Over the 30-plus years that I’ve been following baseball, it seems like a collection of newfangled stats comes out every couple years. WAR, DiPS, wOBA, UZR, exit velocity, spin rate — America’s most rigorously empiricized sport has gone from scribblings in Henry Chadwick’s notebook to having more inscrutable acronyms than the Department of Defense.

My default position on new stats is one of interested skepticism. As a public-facing analyst, I don’t want to stake my reputation on a new metric that might still have serious flaws. It usually takes months or even years for people smarter than me — or at least, people who did more than barely pass their graduate statistics class — to iron out the kinks and figure out how to read and utilize the trendy new stats.

One example: I waited for ages for Justin Lawrence to be good. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox, coming out of the worst season in modern major league history, started 2025 with a bang: an 8-1 win over the Angels on Opening Day. They lost the next two games, then pounded the Twins into smithereens on the last day of March. Since then, the Sox have dropped 12 games out of 14 and once again settled like silt on the bottom of the American League standings table.

It’s not going to be their year after all. But I don’t think it’s going to be as miserable as it was in 2024, and Chase Meidroth is one reason why. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, I sat down to watch the Red Sox-Rays game, hoping to find the answer to a question that’s been bugging me for weeks: Who does Shane Baz look like?

I didn’t come close to an answer, because while watching Baz pitch, I was struck by the sparseness of the young right-hander’s uniform. Only three letters in his name; two digits in his uniform number, but represented by skinny numerals. It stood out on the Rays’ classy blue-on-white uniforms. (Some say it’s boring and/or derivative, but I disagree — it’s a color scheme that’ll never steer you wrong in baseball.)

Then I lost the plot a little. The Rays don’t have a jersey sponsor, and their sleeve patch doesn’t contain any script. Their team name is only four letters long. How close does Baz come to having the fewest characters on his uniform of any major league player? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve gotten prematurely excited about Nick Lodolo before. This is not that. I’ve consulted my physician and I’m working on the problem. But he’s such a weird pitcher I can’t completely forget him.

What’s he up to now? Well, believe it or not, El Cóndor del Río Ohio is not walking anyone. Maybe that’ll change when he starts against the Mariners tonight, but through his first three starts, Lodolo has faced 71 batters and walked only one. And while he suffers the same predilection for hitting batters that plagues many long-levered sidearmers, Lodolo has plunked just one opponent in 2025. Read the rest of this entry »

The SEC’s all-time hit king made his major league debut this week, to almost no fanfare. In some respects, the Tampa Bay Rays are a step down for Jake Mangum. The Rays currently play at Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field, capacity just over 11,000, while they await disposition after Hurricane Milton took the roof off the Trop last offseason.

Mangum played his college ball at Mississippi State, whose ballpark, Dudy Noble Field, holds 15,000, with a record attendance of 16,423 cowbell-whacking, barbecue-devouring maniacs. It’s one of the most electrifying (in good times) and demanding (in bad) environments in all of college sports. To someone who’s played at The Dude, as Mangum has, even the most raucous major league crowd probably feels like a Presbyterian church. Read the rest of this entry »

If White Sox fans hadn’t already been inured to calamity by now, surely the ending of Tuesday afternoon’s game would’ve sent them into an incoherent, frothing rage. Having made it to the bottom of the ninth inning in Cleveland tied 0-0, Mike Clevinger took the mound. Clevinger, for reasons I do not remotely understand, is Chicago’s closer, and the inning before he’d come in to retire José Ramírez with two outs and the bases empty to preserve the tie.

Clevinger started the inning by allowing an infield single to Carlos Santana, alerting the world to the hitherto unknown fact that Santana can still run at this phase of his career. Then, the once-coveted workhorse walked three straight Guardians on a combined 21 pitches to force in the winning run. By the end of his stint, Clevinger’s fastball velocity was dipping into the 91 mph range. It was the second time in the first 10 games of the season that Clevinger took the decision in a 1-0 defeat, and Chicago’s second walk-off loss in as many games.

A game like this invites many questions, most of them more easily answered by the works of Nietzsche or C.S. Lewis (depending on your philosophical predilections) than baseball analysis. But there is good news, other than the fact that we’re all going to die one day, and when we do, we won’t have to watch the White Sox anymore.

See, Shane Smith was nails. Again. Read the rest of this entry »

Early enough in the season, you’ll find some weird stats. This is a well-established fact of baseball in April. There’s even a song about it. As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Kyle Tucker leads the league in position player WAR, with Aaron Judge third and Corbin Carroll fifth; if the leaderboard looked like that at the end of September, it’d probably be a mild surprise — a highly, highly lucrative one for Tucker — but nobody would write a book about how weird the 2025 season was or anything.

But Wilyer Abreu is second in WAR and Tyler Soderstrom is fourth. Both of them are promising young players, but nobody worth listening to had either one in the preseason MVP discussion.

In short, these things will shake out soon enough. There was an old saying to that effect: Baseball season hasn’t really started until Mike Trout leads the league in WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. broke off contract talks with the Blue Jays on February 17. It didn’t seem like there was any animus between the two sides at the time, but the four-time All-Star didn’t want to distract himself during his walk year by negotiating all season long. The deadline was arbitrary, but nonetheless immovable. The Blue Jays tested Guerrero’s resolve with a renewed offer on Opening Day, but he held firm.

Then he changed his mind. I try to avoid the impulse to tell baseball players what to do with their careers, but I’ll say this: $500 million is a really, really good reason to abandon one’s previous position.

Guerrero’s $500 million contract extension with the Blue Jays starts next year, runs for 14 years, and contains a full no-trade clause but no opt-outs. The intention, then, is to keep Guerrero in Toronto for the rest of his career. Read the rest of this entry »

Heston Kjerstad turned 26 in February, and he only has 158 major league plate appearances. That’s more than you or I had at that age, but it’s not a lot relative to expectations. This was a highly polished SEC corner bat who went second overall five years ago, though for reasons I’ll get into, Kjerstad wasn’t your garden variety no. 2 pick. After a token call-up at the end of 2023, in 2024 he spent more time in Triple-A (where he posted a 160 wRC+ in 56 games) than in the majors (where he posted a wRC+ of 116, which isn’t lighting the world on fire, but is still good, especially for a rookie).

Nobody wants to get their shot because of an injury, but Colton Cowser busting his thumb on Sunday leaves a two-month hole that Kjerstad has to, has to, has to exploit. Read the rest of this entry »

During the offseason, I examined Jackson Merrill’s excellent rookie season and concluded that his next big developmental step would have to involve getting on base more. A week into his sophomore season, we don’t know if Merrill is going to walk more. But if he does, he’ll have plenty of walkin’ around money.

Yeah, I feel good about that little bit of wordplay. Let’s move on.

On Wednesday morning, the Padres announced that they’d signed their precocious young outfielder to a nine-year contract extension. The contract is worth $135 million and kicks in next year, leaving his $809,500 salary intact for 2025, but incentives and an option for 2035 could push the total value of the deal to $204 million. Read the rest of this entry »