I say this with nothing but charity in my heart: It’s generally not a good sign when your team has a load-bearing Derek Hill. When the Phillies traded for Hill in June, he was arguably less valuable than the international bonus money they picked up in the same deal.

Hill is a career fifth outfielder with a strikeout rate (31.5% in 806 career plate appearances) that would make almost any hitter unplayable, especially a hitter with a career .281 on-base percentage and a career .132 ISO. But he can run, he can play center field, and he can hit lefties a bit. Best of all — and again, I’m not trying to be unkind here — Hill could not have dreamed up a scenario in which the bar for success was lower. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Detroit Tigers pulled off a truly delightful 1-5-4 double play. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and a video even more, so I’ll save everyone a lot of work and show it to you.

If you’re reading this, and you’re old enough to have lived through the war between small ball and sabermetrics in the early part of this century, you’re probably delighted to see a sacrifice bunt go awry like this. I lived through college baseball in the early-to-mid-2010s — if there was a war over sabermetrics, college ball at this time was its Stalingrad — so that was definitely my first reaction as well. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to understand the history of the Milwaukee Brewers over the past 15 years, you could do worse than the following graph.

In January 2018, the Brewers traded four talented prospects to the Marlins for Christian Yelich. Three of those players were athletic up-the-middle guys with power potential but serious questions about their hit tools. None of them panned out. Yelich, who had been a supporting player on some indifferent Marlins teams, took to the Juiced Ball era like a duck to water. In the first two seasons after the trade he won two batting titles, hit a total of 80 home runs, and finished first and second in the MVP voting. Read the rest of this entry »

The Angels might be as adrift as ever, shedding players at the deadline, but they need someone — anyone — to throw enough innings to close out the season.

The biggest void in their pitching staff was left by José Soriano, who was traded to the Blue Jays a week ago on Monday. Soriano throws incredibly hard and gets a huge number of groundballs. This solidly built right-hander’s triple-digit fastball doesn’t get many whiffs — and his strikeout and walk rates are both cause for concern — but he does have a potent sinker-offspeed combination and a good breaking ball.

How do you replace that guy? Good news: The Angels don’t have to, because they’ve had another Soriano all along. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, a friend of mine asked if ABS challenge data gets incorporated into WAR. (I have extremely cool friends.) It doesn’t, and I explained that while an individual challenge can absolutely change the course of an inning (or a game, or even a season), a single ball-strike call is of negligible run value out of context. If anything, we should be adding challenges to WPA, not WAR, except WPA only gets calculated on a per-plate-appearance basis, rather than a per-pitch basis.

At any rate, challenges aren’t like catcher framing in the early days. In 2008, the first year for which we have framing data, the difference between the best framer in baseball (Brian McCann) and the worst (Ryan Doumit, the poor guy) was 97.7 runs. At 10 runs per win, well, you can do the math on your own. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the best pitch in baseball?

That’s a tough question. Whatever answer you come up with will certainly say just as much about your methodology as the pitch itself. That’s OK. We’re open-minded people here, and there’s more than one way to approach this problem. Read the rest of this entry »

In this trade deadline season where everyone’s within reach of a playoff spot, the Marlins were one of several teams that attempted to chart a middle path. Sure, we’ll sell off some of our best players — including, in Liam Hicks and Lake Bachar, some guys with plenty of team control left — but we’ll add in other trades and try to backfill those roles.

Miami’s big major league add was 26-year-old reliever Victor Vodnik, late of the Colorado Rockies. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and it is: Vodnik has a 5.25 ERA in 36 innings this season, and at the time of the trade, he was fifth among Rockies relievers in gmLI, which is the average leverage index when he enters the game. In other words, the Rockies don’t think Vodnik is a high-leverage reliever, or at least they hadn’t been using him that way.

Vodnik cost the Marlins third baseman Connor Norby, who was the less successful half of the Trevor Rogers trade, and pitching prospect Aiden May. Read the rest of this entry »

Having somewhat unexpectedly found themselves in a playoff spot at the deadline, the Diamondbacks have acquired outfielder Lars Nootbaar from the Cardinals in exchange for minor league pitchers Daniel Eagen and Sandro Santana, along with a player to be named later.

Cardinals Devil Magic has its tentacles in all sorts of places, but a key component of this witchcraft was an ability to conjure up certain types of players at will: innings-eating sinkerballers, pesky middle infielders, and corner guys who get called “professional hitters.”

Nootbaar was one of the last great hitterish Cardinal discoveries before this three-year playoff drought (and counting) set in. His peak came in 2023, when he achieved cult hero status in Japan for his role in helping the country win the World Baseball Classic. During that regular season, he hit .261/.367/.418, good for a 118 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR in just 117 games. He even stole 11 bases and made 67 starts in center field, opening the door for a future in which he could offer more than just good vibes and a bunch of walks. Read the rest of this entry »

The Toronto Blue Jays, wedged as they are between punting this season and reloading for 2027 and beyond, have traded reliever Jeff Hoffman to the Twins for three prospects — pitchers Dasan Hill and John Klein, second baseman Dameury Pena — plus $250,000 in international bonus pool space.

The Jays, ever tinkering, also sent left-handed pitcher Adam Macko to the Rangers for infielder Josh Smith and minor league righty Josh Stephan.

Hoffman is the best player on the move, and based on his landing spot, the likeliest to play a meaningful role in the playoffs, so let’s deal with him first. Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles have traded Adley Rutschman to the Boston Red Sox, along with Jake Rogers, for catcher Carlos Narváez, a PTBNL or cash, and three prospects: right-handed pitchers Anthony Eyanson and Kyson Witherspoon, and teenage center fielders Enddy Azocar.

Wow.

The first reaction to this deal can only be one of astonishment, on multiple levels. The trade itself is audacious, from both teams’ perspective. Even with his trade value and reputation at a low ebb, Rutschman’s talents are gigantic, and the return reflects that.

But this trade’s on-field impact pales in comparison to What It All Means. Rutschman, the no. 1 overall pick in the 2019 draft, was the Orioles’ franchise player as they emerged from nearly a decade in the wilderness to become (if only briefly) a power player in the AL East. Seeing Rutschman in any other team’s colors will be weird enough to inspire the heebie-jeebies. Read the rest of this entry »