walk, an RBI, and a costly error. After spending the last few seasons absolutely torching the minors, it turns out Anthony just needed to smash a 497-foot grand slam – the longest ball hit in either the majors or the minors this season – in order to earn his spot in Boston.

What really brought Anthony to Boston was a left oblique strain to Wilyer Abreu, whom the Red Sox placed on the IL when they announced Anthony’s promotion (though the 497-footer certainly couldn’t have hurt). The team designated Ryan Noda for assignment to open a 40-man roster spot.

After all the anticipation, the promotion happened at the very last minute; there were no tear-jerker undercover boss videos. Although Abreu showed discomfort during Friday’s game against the Yankees, the team wasn’t sure until Monday afternoon that he’d actually need to go on the IL. The Triple-A Worcester Red Sox were on the bus about to head to their next series in the Lehigh Valley when the big club called and asked them to wait. Everybody piled off the bus, but the team’s gear was already en route to Pennsylvania. So Anthony drove up the Mass Pike after getting the news and played the game in borrowed cleats. Luckily, teammate Marcelo Mayer already had one of Anthony’s bats.

The Red Sox could certainly use a savior right about now. At 32-36, they’re in fourth place in the East, nine games behind the Yankees, and 4 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. We currently have them with a 15.7% chance of making the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

I humbly request that you watch the following home run three times. During your initial pass, I merely ask that you permit yourself to marvel at the power of Pete Alonso. Exclaim, should you feel so moved. This level of ferocity certainly merits stiffer punctuation than a period can provide.

The second time you take it in, allow yourself to focus on the reactions. Catcher Dalton Rushing and baserunner Brandon Nimmo offer an illuminating interplay. Nimmo cranes his head toward the heavens and prepares to tag up on the play in spite of the fact that the ball goes on to land some 900 feet past the left field wall. Rushing recognizes at once that the ball has attained escape velocity, and he reacts by lifting his hands with enough suddenness and precision to send you searching the web for the phrase “rude Italian hand gestures.” A couple behind the plate provides a master class in the Long O sound:

SHE: Whoa.
HE: [EXPLETIVE DELETED] Nooo.
SHE: Ohhhh!

On your third pass, please focus exclusively on pitcher Ryan Loutos as he crumbles into dust. The young pitcher’s delivery is a study in contrasts. He’s all elbows and knees as he drops and drives, but he finishes with such rotational force that his follow-through twists him all the way around toward first base, torso first, arms and right leg swinging forward in neat arcs to catch up. He’s linear then rotational, angled then curved, herky-jerky then smooth. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not the results. I mean, it’s not not the results. Nobody feels good about an 0-4 record or a 5.68 ERA. But while the top line numbers are reason enough to worry about Spencer Strider, changes to his delivery and pitch shapes point to deeper concerns. The 26-year-old right-hander has made just four starts this season, but it’s reasonable to ask whether he’ll ever regain the form that just two years ago made him one of the most dominant forces in the game.

First and foremost, this stinks. Strider is a charismatic young player who’s easy to root for. When he’s at his best, standing bow-legged on the mound with his muscles threatening to shred his uniform pants, blowing 100-mph heat past anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in the batter’s box, he’s appointment viewing. After a cup of coffee in 2021, Strider burst onto the scene a fully-formed ace in 2022, laying waste to the league with a 98-mph fastball, a wicked slider, and a rumor of a changeup. From 2022 to 2023, his 2.43 FIP was the best among all starters, and his 10.3 WAR trailed only Kevin Gausman’s 10.7. Strider’s 3.36 ERA was 16th-best among starters with at least 300 innings pitched, and he looked for all the world like he would spend the rest of the decade as a true ace. Four games back from the internal brace surgery that wiped out nearly all of his 2024 season, we’re forced to reassess. Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote a few weeks ago about how Kyle Schwarber deserves to be the first player in baseball history to get not his own bobblehead doll, but rather his own bobble helmet doll, I neglected to mention one thing. Schwarber has been brilliant this season. He’s off to the best start of his entire career. Schwarber is currently running a 164 wRC+, which makes him the eighth-best qualified hitter in baseball. His 19 home runs and 16% walk rate both rank in the top five. That excellent spring is all the more impressive considering that Schwarber is, relatively speaking, something of a slow starter. He owns a career 110 wRC+ in March and April, followed by a 115 mark in May, then a 145 mark in June. This season, he just started out hot and got even hotter. Here’s a table that shows his wOBA in March and April through his entire career:

Schwarber has had plenty of hot streaks like this one before, but never to lead off a season. Moreover, the way he’s doing it is different. With Joey Gallo attempting to reinvent himself as a pitcher, Schwarber stands alone as the game’s foremost practitioner of the Three True Outcomes, but he’s doing his best to abandon one of those outcomes. He’s currently running a 24.4% strikeout rate, which would represent the lowest rate of his career and a drop of more than four percentage points compared to last season. In addition to lowering his strikeout rate, Schwarber is doing more damage than ever when he puts the ball in play. His .499 wOBAcon and .531 xwOBAcon are the best marks of his entire career. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Hannah Keyser, of the excellent Bandwagon newsletter, threw down the gauntlet on Bluesky. She posted a screenshot from MLB Network’s daily research packet and wrote, “I challenge the researches at MLBN who put out the daily stat packet to find a split that makes the Rockies look good.” The screenshot featured a single line of text:

The daily research packet is exactly what it sounds like, a multi-page document that contains tons of research on the day’s slate of games, broken down into bit-sized pieces of interesting information. A team of researchers assembles it each morning, then distributes it far and wide across the baseball media ecosphere. Although you’ve probably never seen this document, it has unquestionably informed your experience as a fan. Each broadcast team has its own researchers, of course, but if you’re watching a game and you hear the announcer casually mention that Mickey Moniak is batting .333 with a .476 slugging percentage when he represents the go-ahead run, you can feel pretty confident that they read that fun fact verbatim from the packet. Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a year ago, the Brewers made the best kind of baseball history: weird baseball history. On May 31, 2024, they hosted the White Sox in Milwaukee, shellacking them 12-5. That part wasn’t weird. It’s hard to imagine anything less weird than the 2024 White Sox losing a baseball game (unless it’s the 2025 Rockies losing a baseball game). The weird part was how the Brewers beat the White Sox. They put up 23 hits, and 16 of those hits came on groundballs. That’s the most groundball base hits ever recorded since the pitch tracking era began in 2008. Would you like to see them all? Of course you would.

That’s what a record looks like. Groundball after groundball finding the various nooks and crannies that made the 2024 White Sox defense so similar to an English muffin. We’ve been waiting until this game’s anniversary to write about it. According to Baseball Savant, since 2008, only one other team has surpassed 12 groundball base hits in a single game. The White Sox tallied 15 against the Tigers on September 14, 2017. And that’s it. That’s the only team that came within three groundball hits of Milwaukee. First, let’s talk about how the Brewers pulled off this feat of worm-burning ingenuity.

As with any record, a fair bit of luck was involved. Balls took crazy hops off the mound and the first base bag. The Brewers hit a perfectly placed chopper and sent a ball hugging the third base line on a check swing. They wouldn’t have broken the record if any one of those balls had bounced another way. But as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design, and there was plenty of design involved here too. Read the rest of this entry »

This year, Josh Bell returned to Washington with a new goal in mind. “What this team needs is slug,” he told reporters during a Zoom call when he signed back in January. He explained that although he’d always prided himself on making contact and avoiding strikeouts – Bell’s career strikeout rate is 14% below the league average and his slugging percentage is 5% above it – he was finally ready to make use of his 6’3” frame and trade contact for power:

That’s kind of in my DNA, but understanding MVPs the last few years, they hit 40-plus homers and they might strike out 150-plus times, but that doesn’t get talked about. The slug is the most important thing. That’s where WAR is. That’s what wins games… I have a big frame, and I should probably hit more than 19 home runs a season. Hopefully, a year from now I can be looking back on a season where I had 40-plus and break my own records for slug in a season. That’s the goal.

Bell came into the season with a more upright stance, a slightly higher leg kick, and a new mission. “I feel like I’m not afraid to strikeout more if it means less groundballs,” he said in February. “I know when I’m at my best, I don’t hit the ball on the ground. I strike out a little bit more. So if I can take one and get rid of the other, then I’ll be in a good place and the average should stay the same or go up. Time will tell.”

I bring all this up because Bell has seen a huge change in his batted balls this season, but it’s very definitely not the change he hoped to see. So far this season, he’s running a .173 ISO, a bit down from his career mark, but more or less in line with what he’s done for the last several years. His hard-hit rate and exit velocity are nearly identical to last season’s marks. So in terms of both results and raw contact quality, he’s not more powerful, but he’s not less powerful either. The experiment may have failed, but it didn’t blow up the laboratory. Read the rest of this entry »

You can’t keep Pete Crow-Armstrong away from the baseball field. I mean that in the sense that he’s a passionate young star who loves the game and plays with his hair on fire all the time. But I also mean that in a more literal sense. The Cubs might need to devise a system for keeping Crow-Armstrong away from the baseball field. He has a problem.

The Cubs walked off the Rockies on Monday night. The score was 3-3. With one out and two on in the bottom of the 11th inning, rookie Matt Shaw stayed back and punched a Tyler Kinley slider into right field, scoring Jon Berti from second base. It was thrilling. (For the Cubs, anyway; for the Rockies, it was probably akin to the feeling you have when you go to bed with a tickle in your throat and you just know that it’s a really bad cold coming on even though there’s no tangible basis for that certainty, and then you do in fact wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible cold.) As you’d expect after a thrilling(-slash-miserable) walk-off hit, Shaw got mobbed by his teammates.

Well, he got mobbed by one teammate, anyway. There’s Shaw, moments after his big hit, engaged in an intimate leaping chest bump with Crow-Armstrong. I mean “intimate” in the sense that it seemed like a special moment, but I also mean it in the sense that it’s just the two of them all alone on the grass under the romantic Chicago skies, smiling at each other like there’s nobody else in the whole wide world. The rest of the Cubs are just out of frame, celebrating too. Read the rest of this entry »