It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Oneil Cruz is 26 years old and still has as much talent as just about any player in baseball. Here’s what I wrote back in August, when the Pirates moved him to the outfield and I eulogized Oneil Cruz the Shortstop: “Cruz is still just 25. I do think it’s more likely that he’ll be fine in center, and possibly even great. Quite simply, there’s more margin for error in the outfield. He’ll take some bad routes and make some bad reads, but he’ll be able to make the most of his speed…” The early returns are not exactly making either Cruz or me look great.
Cruz spent 23 games in center to end the 2024 season, and the results were mixed. His best grades came from Statcast, which had him putting up a very encouraging 2 OAA and 1 FRV. However, Cruz was credited with -3 DRS and -2.1 DRP. On a per-inning basis, the latter number made him one of the worst center fielders in baseball. Still, all those numbers included two errors, which loomed very large in such a small sample size. Outfielders tend not to make that many errors, but Cruz was brand new to the position. He was fast. He had a rocket arm. Even if all he did was cut out the errors, he’d be at the very least a decent center fielder. It was reasonable to assume that he would only get better out there.
He has not yet gotten better out there. 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. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s April, which means that here at FanGraphs we’re contractually forbidden from overreacting to small sample sizes. Overreacting to defensive metrics, which require especially large samples before they stabilize, is an even graver offense, grounds for a written reprimand and public shaming. According to Statcast’s Fielding Run Values, the best non-catcher was worth 16 runs on defense last year. On the other hand, according to Weighted Runs Above Average, the best hitter in baseball was worth 93.8 runs. The sample sizes on defense are a lot smaller and most of the chances are routine, which limits the impact even the best or worst defender can have on the game. However, we’re not forbidden from having fun. Although the small sample sizes make it dangerous for us to draw sweeping conclusions, they make it easy for us to get granular, and nothing says fun like statistical granularity. Today, we’re looking for one thing in particular: specific moments in which we can see a player’s defensive metrics jump or fall by an integer in real time.
Oneil Cruz has already been the most impactful defender according to DRS, racking up a shocking -8 runs over 126 1/3 innings. How did he fall into this abyss? You’d have to dig through every play he’s made this season. It would take a whole article. Maybe I will write that article soon enough, but for now, I’m interested in the other side of the spectrum. Welcome, once again, to Small Sample Size Theater. Read the rest of this entry »
This seems like an apt moment to reexamine the concept of value. What is a relief pitcher worth? What is anything worth? The context matters quite a bit. In boom times, when you can barely remember a past in which the arrow pointed any direction but up, the upside feels so real that it’s hard to resist. Sure, a premier setup man with a short track record is a luxury, but what’s the harm in splurging? In the darker times, when the eggs sitting in your refrigerator have suddenly gone from basic staples to commodities so precious that you can’t afford to waste them on something as trivial as breakfast, you need to hunt for value wherever you can find it.
For an Astros team determined to reset its luxury tax penalty, that means trading away reliever Rafael Montero and eating 72% of the money remaining on his contract in order to be free of the other 28%. For the Braves, reeling from a series of early-season setbacks, that means taking a chance on the discounted Montero and his untested splitter in exchange for a player to be named later. Read the rest of this entry »
Hunter Goodman isn’t going to chase forever. We’re not even two weeks into the season. All the players with .400 batting averages will come back down to earth, and so will Goodman and his 54.1% chase rate. That’s right, I said 54.1%. If you’re a pitcher who misses the strike zone, odds are Goodman will help you out by swinging anyway. Sports Info Solutions has been tracking pitches since 2002, and in that time, no qualified player has ever run a 50% chase rate over the course of a whole season. Hanser Alberto reached 54% during the short 2020 season and Ceddanne Rafaela gave it his best effort in 2024 with a 49.5% mark (just ahead of 2023 and 2025 Salvador Perez), but that’s it. Goodman won’t stay above 50% either, but he is on a record pace at the moment, and his 66.1% overall swing rate is even further ahead of Randall Simon’s all-time record of 63.6% in 2002.
I’m less interested in whether or not Goodman will set a record – he probably won’t – and more interested in what’s going on with him right now. Coming into the season, his career chase rate was 42.8%. That’s plenty high, and it included some nine-game stretches in which he at least approached this level. But for the most part, when he was chasing at an extreme rate, his performance cratered, just like you’d expect.
When the blue chase rate line went up, the red wRC+ line went down. But that seemed to change toward the end of the 2024 season. I don’t think it’ll last, but at the moment, Goodman is running a 109 wRC+ despite an appalling dereliction of discernment. It’s not necessarily that he can’t tell the difference between a ball and a strike. As I write this on Tuesday, there are still five qualified players who haven’t walked at all. Goodman is not one of them, nor is he one of the 149 players who’s swung at a pitch in the waste zone. Read the rest of this entry »
You may have noticed that this is the Year of the Kick-Change. And you may have noticed that last year was the Year of the Splitter, and the two years before that were the Year(s) of the Cutter, and before those years came the Year of the Sweeper and the Year of the High Four-Seamer. You may have noticed that there have been a lot of Years lately, is what I’m saying. And that’s before we even get into the Summer of the Gyro Slider, the Month of the Death Ball, the Fortnight of the Vulcan Change, the Week of the Slip-Change, and the glorious Day of Rasputin’s Cradle. We seem to be living in some sort of pitch type zodiac calendar and I’d like to talk about why that is. If you’re a regular FanGraphs reader, I may not say any one thing that’s totally new to you, but I think there’s value in putting all the pieces together to give a sense of the way pitching has evolved in recent years.
When I interviewed for this job back in 2022, one of the questions I had to answer was, “What do you think is the story of baseball right now?” My answer was pitch design. It felt like every day we’d learn about some new innovation in training, technology, or biomechanics that allowed pitchers to discover new pitches and refine the ones they already had. Although plenty has happened over the last three years, if you asked me that question again today, I’d probably give you the same answer. Read the rest of this entry »
Like you, I have read roughly a thousand articles about torpedo bats in the last four days. The bats, which look funny to us right now and will look normal to us in a couple months, taper at the end and bulge slightly at the sweet spot. Like so many good ideas, transferring that mass from the end of the bat, where the batter doesn’t want to make contact, to the sweet spot, where they do, is so simple that it teeters back and forth between elegance and silliness. Reasonable people can smack themselves in the forehead and think, “How is it possible that nobody ever thought to do this before?” Reasonable people can also giggle at pictures of big chonky bowling pin bats.
This innovation was possible because the rules around bats are fairly permissive. The rulebook spends one page on bats and nearly three pages on balks. Given that those three pages do almost nothing to clarify what does or does not constitute a balk, one page for bats seems pretty slight. In fact, we can boil the rules down to one quick sentence. As Patrick Dubuque wrote on Monday for Baseball Prospectus, bats must be solid wood, round, shorter than 42 inches, and no wider than 2.61 inches. That’s pretty much it. Not only does that sentence not contain many rules, but those rules also give batters some serious latitude. No one on earth is using a 42-inch bat. That’s 64% as tall as Jose Altuve. Marucci and Louisville Slugger don’t even offer bats that are longer than 34 inches. Babe Ruth’s famously enormous bats topped out at 36 inches. Fungo bats top out at 37, which means they’d be perfectly legal to use in a game, and they’re not barely even half an Altuve. The rulebook might as well say that bats may only be as long as the Mississippi River.
Apparently, no one was approaching the diameter limits either. There’s a good reason for that. If you were to increase the width of the barrel to the maximum 2.61 inches, until recently, you’d also be increasing the entire head of the bat too. You’d end up with a bat that was too heavy, and more specifically, too top-heavy. You’d feel like you were swinging a sledgehammer. That’s way too much mass to add to the bat. Eventually, someone was going to realize that you don’t have to increase the entire head of the bat.
Brad Penner-Imagn Images
Researcher Erica Block found this idea (under the name the “bottle bat”) lurking in the American Journal of Physics all the way back in 1963, but the someone who finally made it happen was physicist Aaron Leanhardt, who taught at the University of Michigan for seven years. He is now the Marlins’ field coordinator and was working in the Yankees’ minor league hitting department when he had the idea. “It wasn’t until now that maybe anyone really thought about this, myself included,” Leanhardt told reporters. “You show up every day, you put the glove on you’re given, swing the bat that you’re given, you put the spikes on that you’re given and you go about your day as best as you can, and every now and then, it takes time to question what you’re doing. Couple of years ago, some of the hitters started questioning what they were doing and I just kind of responded to their questions.”
The answer to those questions is simple enough that the physicist can boil it down to a sentence. “It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” Leanhardt told The Athletic’s Brendan Kuty. A ballplayer without a physics degree can sum it up too. Wrote Jazz Chisholm Jr. on social media, “you just move the wood from the parts you don’t use to the parts you do!” The parts you don’t use are the reason the torpedo bat works in the first place. As it turns out, you can break a bat down into three distinct parts. The example below uses Cody Bellinger’s traditional CB35 model, made by Louisville Slugger.
No wonder Bellinger ditched this hunk of mostly garbage for a torpedo bat.
The truth is that nothing matters but the barrel. When Statcast first started releasing exit velocity data, we naturally gravitated toward a player’s average exit velocity. However, smart people quickly started focusing on other metrics like maximum EV, 90th or 95th percentile EV, and best speed (which Baseball Savant has since renamed EV50). Those other metrics are useful specifically because they completely ignore weakly hit balls, which were skewing the sample. Here’s Tom Tango’s now classic graph that explains why they set the cutoff for hard-hit balls at 95 mph.
As he put it, that’s where exit velocity starts to matter. If you hit a ball off the end of the bat, you’re going to hit it weakly. If you remove some mass from the end of the bat, you’ll hit it even more weakly, but who cares? There’s hardly any difference between balls hit 80 mph and 60 mph. However, once you get past 90 mph, hitting the ball flush, that graph gets mighty steep. Every extra mile per hour really, really matters.
Leanhardt explained to ESPN’s Jeff Passan that he used the concept of a “wood budget” to think through the idea, getting more wood on the sweet spot without increasing the overall weight of the bat. “Every penny counts. The fact of the matter is you want your barrels to count the most. You want the most bang for your buck there.” Expanding and strengthening the sweet spot by packing it with as much mass and density as possible helps toward that goal. Adjusting the location of the sweet spot so that it’s right where you tend to make the most contact helps toward that goal. Traditional bats have junk in the trunk. Torpedo bats bring the trunk to the junk.
In order to get a better understanding of the forces at play, I reached out to Vivienne Pelletier, a PhD candidate in materials science at Arizona State University and one of the brightest baseball minds in the public sphere. She explained the finer points of collision efficiency and pointed out something really fascinating. Even after super-sizing the sweet spot, its exact center is still not the optimal place to hit the ball. As it rotates, the bat moves faster toward the head, meaning there will always be a spot just past the sweet spot where the fractional increase in velocity will be worth the fractional decrease in mass. “In a real swing the bat is rotating,” Pelletier told me on Bluesky. “Near your hands it moves slowly and at the head it moves fast, there’s this bat speed gradient. The actual max EVs hitters get come above the point of maximum collision efficiency (which we could call the sweet spot) because the bat moves faster up there.” Every bat has a sweet spot, and every batter’s goal should be to just barely miss it.
As it turns out, every batter has their own sweet spot too. I spoke to Andrew Aydt, Driveline Baseball’s assistant director of hitting, to talk about how torpedo bats could be customized. “When I first saw the torpedo bat come out or gain popularity,” he said, “that’s where my mind went with it too, because of Hawk-Eye being in all MLB stadiums now. Teams have very detailed measurements now from bat tracking and tracking the ball. They know exactly where guys are contacting the ball consistently. So I think this is actually a pretty big advantage for teams that have a good R&D department. They can suggest [based on the] overall average [location of contact] where they should beef up the barrel, or adjust the barrel down some or up some.”
Anthony Volpe, who tends to make contact closer to the bat’s label, had his sweet spot moved in that direction, said YES Network broadcaster Michael Kay during the second inning of Saturday’s game. While this should allow Volpe to increase his exit velocity by ensuring that his contact comes closer to the sweet spot, that location also means that his sweet spot will be moving slightly slower because it’s closer to the knob. Then again, the adjustment to the balance of the bat – lowering the moment of inertia, in physics terms – should allow him to swing the bat harder and to have better bat control, offsetting that loss. Pelletier, who has already run some numbers on the potential gains in exit velocity, explained, “The torpedo bat moves the sweet spot down, meaning that it moves somewhere that’s necessarily moving slower. So, even if you make slight gains on max collision efficiency your max EVs decrease as well.” Physics: Sometimes it’s complicated.
For players whose contact tends to come closer to the head of the bat anyway, the news is even more exciting. Adjusting the sweet spot in that direction would allow them both to make more contact at an optimal spot and to increase the bat speed at that spot (though it would also make the bat effectively heavier and worsen bat control some).
On Sunday, Tango posted the scatter plot below. It shows the contact tendencies of every player in baseball, limiting the sample to swings on which the hitter was on time and on target. He split them up into two categories: Those who get tied up (that is, make contact closer to the label) and those who flail (make contact closer to the head). As you might notice, Volpe is not where we’d expect him to be. He’s actually slightly on the flailing side of things. If anything, based on these particular data, his sweet spot should be pushed further toward the head of the bat. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s swinging the wrong torpedo bat. Additional data could’ve been used during Volpe’s bat fitting that supported sliding his barrel toward the label. “I don’t know that necessarily everyone knows about it,” said Yankees manager Aaron Boone in response to a question about whether league-wide offense would increase as more teams adopted torpedo bats. When asked to elaborate, Boone said: “I think there’s just a lot more that goes into it… a lot went into doing that for our individual guys.” Tango highlighted Jhonkensy Noel as a proud member of Team Tied Up who would benefit from moving his sweet spot closer to the handle.
The odd shape is the grabby part of the torpedo bat, but the fanfare of the last week could have a bigger effect, turbocharging the trend toward hyper-customized bats. “The bat is such a unique tool,” Ryan Jeffers told Passan. “You look at the history of the game, and they used to swing telephone poles. Now you try to optimize it, and it feels like some branches are starting to fall for us on the hitting side of things.” Batters have always tinkered, and plenty of trends have swept through the league before. In the early 2000s it was maple bats, and in recent years we’ve seen trends like axe handle bats and hockey puck knobs. Customization has increased steadily. Orioles hitting coach Cody Asche told The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, “I think if you’re around clubhouses, all 30 teams, you would see a guy or two who’s adopting a bat that is fashioned maybe more specifically for their swing.”
Aydt told me that Driveline started doing bat fittings around four or five years ago. “How much is there to change the bat, or individualize bats to help a player’s performance?” he explained, focusing on the moment of inertia again. “How fast they’re swinging the bat, how hard they’re hitting the ball, consistency. Basically, their collision efficiency (or what we call smash factor), how we can improve that for guys more often, any improvements ball-flight-wise… Since we don’t manufacture bats, it was more finding a good MOI for the guy that we think would help them perform the best. And then recommending bats if they wanted or taking that to their bat manufacturer.” In the last year or two, Driveline has focused less on bat fitting, because bat manufacturers have started doing their own fittings. Aydt mentioned that Marucci has a baseball performance lab for that very purpose. When he saw the torpedo bats take the league by storm, his mind leapt to even more advanced frontiers.
In the coming year or two, we’ll be seeing more torpedo bats specifically, and more bats that are customized to an individual player generally. But they could also be tailored for a specific situation. “I think they could even get more granular than that, having a range of bats made for guys,” Aydt said. “And then depending on that night’s starter or the matchup they’re going to see, they could decide which bat to go with… based off the pitch types they’re seeing, if the hitter misses more at a certain part of the bat based off different pitches or what they’re most likely to see that night. Or if guy has attacked more inside, attacked more outside consistently against that hitter… If they’re going to be facing a ton of velo that night and they’re a guy who doesn’t consistently hit velo well, it could be a good thing to lower that MOI. So that would be moving more of the mass closer to the hands, which is essentially lowering the swing weight. So it’s easier for them to get up to speed quicker, improving the acceleration of the bat to help them catch up to velo.”
Maybe you’re like Rafael Devers and starting the season with a disastrous run of strikeouts because you’re behind on absolutely everything. You’d be a good candidate for a Volpe bat with a lower MOI, helping you get around quicker. Maybe you’re facing a pitcher who loves to attack the outside corner. It might make sense to try a bat with a higher MOI and more mass toward the head. Aydt even raised the possibility of having a two-strike bat. When you fall behind, the bat boy runs out to hand you a bat with a lower MOI so that you can prioritize quickness and barrel control over power.
Eric Hartline-Imagn Images
It’s also possible the torpedo bats will be banned, as one front office source predicted to R.J. Anderson of CBS Sports. If we do see ball boys running out to trade bats every time a hitter falls behind in the count, the league might feel it has to act. It certainly wouldn’t take a particularly dramatic rule change. The rules would just need to specify that no part of the bat may have a diameter bigger than the diameter at a point, say, one inch from the end. It might not even push the bat section of the rulebook past a page.
As with any innovation, buy-in will be a big limiting factor. There will always be old-school baseball men eager to object on principle to any innovation. “When I got jammed, I figured out what I had to do to stop that,” said Angels manager Ron Washington, who ran a lifetime 77 wRC+. “So I didn’t worry about putting more weight in a certain area of the bat.” Current players are much more open to new ideas and technology. Some will be comfortable trying something new, or even following Aydt’s idea and tailoring their bat to the situation at hand. Others will value comfort and consistency. “It is the talk of the game right now,” said Aydt, “but it’s not going to be good for every single hitter.” Said Leanhardt, “Credit to any of the players who were willing to listen to me, because it’s crazy. Listening to me describe it is sometimes even crazier.”
According to The Athletic’s Sam Blum, the Yankees developed torpedo bats in 2022, while the Cubs started working with them last season. Brandon Lockridge was a minor leaguer in the Yankees system at the time and now serves as the small spoon in San Diego’s left field platoon. Lockridge told Blum that when Leanhardt was originally pushing players to try the bats, his pitch wasn’t about exit velocity, but rather about using the bigger barrel to turn some whiffs into foul tips. It’s possible that over the course of 600 plate appearances and 1,000 swings, an extra fraction of an inch could save a player from a third strike or two. However, it’s hard to imagine that this selling point was sexy enough to convince players to try something that looks so different from what they’re used to. Hitters depend on feel. If they’re not comfortable with a bat, no amount of evidence will persuade them to use it.
That’s where the name comes in. You have to imagine it’s more about marketing than anything else. As anyone who’s watched The Hunt For Red October a couple dozen times can tell you, torpedo bats actually look less like torpedoes than traditional bats do, because most torpedoes taper only ever so slightly at the end. What torpedo bats actually resemble is old-timey bombs or pregnant whales.
(Editor’s note: We consulted FanGraphs writer Michael Baumann, who’s seen The Hunt for Red October a couple hundred times, about the torpedo shape issue. His response was very involved and to be honest we started zoning out when he used the word “supercavitating.”)
But as anyone who’s worked for a major league team will tell you, all the evidence in the world won’t help an idea if you can’t sell it to the players and coaches. So while the torpedo bats may have exploded into the public’s consciousness this past weekend, their place in the game owes itself in some degree to Leanhardt’s salesmanship and the open-mindedness of the Yankees, not to mention the bat manufacturers who had to learn how to make them. None of us was there, but I will leave you with a dramatization of Leanhardt’s efforts to get these bats into the hands of the Yankees. I present to you a play in three acts.
ACT ONE
PHYSICIST: Pardon me, young baseball man. Would you be interested in experimenting with our new bowling pin bats? My calculations say that they might help you get more foul tips. [Receives wedgie.]
ACT TWO
PHYSICIST: Hello there, fellow Yankee. Might I be able to persuade you to take a couple whacks with our new juggling club bats? They ever so slightly alter the moment of intertia, and preliminary results indicate that this alteration just might result in an increase in — you know what, I’ll just shove myself into this locker.
ACT THREE
PHYSICIST: Sup, bro. Wanna try this sick-ass torpedo bat? Scientifically proven to make the ball [lowers sunglasses] explode.
The offseason did its best to kill us. It really did. But here we are. Alive. Maybe even invincible. Baseball season has arrived, and we’re here to meet it. But what about your favorite team? Will they live forever? Will they die in a pit? After one day of games (I know, I know, the Dodgers and Cubs have played three), anything is possible. Anything at all. As such, in the thousands of words that follow, I’ve explained how and why each team could win it all, take home the World Series trophy, live forever, usurp the celestial throne and defeat God once and for all. I’ve also explained how and why each team could lose it all, never win another game, trip and fall down the M.C. Escher stairs for all of eternity, die screaming in a frozen void and slowly disintegrate into its elemental particles. Consider these the first and 99th-percentile projections.
Arizona Diamondbacks Why They’ll Win It All: The power of the Double Corbin. In his first full season, Corbin Carroll dragged the Diamondbacks all the way to the World Series. Over his seven seasons, Corbin Burnes’ teams have missed the playoffs just once. And now they’ve joined forces. This is the first team in major league history to feature two Corbins. It will make them invincible. The only thing that could break the spell: trading for Patrick Corbin.
Why They’ll Lose It All: What if something should happen to Ketel Marte? I’m not saying anything will happen to Ketel Marte. I’m just saying that the Diamondbacks are going to worry about it. He’s so valuable to the team. What if he gets hurt? What if he gets tired? What if he gets bored of being amazing at baseball and decides to live the simple life, opening a cute little bed and breakfast out by the lake? The Diamondbacks will be so worried about Marte that they won’t be able to eat. They won’t be able to sleep. They won’t be able to play at all.
Atlanta Braves Why They’ll Win It All: Atlanta is bounce-back city. Ronald Acuña Jr. got hurt. Spencer Strider got hurt. Matt Olson had a down year. Austin Riley had a down year. Michael Harris II had a down year. Sean Murphy had a down year. Ozzie Albies got hurt and had a down year. That’s a lot of stars with something to prove. This year, they’re back and they’re out for blood.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Exhaustion. Atlanta asks a lot of its players. The starters never get days off. The bench players never get in the game. This year, it will destroy them. The starters will get run down, exhausted, waste away. The bench players will start wondering why they’re even there. They’ll forget how baseball works, forget to show up to the stadium. The pitchers will run excellent FIPs, but when the other team puts the ball in play, it’ll just keep on rolling.
Baltimore Orioles Why They’ll Win It All: Their adorable apple cheeks. All those young, identical Orioles with rosy red cheeks and wavy hair give the team a tactical advantage. When an opponent comes to the plate, they won’t be able to tell one player from another. Everywhere they look, there’s another bright-eyed, bushy-tailed baby bird ready to swoop in and steal a base hit. They’re one. They’re the same. They’re everywhere. Nowhere is safe. Why even try to hit the ball at all?
Why They’ll Lose It All: Rotation looks a little thin.
Boston Red Sox Why They’ll Win It All: The Big Three. Roman Anthony, Kristian Campbell, and Marcelo Mayer will lift the Red Sox to heights hitherto undreamt of in Boston — not because Bostonians lack the capacity to dream of greatness, but because greatness of this magnitude, this splendor, is too powerful even to contemplate. In Boston, whenever someone starts talking about this kind of power, people start throwing tea in the harbor.
Chicago Cubs Why They’ll Win It All: They’re gonna find intelligent life up there on the moon. And “The Canterbury Tales” will shoot up to the top of the bestseller list and stay there for 27 weeks. And I will love you again. I will love you like I used to.
Why They’ll Lose It All: I will never love you like I used to.
Chicago White Sox Why They’ll Win It All: So here’s the thing. What you have to keep in mind is that… You know, people throw the word impossible around a lot but… Where there’s a will, um, you know, anything can happen? Right? I’ll get back to you.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Sometimes you just get unlucky.
Cincinnati Reds Why They’ll Win It All: Elly will do it. Elly De La Cruz will lift us to victory on his impossibly large shoulders. He will carry us at the plate, in the field, on the basepaths. Elly will even glide to the mound with those unfathomably long strides when the game is on the line and fire a fastball clear through the catcher’s mitt. “Stee-rike three!” the umpire will shout. Elly will do it.
Why They’ll Lose It All: TJ Friedl will bunt too much. He’ll come to the plate 650 times and bunt 653 times. (He’ll borrow Spencer Steer’s bat and jersey and sneak in an extra three bunts as an imposter.) The grass in front the plate will be worn down into nothing. Friedl will reach base 23 times. He’ll have two RBI. Terry Francona will legally adopt him.
Cleveland Guardians Why They’ll Win It All: The same weird reason they did so well last season, I guess.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Bo Naylor will be sad. He’ll miss his brother Josh Naylor, who used to be his teammate but is now just his brother who lives in a whole other state, in a whole other region, in a whole other time zone. Who is Bo Naylor if not the brother of Josh Naylor? Who will eat breakfast with him? Who will carpool with him? Who will chuck him playfully on the chin and say, “Uh-oh, looks like somebody forgot to tie their cleats nice and tight,” then lace them up the way mom always taught? The sadness will permeate the locker room. The players will spend all day thinking about their own siblings, far away in their own cities and states and countries. They won’t realize until it’s too late that brotherhood was all around them, waiting to be discovered.
Colorado Rockies Why They’ll Win It All: The Rockies have finally figured out the way to take advantage of their unique environment: altitude training. They’ll be the fastest, best-conditioned team in baseball. They’ll never get tired. They’ll steal 20 bases a game. They’ll track down every last ball in the outfield. They’ll win the second game of every double header, 45-0.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Mountain men are strong and hardy. They live rough. They ride all night. They drink from streams and sing mountain songs. Unfortunately, they rarely play baseball, which leaves them unprepared for all the baseball to come.
Detroit Tigers Why They’ll Win It All: They’ll play like tigers. They’ll slash. They’ll claw. They’ll pounce. They’ll also have Tarik Skubal.
Why They’ll Lose It All: They’ll play like tigers. They’ll be endangered due to deforestation and poaching. They’ll be alone and scared. They’ll wonder why they, of all teams, don’t wear pinstripes. Tarik Skubal will develop a blister.
Houston Astros Why They’ll Win It All: Jose Altuve will turn out to be the greatest defensive left fielder in the history of baseball. He’ll vacuum up everything in sight. He’ll play so shallow that he can charge seeing-eye grounders and nail the runner at first. He’ll leap 20 feet to rob home runs that were destined for the Crawford Boxes, then land ever so softly on the warning track like nothing happened. Eventually Astros will realize they don’t even need a center fielder. They’ll move Altuve to left-center and play every game with five infielders. They’ll give up just 13 singles after the All-Star break.
Why They’ll Lose It All: With the University of Houston Cougars charging through the NCAA tournament, the team will get swept up in March Madness. They’ll paint their faces red. They’ll watch every game. They’ll get that Capital One credit card or bank account or whatever it is that Charles Barkley and Samuel L. Jackson are selling. They’ll roll baskets into the batting cages and the bullpen. They’ll shoot hoops all day long and forget to practice baseball entirely. It will turn out that Jose Altuve spent his whole life playing second base rather than left field for a reason.
Kansas City Royals Why They’ll Win It All: Bobby Witt Jr. will wheel a blackboard into the clubhouse, don a tweed jacket, and patiently teach every player on the Royals how to play like Bobby Witt Jr. As his teammates sit in rapt attention, looking away only to jot down notes in the monogrammed notebooks he handed out beforehand, he’ll calmly explain how to run as fast as Bobby Witt Jr, how to hit the ball as hard as Bobby Witt Jr., how to plant your feet in the hole and launch a missile that knocks the first baseman’s glove clean off his hand like Bobby Witt Jr. The Royals will never lose again.
Why They’ll Lose It All: All the protestors shouting, “No kings!” will finally shake the resolution of the Royals. They’ll feel conflicted about representing the idea of monarchy at a time like this. They’ll call their representatives and demand better. They’ll march in the streets. They’ll be the change they wish to see in the world. They’ll never put on those jerseys again.
Los Angeles Angels Why They’ll Win It All: Mike Trout. Mike Trout. Mike Trout will arise triumphant.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Mike Trout will have a knee thing.
Los Angeles Dodgers Why They’ll Win It All: Ball don’t lie.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Actually, ball lies all the time. Ball is both disingenuous and capricious. Ball laughs in the face of expected stats and advanced ERA estimators. Mendacious ball cannot be trusted.
Miami Marlins Why They’ll Win It All: They’re the strongest, fastest fish in the sea.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Old man.
Milwaukee Brewers Why They’ll Win It All: Their job is to win the World Series.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Their job is to provide a summer of entertainment and passion and a way for families to come together.
Minnesota Twins Why They’ll Win It All: The universe owes them this. For one glorious season, the baseball gods will smile on Minnesota once again. Byron Buxton and Royce Lewis will get healthy and play like gods. Matt Wallner and Trevor Larnach will slug 100 home runs. It will turn out that if you let Edouard Julien face left-handed pitching, he’s still a pretty good hitter.
Why They’ll Lose It All: The home run sausage has been sitting in a dark corner of the clubhouse for the last five months, waiting. It has grown limbs. It has grown sentient. It has grown strong. It has not grown a conscience.
New York Mets Why They’ll Win It All: Juan Soto will rub off on Jose Siri. Simply by playing next to Soto, Siri will finally learn plate discipline. He will spit on breaking balls below the zone. He will lay off the high ones. He will see your splitter and raise you a shuffle. He will be the total package at the plate. His defense will also fall off a cliff, but it won’t matter much.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Jose Iglesias took all the vibes with him to San Diego. The Mets will be vibeless. Zero vibes. The locker room will descend into chaos. The players will turn on each other. They will hack one another to pieces. The streets of Flushing will run red with the blood of Brett Baty. Juan Soto will still put up 5.2 WAR.
Why They’ll Lose It All: First the players grow beards. That’s good – let guys be themselves. But then the beards grow unkempt. They’re long and scraggly. They’re down to their chests. The road jerseys just read NE[beard]RK. They’re getting tucked into uniform pants. No one can even see their feet. Paul Goldschmidt goes to scoop a ball in the dirt, comes up with nothing but beard, and it takes him two days to untangle the webbing. Aaron Judge slips on one of those high-performance stroopwafels, hits his head, and gets retrograde amnesia.
Philadelphia Phillies Why They’ll Win It All: Zack Wheeler will grow tired of depending on others and coming up just short. He will pitch on three days rest all season. He will throw 400 innings and strike out the world. During Game 5 of the NLCS, Rob Thomson will walk out to the mound with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 11th inning. When Thomson reaches for the ball, Wheeler will hook the manager’s arm and fireman carry him back into the dugout. He’ll then return to the mound and retire the side.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Sometimes the other team will hit the ball to right field.
Pittsburgh Pirates Why They’ll Win It All: At 4:07 PM Eastern on April 4, the date of the Pirates’ home opener, an F-15 Eagle will perform a flyover at PNC Park. Paul Skenes will be in the cockpit. He will ditch, and as the fighter plane crashes screaming into the Allegheny, Skenes will float lightly down to the turf, stow his parachute, and strike out everyone in the building. His posture will make grown men weep. The Pirates will never lose again.
Why They’ll Lose It All: The Pirates will trade Paul Skenes while his trade value is at its highest. In return, they will receive several packs of flavorful, brightly-colored chewing gum.
[REDACTED] Athletics Why They’ll Win It All: It will turn out that Oakland really was holding back the Athletics all these years. All those horrible people who loved the team and begged them to stay, who organized and boycotted and protested, who chanted and cheered and wept, who waited in line for a spoonful of dirt from the warning track after the final game at the Coliseum? It turns out they were the problem. Finally free from the burden of expectations, of familiarity, of love, the A’s will ruthlessly mow down the competition.
Why They’ll Lose It All: The Athletics will be unmoored. They will have no home, no sense of place, no identity at all. They’ll miss Oakland. They’ll constantly forget when it’s their turn to bat because they’re incapable of wrapping their heads around the idea that they could ever be the home team. They’ll never win a game in Sacramento.
San Diego Padres Why They’ll Win It All: Luis Arraez will finally get curious about this “slugging” thing everyone keeps talking about. He’ll watch one YouTube video of Ken Griffey Jr. and decide to hit 65 home runs. But he won’t. He’ll hit 75.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Having a team full of shortstops will finally backfire for the Padres. Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, and Jake Cronenworth will all finally get fed up with playing out of position. One day in April, they’ll all walk out to short and simply refuse to yield. Xander Bogaerts won’t know what to do. Mike Shildt will run out to short and beg the five shortstops to disperse. They won’t budge. The Padres will allow a BABIP of .750. Every time a ball is hit to short, they’ll race after it and fall all over each other in a heap. Cronenworth will launch a flying tackle at somebody. Merrill will bite somebody. Tatis will crumble like a sand castle.
San Francisco Giants Why They’ll Win It All: Patrick Bailey will frame his way to victory. He will present every pitch so beautifully that the home plate umpires can’t even see it for the tears in their eyes. The Giants won’t walk a batter all year. They’ll only fall behind in the count six times. After they coast to the championship, Major League Baseball will be forced to intervene. They’ll implement a full robot strike zone before the 2026 season. Patrick Bailey will slip away into Redwood National Park, never to be seen again. But sometimes, when the park rangers are making the rounds alone late at night, they’ll swear they hear the sound of a ball hitting a catcher’s mitt. They never hear an umpire call the ghostly pitch a ball.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Buster Posey will inspire the Giants. They’ll take quality-at bats. They’ll hit the ball the other way. They’ll advance the runner and sacrifice and execute the hit-and-run. They’ll master the fundamentals. They’ll play the game the right way. They’ll score 36 runs all season.
Seattle Mariners Why They’ll Win It All: Now that he knows he’s sticking around for a while, Cal Raleigh will take matters into his own hands. On April 10, the Mariners have the day off at home in Seattle, and Raleigh will roll up to T-Mobile park with two truckloads of construction buddies and a cooler full of cold ones. They’ll tear down the crooked batter’s eye and construct a perfect new one by dinner time. The Mariners will have the best offense in baseball.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Raleigh’s buddy Gary will get the proportions wrong when he’s mixing the concrete. In May, the batter’s eye will start tilting forward ever so slightly. By June, it will be listing wildly. The Mariners will put in a work order, but they won’t pay for an expedited repair. In July, the batter’s eye will finally collapse into center field in the middle of a game with a terrifying whomp, coming just inches short of driving Julio Rodríguez straight into the turf like a croquet peg. Rodríguez will refuse to play the outfield ever again. The Mariners will install a new, even more crooked batter’s eye and have the worst offense in baseball. Gary will never forgive himself. Raleigh will never forgive him either.
St. Louis Cardinals Why They’ll Win It All: Nolan Arenado has been listening. He heard everything you said about him. His dwindling production. His shrinking range. His — outrage of outrages — merely average arm strength. He’ll prove you wrong if it’s the last thing he does. He’ll rebuild this team all by himself, one spiteful dinger, one vintage diving stop at a time.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Yeesh, I don’t know. Nolan Arenado’s not looking so hot anymore.
Tampa Bay Rays Why They’ll Win It All: Everyone else in the division will get hurt. The Yankees’ two remaining starting pitchers will get frostbite from the cold tub. Boston’s outfielders will go in for a big group hug after a victory and they’ll squeeze so tight that they dislocate all their shoulders. Charlie Morton, Kyle Gibson, and Tomoyuki Sugano will all throw their backs out looking under the couch for the TV guide. The Blue Jays’ bruised psyches will never recover from their Opening Day beatdown. The Rays will waltz to a title.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Whither the dome? How can the Rays play outside, in sunlight, in moonlight? How would that even work? How do you catch a ball that hasn’t dodged six different catwalks? The Rays outfielders will never figure it out.
Texas Rangers Why They’ll Win It All: Jacob deGrom will finally take something off his fastball for the sake of his health. It’ll sit a mere 97 mph. He’ll still strike everybody out, but he’ll never get tired. He’ll lead the league in starts, innings, wins, complete games, and shutouts. He’ll only pitch five games against NL teams, but he’ll dominate them so thoroughly that he’ll win both Cy Young Awards.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Jacob deGrom will finally take something off his fastball for the sake of his health. It’ll sit a mere 94 mph. He’ll get rocked. He’ll try pitching even slower. That won’t work either. To blow off some steam, he’ll attempt a hilarious prank on his fellow starting pitchers. It will go wrong. Three of them will be decapitated.
Toronto Blue Jays Why They’ll Win It All: The wise, old pitching staff will prove they’ve still got it. Max Scherzer, Kevin Gausman, and Chris Bassitt will turn back the clock and finish one-two-three in the Cy Young voting. Young Bowden Francis will start wearing reading glasses and quoting Mad About You just to try to fit in with his elders.
Why They’ll Lose It All: The ongoing extension negotiations between Ross Atkins and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. will tear the team apart. Every morning for months, the front office will announce to reporters that they’ve made a new, more generous offer to Guerrero. Every afternoon, Guerrero will tell reporters that the offer was so pathetically insignificant that he can’t bear to speak of it. In early May, the beat writers will quit one by one as they run out of euphemisms for the words “negotiation,” “deferral,” and “chump change.” The players will be so wrapped up in the negotiations that they’ll forget that they’re even supposed to be playing baseball.
Washington Nationals Why They’ll Win It All: James Wood and Dylan Crews will be everything they’re cracked up to be and more. James Wood will be Juan Soto, but bigger. Dylan Crews will be James Wood, but smaller. Keibert Ruiz will remember to swing hard. MacKenzie Gore will ride his slider to the promised land.
Why They’ll Lose It All: The Nationals will discover The National. They’ll grow obsessed. They’ll listen to nothing else. Their own internal monologues will take the form of Matt Berninger’s restrained, close-mic’ed but distant vocals. In the pop of the catcher’s mitt and the crack of the bat, they’ll hear nothing but Bryan Devendorf’s dry snare drum, hopscotching impossibly high in the mix. To the Nationals, every love song will be a tale of tragic, star-crossed love. There will be no way out. They’ll spend the season waiting for the crescendo to come, because it feels like the crescendo just has to be coming. It has to be coming. Any second now. Any second now the build will come and it will be glorious. It will never come.
I’m sorry to be the one to break this news to you, but the baseball season is starting in earnest tomorrow. While I’m sure you’re happy that you’ll once again get to watch the baseball men do the baseball thing, this also means that We Tried season is very sadly drawing to a close. This will be our fifthandfinalentry in the series, but as a refresher, We Tried is the term of art for an ex post facto report about a team’s interest in a player who signed elsewhere. If a beat writer reported that your favorite team had interest in a free agent, but only after that free agent became a Dodger, or if a scoops guy laundered the claim that your team took aim at a trade target and missed, I added it to the We Tried Tracker. With 49 of our Top 50 Free Agents off the board – seriously, somebody sign David Robertson already – it’s time to look back on the offseason that wasn’t. How wrong Yoda was; there’s no “do” or “do not.” There is only “try.”
As I searched for the final few additions to the tracker, I continued to refine the criteria for inclusion. For example, I decided at the last minute to honor A.J. Preller’s solemn assertion during the Winter Meetings that the Padres were “involved in, so far, almost all the catchers that have gone off the board to some degree.” I awarded them five extra We Trieds, all for catchers. That pushed them all the way up to second on our leaderboard, but they still finished dead last in our catcher positional power rankings. I also decided not to include the Roki Sasaki circus. The defining characteristic of a We Tried is that the information is publicized after the player signs, and although a few details did come out after he chose the Dodgers, nearly every part of Sasaki’s courtship involved up-to-the-minute updates. Likewise, the Orioles and Braves were both widely linked to Nathan Eovaldi early in the offseason, but once Eovaldi decided to return to the Rangers, no new information on their pursuits emerged. They didn’t capital-T try; they just – yawn – actually tried.
By my count, we bore witness to 99 We Trieds for 39 different players over the last few months. As always, I’m sure that I missed some, and I implore you to help me make it right. What a joy it would be to reach 100. If you spot an omission, please message me on Bluesky or email me at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, which once again is a real email address that I really check. I reply to every message, and I even read everything in the spam folder. The tracker recently received an incredible offer for a “diamond facelit sign” with a three-year warrantee. I don’t know what a facelit sign is, and because the email is riddled with spelling errors, for a while I actually thought it was for a diamond facelift. I was so confused about what would happen were I to avail myself of the three-year warrantee. Would I get my money back? Would they lift my face even further? Would they replace it with a new one?
Want to hear something crazy? Aaron Judge is switching back to right field after an 11.2-WAR campaign, but this year’s top right field projection is still nearly half a win below last year’s. There is obviously some logic behind this: Last year, Ronald Acuña Jr. was younger than Judge and was coming off his own monstrous 2023 campaign. He also plays for a team with a penchant for driving its starters until the wheels fall of, so we had him projected for nearly every single plate appearance. But still, with Judge in right field again, we should probably expect bigger things. The Yankees’ right field projection trails only one other position player spot, Kansas City’s (and Bobby Witt Jr.’s) shortstop projection, and it trails by just one-tenth of a win. Read the rest of this entry »
Early Wednesday morning, the regular season ended — for another week anyway. The Dodgers and Cubs played the second and final game of the Tokyo Series, casting us back into the pit of spring training baseball. Below, some notes on the game, a 6-3 Los Angeles win.
First Inning
It’s snowing in Tokyo. Roki Sasaki Day has finally come.
I woke up just after 4:00 a.m. ET and once again decided to just stay up. I have already written a thousand words about Max Scherzer. I’m not necessarily crisp.
On the first pitch of the game, Justin Steele starts Shohei Ohtani off with a fastball over the plate. Of course he does. He’s Justin Steele. Ohtani seems to be familiar with the scouting report – uh, fastballs – and he launches the ball to the opposite field. For a moment you think he’ll do it. The crowd thinks he’ll do it. Ohtani looks up at the ball hopefully, then grimaces. It lands just short of the warning track. Read the rest of this entry »
