There’s an idiom that gets thrown around in soccer that I wish we would adopt here: talismanic. A talismanic player is particularly important to his team, especially for intangible reasons. Sometimes the club’s talisman is the best player on the squad, but not always. He’s the captain who marshals the defense, or the creative passer who ties the team’s attack together, or a veteran forward who always seems to find the crucial late goal.

We don’t really have a word for this kind of player in baseball. We have club icons, cult heroes, and players with veteran presence, but referring to a player as a talisman implies actual mystical powers that only the team and its fans can truly see.

If any baseball player of the past 20 years is his club’s talisman, surely it’s Salvador Perez. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine is a Tigers fan, God help him. He’s upset about baseball quite a bit these days, and the other night he was miffed about something specific: With two outs in the ninth inning and the tying run coming to the plate, Detroit manager A.J. Hinch pinch-hit with Jake Rogers.

Whatever else the Tigers’ backup catcher has going for him, he’s not a very good hitter. He’s hitting .155/.239/.276 this season, with a 30.9% strikeout rate. (All stats in this article are current through Tuesday’s games.) That’s a wRC+ of 42. Rogers had about a season’s worth of pretty good offensive production spread from 2021 to 2023 — like, a good Mike Zunino season, with a low-.200s batting average, a bunch of home runs, and a strikeout rate in the 30s — but overall he’s a career .198/.268/.380 hitter. He hasn’t batted .200 in a season in three years.

Sure enough, Rogers struck out on four pitches to end the game.

So yeah, it’s jarring to see that guy not only at the plate with the game on the line, but to come off the bench with the game on the line. Hinch put Rogers there on purpose, which seems like the work of a madman.

Believe it or not, it was probably the right decision. Read the rest of this entry »

Andre Pallante starts for the Cardinals on Tuesday, and if he beats Michael King and the Padres, he’ll move into a tie for the National League lead in wins.

I know we’re not supposed to care about wins, but it gives me a chance to talk about a pitcher I’ve had a hard time understanding over his five seasons in St. Louis. I should be more specific, because Pallante’s game is pretty straightforward. That I understand just fine. I just can’t figure out if he’s any good or not. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Readers:

I write to you from a place of hiding. The Phillies’ outfield situation has taken a turn for the worse, and the team has sent out a multitude of agents in response. The Phanatic and his lieutenants — green and fuzzy, mounted on quad bikes, armed with hot dog launchers — are now scouring the countryside in search of able-bodied right-handed adults. From Lancaster to Lakewood, from New Brunswick to New Castle, they maraud over hill and dale. If you own a baseball glove and can bat, you’re liable to be pulled from your bed in the dead of night and dragooned, press-ganged, and otherwise cajoled into service as the Phillies’ right fielder. Read the rest of this entry »

Manny Machado was in the news last week for what got called an anti-analytics rant. This would’ve been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago, when front offices were still coming to grips with empirical study as a part of scouting and player development, but that battle’s over now. The nerds are here.

Machado said the game’s getting harder to play, and that there are “too many stats out there. Too many stats, way too many numbers. I don’t even know half of the stuff that goes up there. I look at the board sometimes, and I even ask some of the guys, like, ‘What is WCCVBB, whatever it is?’… It’s crazy to even keep up with.”

As someone who makes his living using WCCVBB, I think Machado’s actually got a point here. I’m an analyst with a social science background: There is no stat so newfangled I won’t poke it to see if it’ll teach me — or better yet, you, the fans — something new about the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Not very much has gone right in Cincinnati this season. Having fought through injuries, slumps from key hitters, and total no-shows from their closer and the back end of their rotation, the Reds sit just under .500, which in the surprisingly competitive NL Central is good for last place. It’s not how the Reds wanted to build on their playoff appearance a year ago.

One of the few bright spots has been JJ Bleday, who’s hitting .270/.363/.568. Despite appearing in just 39 of Cincinnati’s 67 games, he’s third on the team with 11 home runs and tied for fourth in total bases.

Unlike other Reds standouts, like Sal Stewart and Chase Burns, Bleday wasn’t really expected to do much. The Reds picked him up off the street for $1.4 million after the A’s non-tendered him last November. I was about to make a joke about what it says that Bleday couldn’t even stick in Sacramento, but the A’s are actually pretty deep at his position. At any rate, he was just below replacement level in 98 games in 2025 — that’ll get you non-tendered anywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know how much attention Braxton Ashcraft wants in his life, but he must be either fuming at his lack of recognition or thrilled to be left alone. As much ink has been spilled on the Pirates this year, only some of it has gone to their starting rotation, as opposed to Konnor Griffin or the team’s new cadre of veteran bats. Of that fraction, Paul Skenes dominates the headlines, followed by the talented but frustrating Bubba Chandler, the newly returned Jared Jones, and the occasionally truant Carmen Mlodzinski.

But as of this writing, Ashcraft is in the top 10 in baseball in pitcher WAR, trailing Skenes by only a tenth of a win. And this on the heels of Saturday’s loss to the Braves, in which Ashcraft surrendered nine hits and six earned runs in five innings. I wouldn’t be especially worried; it’s only Ashcraft’s second bad start out of 13, and the Braves will do worse to better pitchers before the season’s out.

Ashcraft was a pretty big prospect: A second-round pick out of a Waco, Texas-area high school in 2018, and the no. 60 overall prospect heading into last season. And he pitched quite well as a rookie in 2025, with a 2.71 ERA and 2.78 FIP in 69 2/3 innings, split more or less evenly between the rotation and the bullpen. So it’s not like he came out of nowhere, but he would’ve been third-favorite for the role of Skenes’ sidekick if you’d asked around a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with a table.

And what a wild table it is. Brooks Raley has secretly been way better than I’d realized. I bring this up to illustrate how dominant Jason Adam has been over the past five years: By most measures, one of the best relievers in baseball. By ERA, the best reliever who’s had a remotely normal career. Adam’s breakout season was 2022, and since then he’s posted an ERA under 2.00 four times in five years, including 2026. His one down year: 2023, when he posted a 2.93 ERA in 54 1/3 innings. Most pitchers would kill to struggle like that. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, Gerrit Cole took his first loss since coming back from Tommy John surgery. After two starts of at least six scoreless innings, Cole got tagged for three home runs against the Guardians. Even so, it’s a promising return for the Yankees’ ace, who’s still throwing in the mid-to-upper 90s. His curveball is still curving, and while his fastball mix has evolved over his career in response to some trend or other, I’m confident he’ll find something that works. He always has.

I got to thinking about Cole in the context of a question I posed earlier this week about Adley Rutschman: Who’s the best draft prospect of the 21st century? Who presented the best combination of high floor and elite upside? The answer to that question is probably not Cole; if you were going for a workhorse college starter, you’d pick Mark Prior, Stephen Strasburg, or Paul Skenes. Or maybe even Carlos Rodón. But Cole definitely fits the bill; there’s a reason he was the top pick in the best draft class of the past 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Reasonable people can disagree on who the best draft prospect of the 21st century is. I think there’s a pretty good case for Adley Rutschman: A switch-hitter with patience and power, a plus defender at a premium position, a College World Series champion who’d been tested repeatedly against the toughest amateur competition in the world and come out on top routinely.

I get why you’d want the tantalizing upside of Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Mark Prior, but to me no other prospect combined a big league starter-level floor with the ceiling of a superstar the way Rutschman did. Read the rest of this entry »