It feels incredibly weird to say this but… it’s a good time to be a Pirates fan? Because Konnor Griffin is coming to the majors. He’ll make his major league debut in Pittsburgh’s home opener on Friday.
Griffin was the Pirates’ first-round pick in 2024, ninth overall, and quickly emerged as the no. 1 overall prospect in baseball. A team that’s been as bad as the Pirates, for as long as they’ve been bad, will have some familiarity with the ballyhooed prospect debut, but I’m not sure even they’ve seen anything like this. I was as big a Paul Skenes fan as anyone, and as pumped as I was to see him hit the majors, he’s surpassed even my expectations.
Well, now Skenes is in the majors to stay. So is Bubba Chandler. The Pirates flirted with spending some money this past offseason, and while a 3-3 record is the definition of unremarkable, the Pirates just went on the road and played the Mets and Reds — two of their erstwhile NL playoff rivals — to a draw. The Pirates might be kind of OK. Life hasn’t been this good, genuinely, in more than 10 years.
But Griffin’s debut is the main event. Because as big as the hype around Skenes was, the expectations for Griffin are even greater. Read the rest of this entry »
Andrew Painter made his major league debut on Tuesday, as the Phillies were coming off a three-game losing streak. That’s a tough assignment; I know it’s the first week of the season, but that has never stopped Phillies fans — who even in the best of times are always looking for a reason to jump off a bridge — from declaring the team irretrievably cooked.
Not so fast, my friends. Because anyone who’s willing to overreact to a one-game sample in April must be over the moon about Painter.
Painter, who turns 23 next month, was one of the top pitching prospects in the entire sport in the 2022-23 offseason. At age 19, he was promoted to Double-A, where he posted a 2.54 ERA in five starts and struck out 37, while walking just two, in 28 1/3 innings. As 2023 dawned, there was a not-unreasonable expectation that Painter would contribute down the stretch in his age-20 season, perhaps as a bullpen stopper, like a young David Price or Adam Wainwright, or perhaps in the rotation. (Remember, this was before Cristopher Sánchez turned into the world-destroying ace he’s become.)
But Painter’s elbow started barking, and an early hesitation to sending him to get Tommy John surgery led to both 2023 and 2024 being written off. With two years of rust, Painter struggled in 2025, pitching to an ERA over 5.00 across two minor league levels, and the first single-digit K/9 ratio of his professional career. The Phillies pitched well last postseason, but they still could’ve used Painter. He simply hadn’t earned the call-up that he’d seemingly had in the bag since early 2023.
He dropped his arm slot and lost a ton of life off his fastball while returning from Tommy John, but the promise remained. He was no longer the top pitching prospect in baseball, nor the top prospect in the Phillies’ system, but he rated no. 27 overall this past offseason and eighth among pitching prospects, with a 55-FV grade. This is still Philadelphia’s most anticipated rookie pitcher since at least Cole Hamels.
It speaks to the Phillies’ faith in the young right-hander that they did not go out and get anything resembling a like-for-like replacement for the departing Ranger Suarez. With Zack Wheeler on the mend from thoracic outlet syndrome, that left Painter in the big league rotation with no safety net. I genuinely do not know who starting pitcher no. 6 is for the Phillies right now, but I am confronted with the possibility that it might be Bryse Wilson if 40-man roster glut were not a consideration.
So, yeah, there’s a bit of pressure on Painter.
If he was feeling that pressure, you couldn’t tell. Painter, who stands an Ent-like 6-foot-7, strolled serenely to the mound for his first competitive big league action. And as good as the stuff and the results were — don’t worry, I’m getting there — Painter’s composure seemed to impress his teammates most.
But it doesn’t matter how calm a rookie pitcher is if he’s throwing slop and getting shelled. So let’s check Painter’s stuff and results.
Yes, the Nationals’ lineup isn’t that good overall, but it features a few challenging hitters: CJ Abrams, Daylen Lile, and the genuinely capital-D Dangerous James Wood. Joey Wiemer is coming off a run of literally not making an out for 10 straight plate appearances, though it looks like the magic (or quantum ray power) has finally worn off.
The value proposition for Painter is that there’s nothing weird about him. He’s just what an ace looks like. He’s huge, he throws hard, he has a varied arsenal of six pitches… there’s just nothing to talk yourself into on the scouting report.
Painter throws two fastballs, a four-seamer and sinker, both of which sat 94-97 and topped out at 98.7 mph. He hit that figure twice in the first inning, when he was freshest and the adrenaline was surely pumping hardest, but he got back to 98.6 mph in the fourth.
Like a lot of modern starters, Painter has one look for left-handed hitters and another for righties. The platoon advantage works because breaking balls move away from same-handed batters and toward opposite-handed hitters. So pitchers like Painter, who have multiple fastballs and breaking balls, want to work side-to-side against same-handed batters and up-and-down against opposite-handed ones. That means four-seamer, sinker, slider, sweeper against righties, and four-seamer, slider, curveball, changeup against lefties in Painter’s case.
Nationals manager Blake Butera loaded up on the former. With six lefties and two switch-hitters in the lineup, Wiemer was the only right-handed batter Painter faced all evening, so we saw a lot of his four-seamer, slider, curveball, and changeup, and relatively little of his sinker and sweeper.
Painter was kind enough to get at least one strikeout on each pitch from that first group of four, so that you can see all of them in this highlight video.
Painter’s first and last strikeouts came against Wood, and both came from working fastball up, curveball down, to change Wood’s eye level and mess up his timing. He struck out in the fifth inning after taking an 80.6-mph curveball for a strike, and then chasing a 97.2-mph four-seamer up and away.
With the fastball and curveball established, Painter could tunnel his changeup into a middle ground in terms of movement and speed. The scouting report on Painter has “FASTBALL VELOCITY” and “NASTY CURVEBALL” written in all caps, but the changeup is a new weapon, perhaps the only positive development from his forgettable 2025 season in Lehigh Valley.
He was able to paint the bottom left-hand corner of the strike zone with his changeup to get Luis García Jr. looking in the third, and he did it again to Jorbit Vivas in the fourth. Both of those pitches were right on the edge of the zone, but Painter worked there so effectively that the Nats were out of challenges when Vivas tried to summon ABS to bail him out.
And when Painter did allow contact, it was pretty innocuous. He let up 12 balls in play out of 21 batters faced. Only three of those batted balls had an xBA of .100 or higher, and only one reached Baseball Savant’s hard-hit threshold of 95 mph. That was the last pitch Painter threw all night: Abrams ripped it to right for a single, and Phillies manager Rob Thomson, wanting his rookie starter to go out on a positive, pulled the plug.
The damage the Nats did against Painter, such as it was, didn’t do much to discredit the rookie’s effort. Lile seemed to have Painter’s number, reaching twice, but one of those two came on a popup that four different Phillies lost in the lights. As a general rule, when someone tags Jon Bois on social media with “watching baseball,” it doesn’t speak well of what’s depicted.
The state of perpetual garment-rending around the Phillies might be unhelpful, as I mentioned up top, but as debuts go, at home in April against the Nats is a pretty soft assignment for a rookie. Painter aced it, so to speak, but that success only earns him a new set of questions to answer. Can he get it done against deeper lineups? Can he survive a third time through the order? Can he hold his velocity? If so, how far up the rotation can he climb — a question that could become quite relevant given the questions about Wheeler’s health and Aaron Nola’s getting abducted by aliens last year.
But that’s life in the big leagues. The hits just keep on coming. Or, in Painter’s case, maybe they won’t.
Over the past few years, one thought has kept bouncing around in my mind: “I must be taking crazy pills.” Don’t run off to the comments to complain about this post getting political, because that’s not the point I’m trying to make. Over the past few years, longstanding institutions and norms have come crashing down without so much as a peep from the people charged with defending them. Whether you think that’s good or not, it’s a matter of historical fact.
Therefore, we live in disconcerting times. COVID, AI, mass media consolidation, man’s inhumanity to man… it messes with one’s sense of order in the universe. We’re rapidly approaching an era in which battery tech and solar power actually make electricity too cheap to meter, but NATO and the Washington Post might not exist by the time we get there.
It’s unsettling. There have been times when I’ve looked around and found that the most logical explanation is that I am, genuinely, being slipped crazy pills without my knowledge. Because surely this must make sense to someone. Read the rest of this entry »
In general, the Pirates’ first series of the year could’ve gone better. What everyone’s going to remember from this past weekend is the worst start of Paul Skenes’ career — probably of his entire life. But it could’ve been worse. Winning one of three at Citi Field against the Mets is probably going to end up looking like even par for one of the tougher assignments in the National League, especially with one of those losses coming in extra innings.
Brandon Lowe hit three home runs. Even Skenes’ awful opening inning was only made possible by some horrendous defense and ridiculous batted-ball luck. And Carmen Mlodzinski struck out the side against the top of the Mets’ order on Sunday. Twice. Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t believe in love at first sight? The Orioles do. Back in December, Baltimore traded a draft pick and four prospects — including two top-40 picks from their 2025 draft class — to Tampa Bay for right-handed pitcher Shane Baz. And on Friday, roughly 48 hours before Baz threw his first competitive pitch in orange and black, they signed him to a five-year, $68 million contract extension that will keep him in Maryland through 2030. It’s the richest contract the Orioles have ever given to a pitcher.
Baz did OK in his first Orioles start, by the way. The Twins scored four runs in 5 1/3 innings, and Baz allowed at least one hard-hit batted ball (i.e. 95 mph exit velo) on each of the four pitch types he threw. That included his changeup, which he only broke out four times and which only generated one swing. Read the rest of this entry »
Bill Streicher, Jeff Curry, David Frerker-Imagn Images, Kevin R. Wexler-NorthJersey.com-USA Today Network
On September 12, 2004, Eli Manning made his NFL debut. The Giants were down three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, and starting quarterback Kurt Warner had taken four sacks and fumbled twice; maybe let the no. 1 overall pick take a spin.
On Manning’s very first play from scrimmage, he handed the ball to Tiki Barber, who ran for a 72-yard touchdown. Now, Manning would go on to have a very, very good career: 16 years in the league, four Pro Bowls, 366 touchdown passes, two Super Bowls, and untold hundreds of millions of dollars in career earnings. But if you look at Manning’s career through a certain lens, he peaked with that first snap.
A quarterback’s job is to advance the ball down the field and score. And while Barber did most of the work, a one-play, 72-yard touchdown drive is about as good as a debut gets. Manning’s career productivity would never be better than it was after that first play. So it proved, and quickly; on the very next possession, Manning coughed up a fumble of his own on a nightmarish three-way hit. Welcome to The Show, kid. Read the rest of this entry »
This extension, the largest ever for a player with so little service time, begins in 2027, buys out two of Crow-Armstrong’s free agent years, and includes escalators that could increase the value to $133 million. But shockingly, (and to the immense relief of those of us who are still parsing the inscrutable Julio Rodríguez extension), it does not include any option years. Whatever happens, Crow-Armstrong can still hit free agency after his age-30 season. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the foundational assumptions of the past 10 years in baseball is that the Braves will always figure something out. Their run of six straight division titles from 2018 to 2023 placed them in a conversation with the Dodgers and Astros as the one of the most consistently successful teams in baseball.
The Braves run a big payroll, but not on a level that allows them to outspend their mistakes. And those mistakes have been few. They always make smart trades, always get their star players to sign under-market extensions, always develop their own talent well. You could argue that the Braves have had more success developing undersized right-handed college starters named Spencer than the Orioles have had with their own pitching prospects of any size, name, and origin over the past 30 years.
But as Atlanta tries to bounce back from its first losing season since 2017, that sense of inevitability is fading. Spencer Schwellenbach is out until midseason with bone spurs in his elbow, and as of Monday, Spencer Strider has a strained oblique muscle and will start the season on the IL. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes, we fail to appreciate the vastness of the mysterious forces behind projections systems. The data speak to each other and sometimes combine in unexpected ways to form unexpected outcomes. Regarding the question of how to rank each team’s designated hitters, what you see here is based not only on projections about player performances but well-informed speculation about how each team will line up. Put it all into the kettle and, well, shock of shocks, there’s an unexpected upset at no. 1 on this list.
Actually, no, it’s Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers again, by more than two wins. I don’t even know why I bothered setting up that gag, no one believed me, even for a second. Read the rest of this entry »
About a month ago, the Padres went shopping over the long weekend and landed a bunch of old guys who seemed pretty washed. I was glib in my appraisal of those moves, suggesting that they’d only work out if A.J. Preller had a time machine.
The Padres live in a perpetual state of roster turnover, which occasionally leaves gaps. That’s how you end up with no. 4 starter Germán Márquez, or platoon first baseman Nick Castellanos. But those two are on major league deals; they were always likely to make the roster in some capacity, regardless of how you feel about those late-2010s stalwarts now.
