Statcast released bat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:

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Shohei Ohtani has a tendency to make absurd things happen. When he came over to the United States, some were skeptical that his offense would hold up as well as his pitching. Then, he came over and did just fine. Whether it’s being a two-time MVP as a two-way player or making it seem plausible that he could have a 10-WAR season as only a designated hitter, Ohtani has a knack for turning fiction into fact. Now, leading the league in batting average and not trailing by much in home runs and RBI, he has a real chance at another rare feat: winning a Triple Crown.

Going into last season, Ohtani appeared to be an excellent hitter, but we always couched that excellence as partially being due to his ability to also pitch. It’s true that he chased 50 homers in 2021, but his triple-slash line from 2018-2022 of .267/.354/.532 (137 wRC+) had the look of a very good hitter, not one that could claim transcendence on that basis alone. But in 2023, he hit .300 for the first time en route to setting career highs for each of the three triple-slash stats (.304/.412/.654), wRC+ (180), and position player WAR (6.5). He was also on a 51-homer pace when an oblique injury in early September ended his season prematurely; he finished with 44 dingers in 135 games. Projection systems were naturally skeptical about last season establishing a new baseline of offensive performance, generally seeing that as a peak-type season, with a more “normal” 140-150 wRC+ likely in 2024. In fact, ZiPS’ zStats – its equivalent of Statcast xStats with a few more ingredients in the stew and more explicitly designed for predictive purposes – saw Ohtani’s expected 2023 line at .289/.377/.590 with 38 homers. A great season to be sure, but still a 99-point dropoff in OPS from his actual numbers.

And 2024? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. Ohtani’s taken another step forward, entering play Friday slashing .355/.425/.678. But this time around, zStats sees Ohtani’s performance as completely warranted by his Statcast, plate discipline, speed, and spray data. In fact, as of Thursday morning, ZiPS thinks that his 2024 line very slightly underrates him! ZiPS thinks that he ought to be hitting .354/.442/.708 considering how he’s played. I cannot possibly overstate how unusual it is for a player to be having this strong a season and still be underperforming. Usually, for even the most talented players, at least a small part of their career-best OPS can be attributed to luck. Ohtani’s 1.103 OPS, a career high, appears to be the result of some slight misfortune. His zOPS is 1.150. That’s ridiculous!

The first thing to look at it when it comes to Ohtani’s Triple Crown chances is his BABIP, to see if his current average is sustainable. Because of the volatility of BABIP, especially across smaller samples, you should bet on a hitter’s BABIP to regress toward his mean over time as luck balances out.

A career BABIP of at least .350 is incredibly rare; only 13 players in MLB history have done that over a minimum of 5,000 plate appearances, and most of those are from the early days of baseball, when BABIP was much higher than it is today. Looking just since the start of the divisional era, only 16 players have a lifetime BABIP of .340 or higher, topped by Rod Carew at .362 and Derek Jeter at .350. All of this is to say that there’s some justified skepticism when someone’s BABIP is pushing .400, and Ohtani currently has a .391 BABIP. There must be a lot of luck involved, right? Perhaps not! At .401, Ohtani’s zBABIP laps the field, and zBABIP is more predictive of future BABIP than actual BABIP. Here are the zBABIP leaders this season, along with their BABIP marks (minimum 100 PA).

We’re less than a quarter of the way through the season, and ZiPS already thinks that only 13 of the 210 players with 100 plate appearances have earned a .350 BABIP. Yet there’s Ohtani over .400, with only a single player within 30 points. As such, factoring in zBABIP, the full model of ZiPS projects Ohtani to be a .318 hitter the rest of the way, rather than the .276 hitter that the current rest-of-season model — which does not use zBABIP — expects him to be. That .042 range is easily one of the largest differences between the full and in-season models that I can remember.

In the end, ZiPS projects a 22% chance that Ohtani will win the batting title, which is almost half the battle for the Triple Crown because home runs and RBI are highly correlated with each other.

I probably don’t need to tell you about Ohtani’s power credentials at this point, but I’m going to do it anyway. Remember that word “transcendent” from above? Well, that’s Ohtani as a power hitter in 2024. His Statcast hard-hit rate is over 60% and he’s crushed more barrels than Carrie Nation, with 30 already this season. Since the debut of Statcast in 2015, only a single player, Aaron Judge in 2022, has hit 90 barrels in a season (106). Ohtani is currently on pace for about 120, hitting one at nearly a 25% clip, which is an absurd rate. ZiPS projects Ohtani to finish this season with 45 homers and a 52% chance of leading the National League.

The trickiest part of the trio is RBI, as Ohtani currently sits 11 behind NL leader Marcell Ozuna. But the full model of ZiPS gives Ohtani a solid 22% chance of leading the NL in RBI; the model is skeptical that Ozuna is this good. He’s probably not going to slug .864 with runners in scoring position for the rest of the year, as he has so far, nor will Ohtani continue to slug .275 in such situations.

In the 52% of simulations in which Ohtani leads the NL in homers, he also leads in RBI 70% of the time – remember, they’re highly correlated – giving him a 36% chance to lead the league in both homers and RBI. Add in batting average and ZiPS puts Ohtani’s odds at winning the NL Triple Crown at 14.6%. (And, for what it’s worth, ZiPS projects Ohtani to have a 5.2% probability to lead the majors in all three three categories.)

Throughout his career, Ohtani has expanded our understanding of what is possible, so much so that accomplishing something with 15% odds seems easy for him. And that’s a pretty good description of greatness: making the nearly impossible seem ordinary.

At 21-16, the Texas Rangers are first in the AL West standings, but it hasn’t been an easy stroll so far. They have an entire rotation of quality starting pitchers on the injured list, and while their offense has remained relatively intact, it has not yet been at full strength. Third baseman Josh Jung had wrist surgery in early April, first baseman Nathaniel Lowe missed the first three weeks of the season with a sore oblique, and shortstop Corey Seager has started slow after a sports hernia surgery in January kept him out for most of spring training. And on Monday, rookie Wyatt Langford, a first-round pick last June who rocketed to the majors to start this season, landed on the IL with a right hamstring strain, retroactive to Sunday. He’s expected to miss three to four weeks, which should keep him out until the end of the month.

Rangers will place Wyatt Langford on IL with a hamstring strain, slightly more severe than Grade 1, Bruce Bochy says. It will be 3-4 week absence

— Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) May 5, 2024

Langford started Saturday’s game, a 15-4 win over the Royals, in left field but was removed in the fifth inning with what was initially diagnosed as hamstring tightness; an MRI later revealed the strain. Texas called up infielder Jonathan Ornelas from Triple-A Round Rock to fill out the 26-man roster.

Mired in a 1-for-15 slump following his first major league homer, an inside-the-parker on April 28, Langford has a brutal 68 wRC+ over his first 31 big league games. Things were bad enough that it was fair to wonder if the Rangers would temporarily send him to the minors to work things out — as the Orioles did recently with Jackson Holliday — but despite Langford’s woes, Texas doesn’t exactly have a better option than him for its lineup.

The Rangers offense is so thin that when Lowe missed the start of the season, the best player they could replace him with at first base was Jared Walsh, last seen hitting .125/.216/.279 for the Angels in 39 games in 2023. Before Ornelas was called up, the Rangers had only three hitters in the organization who were on the 40-man roster and not in the majors; Ornelas, catcher Sam Huff, and outfielder Dustin Harris, who currently sports a 79 wRC+ with Round Rock. Realistically, Langford was the team’s only viable option at DH.

That said, he definitely deserved his place in the Opening Day lineup. Langford was an advanced college hitter when the Rangers drafted him, probably doing so with the expectation that it wouldn’t be long before he reached the majors. He spent just three games at Rookie Ball last year, climbed to Double-A a month later, and after another two weeks, he finished the season at Round Rock. His .349/.479/.657 line across four levels of the minors comes out to a spicy 199 wRC+, basically meaning that Langford did as much damage to minor league pitchers last year as Mookie Betts is inflicting upon major leaguers so far this season. Hitting .365/.423/.714 in spring training did nothing to dissuade the Rangers of the notion that he was ready to play in the majors less than a year out of college.

Nor were the Rangers alone — 16 of the 25 FanGraphs staffers and contributors who made preseason picks predicted that Langford would win the AL Rookie of the Year, myself included. Those of us of fleshy construct were joined by the computers; entering the season, ZiPS projected him to post a 118 wRC+ this year, and Steamer was more bullish, at 125. Even the biggest Langford skeptic around, THE BAT overestimated him with its 92 wRC+ forecast. The betting world was in on him as well, with most books giving Langford the third-best preseason odds to win the ROY, behind teammate Evan Carter and Holliday.

Despite all this doom and gloom, there are some positive nuggets buried within Langford’s rough start. His plate discipline has remained intact; he was still better than league average at not chasing, making contact, and getting to 1-0 counts. His hard-hit percentage (38.6%) is a close enough neighbor to league average (44th percentile) that it could be borrowing its lawn mower. And although his .388 xSLG, per Statcast, is a number that would thrill few players other than Nick Madrigal, it is a huge leap from Langford’s actual mark of .293.

Running the xStats equivalent in ZiPS (zStats), you get an estimated line of .237/.326/.378 with four homers from his Statcast, plate discipline, pull/spray, and speed data. That is hardly good, but it looks like merely mediocre rather than disastrous.

What effect does his sluggish start have on his long-term outlook? I fired up the full ZiPS model to get an idea about how his 2024 so far has impacted his projections for the next six seasons.

Those projections are a good bit lower than his preseason ones, which had his WAR from 2025 to 2027 at 3.5, 3.8, and 3.6, respectively. This is unsurprising; Langford’s professional stats history was far shorter than most players and ZiPS had to use the much less accurate college translations as part of his projections, so these were always going to be more sensitive to 2024 play than they would’ve been for other major leaguers. Even so, Langford still projects as a solidly above-average bat who ought to be a long-term fixture in the Rangers’ lineup.

Langford’s breakout has been delayed by his struggles and now his injury, but his day is still coming. That’s encouraging for him, and it certainly bodes well for a Rangers offense that sure could use him.

It’s a great time to be a fan of the Baltimore Orioles. This is now the third season since their emergence from the dark basement of the AL East, and they no longer retain their tatterdemalion appearance. The O’s, at 20-11, have been winning by the very straightforward method of beating their opponents into submission, not by collecting more than their fair share of extra-inning and one-run victories. While the pitching staff has been a big part of the team’s success, what has made the Orioles so dangerous is a lineup that leads the American League in runs scored and wRC+. Even better for an O’s fan, they’re terrorizing opposing pitchers with a lineup that’s largely made of players that came up with the franchise and are several years away from hitting free agency. And there’s more on the way, giving the team a rather novel first world problem: having too many hitters and not enough lineup spots.

That the O’s have some of the best young offensive talent in the majors should not be lost on anyone who is into baseball. Adley Rutschman was the runner-up for AL Rookie of the Year in 2022, Gunnar Henderson took the award last year, and Jackson Holliday was the heavy favorite before his poor debut. Holliday could very easily come back and win it in the end, but if he doesn’t, one of the current favorites is yet another young Baltimore left-handed hitter, Colton Cowser. Through Thursday’s games, Cowser stands with the top WAR among AL rookies, with a .277/.351/.578, 164 wRC+ line. I haven’t even mentioned Jordan Westburg, who has an .890 OPS while splitting time between second and third base.

Even with Holliday falling flat in his first 10 games in the majors – something I expect him to rectify in the not-too-distant future – the O’s are leading the league in WAR from players younger than the traditional peak age of 27.

In franchise history, including its first year as the Milwaukee Brewers in 1901 and through decades as the St. Louis Browns, the 2023 team ranked seventh in WAR (12.2) from position players younger than 27, and this year’s team is already within shouting distance of halfway to that mark. So naturally, my question is how this team is likely to end up by the end of the season, and whether it would stack up to the best young offensive teams ever. For this, I’ll use our Depth Charts playing time to give plausible estimates of how the O’s will use their lineup for the rest of the season.

Even with Depth Charts projecting a much more conservative promotion schedule for Holliday than expected at the start of the season, the O’s have a mean projection of 21.7 WAR from this group of players. That would be the best in team history, edging out the 1973 club with Bobby Grich, Don Baylor, Earl Williams, and Al Bumbry as the headliners. And yes, it’s significant on a historical level as well.

Their 21.7 WAR would be enough to put the Orioles in the top 25, and there’s an argument that this undersells the group. The vast majority of the teams with the most 26-and-under contributions come from the pre-World War II era, when players were called up at younger ages and there was no ticking service time clock. Looking at just the divisional era – which now covers more than half a century – the Orioles rank impressively among recent stables of young talent.

There are some mighty impressive teams on that list, most notably the Big Red Machine and the early 1970s Athletics before free agency.

And even this perhaps underrates Baltimore’s offensive talent. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Holliday destroy in the minors and get a quick call back up, and if he does, he would slide right into the everyday lineup. Otherwise, though, the Orioles are now up to the practical limitation of roster and starting lineup spots. Cowser is an example of this: It would have been hard to get him regular playing time if not for Austin Hays’ dreadful start to the season. (Hayes is now on the IL). Heston Kjerstad was called up to replace Hays on April 23, after hitting .349/.431/.744 at Triple-A Norfolk, yet the former first rounder has gotten only eight plate appearances total in three games — the O’s have played 10 games with him on the roster.

Kjerstad is far from the only Orioles farmhand who likely would have gotten more playing time on a team with a thinner roster. At Triple-A, Coby Mayo is hitting .333/.397/.683 with 11 homers while mostly playing third base, a position at which the Orioles are already overflowing. Connor Norby has split time at second base and the outfield with an .829 OPS at Norfolk, but there’s no obvious place for him to get playing time unless the team decides to cut Ramón Urías. Using up-to-date minor league translations for Kjerstad, Mayo, and Norby, we can get an idea, via some up-to-date ZiPS projections, at what this trio could do if they O’s had playing time to give them.

All three players project as league average or better if they started in the majors right now.

While this represents a pretty enviable problem for the Orioles to have, it also can be an opportunity. The organization is deep in hitters, but its farm system does not have anywhere near the same depth when it comes to pitching. We don’t yet have a 2024 farm system ranking up for the Orioles, but in the updated 2023 list, the top 15 prospects featured just two pitchers, Cade Povich and Seth Johnson. Corbin Burnes was a great acquisition, but it doesn’t have to end there; as teams fall out of contention, the possibility exists for Baltimore to add a pitcher who can not only pitch down the stretch or in a possible playoff series or three, but in 2025 and beyond. The surplus of offensive talent should give the Orioles the ability to offer more for the right pitcher than practically any other team in baseball can, and if they do swing a trade, they’d still have so many other hitters in the pipeline that such a move likely wouldn’t make a dent in the team’s long-term outlook in a meaningful way.

Whether Baltimore gets to the World Series after a drought of more than 40 years is still uncertain. But this is the Orioles team that looks the most like the ones of the early Earl Weaver years: It’s a club that’s built mostly from within and overflowing with young stars. That worked out pretty well the first time around.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: G’day!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: It is a time for chats.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: THATS A STATEMENT NOT A QUESATION

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I think so, it wasn’t even a stretch coming into the season either

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Spending money can be a lot of fun, but spending someone else’s money is even better. And that’s exactly what we’re doing today!

About a month into the season is typically when I look at some of the players who are prime extension candidates and the possible deals they might work out with their teams. As usual, the contracts here are not necessarily what I would offer the players or what they will get, but what the mean, cold-hearted projections think would amount to a fair agreement. For each player, I’ve included their ZiPS projections with the latest model updates.

Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds (Nine years, $192 million)

It’s going to be a long time until Elly De La Cruz is eligible for free agency, but if the Reds wish to signal to the fans that the best players they develop will be in Cincinnati for longer than their middle arbitration years, ownership is going to have to make a real commitment to one of them at some point. And who is a better option than De La Cruz? I would have said Matt McLain a few months ago, but his major shoulder surgery makes it a risky time for both team and player to come to a meeting of the minds on a future dollar figure. De La Cruz still has issues making contact, but his plate discipline has continued to improve since his debut. He’s drawing a lot more walks this year and he’s actually been better than the average major leaguer at not chasing pitches. And with better plate discipline should come more power because a greater percentage of his swings will come against pitches that he can actually drive.

As you can see below, he wouldn’t need to exceed his 50th percentile projections for home runs by much to secure a 40/40 season. In fact, after hitting his eighth home run of the year Monday night, De La Cruz is currently on pace for 45 homers and an absurd 101 steals this season — and he still has a lot of polishing left to do. He’s also showing he’s far from a defensive liability at shortstop, even though a healthy McLain is still probably preferable there. This contract buys out some of De La Cruz’s early free agency years and gives him a big wad of guaranteed dough.

Corbin Burnes, Baltimore Orioles (Eight years, $210 million)

If you’ve been following my work for a while now, you surely know I’m an Orioles fan. And like many other Baltimore fans, I remember the moment when I became unhappy with the ownership of the late Peter Angelos. My feelings toward him soured because of how he and the Orioles handled their free agent negotiations with Mike Mussina. After Moose had previously taken a hometown discount, the O’s assumed he would continue to pitch for them at a below-market rate, and as a result, they lowballed him the next time he was eligible for free agency. He declined, leading to the second-best pitcher in team history finishing his career wearing Yankee pinstripes and ensuring that his Hall of Fame plaque wouldn’t have an ornithologically correct bird on the cap.

While I still think the team should lock up Grayson Rodriguez long term, it’s far more urgent< for the O’s to extend Corbin Burnes, given that he hits free agency after the season. No better pitcher will be available this winter, and nobody in the minors anywhere, for any team, is a safe bet to be better than Burnes over the next five or six years. New owner David Rubinstein has said all the right things, and he made a nice gesture when he bought everyone at Pickles a round of drinks, but the best way to show that he’s serious about building a perennial contender is to not let his team’s ace sign elsewhere. Given the O’s have just about nothing in the way of financial obligations, there’s no reason not to extend him. If that means paying more than that figure above, so be it.

Bo Bichette, Toronto Blue Jays (Seven years, $151 million)

Let’s be clear, despite his uncharacteristic struggles so far this season, I think Bo Bichette will command more than $151 million, and while the Blue Jays may balk any amount greater than that figure, they should still be willing to pay him whatever it takes to keep him around for the bulk of his career. Because of his position and his consistency (again, his first month of this season notwithstanding), Bichette has emerged as the best scion of a baseball family in Toronto, and time’s running out to extend bounty hunter Boba Chette before he hits free agency after the 2025 campaign. I actually think he’ll age better than ZiPS does, at least offensively. Either way, shortstops get super expensive if you wait until they hit the open market. That means that now’s the time for the Blue Jays to extend him if they’re going to keep him, even if that means going over this projected offer to ensure he doesn’t reach free agency.

Alex Bregman, Houston Astros (Four years, $101 million)

The Astros have been able to let some of their offensive contributors walk in free agency — Springer and Carlos Correa among them — mainly because they’ve had pretty solid replacements coming up at the same time, such as Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, and Jeremy Peña. There’s no similar player on the horizon who can take the place of Alex Bregman. And with Houston already reeling with its pitchers, it would be a lot to ask the front office to fill a gaping hole at third base as well.

Max Fried, Atlanta Braves (Six years, $150 million)

Atlanta has a knack for being able to survive epidemics of pitcher injuries in ways that are fascinating if you’re a fan of the team and maddening if you root for another one. But with Spencer Strider already out for the rest of this season after undergoing internal brace surgery for his damaged elbow, can Atlanta really afford to let Max Fried and Charlie Morton depart this offseason? I like what Reynaldo López has done this season, but you don’t really want to go into 2025 counting on his continued success, Chris Sale’s health, and a full recovery from Strider following his second UCL procedure? The Braves reportedly offered six years, $162 million to Aaron Nola; how could they not make a similar offer to Fried, a similarly valued pitcher who has been a large part of their recent success? Now, all reports I’ve heard suggest Fried’s not keen on discussing an extension during the season, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t change his mind if Atlanta gives him a good reason to do so.

Josh Naylor, Cleveland Guardians (Four years, $80 million)

Since the start of the 2002 season, the Guardians have received 10,109 plate appearances from first basemen not named Jim Thome, Carlos Santana, or Josh Naylor. Those 57 hitters have combined to hit .253/.324/.426 for 7.7 WAR, or about 0.5 WAR per 600 plate appearances. This is a franchise that has struggled to find solid fill-in first basemen, so it’s hard to imagine the Guardians would be able to find an an adequate replacement if Naylor walks after 2026. And this is hardly a blockbuster deal; it’s similar to what Kyle Schwarber got from the Phillies coming off the best season of his career (2.7 WAR in 2021). Naylor’s not a superstar, but he’s in his prime years. That should be enough incentive for the Guards to pay for him to stick around, and so long as the deal is fair, the fact that Josh’s younger brother Bo also plays for Cleveland might make him more inclined to stay.

Jackson Merrill, San Diego Padres (Seven years, $95 million)

Jackson Merrill has one of the odder long-term projections according to ZiPS, which expects him to have a long, stable plateau rather than a period of significant growth followed by a steady decline (at least in the years covered below). But ZiPS is increasingly coming around to his reputation as a good bad-ball hitter, and his batting average projections have improved considerably since the winter. Merrill looks to be a solid player, and he’s one the Padres may need toward the end of their long-term deals with infielders Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado, and Jake Cronenworth.

Pete Alonso, New York Mets (No offer)

Pete Alonso is rightfully a very popular player in New York, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the Polar Bear, both because homers are fun and because ZiPS was in on him very early when he was a prospect (everyone likes looking smart). And with his free agency imminent, this would be a suitable time to extend him on a long-term contract. The problem is, the more I look at the situation, the harder it is for me to think of a scenario in which he and the Mets could come to terms on a deal unless one party was willing to come out of the negotiation feeling very unhappy. ZiPS suggests a four-year, $70 million contract, and I can’t imagine Alonso feeling anything but insulted by an offer like that. I think given Alonso’s place in the organization and the hiccups in the development of Brett Baty and Mark Vientos, the Mets would be willing to pay Alonso more than a projection suggests, but I can’t see them offering him Freddie Freeman or Matt Olson money, either. Because the basic fact is that Freeman and Olson are more well-rounded players than Alonso, who has one amazing dimension. Just to illustrate, below Alonso I’ve included the projections for Freeman and Olson over the next six years.

Alonso projects to be slightly worse than them in the short term and then to be similar in the later years, though that’s likely because he is younger than them. Plus, by the end of 2024, the other players’ contracts already will have covered two additional prime seasons from Olson and three from Freeman. I don’t think any pending free agent has a bigger gulf than Alonso does between the perceived value of his past and the expected value of his future, and as such, this has contract boondoggle written all over it, as big as it was with Kris Bryant a couple years ago. I don’t envy the Mets for the decision they have to make with Alonso, because letting him go, trading him, and keeping him all feel like poor options.

Tuesday, April 2 was a good day for the Chicago White Sox. A solid seven-inning start from Garrett Crochet gave the team a lead into the late innings and the bullpen managed to preserve the win. This win, the first of the season, moved to Sox to a 1-4 record, a .200 winning percentage. That’s not an impressive start to the season by any means, but that 1-4 record represents the high-water mark of the month-old 2024 season for the Pale Hose. At no point in the last three weeks have the White Sox had a seasonal winning percentage better than .200, and the four-game losing streak to begin the year is their shortest losing streak so far. Whenever a team that’s projected to be terrible starts the season even worse than expected, we instinctually invoke the 1962 Mets, who set the record for the most losses in a season, at 120. We’re at that point with these White Sox.

What’s striking about Chicago’s start is that in some ways, it’s not even particularly unlucky. Yes, Yoán Moncada and Luis Robert Jr. are out for significant stretches of time, but the projected WAR for their missed playing time so far is a bit under one win. The team’s had only two other IL stints since the start of the season and both injured players, reliever John Brebbia and slugger Eloy Jiménez, returned quickly. Other than Moncada and Robert, the Sox are fielding largely the lineup, rotation, and bullpen that they intended to when the season began. They’re only about a single win worse than their Pythagorean record, and in their three wins, they outscored their opponents by a total of four runs, meaning they were just a few bad breaks from being in the 1988 Orioles territory of dreadful starts.

Chicago’s pitching, at least, hasn’t been completely hopeless. Don’t get me wrong, the White Sox staff ranks at or near the bottom of the league in ERA, FIP, and the various spins on these numbers, but the bullpen has been sort of average, and there have been at least flashes of competence from some of the starters. Crochet’s ERA is ugly, but his peripheral stats are much better and the reasons he’s struggled (homer rate, BABIP) are two of the most volatile stats in existence. Erick Fedde has looked a lot better than he did before his stint in Korea and was terrific on Tuesday, striking out 11 Twins in a 6-5 walk-off loss for the Sox. No, it’s not the pitching that’s the primary offender right now; it’s the offense.

The White Sox have been cosplaying as a Deadball era team, hitting .189/.263/.292 and scoring barely over two runs per game. To put that into context, they have a 62 wRC+ as a team, a mark that has never been maintained for a full season by any big league club; the worst hitting team over a full season was the 1920 Philadelphia A’s, with a 68 wRC+. Even if we look at just the first 24 games of a season, the White Sox lineup is among the most inept since 1901.

Teams were shut out an average of 10.3 times last year; these White Sox have been shut out eight times, meaning they’ve already been shut out half as many times as the offense that led the majors in shutouts last season, the Oakland A’s. Chicago is more than a third of the way toward matching the 2019 Marlins and 2022 Tigers for the highest single-season total of shutouts in the wild-card era, with 22. Let’s catch up quickly on the current AL Central projections in ZiPS.

The White Sox are hopelessly out of the race in a division where “showing up for the season” is basically all it takes to contend. Their current 80th percentile projection to finish the season is about 10 wins worse than the 20th percentile projection for any other team. That 20th percentile projection of 47.2 wins would amount to 115 losses, tantalizingly close to 120. Let’s get the exact distribution of the South Siders’ results.

ZiPS currently gives the White Sox an 8.1% chance of winning 42 or fewer games. When I projected the A’s last year, they came out with only a 5.2% shot at finishing that poorly. Congratulations?

The 2024 White Sox are fairly likely to set franchise records for futility. The current projections give them a 43% chance to have the worst winning percentage in franchise history, a mark currently held by the 1932 club, at .325.

It’s also hard to see where the White Sox would get surges of improvement outside of a regression toward the mean. At the earliest, Moncada is still a few months away from returning. ZiPS is already assuming that Robert’s IL stint will be much shorter and he’ll come back and play as he was expected to coming into the season. There are no hotshot prospects expected to make an impact this year, and the big league roster looks an awful lot like a Triple-A team at the moment, full of fringy veterans.

And don’t forget: The White Sox could get even worse than this come trade season. Moncada’s likely going to return too late to be tradeable at the deadline, but everyone else should be available. I’m including Robert; next season is his last under his base contract before the team option years, and I can’t envision this franchise turning things around before he hits free agency. If 2023 wasn’t sufficient notice that the team’s competitive window has been slammed shut and locked, it’s clear now that the whole thing has been bricked over.

It’s tragic – in a baseball sense – that the fans endured a seven-year rebuild only to have the win-now phase amount to only two seasons, one of them severely shortened by the pandemic. And unlike teams that can claim to have suffered an extraordinary series of unfortunate events, this tale is largely one the White Sox wrote for themselves. Coming off a 93-win season in 2021 in which they lapped the division, finishing in first by 13 games, the White Sox suddenly stopped acting like contenders. Rather than addressing their weaknesses, they simply added a couple of relievers (Kendall Graveman and Joe Kelly) and called it an offseason. Despite getting no offensive contributions from second base, the outfielder corners, and designated hitter in 2021, the team’s big position player move was bringing back Leury García on a three-year contract.

Demosthenes, an Athenian politician of the fourth century BC, once wrote that “the easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.” This comes from one his speeches (the Olynthiacs) in which he urged military support of Olynthus, attacked by Philip II of Macedon in 349 BC. And it’s a fitting quote for the White Sox, a team that has largely been run with decisions based on things they want to be true, rather than things that are actually so.

The White Sox wanted to address the second base hole, a problem for years, by just going with whatever utility guys they had on hand. They wanted Andrew Vaughn to hit in the majors in 2021, despite his struggles at High-A ball in 2019 and the cancellation of the minor leagues in 2020. They wanted Tony La Russa to manage the team to glory, and Jiménez to turn into prime José Bautista, and Moncada to stay healthy. The wish list goes on and on.

The end result is that the Sox squandered a position in which they had many advantages. They were a team at the top of the division with a payroll that was tens of millions of dollars from the luxury tax threshold. They had much of their young core a long way from free agency and the financial potential of playing in one of the country’s largest media markets. They played in the weakest division in baseball. Now they’re the worst team in that division.

The White Sox are too far gone, with problems that run too deep to be papered over by a few personnel changes and a handful of hires to their notoriously tiny analytics department. At this point, it feels like the only way for the franchise to turn things around is to clean house. That includes Jerry Reinsdorf, the team’s owner, who by all indications is a large part of the current dysfunction, but who by all indications has no intention of selling the team. So, can the White Sox lose 120 games? Sure. But maybe the better question is this: What would it matter if they did?

If the Houston Astros were to sing a jovial song consisting of a list of their favorite things, April 2024 would definitely not make the cut. At 7-16, the Astros are looking up at everyone in the AL West, even the Oakland Athletics, a franchise that barely exists as a going concern in 2024. Cristian Javier’s injury adds another name to the injured list, and though he isn’t expected to miss a lot of time, his absence further depletes a struggling team that needs all the help it can get to climb its way out of a hole that keeps getting deeper.

How bad is a 7-16 start? Well, only two teams have ever overcome such a rough season-opening stretch to later make the postseason.

Only the 1914 Boston Braves had a worse start, going 4-18-1 over their first 23 games. It may be tempting to use that tale as inspiration, but the fact that their turnaround was enough to earn them the appellation of “Miracle” Braves reflects the improbability of the feat. Excluding the Astros, 103 teams have started a season with precisely seven wins in 23 games; the average finish for these teams was, pro-rated to 162 games, a 67-95 record.

But all is not doom and gloom. Almost 20% of these teams played at least .500 ball the rest of the way (18 of 103), and this looks a bit worse because of the simple fact that a lot more lousy teams start off 7-16 than good ones do. It doesn’t necessarily follow, then, that a team we believed to be a quality one will have a fate as bleak as what happened with the clubs we thought would be much worse. How often do teams that we expect to be good start off this slow? I’ve never gone back and re-projected whole leagues before I started running team projections in 2005 – though it is on my voluminous to-do list – but I do have nearly two decades of projections to look at. So, I took every team that stood at single-digit wins after 23 games and looked at how they were projected entering the season.

After chopping off the teams from 2020, since 23 games was a massive chunk of that season, we end up with 117 teams, including the Astros on seven occasions (though only one of those Houston clubs finished above .500). Seven of those 117 teams did go on to win 90 games, and not surprisingly, it was largely made up of teams projected to be good; those seven teams had an average preseason projection of 86.3 wins.

Let’s pivot back to the 103 teams that began the season with exactly seven wins in their first 23 games so we can figure out how they did after their wretched starts and compare their actual finishes to their projected ones. Collectively, these 103 teams had a .458 winning percentage after their 23-game starts, compared to their overall .469 winning percentage projected before the season. I also did a quick-and-dirty method to get every team’s in-season projection after game no. 23, and the projected winning percentage for the rest of the year was .460, barely above the .458 actual mark. I tested only ZiPS, but I expect other similarly calculated projection systems to have similar results.

So, what do the projections say about the Astros right now? I ran a full simulation after Sunday’s games were complete.

The Astros are hardly dead in the water and are helped out by the fact that the best teams in the AL West so far are still hanging right around .500. But it’s been enough to slash five projected wins from Houston’s preseason total and drop its playoff probability by about a third. In other words, after this awful start, the Astros are more likely than not to miss the postseason, according to ZiPS. The situations in which they make the playoffs are now largely upside scenarios rather than average ones. And that means the calendar is now an enemy.

How long can they afford to keep winning three out of every 10 games before their playoff hopes evaporate? To estimate this, I’ve continued giving the Astros a roster strength of .300 (projected winning percentage vs. a league-average team in a neutral park) and re-checking every five games.

At the rate the Astros are playing, they’re basically toast in five more weeks. Even playing .500 ball over this span carves off another meaty slice of their playoff probabilities (15.6% division, 31.6% postseason). Any shot they have at turning things around has to involve getting better pitching. The Astros are second in the league in on-base percentage and slugging percentage, and of the nine players with at least 50 plate appearances, seven of them have a wRC+ above 100, with three of them above 150. Alex Bregman (76 wRC+) will almost certainly get better, but I’m less confident about José Abreu, whose horrifying start (-32 wRC+) is even more abysmal than last year’s putrid April (45 wRC+).

Meanwhile, Astros starting pitchers have the fourth-worst strikeout rate (18.8%) and the second-worst walk rate (11.3%) in baseball. To get better pitching quickly is going to be a challenge due to injuries. As noted briefly above, Javier is going to miss at least a couple of starts. And while Framber Valdez is nearing a return, José Urquidy isn’t fully throwing from a mound yet, and Luis Garcia and Lance McCullers Jr. are months away. Justin Verlander’s return isn’t enough to flip the script instantly. That leaves Houston in an awkward situation in which it needs pitching before the deadline, but perhaps not as much afterwards. I usually counsel teams not to panic, but given the urgency of this situation, I think the Astros need to be aggressive at identifying and acquiring pitchers. The Marlins may not be keen on giving up Edward Cabrera given his low salary, but the Astros should at least have the conversation about a trade for him.

Houston remains an excellent team, but starting 7-16 means that the clock is ticking very loudly. And if the Astros just stand pat, by the All-Star break they might find themselves turning their attention toward 2025.

Pitching for Triple-A Indianapolis on Thursday, Paul Skenes extended his streak of scoreless innings to 12 2/3 to start the season. In his fourth start, Skenes whiffed eight of the 14 batters he faced against the St. Paul Saints, Minnesota’s Triple-A affiliate.

Skenes is the best pitching prospect according to our prospect rankings, so I doubt I have to use too much of this space to convince you that Skenes is an impressive talent. Across nine professional starts since being the first pick in the 2023 draft, he has struck out an eye-popping 37 batters in 19 1/3 innings, just under half of all batters he’s faced. In addition to those strikeouts, he’s allowed just four walks – this is not a case of a flamethrower with only a casual acquaintance with the strike zone – and has yet to allow a professional homer. He ranked only fifth among pitching prospects in the ZiPS Top 100, which may not sound quite as electrifying, but given that ZiPS is designed to be suspicious of players with almost no professional experience, it was high praise to consider him that highly after he’d recorded only 6 2/3 innings as a professional before 2024.

Skenes throws hard, and entering Thursday’s game, he had the highest average fastball velocity of any Triple-A pitcher.

Suffice it to say, Thursday didn’t do anything to change where Skenes lands on this ever-so-slightly dated ranking, as his 41 fastballs against St. Paul averaged 100.5 mph. His slowest fastball traveled at 99.1 mph, enough that it would be the offering of a lifetime for many pitchers. Adding in his most recent start, his contact rate on those fastballs is the third lowest in Triple-A (min. 30 fastballs), behind only Edwin Uceta and Mason Englert.

Velocity, of course, doesn’t mean much if your secondary pitches aren’t good. But Skenes is no slouch here, either.

The table above includes his seven whiffs on the 10 secondary pitches he threw Thursday. Clearly, Skenes isn’t a pitcher using velocity to try to make up for lackluster secondary offerings. He knows how to miss bats just as well with chicanery as he does with brute force. He’s so thoroughly dominated hitters that he’s been heavily using just his fastball, changeup, and slider; he’s thrown one curveball in total over his last two starts (against Toledo on April 12), and on Thursday, he threw his “splinker” (splitter-sinker) twice against St. Paul. When Skenes isn’t leaving batters futilely swinging at gaseous oxygen and nitrogen, they’ve generally been hitting those pitches into the ground, not the stands.

Back before the season, ZiPS already saw Skenes as a league-average starter in 2024 despite almost no professional experience. For his four starts in 2024, ZiPS translates those numbers as one homer, three walks, and 20 strikeouts in 12 innings, for an ERA of 2.72. Add in that and the Statcast numbers that stabilize very quickly and Skenes’ ZiPS projections are now aligned with his Steamer ones.

In terms of run prevention, Skenes’ projection for the rest of this season is better than the three top members of Pittsburgh’s rotation, Martín Pérez, Mitch Keller, and Jared Jones. And that sunny optimism comes from a mean ol’ projection system, which doesn’t have the ability to get a shiver down its transistors when it sees Skenes exile batters like they’re Bruce Banner walking away to sad piano music.

Now, even without looking at this through the cynical lens of service time shenanigans, you can understand why the Pirates are being conservative with Skenes, though you certainly don’t have to agree with what they’re doing. As noted, Skenes doesn’t have a lot of professional experience and they are trying to keep his workload down. He throws the ball ridiculously hard, and extreme velocity does come with the risk of elbow damage and, therefore, Tommy John surgery. But that risk will be there at whatever level he’s throwing, and the whole purpose of giving a pitcher minor league experience is for him to learn how to get big league hitters out. I’m a believer in the idea that you have to challenge a prospect, and the only players who can challenge Skenes at this point are in the majors.

Besides, the Pirates can still manage Skenes’ workload in the majors. They can continue to give him three-inning appearances and ramp him up gradually with some creativity. Let him start and throw those three-inning specials or tandem starts or just have him pitch three or four innings in relief when the opportunity arises. Even if they’re not confident enough in his durability to start him, Skenes can certainly throw quality bullpen innings and reduce the workload of the rest of the ‘pen. Earl Weaver, my favorite manager ever both for objective and subjective reasons (hey, I’m from Baltimore), was certainly quite happy to break starters in as relievers for a while. Jim Palmer, Doyle Alexander, Scott McGregor, Dennis Martinez, and Mike Flanagan all spent good chunks of time as relievers before Weaver put them into the rotation.

[Note: As my colleague Jay Jaffe just reminded me, Weaver wasn’t manager until ’68, so Palmer was Hank Bauer, not Weaver -DS]

This becomes even more of an imperative when you consider where the Pirates are in the standings. If they were playing like the White Sox, maybe calling up Skenes in a furious attempt to avoid losing 110 games wouldn’t be worth upsetting the apple cart. The Pirates may have cooled down since their torrid start, but at 11-8, they are just a game out of first place in the NL Central. ZiPS currently projects the Pirates to have a 10.3% chance of winning the division and a 23.3% chance of making the postseason. If Skenes throws 100 innings in the majors this year, rather than the 60 that ZiPS currently projects when doing its season simulations, Pittsburgh’s odds to win the division climb to 14.2% and its probability to snag a playoff berth jumps to 28.9%. In a tight NL Central race, with all five teams having a plausible shot at winning the division, every game truly matters.

For years, the Pirates have been sacrificing the present to build for the future, so they shouldn’t sacrifice that future to play for a premature present. That said, because Skenes is clearly ready to face big league hitters, there’s no point in keeping him in the minors. It’s time for the Pirates to promote him and make their future the present.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: TIMEFORADANCHAT AH CN ADAR OF EMIT

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Some stir-fried chicken I made on Tuesday.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I’m writing on this for tomorrow!

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