One of my favorite college baseball players of the past 15 years is making his major league debut tonight for the Reds, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about him, because I think he could become one of your favorite professional baseball players if you give him a shot.

His name is Chase Burns. He was the no. 2 pick in last year’s draft, where he received the joint-highest bonus ($9.25 million) in his class, and the no. 28 prospect in the preseason Top 100. He throws 100 mph without breaking a sweat, with an unholy slider that twists and squirms and changes shape like Medusa’s hair, with a similar effect on hitters. In his last start, Burns punched out seven Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders in seven innings. Behold.

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In 2023, Mets left-hander David Peterson struck out 128 batters in 111 innings. Peterson’s strikeout rate that year, 26.0%, was 27th in the league out of 127 pitchers who threw 100 or more innings. He was tied with Zac Gallen, not far behind Luis Castillo, Gerrit Cole, and Zack Wheeler.

The next year, Peterson’s strikeout rate dropped by more than six points, to 19.8%, but he shaved three-quarters of a run off his FIP, and more than two runs off his ERA. This year, Peterson is striking out 21.5% of opponents, and after Wednesday night’s complete-game shutout of the Nationals, his ERA is 2.49, which is 14th among qualified starters.

But I thought striking batters out was good! How did Peterson turn into this unhittable monster while running a lower strikeout rate than Shane Baz? Read the rest of this entry »

I thought the other shoe was dropping on Andrew Abbott when the Brewers knocked him around last week. If your worst start of the season is five runs on seven hits in six innings, that means you’re having a damn good season, but I didn’t expect Abbott to keep rocking an ERA in the 1.50s all year. Surely some regression was coming.

A week later, it seems the other shoe remains aloft. Abbott followed up that rough day at the office with a shutout of the Guardians on Tuesday, his first career complete game. It was his fourth scoreless start of five innings or more this season, and the ninth time (out of 11) that he’s surrendered one run or less.

How’s he doing it? Well, a few weeks ago Jake Mailhot called Abbott a “contact-suppression monster,” owing to his funky fastball movement and some offseason tweaks to his changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates beat the Phillies 2-1 on Sunday, and near as I can tell everyone was pissed about it. The Phillies, a would-be World Series contender, had just gotten swept by a team they’d been hoping to do some damage against, and dropped to 1-9 in their previous 10 games. The Pirates, for their part, had just gotten one over (three over, actually) on their intrastate rival, but Paul Skenes didn’t get the win.

The biggest, scariest pitcher in the league had gone 7 2/3 innings, allowing only one unearned run, but had left the game while it was tied in the top of the eighth. That left the NL Cy Young frontrunner with an ERA of 1.88 in 91 innings, but a record of just 4-6. Is it important for Skenes to get the win? Not exactly. But the incongruity between record and performance was just another reminder of how little support this disappointing team is giving the generational talent that had fallen into its lap.

Skenes is the class of the Pirates rotation, but he’s not the only talented pitcher the Bucs have. Even with Jared Jones and Johan Oviedo in the shop getting their elbows worked on, Mitch Keller is having a solid season. Keller is top 25 in the league in innings and WAR, and despite some indifferent strikeout numbers, he’s kept the ball in the yard and scratched out a 4.13 ERA — that’s a 100 ERA- on the dot — with a 3.27 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball suffers from the same fundamental contradiction as every spectator sport. It is an entertainment product, a work of narrative nonfiction, if you like. A compelling narrative must adhere to certain norms and strictures; even when expectations are subverted, the audience responds best when those expectations are built up first.

The players and managers who act out the on-field drama, and the front office personnel who hire and direct them, aren’t in the business of storytelling. They’re in the business of problem-solving. That problem: How to put runners on base and, once there, to advance them home. And to prevent one’s opponent from doing the same.

The more we know about this problem, the greater detail in which it’s studied, the greater the risk that a solution will emerge. There might be more than one way to skin a proverbial cat, but if one method emerges as the most efficient, everyone will adopt it. And what’s the fun in that? Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I give. I did not expect the Detroit Tigers to have the best record in baseball a week into June. Or at any point in the season, to be honest. We all knew that this was a playoff team with some developing young talent still in the pipeline; a return to the postseason and a run at the AL Central title seemed like reasonable goals. But the Tigers have not only done what was expected (Tarik Skubal’s continued excellence) and hoped for (former no. 1 picks Spencer Torkelson and Casey Mize leveling up), they’ve gotten breaks they could not even have dreamed of (Zach McKinstry’s .360 OBP).

But one obvious place the Tigers were set to improve was behind the plate. Jake Rogers is a terrific defender, and not as bad a hitter as I thought before I looked up his numbers. Which is to say I thought his numbers were horrendous; they were merely bad. Rogers was one of just 12 players to hit under .200 in 300 or more PA last year; out of 286 players who hit that playing time threshold, he was in the bottom 20 in wRC+.

Great defense behind the plate covers for a lot of offensive sins, but speaking generally, playoff teams don’t like to have a guy in the lineup every day who makes outs 75% of the time. Surely, there’s a way to achieve equivalent defense without giving up quite so much offense?

Good news; Dillon Dingler is here, and he can do better than that. Read the rest of this entry »

About six weeks ago, Eric Longenhagen published his Dodgers Top Prospects list. It ran 51 players deep, and was headlined by some of the trendiest names in prospect circles: Roki Sasaki, Dalton Rushing, Zyhir Hope. Down at no. 24, headlining the 40 FV group, was a blurb that started with the following phrase: “Low Leverage Ben.”

Ben Casparius is a bulk reliever. He is now what the fifth starter in a four-man rotation was 40 years ago. Most baseball fans know him as the rookie who got called on to make a spot start in Game 4 of last year’s World Series. He’s the guy you call on when Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, and Walker Buehler have all taken their turns in the rotation, and Clayton Kershaw is hurt. And so is Tyler Glasnow. And Tony Gonsolin. And Bobby Miller. And River Ryan. And Gavin Stone. And Emmet Sheehan. And (ironically) Kyle Hurt. And Shohei Ohtani, or half of him, anyway.

I guess when you’re in the double digits on the Dodgers’ starting pitcher pecking order, getting “Low Leverage” as a nickname is an occupational hazard. But I don’t like it. Mostly because it’s one short of the three-beat alliteration that made “Late Night LaMonte” roll off the tongue so felicitously. (My condolences to LaMonte Wade Jr. on his recent DFA.)

But also because it’s not true. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Stowers used to be part of that Baltimore Orioles position player prospect fire hose, but it’s OK if you forgot about him. Said fire hose has turned to a dribble as the Orioles’ fortunes have reversed. You also might have gotten him confused with Colton Cowser, which might be why the Orioles felt like they could trade him to Miami last summer for Trevor Rogers. (The other prospect in that trade, Connor Norby, has the same similar-name-mixup thing going with Coby Mayo. This town ain’t big enough for the two of us, etc.)

And if you still had your eye on Stowers after all that, you were probably put off when he hit .186/.262/.295 in 50 games for the Marlins after the trade. A better team, with a deeper talent pool, might’ve removed a 27-year-old outfielder with that batting line from its major league roster. But in Miami it’s more like a talent splash pad, so Stowers remains.

So much the better, because after 52 games, the former Stanford slugger is hitting .291/.362/.508. He has the same wRC+ as the much-celebrated Pete Crow-Armstrong, a higher wRC+ than Fernando Tatis Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Bobby Witt Jr., three second-generation big leaguers with more than $1 billion in contracts among them. Read the rest of this entry »

Count me among the multitudes who have been borderline obsessed with the emergence of Pete Crow-Armstrong as a superstar this season. I’m sure he’ll reach a saturation point eventually where hardcore fans get tired of him — it happened to superhero movies, and bacon, and Patrick Mahomes — but we’re not there yet.

Every time I write about PCA, I revisit the central thesis: This is a player who’s good enough to get by on his glove even if he doesn’t hit a lick. But out of nowhere, he’s turned into a legitimate offensive threat. Great athletes who play with a little flair, a little panache, a little pizzaz, tend to be popular in general. The elite defensive center fielder who finds a way to contribute offensively is probably my favorite position player archetype; the more I compared PCA to Lorenzo Cain, Jackie Bradley Jr., Enrique Bradfield Jr., Carlos Gómez… the more I understood why I’d come to like him so much.

In fact, let’s take a moment to talk about Gómez, and his offensive breakout in the early 2010s. Read the rest of this entry »

Way, way, way back in December 2023, the Rangers signed Tyler Mahle to a two-year contract. Absolutely nobody cared at the time, mostly because the news dropped the same day as Shohei Ohtani’s first press conference with the Dodgers. But also because Mahle, then recovering from Tommy John surgery, was expected to play a trivial part, at best, in the 2024 season.

Mahle had been a bit of a hipster favorite as an upper-mid-rotation starter in Cincinnati and then briefly in Minnesota — far from a household name, but from 2020 to 2022, he’d been quite good, and in high volume. Over those three seasons, he’d averaged 27 starts, 146 innings, and 3.0 WAR per 162 team games, with an ERA- of 90. For two years and $22 million, the Rangers were conceding that he’d rehab on their dime for most of 2024. But he would’ve been available for the 2024 playoffs if they’d made it that far, and if everything worked according to plan, they’d have a workhorse no. 3 starter under contract for 2025 at a fraction of what that kind of production usually goes for.

At least in 2025, everything has been working according to plan. Mahle has made 11 starts so far this season, with the past 10 lasting at least 80 pitches and five innings. Until his most recent outing, he hadn’t allowed more than two runs in any start. Even then, he allowed only three runs in his season-worst outlier. His 1.80 ERA is fifth best among all qualified starters. Read the rest of this entry »