The Tigers didn’t wait long. On Monday, the team announced that starter Reese Olson would miss the rest of the season (and possibly the postseason) with a right shoulder strain, and that same day, Detroit filled Olson’s rotation spot by swinging a trade within the division for Minnesota right-hander Chris Paddack. The full deal brought Paddack and reliever Randy Dobnak to the Tigers in exchange for 19-year-old catching prospect Enrique Jimenez. The trade represented an attempt to stabilize an increasingly banged-up Detroit rotation for an increasingly important stretch run. For the Twins, the move kicked off what has the potential to be a significant sell-off.

We’ll start with the Twins side. “It’s just crazy how fast it can turn around,” Paddack told Dan Hayes of The Athletic, who initially reported news of the deal along with Ken Rosenthal. “World just got twisted upside down, to say the least. It stinks. This business is out of our control sometimes. I was really pulling for us, as a Twin. I was hoping we would make some moves and go get that Wild Card spot. I’m excited for this new opportunity with a new team.” It’s not immediately clear who will take Paddack’s spot in the Minnesota rotation. The Twins have a bullpen game planned for today. Paddack will start tomorrow, and he’s lined up to face his old squad when the Tigers and Twins face off a week from today. The Twins broadcast made a point of circling the date on the calendar during last night’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

“All in all, we got good news today,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters on Saturday. “I think all of us kind of feared the worst.” On Sunday, the good news Boone was referring to became official. The scuffling Yankees placed Aaron Judge on the 10-day injured list with a flexor strain in his right elbow, but not a torn UCL. Judge underwent an MRI on Saturday, and based on reports that the Yankees think Judge has a chance to miss only the minimum 10 days, it seems safe to assume that the imaging revealed only a minor strain. He has received a platelet-rich plasma injection and won’t throw for 10 days to two weeks. Crucially, returning after the minimum would also allow Judge to be back by the time of his bobblehead day on August 13. The Yankees also traded for utility player Amed Rosario on Sunday, but we’ll cover that move after addressing the news about Judge.

Concern about the elbow arose last Tuesday, when Judge was noticed grimacing after throwing the ball in to the infield. The right fielder did his best to tamp down concerns, telling reporters, “I make facial expressions all the time,” in his characteristic deadpan. He also downplayed the injury to the organization, trying to push off calls for an MRI. “You never want to go in the tube,” he said. But he DH’d on Wednesday and exhibited more discomfort on Friday. “Throwing is the main concern,” Judge said on Saturday. “Hitting happens too quick, and it’s not really the motion that I felt anything. I think the muscle that hurts is the muscle used to grip, so there might be some issues with that.” Over his past nine games, he’s batting .143 with a 35 wRC+. That stretch dropped his best-in-baseball 220 wRC+ all the way down to a still-best-in-baseball 208. According to Jon Heyman of the New York Post, the absolute best-case scenario is that Judge returns after 10 days, then needs just 10 days at DH before getting back to right field. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you just can’t wait for the weekend. On Friday afternoon, the Rockies traded longtime third baseman Ryan McMahon to the Yankees in exchange for pitching prospects Griffin Herring and Josh Grosz. MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported the deal, while Jorge Castillo of ESPN was first to report Herring’s inclusion and Bob Nightengale of USA Today was first to name Grosz.

McMahon was drafted by Colorado in 2013 and has spent his entire nine-year career with the Rockies; he ranks ninth in franchise history in games played. He is in the fourth year of a six-year, $70 million extension, and the Yankees will take on the rest of his remaining contract. He is owed a tad less than $4.2 million this season, and $16 million a year in both 2026 and 2027. At the time of the trade, the Yankees have an 88.8% chance of making the playoffs, but they’re 4 1/2 games back of the Blue Jays in the AL East after dropping two of three in Toronto earlier this week. New York could use a boost, and to say that McMahon has the potential to fill a position of need would be an understatement. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Allen is definitely going to show up on my FanGraphs Walk-Off page. I’ve checked in on him a lot over the last month, but of the 1,664 stats on his player page (yes, I counted them all), I’ve really only been paying attention to one number. I just want to know how many plate appearances Allen has. The answer is 304, and that won’t do.

A month ago, I wrote about homerless qualifiers, the all-but-extinct subset of players who come to the plate often enough to qualify for the batting title – a minimum of 3.1 plate appearances per team game, or 502 over a 162-game season – without hitting even a single home run. At the time, Xavier Edwards was the only homerless qualifier left, but I didn’t believe in him – which is to say that I did believe he had the capacity to hit a home run. He did just that on July 12, blasting a 97.8-mph wall-scraper off Scott Blewett:

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a time in life when you expect the world to always be full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of space where the memories are.

– Helen Macdonald

On Tuesday night, Rich Hill made his first major league start of the season and his first ever as a Kansas City Royal. Although he took the loss, the game lived up to its billing as a feel-good story. The 45-year-old lefty went five innings against the second-best offense in baseball, allowing one earned run and two unearned. He walked two Cubs, struck out one looking, induced 11 groundballs, and left the game with a 1.80 ERA. Stylistically, it was a vintage Rich Hill performance (from a vintage Rich Hill), featuring not-so-fastballs, loopy curves, and dropdown frisbee sliders. It was also a vintage Hill performance from a sensorial perspective, in that it involved a whole lot of strange human sounds.

I mentioned Hill’s vocalizations when I wrote about the minor league deal he signed with the Royals back in May. They’re right there in my mental map of a Hill start. But memory just can’t do justice to some things. It fades. It falters. Even the events that imprint upon us most deeply tend to loosen their hold with time. It’s cruel, but it’s for the best. If our memories could transport us exactly to who we were when we felt that first rush of puppy love, heard that one perfect song, tasted that one croissant in Paris, would we even bother to seek out new experiences, or would we just live within the old ones and keep playing the hits? All of this is to say that I thought I was prepared for the Rich Hill experience. I tuned into the game Tuesday night expecting to hear the man grunt. But then I actually heard the man grunt. I was not prepared. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I wrote up the news that David Robertson had signed with the Phillies. In my (and, I assume, everyone else’s) favorite paragraph, I mentioned that several teams had reportedly been in on the veteran right-hander. Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman combined to mention interest from the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, and “many others.” Depending on your perspective, this marked either the last We Tried of the 2025 free agency period or the first of the trade deadline period. As a quick refresher, We Tried is a catch-all term for any time we find out, after a player has ended up with one team, that another team also tried to land them. In its purest form, the We Tried is a front office’s bid for partial credit, an attempt to curry favor with the fans by demonstrating that it is trying to build a winner for them. I spent the offseason documenting each and every one in a disturbingly comprehensive spreadsheet.

I didn’t make a meal of this yesterday, mainly because Robertson’s free agency was a real outlier. The offseason ended months ago. He’s a 40-year-old reliever who didn’t get an offer he loved, so he stayed in shape and spent the spring hanging out with his family, then held a workout for teams on Saturday in order to sign before the deadline. Lots of teams were in on him and lots of teams showed up to watch him pitch, so word of who was there was bound to come out at some point. It definitely represented a We Tried, but it didn’t seem earth-shattering, and it was by no means a typical one. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve finally done it, friends. Everybody take a bow. It took until July 20, but we’ve finally found a home for the last holdout on Ben Clemens’ 2025 edition of the Top 50 Free Agents. On Sunday, the Phillies took their shot on lucky no. 46, agreeing to sign veteran reliever David Robertson to a $16 million contract. Prorated for the late start date, the contract will actually pay the right-hander somewhere around $6 million. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic broke the news, while MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reported the contract details. According to Matt Gelb, also of The Athletic, Robertson will need a ramp-up period, which means he’ll need to agree to an assignment in the minors.

So why the hell did this take so long? Here’s my best answer: Uhh… ageism?

Let’s start with Robertson’s blurb from the top 50, which I don’t feel bad about plagiarizing here because I wrote it:

Over the past three seasons, Robertson has a 2.82 ERA and a 3.24 FIP. Over 188 appearances and 201 innings, he’s accrued 3.8 WAR, 12th most among all relievers. As he enters his age-40 season, Robertson is coming off his best FIP since 2017. His cutter averaged 93.3 mph in both 2023 and 2024, the fastest it’s been since Obama’s first term. According to Statcast’s run values, that cutter was worth 19 runs this season, making it the sixth-most valuable pitch in all of baseball. Knowing what it knows about aging curves and the volatility of relief arms, ZiPS projects Robertson for 0.5 WAR, but we humans should at the very least be open to the possibility that he’ll live forever. Until we see him fall apart with our own eyes, there’s no reason in particular to believe that he won’t just keep serving as an effective bullpen arm until sometime in the middle of the next decade. Robertson’s fourth straight one-year contract with a playoff hopeful would do quite nicely.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, Ben Clemens laid out five fun things to watch during the second half of the 2025 season. The one that caught my eye was the race to lead the league in bunts for base hits. The contestants all make plenty of sense. The group of Kyle Isbel, Jacob Young, TJ Friedl, Victor Scott II, and Xavier Edwards includes four light-hitting, fleet-footed center fielders and one light-hitting, fleet-footed shortstop. But there’s another bunting race going on, and in it, these four speedsters – along with everyone else in baseball – are getting dusted by Jose Herrera, the Diamondbacks backup catcher whom Statcast rates as the 491st fastest out of 510 qualified players this season. It’s the race to lead the league in sacrifice bunts, and no one in baseball is quite so eager to choose the greater good over their own personal gratification than Herrera.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Herrera is tied for fourth in attempted sac bunts. He just leads the league because he’s batting a thousand on his attempts. (Not literally, of course; a successful sac bunt doesn’t count toward your batting average at all.) The other players I’ve mentioned have failed, fouled, or whiffed on their bunts a lot, but not Herrera. We’re going to put Herrera’s proclivity for the sacrifice into context a little later, but let’s start with the obvious question. Why does Herrera bunt so much? It can’t just be because he’s good at it. It’s certainly not because he thinks he can beat out a hit with his third-percentile sprint speed. Often enough, he’s not even pretending to run hard. On this play, it’s not so much that he’s sacrificing himself as it is that he’s just kind of surrendering. Read the rest of this entry »

Ceddanne Rafaela’s breakout 2025 season has truly been a surprise. It wasn’t just that he ran a wRC+ of 80 in his first full big league campaign in 2024. It was how he got there. He ran the worst chase and strikeout rates of all qualified players. His contact rate and exit velocity ranked right near the bottom as well. He still looked like he could be a very good player by way of excellent defense in center field, but even though he was just 23, it raised real concerns about his potential at the plate. Beyond the fact that players haven’t historically improved their chase rates much after their rookie seasons, Rafaela’s chase rate was so extreme that it was hard to find someone to compare him to. A young player would be expected to refine his plate discipline some, but even if he had literally knocked an unheard of 10 percentage points off his chase rate, he still would’ve had the 12th-highest chase rate among all qualified players. And yet here he is now.

Rafaela has a 115 wRC+ and is on pace for 5.6 WAR this season. He has been the most valuable position player on the Red Sox. It’s probably helped that Rafaela has a year of experience under his belt and has been allowed to stick in center field all season, but this is a huge turnaround nonetheless. How did it happen? Let’s start at the beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

The rumblings have started. On Tuesday night in the unincorporated territory north of Atlanta, the American League clawed its way back from a 6-0 deficit in the late innings, wrestling the All-Star Game into its first ever swing-off. The problem with the swing-off, the reason for the rumblings, was apparent even before the ninth inning ended: It might be too much fun. Too much fun could result in disaster, an eruption that would reshape the landscape of baseball for all time to come, killing extra innings once and for all and replacing them with something that smacked suspiciously of soccer.

The protectors of baseball’s sovereign dignity chewed their fingernails to the quick as Brent Rooker readied himself in the batter’s box to the opening strains of “Hotel California.” They wailed when he launched two baseballs into the left-center field seats, thrilling everyone with eyes to see or ears to hear. Steven Kwan leapt into the air with the innocent delight of a child. It was a dark omen.

“Will no one think of the children?” moaned the traditionalists when Kyle Stowers punched one over the hulking brick wall in right center and jubilation reigned near Atlanta. Their fear reached a crescendo when Kyle Schwarber duck-walked into the box, leaned back, and shook his bat in all directions as if to ward off any evil, defense-minded spirits. Schwarber, who has spent his entire career smacking monstrous, momentous home runs as casually as the rest of us put our socks on in the morning, had the potential to alter baseball’s future, cementing the swing-off as a consummation devoutly to be wished, a future too fun to avoid. If any player could turn his three swings into three signature homers, it was Schwarber. Read the rest of this entry »