I’m sure you know the joke about the two hikers, the bear, and the running shoes. A bear is chasing two men through the woods; one stops to put on his running shoes. “You fool!” his friend says. “Even in those shoes you’ll never outrun the bear!”
“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” says the man. “I just need to outrun you.”
It’s an old joke, and I tell it a lot because I find it to have the probative value of an actual Biblical parable. You don’t need to be great; just be better than the other guy. For the past week, the Phillies have been mired in a losing streak that would’ve gotten national attention had the bear not been devoting its attention to eating the Mets. But on Wednesday, the Mets finally snapped their 12-game skid and the Phillies dropped their eighth game on the bounce. Now the two rivals both sit at 8-16, the worst record in the National League. Read the rest of this entry »
Every successful professional athlete has to have a strong drive for self-improvement. You start each morning with the goal of being a little bit better than you were yesterday; I’m sure I’ve seen words to that effect on a ballplayer’s t-shirt or social media bio somewhere.
Brice Turang can do you one better: He gets a lot better every year. As a 23-year-old rookie, he hit .218/.285/.300, which is not the kind of line that ordinarily gets a guy 448 plate appearances’ worth of playing time. Fortunately for Turang, the Brewers (for all their other successes) have been pretty awful at home-brewing hitters over the past decade, and Turang entered 2024 as their starting second baseman. Read the rest of this entry »
The other night, I was lying around, looking at my phone, trying to fry as many neurons as possible without using hard drugs or listening to Angine de Poitrine, and I saw something that bugged me a little. It was a highlight reel from a series of interviews with Padres closer Mason Miller and Kait Maniscalco, which started off as follows:
Maniscalco: Do you think closers have to have a couple screws loose to want to pitch in the highest-pressure situation in the game?
Miller: Quietly, yes. Outwardly, I think you can keep it together and be a fairly normal dude… I wouldn’t say anybody would say I have a screw loose quite yet.
There are two ways to read this question. First: Does it take an unusual personality type to thrive in a high-pressure environment like closing out a big league baseball game? Probably, to some extent. The ability not only to thrive under pressure but also to shake off failure when it comes is a special thing, one baseball people have tried and struggled to identify since the closer role was invented. Read the rest of this entry »
On Wednesday, the Detroit Tigers signed rookie shortstopKevin McGonigle to an eight-year, $150 million contract extension, keeping him under team control through 2034. When McGonigle was going through the draft process, quite a few observers — including me — saw a heady, left-handed-hitting second baseman with average size but a polished, punchy bat, noted that he is from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and thought, “Maybe he’ll be the next Chase Utley.”
As big as the hype around McGonigle has become, that’s still a lofty comp. Utley played 16 years in the majors, made six All-Star teams, produced 61.5 WAR (including five straight seven-win seasons), and appeared in three World Series, winning one. If McGonigle ends up doing all that, I think everyone walks away happy. But after just 17 major league games, McGonigle guaranteed that he would out-earn his childhood hero, who pocketed a mere $125.6 million across his decorated career. Read the rest of this entry »
Three weeks into the 2026 season, I find myself looking around the league and being astonished by how right I was about everything I thought was going to happen. I’m already on the board in the Effectively Wild predictions game with Artemis II taking off before the first 117-mph batted ball, and my off-the-wall prediction that Mickey Moniak would lead all no. 1 picks in home runs is somehow on track. This despite Moniak starting the season on the IL.
If I’m going to get all my victory laps in this season, I’d better start now, beginning with Brandon Lowe being a great pickup for the Pirates.
Lowe wasted no time endearing himself to the Yinzer crowd, as he went deep twice on Opening Day. Lowe’s total of dingers has since swollen to seven. That’s good for second in the league behind Jordan Walker, which tells you how early in the season it is. But Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, and Sal Stewart (speaking of guys who started hot) are also part of that second-place tie. It still takes a certain quality of hitter to go deep so many times so early in the year.
I always thought Lowe was an inspired get for the Pirates, especially since they paid so little to acquire him. It was a three-team deal with the Rays and Astros, which brought Lowe, Jake Mangum, and Mason Montgomery to Pittsburgh from Tampa Bay, with Mike Burrows going to Houston. I don’t want to spend too much relitigating this trade, but Lowe’s gotten off to a hot start as Pittsburgh’s starting second baseman.
Montgomery has been used as a high-leverage reliever, where he currently has a 42.5% strikeout rate and a 5.40 ERA, so maybe we should let those marbles settle for a minute before passing judgment. Mangum is a weird player (I wrote about why last year) who was way better than I expected as a rookie; he’ll never hit for power, but he’s probably fine as a fourth outfielder and pinch-runner. That’s not a bad haul for a starer the Pirates weren’t going to use anyway.
I’ve been a big fan of Lowe’s since his days at the University of Maryland, where he shared an infield with LaMonte Wade Jr. and future big league reliever Jose Cuas, but I’ll be the first to admit he’s a limited player. He strikes out a lot; 27.1% for his career, and 26.9% in 2025. When the Rays traded Lowe, he’d played enough to qualify for the batting title just once in four years, and his walk rate had been on the decline two years running.
Lowe is not a very good defensive second baseman, and that criticism has gone from a nag to a blaring alarm as he’s hit his 30s. And despite terrific power numbers, he’s merely an OK on-base guy (.314 OBP from 2022 through 2025) who doesn’t actually hit the ball especially hard.
All that said, the real reason the Rays got rid of him for cheap was his $11.5 million salary. (Say what you will about Lowe’s limitations, he’s at least as good as Gavin Lux and better than Richie Palacios and Taylor Walls.) That’s a lot for Tampa Bay, and it would’ve been a lot for the Pirates under normal circumstances, but for an up-the-middle guy who would probably hit 20 to 30 home runs and post about 2 WAR in a full season, that’s not much at all. The fact that the Pirates — usually the sport’s most miserly franchise — would make such a move was profoundly encouraging.
Because the Pirates have already completed the two hardest steps toward building a contender: They have the best pitcher in the National League in Paul Skenes, and by all appearances, they have a superstar shortstop in the making in Konnor Griffin. But they sucked at a bunch of different positions, including second base.
Actually, second base itself was pretty bad last year; only first base and DH produced fewer total WAR league-wide than second base. Second basemen also tied with center field for the lowest league-wide wRC+ by defensive position. (The weakest offensive position is supposed to be catcher, but I’m assuming Cal Raleigh screwed up the curve by himself.)
Even by that low bar, the Pirates’ second basemen failed to cover themselves in glory in 2025: 1.3 WAR (20th out of 30 teams) and a wRC+ of 80 (23rd out of 30). Lowe beats those figures in his sleep. If he strikes out a lot, you live with it. If he’s a terrible defender at second, well, you’ve got Ryan O’Hearn in the outfield—Lowe is the least of your worries.
As much as I loved this trade for Pittsburgh, I did not foresee that after 16 games, Lowe would be hitting .250/.375/.633. His 1.0 WAR is three tenths of a win from what all Pirates second basemen produced on the aggregate last year. His .383 ISO wouldn’t just be a career high for him, it would be a career high for Judge.
Lowe is currently running a .211 BABIP; he’s a fly ball hitter, traditionally, and therefore not a big BABIP guy. Even so, that figure would usually portend better batted ball luck down the line. Statcast data, as you might expect, shows the opposite. Lowe is currently outstripping his xSLG by more than 160 points, and his EV90 of 103.5 mph is merely 127th out of 189 qualified hitters at the moment. His bat speed is also down from previous years, which I mention not to ring alarm bells but merely to point out that he hasn’t unlocked some hitherto undiscovered fast-twitch ability.
Lowe does two things really, really well. First: He kills fastballs. Last year, he hit .278 and slugged .564 off four-seamers; he was one spot above James Wood on the leaderboard for wOBA on four-seamers, and 13th in the whole league in run value created.
Lowe has seen 73 four-seamers in 2026. He swung at 28 of those and put seven of them in play, including three that landed in the seats. Lowe has seen 42 fastballs of all kinds in Statcast’s heart zone. He’s slugging 1.133 on those pitches, 15th out of 336 batters who have seen 50 or more fastballs so far this season. Here’s one:
Look, you can’t throw 92 middle-middle to any decent hitter in this league, but Lowe is better at dispatching those than most. That’s thanks to his second special ability: Over Lowe’s career, 23.1% of his batted balls have been pulled and in the air; the league average over that time is 16.7%. This is where damage gets done. Pull-side line drives turn into doubles and triples, pull-side fly balls turn into home runs.
Statcast’s expected stats (e.g. xSLG) take into account launch angle and exit velo but not batted ball direction. Over a big enough sample, that evens out, but the fact that Lowe’s in-air pull rate is 26.7% right now gives us some insight into how he’s hit seven home runs in three weeks with lackluster exit velo numbers.
All seven of Lowe’s home runs this season have come to the pull side, as did 19 of his 31 dingers last year and 111 of his 164 career major league home runs. PNC Park is a good spot for him then; it’s only 320 feet out to the right field foul pole, which is the fifth-shortest right field porch in the league.
The venue’s famous 21-foot right field fence might cost Lowe the odd wallscraper, but what we’re looking at here is basically a mirror image of the Crawford Boxes in Daikin Park in Houston; it’s 315 feet out to left field there, with a 19-foot wall. You know who plays there: Mr. In-Air Pull Rate himself, Isaac Paredes. Last year, Paredes had a 14th-percentile hard-hit rate, and his EV90 was 224th out of 277 batters with 300 or more plate appearances. This is not a guy with a ton of pop.
Nevertheless, Paredes hit 20 home runs in 438 plate appearances. Half of those 20 home runs came at home and to the pull side. I don’t think Lowe is going to rip off 45 wallscrapers, buoyed by the proximity of the right field wall. But he won’t have to in order to be an asset to a Pirates team that needs all the pop it can get, whatever form it takes.
But a college baseball hotbed it is not. Rider and Penn are nearby, and both schools are frequent pesky no. 4 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Which is fun, but it’s not too interesting to a national baseball writer who focuses primarily on the major leagues.
Last weekend was different. Several rounds of Big Ten expansion led to an unusual event: UCLA, the no. 1 team in the country, with presumptive no. 1 overall pick Roch Cholowsky in tow, was obliged to visit Rutgers. I’ve had this series circled on my calendar since last year, and here’s what I learned. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I did a radio hit in Baltimore to talk about the Orioles’ five-year extension for right-handed starter Shane Baz. As you might expect, I got asked for my general impressions of the Orioles’ rotation, and I gave an answer I did not expect to be controversial: I like Baltimore’s rotation, and I’m quite fond of Trevor Rogers and Kyle Bradish, the top two starting pitchers. That said, the Orioles don’t have a clear no. 1-quality starter, which could end up as a weakness in a playoff series.
“Ace” and its synonyms are fuzzy in meaning, so I’ll define my terms as clearly as I can: I meant that the Orioles don’t have a starting pitcher who can be expected to go up against one of the top pitchers in the league and fight him to a draw for six innings. I’ll give an example from last year’s World Series: I think Yoshinobu Yamamoto is a better pitcher than Kevin Gausman — and sure enough, Yamamoto beat Gausman twice in as many attempts — but the difference isn’t so great that you’d be able to tell over one start.
I got some pushback on social media — some of it quite intense — from Orioles fans who like their chances with Rogers against Tarik Skubal. Every sports fan thinks they’re the center of the universe these days, and accordingly that everything about their team is better than the biased national media will give them credit for. (Except White Sox and Twins fans, who think everything about their team is even worse than the biased national media realizes.) Even if that weren’t true, I would ordinarily never admit to treating randos on X, the Everything App, like an assignment editor. That way lies madness. Read the rest of this entry »
Mostly, we treat the Los Angeles Angels like the friend whose life is a wreck but there’s nothing you can do about it because they’ll never ask for help and won’t take advice. So you just check in on the AL West standings every so often and feel a combination of pity and helplessness.
Well, you can take your pity and shove it, because as I write this the Angels are in first place in the division. Tied for first place, at one game over .500, but it still counts. Much as Jo Adell’s three-robbery night on Saturday won fawning headlines, and much as Zach Neto’s four home runs are leading the offense, there is one man driving this train: José Soriano. Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Rondone/The Republic-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
“Gee, Michael Soroka has been pretty good,” is the kind of statement that tells you more about the calendar than Soroka himself, but the point remains: Michael Soroka has been pretty good. The big Canadian steamrolled the Tigers (my pick for the AL pennant) with 10 strikeouts in five scoreless innings in his first start of the year. He followed that up with a solitary earned run over five innings against his former team, the Atlanta Braves.
The total bill, so far, is 13 strikeouts and 13 baserunners allowed (eight hits, four walks, one hit batter) in 10 innings, with a 0.90 ERA and 2.10 FIP. And against reasonably tough competition. So do the Diamondbacks, currently in dire need of pitching with seven big league arms currently on the IL, have something here? Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
