At best, the Rays (54-52) and Cubs (51-56) are on the outskirts of their leagues’ respective Wild Card races, and while both have been busy ahead of the July 30 trade deadline, they’re geared towards improving for down the road rather than this season. On Sunday, the two teams came together for a swap of club-controlled third basemen, with Isaac Paredes heading to Chicago and Christopher Morel to Tampa Bay along with a pair of pitching prospects, righties Hunter Bigge and Ty Johnson.

The 25-year-old Paredes is no stranger to the Cubs, as they signed him out of Mexico for an $800,000 bonus in July 2015, then traded him to Tigers on July 31, 2017 — when he was still in A-ball — alongside Jeimer Candelario in exchange for Alex Avila and Justin Wilson. Since being dealt to the Rays in April 2022, he’s developed into an effective middle-of-the-lineup hitter. After receiving down-ballot MVP support for his 31-homer, .250/.352/.488 (137 wRC+) performance last year, he made his first All-Star team this year, and is currently hitting .245/.357/.435 (130 wRC+) with 16 homers.

Despite that output, Paredes does not hit the ball very hard. His 85-mph average exit velocity ranks in just the fourth percentile, while his 26.1% hard-hit rate is in the fifth percentile; his 5.4% barrel rate is in the 26th percentile. But Paredes excels at pulling fly balls, and particularly at depositing them into the left field corner, which at Tropicana Field is closer to home plate (315 feet) than any current ballpark, since balls hit to Fenway Park’s Green Monster (310 feet away but with a 37-foot high wall) and Minute Maid’s Crawford Boxes (315 feet away with a 21-foot high wall) both require greater elevation to get out. Entering Sunday, Paredes’ 46 pulled fly balls tied him with Anthony Santander for the major league lead, with all 16 of his homers coming via that route. Read the rest of this entry »

In the abstract, you can never have too much pitching, but managing 26- and 40-man rosters means dealing with practical limits instead of theoretical ones. Last Monday, in the midst of a week in which they would need to call up one starting pitcher and activate two more from the injured list, the Dodgers designated James Paxton for assignment. On Friday, they dealt the 35-year-old lefty to the Red Sox — the team he pitched for last season, and rehabbed from Tommy John surgery with the year before — in exchange for infielder Moises Bolivar, a 17-year-old Venezuela native playing in the Dominican Summer League.

Dogged by so many injuries throughout his 11-year major league career that he’s never topped 29 starts or qualified for the ERA title, Paxton has at least been healthy enough to remain in a rotation all season; his 18 starts and 89.1 innings both rank third on the Dodgers. He did a solid job for Los Angeles at times, but the returns had diminished in recent weeks. After allowing just two runs over an 18-inning span from June 11–24 — lowering his ERA to 3.39, albeit with a 4.78 FIP — Paxton was rocked for nine runs and 12 hits in four innings by the Giants on June 30, beginning a 17.2-inning, 17-run spiral that included 12 walks and three homers over his final four starts in blue. With that run of runs, he finished his stint with the Dodgers with a 4.43 ERA, a 4.96 FIP, a 4.84 xERA, and 0.3 WAR.

Interestingly enough, the last of Paxton’s starts was against the Red Sox in Los Angeles last Sunday. In five innings, Paxton walked four and allowed four hits and three runs while striking out seven. Since it was his 18th start of the season, it meant that he maxed out the $7 million worth of incentives in his one-year deal on top of his $4 million base salary and $3 million signing bonus; he received $2 million for making the Opening Day roster, $1 million for being on the roster on April 15, $600,000 apiece for reaching the 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 16-start milestones, and then $1 million for the 18th. Thus the Red Sox are only paying the prorated share of his base salary, about $1.4 million. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that Shohei Ohtani’s game is missing a dimension. After three straight seasons of excelling both at the plate and on the mound — a span that netted him two American League MVP awards, a runner-up spot, and a fourth-place finish in the Cy Young Award voting — the two-way phenom underwent his second ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction last September, and won’t pitch again until 2025. Even so, while moving from the Angels to the Dodgers via a record-setting 10-year, $700 million free agent deal, the now 30-year-old superstar is amid another dominant season, one that could earn him a third MVP award and bolster a unique case for the Hall of Fame.

Ohtani is a unicorn. No player in 20th- or 21st-century AL/NL history, not even Babe Ruth in his last two seasons with the Red Sox (1918–19), has sustained regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excelled at both endeavors. From 2021 — after returning from a lost, pandemic-shortened season in which he threw just 1.2 innings — to ’23, Ohtani did just that. He hit a combined .277/.379/.585 across those three seasons, posting the majors’ second-highest slugging percentage and fourth-highest wRC+ (157) and home run total (124), as well as the fourth-highest strikeout rate (31.4%) and sixth-lowest ERA (2.84) of any pitcher with at least 300 innings. By FanGraphs’ reckoning, his 26.1 WAR for the span was 4.9 more than second-ranked Aaron Judge, while by that of Baseball Reference, the margin was 7.4 WAR (28.5 to 21.1).

While he’s not pitching every sixth or seventh day this season, Ohtani is balancing his daily presence in the Dodgers’ lineup with the typically arduous rehab from UCL surgery — he did not undergo a traditional Tommy John surgery but a hybrid procedure that involved both an artificial internal brace and the insertion of a tendon to repair the damaged ligament. Though he’s gone through streaks and slumps, you’d hardly know it from his numbers, as he’s hitting .312/.399/.635 while leading the National League in slugging percentage, homers (31), wRC+ (185), and position player WAR (5.5 fWAR, 5.7 bWAR). With six more steals, he’ll notch his first 30-homer/30-steal season, and with 0.4 more bWAR (or 1.1 more fWAR), he’ll set a career high for position player WAR. Per his rest-of-season ZiPS forecast, he’s projected to add another 2.1 WAR. (For the rest of this piece, I’ll be referring to the B-Ref version of WAR unless otherwise indicated.) Read the rest of this entry »

Francisco Lindor delivered a gut punch last night — or rather two of them, homering from both sides of the plate Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium and powering the Mets to a 12-3 rout and a four-game sweep of this year’s Subway Series. After a slow start, the 30-year-old switch-hitting shortstop has been on fire since moving into the leadoff spot in mid-May. He’s helped the Mets turn their season around, given himself a shot at replicating last year’s 30-homer, 30-stolen base combination, and burnished a resumé that will in all likelihood carry him to Cooperstown one day.

The Mets already led 3-2 when Lindor came to bat with one on in the fifth inning. Batting from the left side against a scuffling Gerrit Cole, he smoked a 92-mph cutter on the inner edge of the strike zone, launching a towering shot into the second deck in right field to open up a 5-2 lead. With the score 8-2 in the seventh and two men on, he hit righty against lefty Caleb Ferguson and crushed a 95-mph middle-middle fastball for a 432-foot three-run homer to left center:

The homers were Lindor’s 20th and 21st of the season. Paired with his 20 steals, he’s on pace to match or top last year’s combination of 31 homers and 31 steals and join Ronald Acuña Jr. as the only active players with two 30-30 seasons under their belts; Bobby Witt Jr. (18 homers and 23 steals) and José Ramírez (24 homers and 18 steals) could join him as well. After batting just .195/.268/.362 (82 wRC+) through May 17, mainly while hitting second or third, he’s hit .306/.388/.566 (171 wRC+) with 14 homers in 268 PA out of the leadoff spot. The Mets were 20-24 when manager Carlos Mendoza made the move, but they’re 33-24 since, half a game behind the Cardinals (34-24) for the National League’s best record. They now occupy the second NL Wild Card spot, and instead of a much-anticipated sell-off ahead of the July 30 trade deadline, they’re likely to be buyers. Read the rest of this entry »

It has not been a very good year for pitchers aspiring to reach the Hall of Fame. Two of the four starters widely perceived to have sealed the deal have yet to throw a single pitch in the majors thus far — one hasn’t even signed and may in fact be done — and the starter who entered the year with the most momentum didn’t debut until June 19 due to (gulp) an elbow injury. Just one Cy Young Award winner from the past decade has pitched a full season, while four are in various stages of recovery from Tommy John surgery. Meanwhile, the three most-likely relievers have all been erratic to some degree or another; one of them isn’t even his team’s regular closer.

With the Hall of Fame Induction Weekend circus having left Cooperstown following Sunday’s festivities to honor Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, Jim Leyland, and Joe Mauer, it’s a good time to ponder which active players are on their way. But particularly since the last time I took stock about a year ago, the picture is less rosy for just about every starter except Paul Skenes, and it’s far too early to talk about him. Even at a time when pitching seems to be winning the daily battle — scoring and slugging percentage are near their lowest marks in the last decade, and batting average is in a virtual tie (with 2022) for the fourth-lowest mark since 1900 — pitchers are losing the war against longevity.

This isn’t exactly a new topic, of course, and while I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how Hall voters will adjust their standards in the coming years, and how we might differently evaluate pitchers through tools such as S-JAWS (which reduces the skewing caused by the heavy-workload pitchers of the 19th and early 20th-centuries) and rolling WAR leaders, I don’t have a clear answer. The main problem is that if we decide to lower the standards by which we judge more recent starters, we are left with literally dozens of pitchers from past eras with similarly impressive resumés, and logistical roadblocks to honor an equitable share of them. If the recently retired Adam Wainwright (45.2 career WAR/36.5 adjusted peak WAR/40.7 S-JAWS) is worthy of a spot in Cooperstown, then how do we reckon with the careers of Luis Tiant (66./41.3/53.7), David Cone (62.3/43.3/52.8), Dave Stieb (56.4/41.8/49.1), and Johan Santana (51.7/45.0/48.3) — to name just a few aces from the past half-century? Given the ability to fit just eight candidates on an Era Committee ballot, with Negro Leaguers, managers, and executives also in the pre-1980 mix, and the deck generally stacked against candidates who fell victim to the Five Percent Rule, there’s little chance of catching up anytime soon. Read the rest of this entry »

At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the third full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, four are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, eight are between 1.0 and 2.0, and three are above 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .245/.321/.421 for a 109 wRC+; that last figure is up three points from last year, and seven points from the last time I did this list, via a slash line that’s virtually identical (the majors’ slugging percentage as a whole has dropped 17 points from last season).

This year, we’re seeing a greater number of teams invest more playing time in a single DH. Whereas each of the past two seasons saw three players reach the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five; similarly, 11 player are on pace to reach 400 PA as DHs, compared to eight last year. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.

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Today the Killers list turns the corner — or rather turns to the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in the outfield corners. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I’ve batched the two corners together into one supersized roundup because three of the seven teams below the WAR cutoff for left field also make the list for right field, and because there’s plenty of crossover in play with regards to personnel. The capsules are listed in order of their left field rankings first, while noting those three crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the July 30 deadline, but these are teams to keep an eye on. All statistics are through July 14.

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Strength up the middle is important to any contender, but with so many teams still in the hunt for a playoff spot, it’s no surprise some of them are have some weak spots. Sometimes it’s easier for a team to convince itself that the metrics aren’t fully capturing the strength of a light-hitting player’s defense if they’re playing a premium position, which seems to be the case with the shortstops and some of the center fielders in this year’s batch of Killers. On the flip side, occasionally it’s easier to justify shaky defense if there’s at least a hope of getting adequate offense. Then there are the times that guys get hurt and somebody has to stand out there in the middle pasture looking like they know what’s going on.

While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

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Today, we have a two-fer of Killers lists covering a couple of key defensive positions, specifically the hot corner and behind the plate. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. That may suggest that some of these teams will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because their performance at that spot thus far is worth a look.

Cubs

Following the free agent departure of Willson Contreras, last year the catching corps of Yan Gomes, Tucker Barnhart, and rookie Miguel Amaya ranked 21st in WAR. Heading into this season, it made at least some sense on paper to have the 25-year-old Amaya — a former Top 100 prospect who lost significant development time to the pandemic and November 2021 Tommy John surgery — get more playing time while moving the 37-year-old Gomes, whose framing metrics had declined, into a backup role. Unfortunately, both have been terrible. Amaya has hit just .201/.266/.288 (59 wRC+) with average-ish defense (good blocking, poor throwing) en route to -0.1 WAR. Gomes was even worse both at the plate (.154/.179/.242, 15 wRC+) and behind it (-5 DRS, -4 FRV, -3.9 FRM) before getting released on June 21, replaced by Tomás Nido, who had just been released by the Mets. Nido has hit .202/.229/.331 (57 wRC+) overall but is just 4-for-41 as a Cub. Defensively, he’s got a mixed bag of metrics, though he’s been a whisker above average framing-wise. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we turn our attention to the second base Killers. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin; as you can see by the table below, four of the six teams listed here project to receive more than a win from their current cast of second base options. Even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look, and the incumbent may no longer appear to be the best option.

Particularly in light of those projections, I don’t expect every team to go out and track down an upgrade before the July 30 deadline, though I’ll note that some of the players cited within for their poor performance are themselves change-of-scenery candidates; one team’s problem may be another team’s solution, albeit not necessarily an ideal one. Either way, I’m less concerned with those solutions – many of which have more moving parts involved than a single trade — than I am with the problems. Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics are through Sunday.

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