The last thing the Yankees needed amid a slump that’s knocked them into last place in the AL East for the first time since April 26, 2021 was in injury to their best player. Yet that’s what they’re facing, because on Monday they placed Aaron Judge on the 10-day injured list due to a strain in his right hip. While the injury isn’t believed to be a severe one — indeed, the reigning AL MVP and the team waited the weekend to see if he felt good enough to return to the lineup — it comes at a time when New York has already been hit hard by injuries, magnifying the roster’s shaky construction.

Judge injured himself last Wednesday, on his 31st birthday. In the second inning, after collecting his second double of the game off the Twins’ Kenta Maeda and helping the Yankees build up a 5–0 lead, he attempted to steal third base. Catcher Christian Vázquez made a perfect peg to third baseman Willi Castro, who tagged Judge on his helmet as he made an awkward headfirst slide into the bag.

The initial concern about Judge was that he’d jammed his right wrist; cameras and tweets from the Target Field press box showed him flexing and shaking his right hand in the dugout afterwards. That he was serving as the team’s designated hitter that day created some suspense as to whether he’d take his next plate appearance. He did, and reached base two more times. But he departed after four innings and two plate appearances on Thursday against the Rangers due to discomfort in his right hip. “It was just a little grab in the hip area — after that headfirst slide… the whole right side has been a little locked up,” he said after that game. “The culmination of having that [slide] and a couple of swings today, I just really couldn’t get it loose.”

An MRI showed what the team described as a small strain near the top of his right hip. Judge didn’t play in any of the remaining three games of the series, forcing an already beaten-up team to play shorthanded. The Yankees lost all three, scoring just four runs and collecting a total of 16 hits. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Rangers shocked the baseball world by signing Jacob deGrom to a five-year, $185 million contract in December, it was with the hope that the 34-year-old righty could steer clear of the type of injuries that limited him to a total of 26 starts in the 2021 and ’22 seasons. But since the opening of camps in February, it’s been a bumpy ride, and that’s carried over into the regular season. On Friday night, for the second time in three starts, deGrom took an early exit due to an arm issue; this time, he’s headed to the injured list, with a diagnosis of elbow inflammation. To call upon an oft-used metaphor: this fancy, expensive, high-performance sports car is once again in the shop.

Facing a Yankees lineup weakened by injuries — no Aaron Judge, no Giancarlo Stanton, no Josh Donaldson — on Friday night, deGrom cruised through the first three innings, retiring all nine hitters on a total of 28 pitches, striking out two and never reaching a three-ball count. He began to labor in the fourth, however. After a six-pitch groundout by DJ LeMahieu, he issued a five-pitch walk to Anthony Rizzo, then went to a full count against Gleyber Torres before getting him to fly out, and finally allowed a two-strike single to Willie Calhoun. Notably, deGrom’s last two pitches to Calhoun — a 96.6 mph fastball taken for a ball and then the 89.4 mph slider that he hit, both of which were several inches outside — were down about three miles per hour relative to their previous offerings of that type.

That sudden drop cued pitching coach Mike Maddux and the team trainer to visit the mound; Maddux soon tag-teamed with manager Bruce Bochy, who did little more than pat a dejected-looking deGrom on the shoulder and send him on his way.

After the Rangers finished off their 5–2 win, the team announced that deGrom had departed due to forearm tightness; the pitcher himself described it as “just some discomfort.” According to general manager Chris Young, an MRI taken the next day showed inflammation, but notably, he made no mention of structural damage, suggesting that whatever the team saw with regards to deGrom’s ulnar collateral ligament, flexor, and whatever else was, if not in mint condition, not a concern at this time. The Rangers elected to put him on the 15-day injured list, though Young downplayed the situation, saying, “[H]e came in today and felt OK, which was a positive, but given how important he is to us and our season, we’re going to play this very cautiously and see how he responds over the next several days to treatment. And then after seven to 10 days, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next steps are.” Read the rest of this entry »

Say this for the White Sox: They scored runs on Thursday. Sure, they were thrashed 14–5 by the Rays, which extended their losing streak to eight games, but they ended their scoreless streak at 25 innings, scored more runs than they had in the previous four games (three), and matched their total of hits from the previous three games (11). When you’ve lost 13 out of your last 15 games, this counts as progress.

Chicago’s current skid has dropped the team’s record to 7–19, the third-worst in the majors. There’s no ambiguity about whether the White Sox are bad: they also have the third-worst run differential and projected winning percentage, according to both PythagenPat and BaseRuns:

In the words of James Brown, “People, it’s bad.” Read the rest of this entry »

Robbie Ray did not replicate his 2021 AL Cy Young-winning form last year. In fact, he struggled down the stretch, but he did make a solid contribution as the Mariners ended their 21-year playoff drought. Alas, he won’t get to help them try to repeat that feat. On Wednesday, the Mariners announced that the 31-year-old lefty will undergo surgery to repair a torn flexor tendon and miss the remainder of the season.

After a promising spring training in which he restored some lost velocity to his four-seam fastball, Ray made just one start, and it wasn’t pretty. Facing the Guardians on March 31, he needed 26 pitches to complete the first inning, during which he issued back-to-back four-pitch walks to José Ramírez and Josh Bell before escaping by striking out Josh Naylor. His fastball velocity quickly diminished and he lasted just 3.1 innings, walking five and surrendering four hits and five runs (three earned).

In the immediate aftermath, Ray didn’t tell reporters that he had felt tightness in his forearm starting in the second inning, a problem that he attributed to the cold weather. After undergoing an MRI the next day due to lingering soreness, he was diagnosed with a Grade 1 flexor strain; only in discussing the injury with reporters did he reveal his discomfort. Read the rest of this entry »

The good times are rolling in Pittsburgh. Though their seven-game winning streak ended on Tuesday night as they failed to hold a 7-2 lead against the Dodgers, the Pirates are off to a 16-8 start, their best since 1992, and they lead the NL Central by a game. What’s more, they’ve finally sealed a long-term deal with their star left fielder, as Bryan Reynolds has reportedly agreed to an eight-year, $106.75 million extension that covers his 2023-30 seasons.

It’s the largest contract in Pirates history, outdoing Ke’Bryan Hayes‘ eight-year, $70 million extension as the team ventures into nine-digit territory for the first time. The deal includes a six-team no-trade list, the first time in 17 years that the Pirates have included some form of no-trade protection in a contract. Notably, it does not include an opt-out clause, an item that had previously been a stumbling block when the two sides neared a deal with the same dollars-and-years framework just before Opening Day. Reynolds wanted an opt-out after 2026, meaning that the Pirates would gain only one more year of control if he were to exercise that option.

As with that proposal, the contract incorporates the 28-year-old Reynolds’ $6.75 million salary for this season, his second of arbitration eligibility (as a Super Two, he has two more remaining). He also receives a $2 million signing bonus, with salaries of $10 million and $12 million for 2024 and ’25, his final two arb years, and then $14 million for ’26 and $15 million annually for ’27-30. The Pirates hold a $20 million club option and $2 million buyout for his services in 2031, his age-36 season.

If those annual salaries seems a little light to you, you’re not alone, but the particulars of his situation make it worth a closer look. We’ll start with Dan Szymborksi’s ZiPS projection from February, which suggested a six-year, $95 million valuation for Reynolds’ 2024-29 years:

Under the actual contract, Reynolds will be paid just $81 million for those six years. On the other hand, he’ll make $15 million for what eyeballs to be about a one-win projection for 2030, so much of that shortfall comes out in the wash.

The problem for Reynolds — the reason the dollar figures aren’t bigger — is something of a perfect storm of service time and aging curves. He was stellar in 2021, making the NL All-Star team while hitting .302/.390/.522 (141 wRC+) with 6.2 WAR, but he slipped to .262/.345/.461 (125 wRC+) and 2.8 WAR last year. Even with ZiPS forecasting him at 4.0 WAR this year, going forward he projects to lose about one win for every two years as he ages. On top of that, his salary is being drastically suppressed by the arbitration system during what project to be his strongest seasons; as a free agent, he’d be worth over $30 million a year for 2023-25, but he’ll only make about 30% of that.

As Dan summarized via Twitter, “[I]t’s hard to value those seventh and eighth years very highly at all for a 3-4 win player that far away in his mid-30s. Obviously, Reynolds would have done better if he were a free agent this year. But he’s not and this price is the product of his age and MLB’s service-time rules; Reynolds just didn’t have a great deal of leverage because the Pirates already had nearly all the years they wanted.”

That’s a bit of a harsh reality, but it’s offset by Reynolds getting the stability and security he valued. Though he requested a trade in December after the team reportedly offered a six-year, $80 million extension — over $50 million short of the eight-year, $134 million deal he was seeking — he cared enough to return to the table and found a way to stay, even forgoing the opt-out.

It’s nice to see Pirates fans get nice things for a change, and the structure of Reynolds’ deal is such that even by the craptastic standards of the way the team has been run under owner Bob Nutting, none of the annual salaries should be backbreaking. Unless his option is picked up, Reynolds won’t even set the franchise’s single-season record for salary, and not until 2027 would he surpass Andrew McCutchen for the highest salary solely paid by the team, which turns out to be an important distinction given their dismal history:

Is Reynolds as good as prime Cutch? No, but McCutchen signed his six-year, $51.5 million extension 11 years ago, and industry inflation has obviously pushed salaries upwards since then. Someone was bound to break McCutchen’s franchise record before the next ice age arrived, and it makes sense that it was Reynolds, whose 6.2 WAR in 2021 was the highest for a Pirate since McCutchen’s 7.4 WAR in ’14.

As for his current performance, when I checked in on him just a couple of weeks ago, Reynolds was off to a sizzling start, hitting .356/.367/.778, leading the NL in slugging percentage and homers (five), and ranking fifth in both WAR (0.7) and wRC+ (184); amid that tear, he was named NL Player of the Week. Now he’s down to .294/.319/.553, and his 127 wRC+ is just two points ahead of last year and two behind his preseason ZiPS projection. Regression doesn’t mess around, kids.

That said, even given the ups and downs, Reynolds is hitting the ball harder this season than he has in the past, and the sample sizes are either approaching or past the point where they start to stabilize, so his performance is worth an update:

Via Baseball Prospectus’ Russell Carleton, exit velocity begins to stabilize around 40 batted ball events and barrel rate at 50 BBE, so you can start to take what he’s done thus far seriously; he’s in the 84th percentile for the former and 92nd percentile for the latter. Ground ball, fly ball, and hard-hit rates begin to stabilize at 80 BBE, a total he should reach soon after he returns from the bereavement list. (Reynolds left the team for a personal matter on Sunday, which allowed the Pirates to recall 33-year-old career minor leaguer Drew Maggi, who has yet to get into a game — what’s Derek Shelton waiting for?)

With more balls in the air, a higher average exit velocity, and more frequent barrels, Reynolds has an expected batting average of .314 (95th percentile) and an expected slugging percentage of .604 (93rd percentile); he’s fallen off from the major league-leading .896 he put up during the season’s first two weeks, but that was always going to happen.

The good news for the Pirates is that even as Reynolds has cooled off, other players have stepped up, to the point that Connor Joe (.328/.423/.590, 174 wRC+), Jack Suwinski (.269/.385/.635, 166 wRC+) and McCutchen (.270/.371/.527, 141 wRC+) are outhitting him within a lineup that ranks sixth in the NL in wRC+ (108) and fourth in scoring (4.92 runs per game). Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball the Pirates are allowing only 3.92 runs per game, the NL’s fourth-lowest rate, and they’re tied with the Brewers for third in the league in run differential (+24) behind only the Cubs (+45) and Braves (+38). It’s still early enough not to get too wound up about their start, but for the first time in awhile, the Pirates are offering significant measures of hope, and wrapping up Reynolds for the future is something worth celebrating.

Logan O’Hoppe has been one of the bright spots of the Angels’ up-and-down season, but unfortunately, the 23-year-old rookie catcher may have played his last game in 2023. On Sunday, the team revealed that O’Hoppe will need surgery to repair the torn labrum in his left shoulder, an injury that is expected to sideline him for four to six months.

The 23-year-old backstop first injured the shoulder while swinging the bat last Monday in Boston, but he remained in the game and played the next three as well. “It felt fine after it popped back in, in Boston,” he told reporters on Sunday, describing what sounds like a subluxation, not unlike what Fernando Tatis Jr. frequently experienced before undergoing surgery last September. “I mean, you hit three or four balls over 100 [mph], you think you’re fine,” he added.

Alas, O’Hoppe reaggravated the injury while hitting a single in the ninth inning of Thursday night’s 9–3 loss at Yankee Stadium. He fell down in obvious pain after hitting a hot smash down the third base line, recovered to run to first base on what otherwise would have been a double, then exited for a pinch-runner.

The Angels put O’Hoppe on the injured list on Friday, and by Sunday his season was in jeopardy. Only after he undergoes surgery on Tuesday will the prognosis be more clear, though for the moment he and the Angels have some optimism that a return in late August or September will be possible. Read the rest of this entry »

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks!

2:03	Jay Jaffe: Sorry for the brief delay. I was immersed in details about Bryan Reynolds’ extension, which I’ll be covering for FanGraphs tomorrow. Today I have a piece on Logan O’Hoppe’s season-threatening labrum injury https://blogs.fangraphs.com/logan-ohoppes-promising-rookie-season-may-…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: And yesterday I tapped into some Max Power https://blogs.fangraphs.com/muncy-is-back-to-showing-maximum-power/

2:03	Jay Jaffe: Anyway, on with the show

2:05	Jay Jaffe: I think not being an American team complicates things exponentially. I know there’s a lot of sentiment when it comes to returning baseball to Montreal but it’s not at all clear that anyone can get a ballpark built there, and without that, you’ve got bupkis.

Read the rest of this entry »

Max Muncy’s career has had its ups and downs in recent years… or steps forwards and backwards, depending upon which plane you prefer for directional metaphors. Lately the slugger has been on a home run binge, one involving a mechanical tweak — a slight step backwards with his left foot at the start of his swing — that he adopted last year and then briefly abandoned this spring.

This weekend, Muncy took over the major league lead in home runs with 11. He went yard four times during the Dodgers’ four-game visit to Wrigley Field from Thursday through Sunday, starting the festivities with a solo shot off starter Javier Assad on Thursday night, adding a pair of late-inning blasts off Mark Leiter Jr. and Brad Boxberger on Saturday (the first of those a two-run homer), and capping his weekend with a two-run drive off Marcus Stroman on Sunday. The last of those gave the Dodgers the lead and helped them take three games out of four from the Cubs.

Muncy’s hot streak didn’t just begin last Thursday; it’s been going on for two weeks. After homering just once while going 4-for-33 in his first nine games, he bookended a three-game series at Oracle Park with a pair of two-homer games, then homered in losing causes in series openers against the Cubs and Mets at Dodger Stadium. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Greene left his most recent start after taking a comebacker off his right shin, but the 23-year-old righty appears set to stick around Cincinnati for awhile. Per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the fireballer agreed to a six-year, $53 million extension (2023-28) with a seventh-year club option. Remarkably, amid the Reds’ teardown, this deal makes him the roster’s first player with a guaranteed salary for next season.

Via MLB Trade Rumors, this is the second-largest extension for a pitcher with between one and two years of service time, after Spencer Strider’s six-year, $75 million deal with the Braves. Strider sold high, so to speak, signing that contract coming off a 202-strikeout, 1.83-FIP season in which he was runner-up to teammate Michael Harris II in the NL Rookie of the Year voting. Greene, who’s less of a finished product, didn’t have quite that kind of platform.

Chosen with the second pick of the 2017 draft out of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California — at a point when he was still a two-way player — Greene quickly shifted his focus to pitching and found early success in the minors. He earned a spot in the 2018 Futures Game, but not long afterwards sprained his UCL and lost a season and a half to Tommy John surgery. When he debuted in the majors on April 10, 2022, he had just 186 minor league innings under his belt, which is to say that he was still rather raw. Particularly considering he was on a team that lost 100 games, and that he was hit hard early in the year, he acquitted himself well, posting a 4.44 ERA and 4.37 FIP in 125.2 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Kershaw didn’t need his 200th career win to burnish his Hall of Fame credentials, but on Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium, in his first start with the milestone within reach, he secured it in brilliant fashion. In an outing bookended by his pitching out of jams, Kershaw tossed seven scoreless innings against the Mets, a team he has utterly dominated throughout his career.

In securing the milestone, Kershaw joined Justin Verlander (244 wins), Zack Greinke (223), and Max Scherzer (203) among active pitchers, and Hall of Famers Don Sutton and Don Drysdale as those who won at least their first 200 games as Dodgers. He became the 121st pitcher in major league history to reach the plateau, and just the 13th to do so entirely with one team:

200+ wins, 1 team.

Clayton Kershaw just joined an exclusive list. pic.twitter.com/yCZYTsEgPw

— MLB Stats (@MLBStats) April 19, 2023

Before we go further, it’s time for the usual caveat about pitcher wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon the stat, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one doesn’t need to know how many wins a pitcher amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value — and single-season totals in particular can be wildly misleading — those totals do affect the popular perceptions of their careers and still carry a certain cachet among players. Read the rest of this entry »