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-…
International Baseball: The Montreal Expos have one of the most iconic logos of all time and there seems to be a renewed interest in baseball. Can Montreal or Mexico City be taken seriously as expansion teams? How does the calculus of not being an American team factor in?
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.
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:
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 »
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my weekly chat.
2:02
Jay Jaffe: I just went live an hour ago with my deep dive into the news that a Salt Lake City-based group has thrown its hat in the ring to bring an expansion franchise to the city where I grew up — a possibility I was immediately dismissive of last week. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/salt-lake-citys-bid-for-a-major-league-exp…
Anthony: What the heck is going on with Alek Manoah? He’s been brutal so far after being great last year.
2:08
Jay Jaffe: Good question. I haven’t seen much of him but I notice that his velocity is down a bit, and he’s getting hit very hard (7.43 xERA, woof). A quick look at his Stuff+ data shows that the scores for both his fastball and slider have particularly receded, (103 to 98 on the former, 111 to 101 for the latter,), with his overall Stuff+ and Pitching+ (including location) falling from 100 to 94. Velocity, shape, movement, I’m not sure what’s up but I’d guess he’s got some mechanical issues to iron out.
That was my knee-jerk reaction to last week’s announcement that a Salt Lake City-based group had launched a bid for a Major League Baseball expansion team. Growing up in SLC from 1973–88, I learned to appreciate the area’s mix of minor and major league sports and accept its limitations. I’d already seen prospects on their way up and journeymen on their way down while attending several games of the Pacific Coast League’s Salt Lake Gulls and the Central Hockey League’s Salt Lake Golden Eagles by the time the NBA’s New Orleans Jazz sputtered into town in 1979, financially beleaguered and thin on talent. Frankly, that operation felt minor league itself.
The Jazz eventually grew into an NBA powerhouse, but even having lived and died with that team, and watched the city’s growth mostly from afar for the past three and a half decades (my parents do still reside there), I was not prepared to accept the notion that the city’s time had come for an MLB franchise. I fully understand why the average fan — who for years has been hearing about Portland, Nashville, Montreal and other potential sites — might not be either. But upon closer investigation, this skeptic is convinced the SLC bid is a real contender — though one major and almost unfathomable obstacle looms.
MLB has no imminent plans to expand, but that didn’t prevent a consortium called Big League Utah from announcing its intent to compete for a franchise once the league does decide it’s ready for a 31st and 32nd team. Last week, Big League Utah launched an eye-catching campaign in connection with the groundbreaking of a redevelopment that could include a new ballpark. In touting the state’s growth, economy, location, local enthusiasm for sports, and quality of life, the group calls Utah “a five-tool player” — and I have to admit, that’s a pretty catchy way of putting it. Read the rest of this entry »
The Rangers have spent virtually all of the young season atop the AL West, and they solidified their position this weekend by taking two out of three games from the Astros in Houston. Though they’re off to their best start in seven years, they lost Corey Seager to a left hamstring strain last week and may not get him back for a month, threatening the momentum they’ve built.
The 28-year-old Seager came up limping while running out a fifth-inning double against the Royals last Tuesday; he grabbed at his left hamstring shortly after rounding first base, hopped his way to second in awkward fashion, and then started back to the Rangers’ dugout before the trainer could reach him. On Wednesday, general manager Chris Young told the media that an MRI revealed Seager suffered a Grade 2 strain.
This is unfortunately an all-too-familiar position for Seager — on the injured list — and an all-too-familiar injury for him as well. While a member of the Dodgers in 2019, he missed a month with a similar left hamstring strain, not to be confused with the myriad other injuries the shortstop suffered with the Dodgers, including a torn ulnar collateral ligament requiring Tommy John surgery in 2018 and a right hand fracture in ’21. After playing 157 games and winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2016 and then 145 games the next year, Seager played in a total of 307 games out of a possible 546 from ’18 to ’21, the equivalent of 91 games over a full season.
After signing a 10-year, $325 million deal in December 2021, Seager was healthy enough to play in 151 games last year, his highest total since 2016, but despite clubbing a career-high 33 homers, he slumped to a .245/.317/.455 line, setting full-season lows in all three slash stats. That was still good for a respectable 117 wRC+, five points higher than his injury-marred 2019, but it wasn’t exactly what the Rangers had in mind when they signed him. Read the rest of this entry »
When the Braves won the World Series in 2021, Ronald Acuña Jr. was a bystander, as a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee knocked him out for the second half of the season and the entire postseason. He returned to action near the end of April last year, but while he was the Braves’ second-most valuable outfielder — which wasn’t saying much due to the slumps and calamities that befell the team’s other fly chasers — his performance was far short of the high standard he’d set since debuting in 2018. With a strong start to his 2023 season, Acuña is showing signs of recovering his pre-injury form, though his performance in a couple of areas does raise concerns.
After hitting a sizzling .283/.394/.596 (157 wRC+) in 82 games before tearing his ACL in 2021, Acuna dipped to .266/.351/.413 (114 wRC+) in 119 games last year. It wasn’t a bad performance; his wRC+ ranked among the top 30 of all outfielders, and his 2.1 WAR prorates to about 2.6 per 650 PA. On a team where all of the other outfielders besides rookie Michael Harris II — namely Travis Demeritte, Adam Duvall, Robbie Grossman, Guillermo Heredia, and Eddie Rosario — netted -1.1 WAR, Acuña’s contribution wasn’t an unwelcome one, helping the team win 101 games. Yet his season was well shy of the elite level that he set for himself pre-injury, with a 140 career wRC+ and 6.0 WAR per 650 PA. After all, this is a player whom Dan Szymborski had once projected as the most likely to supplant Mike Trout as the game’s best in terms of WAR.
Acuña missed his chance for that, but he’s still just 25 years old, and through the first two weeks of the season, he’s hitting .370/.452/.537 through 62 plate appearances. Already he has three three-hit games and four two-hit games under his belt, and he’s helped the Braves jump out to a 9-4 record even while dealing with numerous injuries to their rotation and lineup. Read the rest of this entry »
In case you were worried that Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge somehow forgot how to be excellent at baseball since the end of last season, fear not. The 2021 and ’22 American League Most Valuable Players are off to strong starts this season, highlighted by a shared distinction: both have gotten on base in every game thus far, extending lengthy streaks that have carried over from last season.
Admittedly, on-base streaks aren’t as sexy as hitting streaks. Nobody rhapsodizes about them or scrutinizes their mathematical unlikelihood the way they do Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak from 1941. Comparatively few people — professionals as well as fans — could tell you who holds the record for consecutive games getting on base. The answer is Ted Williams in 84 straight games from July 1 through September 27 in 1949, which makes perfect sense given that the Splendid Splinter is the career on-base percentage leader (.482). DiMaggio is a distant second at 74 games, with his more famous streak occupying games 2–57 of the longer one. Williams also owns the third-longest streak at 72 games bridging 1941 (the year he hit .406) and ’42, but as for the fourth-longest one — and the longest of the post-1960 expansion era — it belongs to Orlando Cabrera, he of the career .317 OBP and 83 wRC+. Cabrera reached base in 63 straight games from April 25 through July 6 in 2006. Go figure. Read the rest of this entry »
Oneil Cruz’s fractured fibula is the biggest story surrounding the Pirates. On the positive side, the return of Andrew McCutchen to the fold is neat, and Tuesday night’s walk-off home run by Ji Hwan Bae was pretty cool. To these eyes, however, the most noteworthy thing about Pittsburgh thus far — even beyond the fact that the team’s 7–4 start is its best since 2018 — has been the torrid play of Bryan Reynolds. The 28-year-old outfielder has been the one of the game’s hottest hitters, and he’s done it as progress toward a contract extension has ground to a halt just when it seemed that a deal to keep him in black and gold was within reach.
Reynolds ended last weekend as one of seven players who had collected hits in every game this season (José Abreu, José Ramírez, Nolan Arenado, Randy Arozarena, Bryson Stott, and Jordan Walker were the others). He and Abreu both went hitless in Monday night’s Pirates-Astros contest, and by the close of play Tuesday, only the streaks of Stott and Walker remained intact. Still, season-opening hitting streaks come and go pretty quickly; of more interest is that Reynolds has been putting up eye-opening numbers. Through Tuesday, he’s hitting .356/.367/.778, leading the NL in slugging percentage and homers (five) and ranking fifth in WAR (0.7) and wRC+ (184). Mind you, those numbers looked even more impressive before his 1-for-8 on Monday and Tuesday nights, but the sudden itch to write about Adam Duvall, an even hotter hitter in this young season, going down with a wrist injury got in my way.
For Duvall, Reynolds, and everyone else, we’re still in Small Sample Theater territory, but as with the Red Sox slugger, some underlying numbers have me wondering if we’re seeing real improvements to his game. For starters, like Duvall, he’s cut his strikeout rate dramatically: Last year he struck out 23% of the time, and for his career he’s at 21.5%, but this year, that’s down to 10.2%. Given that strikeout rates stabilize around 60 PA and that Reynolds is at 49, this could wind up being noteworthy, though unlike Duvall, his swinging-strike rate hasn’t fallen quite so dramatically, going from 12.9% last year to 11.9% this year. His 31.1% chase rate is down 4.5 points from last year, when he tried to hack his way out of a slow start, and is just half a point lower than his career mark, but even so, he’s walking in just 4.1% of his plate appearances, less than half of his 9.7% career mark.
All of this translates to more contact than usual for Reynolds, and he’s making the most of it. Seriously: He’s hitting the ball in the air much more than ever, and his average exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard-hit rate are beyond anything in the Bryan Reynolds catalogue. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks!
