Brandon Pfaadt — former top prospect, 2023 postseason hero, recipient of a long-term extension after just one full season of big league work — lasted only three starts in the major league rotation at the beginning of 2026. After allowing 12 runs in 16 2/3 innings, the Diamondbacks had seen enough. Big contract or no, Pfaadt went off to middle relief.

Pfaadt had a 5.94 ERA and 5.37 FIP when he made his last start on April 11. In 10 bullpen outings that followed — including, it must be said, a couple very strong bulk relief stints — Pfaadt posted a 5.91 ERA and 5.47 FIP in 21 1/3 innings. The next demotion was to Triple-A Reno, an indignity for a pitcher who’d started 65 games across 2024 and 2025. Only Logan Webb and Jake Irvin had made more big league starts in that time.

Pfaadt spent less than four weeks in the minor leagues. When he came back, he went straight back into Arizona’s rotation, and immediately started pitching better than he ever had before. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer is nearly over. The Premier League is back in business and the NFL is close behind. Kids are going back to school. The other day, I opened a window and it didn’t feel like sticking my face in a pizza oven.

That means it’s time for me to look at the Cleveland Guardians’ lineup and wonder what the heck they’re doing in the playoff race. But rather than do a deep dive on whoever this year’s load-bearing Tyler Naquin or Owen Miller is, I want to take a step back and look at this issue from a historical perspective.

Because this year, the Guardians aren’t the only team with playoff aspirations and a lineup full of question marks. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies won their ninth straight game on Sunday. Cristopher Sánchez started and Kyle Schwarber hit a game-winning home run.

There are home runs and then there are home runs, and even by Schwarber’s standards, this one was a tank: straight out to dead center, over the batter’s eye. Read the rest of this entry »

As an inveterately unhappy middle-aged man, I don’t like pointing out when things get better. So when I say that the 2023 MLB rule changes massively improved baseball as a spectator experience, you can rest assured that I’m not making that assertion lightly.

You know what I’m talking about: The shift ban, the pitch clock, and the pizza box bases. Back in the olden days, a sufficiently daring and athletic ballplayer could rack up 50, 60, or even 100 steals in a season. But the response to that era has been a gradual tightening up of baserunning tactics.

First, the roided-up giants of the 1990s got too stiff and meaty to run and slide. Even those athletes who maintained their springiness didn’t want to run into an out when the guy at the plate could use his 25-inch forearms to drive them in from anywhere. In the 2000s, an army of Theo Epstein wannabes took over baseball operations en masse. These men, with their locust-like commitment to efficiency, discouraged risky baserunning behavior even further. While their Harvard MBA classmates were killing the American housing market, they killed the stolen base. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »