Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the first installment of that series. The introduction can be found here.
April 13
It’s somewhere around 9:30 PM and Derek Jr. is asleep. I am, briefly, watching baseball for the first time since she was born two weeks ago. The Mets and Dodgers are in the eighth inning. The main thing I notice is Joey Gerber’s delivery. I’ve never heard of Gerber before, but my daughter is wearing a Gerber brand onesie, and I sincerely hope he’s the heir to that particular fortune. His leg kick is a joy to behold:
It would be a grave understatement to say that Gerber has a high-energy delivery. Brendan Gawlowski called him funky. Eric Longenhagen said he had an “odd, chicken wing arm action.” I’m inclined to go with Ricky Conti, who called the delivery “violent, with tons of effort and recoil.” When you think of a pitcher’s leg kick, you think of, say, Justin Verlander smoothly raising his knee up toward his chest, his lower leg pointed straight down toward the rubber. Even Juan Marichal’s legendary leg kick started roughly the same way. He raised his knee, and at first, his lower leg merely came along for the ride. What made the leg kick famous was that Marichal’s foot just kept on rising long past the point where other pitchers’ stopped. He reared way back, intimidating the batter with the bottom of his spikes, and catapulted down the mound, the ultimate tall-and-fall delivery. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. I have missed you. I have been on paternity leave for the past two months because — and I’m told this is the most common reason people go on paternity leave — my wife and I had a baby. Mostly, my wife had the baby while I said things like “You’re doing great,” and “I’m so proud of you,” and “Hey look, a baby,” but this is very much a team sport. Our free agent acquisition arrived loaded with tools like spiky hair, world-weary eyes, and a trapezoidal mouth with a cute little dimple just beneath it, but she’s a little short on big league experience. We’ll have to coach her up.
So now we have this baby girl. It’s unclear whether she’s a bouncing baby girl — we haven’t dropped her yet — but she certainly seems healthy enough. I’m looking at her right now. She’s sleeping in her crib all swaddled up like a salami. She is, as babies tend to be, adorable. She is also — and again I’m informed that this is standard — somewhat labor intensive.
While laboring over this novel life-form for the past two months, I have watched precious little baseball. I have done precious little anything other than care for my wife and child (or, as I am still getting used to calling it, my family). As a result, I am wildly underinformed about the latest developments in my field of expertise. The stray missives that reached my ears often left me with more questions than answers. Did somebody Monstars the NL East? Are we sure this is the sameIldemaro Vargas? When did all these bodies get so loose? Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, we got a mailbag question from James, whose glimpses of Luis Arraez during the World Baseball Classic left him looking for one weird trick to vault the three-time batting champion back up to his previous heights. I had so much fun answering the question that its word count moved it out of mailbag territory (non-Jay Jaffe division, anyway) and into regular article territory. The question was on the longer side, but here’s an abridged version:
If [Arraez] could wear a ribbon on his wrist to deter a bad hitting habit, would he be able to avoid something that drags him down?
My first idea was swinging on 3-1 counts… If he spit on 3-1 pitches habitually, until opposing pitchers caught on, what percentage of them would have landed him on first? What impact would that have on his OPS & WAR, and how would that impact his value and employability?
Could there be other commonplace opportunities that may be similarly exploited?
I realize James is asking for a more specific answer here, but I want to start with the overview, because at this point, I think people may have forgotten that once upon a time, Arraez actually had great plate discipline. From 2019 to 2022 he ran a 24% chase rate and a 9% walk rate. That walk rate was 5% higher than the league average. From 2023 to 2025, he had a 34% chase rate and a 4% walk rate. That walk rate is now a staggering 45% below the league average! Over the same period, Arraez’s swing rate on pitches inside the zone fell from 65% to 62%. He wasn’t just chasing more; he was making worse swing decisions all around. That’s a lot of shifts in the wrong direction, and even though Arraez also cut his strikeout rate nearly in half, his wRC+ dropped from 123 to 109. Read the rest of this entry »
At this time time last year, I made a series of predictions. I explained why each team might make it to the promised land, as well as why each team might find itself dead in a pit. We’re running it back this year. Will your favorite team win it all? Will it perish in a factory fire? Here’s how it might go down. Consider these the first- and 99th-percentile projections. If you missed the National League edition yesterday, you can check it out here. Today we’re on to the American League.
Baltimore Orioles Why They’ll Win It All: After two years of struggle, Adley Rutschman will come back and play like a star again. He’ll be a six-win MVP candidate. He’ll instantly look like he did in 2022 and 2023. Where has that guy been the past two years? The answer is simpler than you think. He’s been hiding in the basement while his secret twin, Badley Rutschman has limped to league-average performance. That’s right, he uses a double. This two-years-on, two-years-off gambit used to work well enough. Badley was more than capable of tearing up the Pac-12 and the high minors, but the big leagues are another story. Badley couldn’t quite hack it, but Adley will return and Badley will be back in the basement. (Don’t worry, it’s a nice enough basement.) The secret twin life is a tough one, but it’ll bring the O’s back into the first division.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Playing behind Alex Bregman in the World Baseball Classic will mess with Gunnar Henderson’s head. Do you know the last time Gunnar Henderson was a backup? Neither does Gunnar Henderson. He’s not meant to play third base second fiddle. He’s feeling like a second-class citizen for the first time. Number two’s supposed man the six, not bat seventh. By the Fourth of July, he’ll be striking out a third of the time and batting fifth and seven ate nine. Read the rest of this entry »
Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel-Milwaukee
At this time time last year, I made a series of predictions. I explained why each team might make it to the promised land, as well as why each team might find itself dead in a pit. We’re running it back this year. Will your favorite team win it all? Will it perish in a factory fire? Here’s how it might go down. Consider these the first- and 99th-percentile projections. Check back for the American League tomorrow.
Arizona Diamondbacks Why They’ll Win It All:Geraldo Perdomo is just getting started. The shortstop had an ugly rookie season at the plate, then jumped to right around league average in 2024. In 2025, he exploded, running a 138 wRC+ and knocking 20 home runs, a 143% improvement over his career mark. He combined that quantum leap in offense with his trademark excellent defense and baserunning, ending up with 7.1 WAR and finishing fourth in the NL MVP voting.
In 2026, Perdomo’s going to make another 36-point jump in wRC+. He’s going to finish with a wRC+ of 174, sock 34 dingers, put up a 12-win season, and dethrone Shohei Ohtani. I mean that literally. He’ll win the MVP, yes, but Perdomo will also walk into the Dodgers clubhouse on Opening Day and yank the ergonomic swivel chair from under Ohtani’s versatile posterior.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Everything I’ve just described will come to pass, for a while. Perdomo will unseat Ohtani and get off to a scalding start, spraying homers all over the greater Phoenix area. Then the Dodgers will come to town for a four-game set in June. For four days, Perdomo will watch Ohtani, just returned from the injury list (coccyx), limp around the bases. After the rubber match, Perdomo will stay in the clubhouse long after everyone has left. He’ll take a look in the mirror. “Who are you?” he’ll ask (though he’ll be munching a protein bar, so it will come out sounding more like, “Froowroo?”). He won’t like the answer. He’ll decide that he liked the old Geraldo Perdomo better. The one who led the league in sac bunts every year. The one who put up league-average seasons like clockwork. The one who never broke any butts. He’ll never hit another home run.
Atlanta Braves Why They’ll Win It All:Michael Harris II is finally going to come out of the gate strong. The 2022 Rookie of the Year has never been an All-Star because despite a career 134 wRC+ in the second half, his first-half mark is a disastrous 80. It’s the most extreme split in major league history. All that will change in 2026. Harris will put up a 134 wRC+ in the first half, and then he’ll still undergo his usual 50-point jump. He’ll be an All-Star, then he’ll be All-World in the second half. The rest of the Braves will get injured. It won’t matter.
Why They’ll Lose It All: In a desperate bid to recapture the glory of the 2021 World Series championship squad, Alex Anthopolous will wheel the soft-serve ice cream machine back into the Atlanta clubhouse. This will prove a mistake, because as it turns out, you have to clean those things. The machine, which had been sitting in a closet since the fall of 2022, will be full of microbiota that qualify as neither toppings nor mix-ins. The entire 26-man roster, the entire coaching staff, and two clubbies will wind up on the IL with tummy trouble. Everyone at Triple-A Gwinnett will get called up at the same time, crucially, before the soft-serve machine is identified as the culprit. They, too, will fall victim to the swirl sickness. Neither the Braves, nor the pipes will recover.
Chicago Cubs Why They’ll Win It All: Because it was foretold in Back to the Future, again. What, didn’t you ever watch Back to the Future Part IV? It was straight-to-video, so I understand if you missed it, but Marty McFly, played by a guy who looked at least a little bit like Michael J. Fox, ends up in 2026, and he can’t come home until his son, Arthur, gets help for his debilitating gambling addiction. It’s quite accurate and thoroughly depressing. Anyway, the Cubs win the Series again, and Arty McFly loses everything and lives out the rest of his life skateboarding across the great Pacific garbage patch.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Some time in May, Pete Crow-Armstrong will go back on a ball and disappear into the ivy. Like, he’ll just be gone. The Cubs will send dozens of people out there after him, poking and prodding the wall, shouting his name. They won’t find a trace of him. A bereft Seiya Suzuki will try to walk through the ivy and join PCA, wherever he is. He’ll just bonk his head on the bricks over and over again. The Feds will shut down Wrigley Field while they conduct their investigation, and the Cubs will play their home games at Rate Field. With PCA on indefinite leave and Suzuki on the IL with a concussion, they’ll post the worst outfield WAR in the league
Cincinnati Reds Why They’ll Win It All: Do you know what Matt McLain has been doing during spring training? He’s batting .529. He’s hit seven home runs in 17 games. He’s got a 301 wRC+. Guess what? He’s going to keep it up. McLain will transition from spring training to the regular season without so much as a hiccup. He’ll never slow down. He’ll hit .700 in the playoffs. Elly De La Cruz will be pretty good, too.
Why They’ll Lose It All: McLain will only be pretty good. De La Cruz will only be pretty good, too. In fact, everyone on the Reds will be pretty good. As it was foretold, Cincinnati will be a medium place. You might think that would make the Reds a medium team, but it’s not that simple. Every inning they play will end in a tie. They’ll never finish a game, except by way of suspension. The whole damn system will break down. They’ll be cast out from the league, and then the sport.
Colorado Rockies Why They’ll Win It All: In a brilliant bit of outside-the-box Moneyball thinking, Paul DePodesta will sign the Rocky Mountains to a contract. “His defect is that he’s literally a mountain range,” he’ll say as he pitches the scheme to Dick Monfort. “Nobody in the big leagues cares about him, because he mountains funny.” Colorado will go from an extreme hitter’s park to an extreme pitcher’s park overnight, since every ball that lands on the ground will have technically been caught by Colorado’s right fielder, literally the Rocky Mountain range. (Brenton Doyle will still keep his job as the center fielder, because have you seen him out there?) The Rocky Mountain range will strike out quite a bit, but nobody will mind it much when it’s holding opponents to a BABIP of zero.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Even with a BABIP of zero, Rockies starters will give up enough homers to end up with 105 losses.
Los Angeles Dodgers Why They’ll Win It All: Inertia.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Entropy.
Miami Marlins Why They’ll Win It All: It turns out that calling pitches from the dugout is a winning strategy after all. The Marlins’ front office quants will read “The Purloined Letter” 15 times in a row, then develop an unbeatable algorithm that calls the perfect pitch for every situation based on the count, the game situation, the pitcher, the catcher, the weather, the time of day, and an extensive psychometric profile of the batter. They’ll stick it in the dugout disguised as a quality control coach and let it cook. Opposing batters will be constantly off-balance. They’ll flail wildly at pitches in the dirt. Their knees will buckle at get-me-over curveballs. They’ll start to think the Miami pitchers can read their minds. They’ll grow paranoid. They’ll second-guess themselves and third-guess themselves. They will have struck out before they even step into the batter’s box.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Some time in April, the other teams will get wise. That coach in the Marlins dugout – the one with the boxy head and boxy torso, who never moves a muscle but whose eyeballs flash a sequence of bright colors after each pitch – isn’t really a coach. The opposing manager will finally ask the umpires to check him out. “That’s just Jerry!” manager Clayton McCullough will shout. “He has a condition!” But the jig will be up. The umpires will tap on Jerry’s hollow cube of a head, and the left side of his mustache will come unglued and flutter in the light breeze. He’ll never call another pitch.
Milwaukee Brewers Why They’ll Win It All: The Bratwurst won’t just win the first 15 runnings of the sausage race. It’ll destroy the other sausages. It’ll keep on running around the entire warning track and lap them. Pat Murphy will sign the Brat to a contract and start it out as a pinch-runner. After a week or two, the Brat will stand alone atop the Baserunning Runs leaderboard. It’ll swipe bases left and right. It’ll tag up on popups. It’ll steal home and slide across the plate before the pitch even arrives. And it’ll do all this in full costume. Murphy will make the lederhosen-clad Bratwurst his everyday center fielder, and it will reward him with thrilling diving catches, a surprisingly accurate arm, a .275 batting average, and 25-homer pop. Jackson Chourio will be pretty good, too.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Just after the Bratwurst earns All-Star Game MVP honors, the Brewers will celebrate with a sausage appreciation night: sausage-making competitions, grilling competitions, bratwurst-eating contests, kids in sausage costumes, the whole nine yards. But while handing out an award to a local sausage-maker right in front of home plate, the sure-footed Bratwurst will trip and tragically stumble directly into a running sausage grinder. To the horror of 41,900 celebrants, it will return to its previous state, an unformed pile of meat (with veins of lederhosen mixed in there, too). The crowd will watch in stunned silence as all of the sausage-makers on hand try in vain to put the Bratwurst back together again. The entire state of Wisconsin will go into mourning. The Brewers will play out the string lifelessly. Murphy will take a flier on the Polish sausage, but it’ll keep getting doubled off because it doesn’t understand the tag-up rule.
New York Mets Why They’ll Win It All: It turns out that right field was the problem for Juan Soto all along. After a career of unrelenting defensive ghastliness, he’ll be great in left field. He’ll be… well, he still won’t be elite out there. But he’ll be quite good, and all of a sudden, his game will have no weaknesses at all. He’ll have an average Juan Soto season at the plate, steal another 35 bases, and all of a sudden, that 158 wRC+ will put him in line for a nine-win season. He’ll carry the Mets into the playoffs.
Why They’ll Lose It All:Francisco Lindor will miss his hamate bone. The surgery won’t hinder his performance at the plate – at least not physically. He’ll just miss it, you know? He once had a whole hand full of bones, and now he’s got a missing piece. He’ll feel incomplete, distracted, and the rest of the Mets will follow their leader. They’ll never quite get it together. They’ll always feel like something’s missing, even if they can never quite name it.
Philadelphia Phillies Why They’ll Win It All: The Lord will look down upon Philadelphia, see a team that just agreed to devote a quarter of a billion to pitchers named Jesús and Cristopher, and the Lord will smile.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Measles and listeria will sweep through the clubhouse. No one will say out loud who’s responsible for it, but everyone will know.
Pittsburgh Pirates Why They’ll Win It All: Because they might actually be good. Maybe? Possibly? They might, like, just have a good team. With good players? I know, I know. But it’s possible. Maybe.
Why They’ll Lose It All: At a certain point, Paul Skenes will decide that he’s sick of losing at baseball and go back to the Air Force Academy.
San Diego Padres Why They’ll Win It All: Welcome to the Nick Castellanos Revenge Tour. Castellanos will work his way into the starting lineup by hook or by crook, and he will unleash unholy fury upon the baseball for the sole, spiteful purpose of making sure the Phillies know exactly what they’re missing. He’ll slug hellaciously, and he’ll step up as a clubhouse leader to lift the rest of the Padres with him. It’ll be like that scene in The Natural where the New York Knights actually look like a baseball team during practice. His defense will still be pretty bad.
Why They’ll Lose It All: Joe Lacob, owner of the Golden State Warriors, is known to be in the running to purchase the Padres, and he’ll have the winning bid. San Diegans will rejoice now that the man who oversaw a dynasty in Oakland (then promptly moved it to San Francisco) has just purchased their team. But Lacob will have learned all the wrong lessons from the success of the Dubs. He’ll trade what little is left of the farm for Trayce Thompson. He’ll sign Xzavion Curry. He’ll hire Draymond Green to manage the Padres, and that will go exactly as well as you might expect it to go. He’ll move the team to LA.
San Francisco Giants Why They’ll Win It All: Remember when Luis Arraez played in Miami and put up a career-high 131 wRC+ dumping weak liners into that enormous outfield? Well, he’s finally landed in San Francisco and found himself another big old outfield. He’s going to go back to hitting .350, and he’s going to teach Jung Hoo Lee all his tricks. Matt Chapman and Rafael Devers are never going to come to the plate without a couple runners on base.
Why They’ll Lose It All:Logan Webb can’t start every game.
St. Louis Cardinals Why They’ll Win It All: The Cardinals will try something new in the outfield. They’ll turn Victor Scott II loose. “Any ball you can reach, you go get it,” Chaim Bloom will tell him. This newfound freedom will strike Scott as a revelation. He’ll finally realize that the artificial boundaries separating center field from left and right are just that. Artificial. Limitations keeping him from unlocking his true potential. The scales will fall from his eyes and he’ll range through the outfield like a holy wind, catching everything there is to catch. Jordan Walker and Lars Nootbaar will take to positioning themselves directly on the foul lines, content to steal outs on the occasional would-be foul ball while Scott takes care of the rest. The Cardinals will have the best defense in the league.
Why They’ll Lose It All: They’ll still need some hitters.
Washington Nationals Why They’ll Win It All: Pass.
Why They’ll Lose It All: In an odd mathematical quirk, it turns out that it’s really hard to have a successful season while losing more than 90 games. Let’s just give Paul Toboni some time.
Cristopher Sánchez wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. He’s now not going anywhere for even longer. With Ranger Suarez in Boston, Zack Wheeler recovering from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola looking his age, the 29-year-old left-hander is the ace of a Phillies starting rotation that led baseball in WAR in both 2025 and 2023 and hasn’t finished below fourth this decade. On Sunday, the Philadelphia signed Sánchez to a contract extension that will keep him around through the 2032 season, with a club option for 2033, when he’ll be 36. The move also comes less than two weeks after the team inked Jesús Luzardo to his own five-year, $135 million extension. Clearly, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski would like to maintain the status quo.
Robert Murray of FanSided broke the news of the deal. Matt Gelb of The Athletic reported that the contract is worth a guaranteed $107 million, and Francys Romero of Beisbol FR reported that it included more than $13 million in incentives. The club option for 2033, if it’s picked up, would add another $32.5 million. This may well sound familiar. In June 2024, the Phillies signed Sánchez to a four-year extension that contained two more club options for 2029 and 2030. Those first four years bought out all of his arbitration years for $22.5 million. If picked up, the two club options (along with Cy Young incentives) could have increased the maximum value to $56.6 million.
We’ll get back into the mechanics of the deal and what they mean soon. We’re not going to spend more than a few paragraphs on why the Phillies decided Sánchez was worth all this. That part should be obvious. Sánchez is quite simply one of the best pitchers in the world. He finished 10th in the National League Cy Young voting in 2024 and second in 2025. He has a career ERA of 3.24 and a FIP of 3.15. By any standard, the lefty found an entirely new level in 2025, running a career-high 26% strikeout rate. His 2.55 FIP was nearly half a run better than his previous career best, and his 63 DRA- was nearly 20 points lower than his previous best. Read the rest of this entry »
I love the spring training leaderboards. Anything can happen in spring training. Did you know that Trevor Story, who is 33 years old and has spent a significant portion of his adult life on the injured list, is tied for the spring lead with three triples? Story hasn’t hit a regular-season triple since he quit working at the triples factory knows as Coors Field, but here he is atop the leaderboard because it’s spring training. Did you know that Luis Matos leads the world with four hit-by-pitches? He’s been plunked just three times during the regular season, but here he is in spring training with an HBP rate higher than his career walk rate. None of this means anything, but that’s part of the fun.
Shea Langeliers and Matt McLain are tied at the top with six home runs. Langeliers is certainly not a surprise. He’s a genuine power hitter with 60 combined homers over the past two years. McLain’s got plenty of power, but only once before has he hit six in a span of 15 games. This is at the very least a notable outcome for him, and as I went down the leaderboard, I found some seriously surprising names. How does 33-year-old Ben Gamel, owner of 41 career homers in 723 career games, find himself tied for sixth in baseball with four spring-training homers in just 11 games? Today we’re hunting for players with even more extreme splits. We’re looking for guys who have hit more home runs in spring training than in the regular season. We’ve got spring stats going back to 2006, so I pulled them along with major league stats going back to the 1990s. Let’s find some guys who peak really early.
We need to ask our question more specifically, though, because plenty of players who didn’t stick in the majors (or who haven’t yet stuck in the majors) will have more plate appearances in spring training, and thus more home runs during spring training, than in the regular season. Bryce Brentz is the runaway leader in this category. Brentz was a power-hitting outfielder who played parts of the 2014 and 2016 seasons with the Red Sox. He launched 161 homers across 10 minor league seasons and another 12 across nine different spring trainings. But he only got into 34 major league games and hit just one home run. That’s a differential of 11 home runs! The top of the leaderboard is all players like Brentz who hit more homers during spring training because they played more during spring training. It’s great to recognize them, but it’s not quite what we’re asking. Read the rest of this entry »
The World Baseball Classic likely provided many fans their first glimpse of Nolan McLean. The 24-year-old right-hander debuted last August and made just eight big league starts. If you missed his work against Italy on March 10 – if you only caught the last six innings, or if you only saw his line at the end of the night – you might have wondered how McLean ended up starting the championship game for the United States against Venezuela. You might have wondered how this prospect with hardly any major league experience, who earned a 9.00 ERA along with the team’s only loss in the tournament to that point, could have possibly earned that honor over the other All-Stars on the roster.
McLean’s line against Italy wasn’t exactly inspiring. He allowed three earned runs across three innings. He struck out four, but he also walked two batters, hit another, and allowed two home runs. Most of the batted balls he gave up were hard hit. And after that ignominy, he was set to face off against Ronald Acuña Jr. in the championship game? The same Ronald Acuña Jr. who did this to the famous McLean sweeper back in August?
Even if that was your frame of reference coming into Tuesday night, it didn’t take long for the pieces to fall into place. As is so often the case with nasty young flamethrowers, McLean looked absolutely unhittable, even when he was getting hit. Eric Longenhagen has described McLean’s pitches as moving “violently,” and I think that’s right on the money. The slider doesn’t look like it’s sweeping so much as it looks like it’s changing its mind halfway to the plate. It’s an optical illusion due to the camera angle behind the pitcher, but it honestly looks like it’s shifting into top gear once it makes its left turn. The sinker looks like it’s teleporting to the catcher’s glove. The curveball looks like it’s suddenly realized that it has left its curling iron plugged in and needs to get back home as soon as possible. (Even a curveball needs to feel pretty every sometimes.) Read the rest of this entry »
The hardest-hit ball of the World Baseball Classic semifinal between the United States and the Dominican Republic only traveled 191 feet. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s fourth-inning double left the bat at 116.1 mph, but it was just the 23rd-longest batted ball of the game, a few feet behind a Ketel Marte popout that was hit more than 40 mph softer. None of this was necessarily shocking. After the play, John Smoltz revealed even he was aware that sabermetric types wish Guerrero would find a way to lift the ball more often and turn some of his scorched groundouts into extra-base hits and extra-base hits into home runs.
This decade, 26% of balls hit 116 mph or harder have gone for home runs, and the lowest launch angle among those home runs was 15 degrees. Guerrero hit his double at just five degrees, and over the past five years, he ranks fourth in baseball with 28 non-homers of at least 116 mph. Five degrees is not the optimal launch angle if your goal is to do damage, but hitting a ball that low and that hard can have other benefits.
One benefit is that the ball can really slow down on its way to the wall. When you hit a screaming line drive or a high fly ball to the wall, it maintains much of its velocity and bounces off hard. When you hit a low liner or a grounder, all that contact with the outfield grass slows it down. Hard as it was hit, this ball didn’t have all that much velocity left, and the padding on the wall absorbed much of the remainder. It rolled back across the warning track and likely would have stopped entirely as soon as it encountered the grass. The outfielder has to wait back, wary of a hard carom bouncing past them, so when the ball dies like that, they need extra time to go get it, giving you more time to coast into second or stretch for third.
A weak carom also carries aesthetic benefits. When a ball is moving that slowly, you can’t field it normally. Below a certain velocity threshold, gloves are more hindrance than help. If you’re picking up a stationary baseball, or one moving at anything below a brisk walk, say 5 mph, it’s harder to pick the ball up off the ground with a glove than it is with your bare hand. Stiff leather fingers aren’t as sensitive or as flexible as real fingers, and the ball doesn’t have enough momentum to roll up into the pocket. Since you have to get the ball to your throwing hand anyway, you’re better off cutting out the middle man and barehanding the ball. It happens every day, but usually it happens for infielders who are dealing with bunts or squibbers. They charge hard, then scoop up the ball and throw it in one motion. It’s a thing of beauty, but it works quite differently in the outfield.
How much have you thought about the word toddler? As you can deduce, it means one who toddles, walking “with short tottering steps in the manner of a young child,” according to Merriam-Webster. The word first appeared in the early 16th century. There were tots, and the way they got around became tottering and tottling, which then became toddling. Finally, a good 300 years later, those tots who toddled became known as toddlers. (Who knows, they may have even enjoyed the occasional hot toddy. It was a different time.)
A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch, Charles Mackay, LL.D., 1888
Of course, toddling isn’t the only hallmark of a toddler. Our balance, motor skills, and proprioception evolve (and then devolve) over time, so we end up moving very differently at each stage of life. For example, when adults bend over to pick something up off the ground, they bend at the waist, but they also tend to put one foot in front of the other and go into a slight lunge to bring their torso closer to ground level. Toddlers have a different approach, getting into a deep crouch and reaching for the item while it’s still way out in front of them. They tuck their chests against their knees and they have to stick their elbows out to make room. Because they’re not yet champions of spatial awareness, they don’t often nail the location of their squat, which is the reason they often end up reaching way out or way across their bodies.
I bring all this up because when Roman Anthony, playing left field for the United States at the time of Guerrero’s blistering low-launch-angle double, loped out to the warning track to field the ball, I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t exactly look like the Greek god, top-prospect-in-baseball, uber-athlete we’ve come to expect. He looked, uh, different.
Anthony looked either like a toddler playing with a toy dump truck or a grown man doing a pretty convincing impression of an anteater. I’m going to be honest with you. I went through a bunch of pictures of my nieces and nephews, and it didn’t take long to find a photo of a niece in the exact same pose. She’s two years old, and she’s not wearing a shirt or pants because she was just playing in the sprinklers. She’s crouched down to pick up a worm from the garden. She looks exactly like Anthony in the picture above, and I wish I could show you the two side-by-side in the Miami outfield, which I absolutely mocked up in Photoshop. Alas, I cannot do that to my niece, who is no longer two years old.
How did Anthony get into this position? For starters, in the outfield, you’re no longer scooping the ball up gracefully and firing it on the move. The weak carom is the only situation where you have to barehand the ball, and you’re always moving away from the infield to get it, which means you’re running, stopping to pick up the ball, then reversing your momentum to throw it into the infield. It’s a halting, graceless maneuver at the best of times. But other outfielders seem to manage it. Here are Anthony’s Red Sox teammates, Nick Sogard and Wilyer Abreu, making similar plays.
They chop their steps and time things so that the ball arrives between their feet rather than way out in front of them. They get low to field the ball, but their chests aren’t tucked tightly against their knees. They still look like athletes. To be fair, they’re also benefitting from a more flattering angle, but let’s break down the video of Anthony on Guerrero’s double frame by frame just to make sure we understand the progression.
Here’s Anthony running after the ball with his trademark long, graceful strides. He’s a 6-foot-3 miracle with a 55 current value on his run tool.
Next, here he is putting on the brakes. He may be slowing down, but the picture is still alive with movement as he powers down into a hover.
And here Anthony is, settling into a defensive crouch as he awaits the carom off the wall. He’s low, he’s alert, he’s ready for anything. Wherever this ball decides to bounce, he’s about pounce.
Um, so this is Anthony scuttling like a crab. He’s scuttling like a crab now. The ball didn’t so much bounce off the wall as it did die on the wall, and Anthony just kind of stayed in the crouch and started – sorry, scuttling is really the only word I can think of that applies here – toward it.
So this is the difference between a professional athlete and a toddler. When the right leg is still extended, planted in the ground for maximum leverage, the foot digging into the dirt at an angle, Anthony is a force to be reckoned with. Once the right leg is bent, he’s completely flat-footed, knees to his chest, left elbow stuck way out to the side so he can wrap his arm around his leg; he’s everyone’s nephew, powerless to stop himself from befriending a worm.
This is the frame that really takes it over the toddler top. For some reason, Anthony doesn’t grab the slow-moving ball with his fingers. He reaches out with his hand angled back. It looks like he doesn’t know what to do, so he’s just going to slap the baseball. He lets it get deep into his palm and grabs it with his whole hand. Professional baseball players do not grip the baseball that way. They have enormous hands and get a four-seam grip, holding the ball with their fingertips. There’s air between the ball and their palm. When Anthony finally picks up the ball, he holds it the way you might cradle a melon.
After that, sadly, Anthony returned to his usual status as a fearsome baseball warrior blessed with grace and agility.
Anthony has a long career ahead of him, and he will awe us with many astounding feats of power and dexterity. For now, though, let’s make sure we treasure this memory of him as an adorable toddler before he hits the terrible twos.
This season has the potential to be an odd one for catchers. None of us knows exactly how the ABS challenge system will affect the way they go about their job, but all of us will be paying close attention. We’re a couple years into the one-knee-down revolution, and while the conventional wisdom was that it would help keep them fresher and allow them to play more innings, the top 30 catchers in terms of innings caught actually caught fewer innings in 2025 than they did in 2024.
The top of the list is fun. We’ve got 60-homer Cal Raleigh in his own stratosphere, William Contreras in his shadow, and Patrick Bailey one-tooling his way to the top tier. We have deep teams like the Blue Jays and Yankees, Rookie of the Year Drake Baldwin, rookie Gold Glover Dillon Dingler, and veteran Will Smith, who became an entirely different hitter at age 30. And nobody knows what to expect from Adley Rutschman.
