Author Archive: Michael Baumann

When Aaron Judge is healthy, he’s the most dangerous hitter in baseball. Sometimes I get alarmed at how uncontroversial a statement that is; ours is a sport that so frequently humiliates those who make such sweeping, unequivocal judgments as those.

But the empirical evidence is what it is. Judge has played 150 or more games in a season four times in his career. In those four seasons, he’s led all position players in WAR four times and led the league in wRC+ three times. He’s been named AL MVP three times and finished second once, ahead of some real doozies: Cal Raleigh’s 60-homer year, Bobby Witt Jr.’s 10.5-WAR campaign in 2024, Shohei Ohtani’s best pitching season — in fact, a healthy Judge is the only thing that’s ever trumped a healthy Ohtani in an MVP race.

So again, it’s not uncontroversial to say that when Judge is healthy he’s the best hitter in the world. He has not, however, always been healthy. Least of all this season, when he missed three months with a broken rib. And now, the single-season AL home run king is back on the IL with a calf strain. The timing could not be worse. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 24, I wrote about the Phillies, who’d just completed a nine-game winning streak in terrific style. After dropping the first two games of an extended West Coast road trip, they ripped off another six-game winning streak, with a run of seven games against the first-place Braves in a 10-day stretch to come.

Things haven’t gone so well since. Over the past two weeks, the Phillies are 4-8, with five of those losses coming by a single run. The bullpen is showing fatigue cracks; Jhoan Duran has lost twice while pitching in non-save situations, while on Friday, three different Phillies relievers blew saves in the span of three innings.

One of the bright spots of the Phillies’ last homestand came on Labor Day, when Jesús Luzardo threw a shutout in a 1-0 victory over Atlanta, thus obviating the need for a bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been almost four months since one of my periodic check-ins on Sandy Alcantara. And everything’s going well. In May, I declared the 2022 NL Cy Young winner “part of the way back,” after he’d lowered his ERA from 5.36 in 2025 to 3.53 in his first 10 starts of 2026.

Alcantara has started another 21 games since that post, and the results have been similar, if not quite as good. Since May 21, Alcantara is 10-8 with a 4.01 ERA, with xERA and FIP marks in the low 4.00s as well. Even in 2022, Alcantara was never a big per-inning strikeout guy; he was fourth in the league in punchouts mostly on the strength of how many innings he threw. That year’s NL strikeout leader, Corbin Burnes, struck out 36 more batters in 26 2/3 fewer innings.

But Alcantara used his height and changeup and three-fastball combination to get lots of groundballs and allow basically zero homers. Thus: The no. 11 strikeout rate in the NL (out of just 22 qualified starters) led to the no. 2 ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

When we think of the Miami Marlins throughout their history, offense doesn’t frequently come to mind. This franchise’s various owners haven’t traditionally put many resources behind the club, and what resources do come in often go to pitching. We remember the rotations led by Dontrelle Willis and Josh Beckett, or Kevin Brown and Livan Hernandez, or José Fernández.

Giancarlo Stanton’s 59-homer MVP campaign stands out in the memory partially because of how loanDepot Park blunted even his prodigious pop. (And also because Stanton got salary dumped to the Yankees before he could defend his NL home run crown.)

Here’s a wild stat: After this past weekend, the Marlins have a team wRC+ of 100. That’s their third-best wRC+ in history; they have only bested that mark in 2007 and 2017, with a joint franchise record of… 101. Read the rest of this entry »

This year, the Philadelphia Phillies are 26th in team position player WAR and 27th in wRC+. It’s not because they haven’t thrown enough money at the problem. They’re paying eight position players at least $10 million this year, if you include the cost of Nick Castellanos’ buyout. Nine players have batted at least 250 times for the Phillies this year; Brandon Marsh is the only one who didn’t cost them either eight figures or a first-round draft pick.

And yet: Even as Kyle Schwarber chases yet another home run title and Bryce Harper posts his best OBP in three years, Bryson Stott is within a tenth of a win of the team lead in WAR.

Stott, one of the quietest and least conspicuous members of the Phillies’ core, has taken his turn to carry the baton. Over a two-month span, from June 15 to August 15, Stott hit .306/.404/.462 and was third in WAR in the entire league. Read the rest of this entry »

Leading Astros pitchers in WAR usually takes some doing. The current AL West standings have Houston in line for its eighth division title and 10th postseason appearance in the past 12 years. Over that time, Astros pitchers have won three Cy Young Awards — two for Justin Verlander, one for Dallas Keuchel. Six other starters (Gerrit Cole, Framber Valdez, Lance McCullers Jr., Hunter Brown, Collin McHugh, and Yusei Kikuchi) have gotten downballot votes.

This year, the first-place Astros’ pitching WAR leader is 29-year-old Peter Lambert. It’s not a classic Astros rotation by any means — Brown and Cristian Javier have both spent a big chunk of the season on the IL — but Lambert is at the front of it nevertheless. No one expected this, least of all Lambert himself. Read the rest of this entry »

As special and precious as Shohei Ohtani is, it makes sense that he’s delicate. Both the Dodgers and the Angels before them have handled Ohtani with padded tongs: six-man rotations, pitch counts, a full-time DH role. Ohtani has played just 8 1/3 career innings in the outfield, even though he clearly has the legs and arms to play center.

It hasn’t mattered. For spurts lasting a season or two at most, Ohtani has held up, but he’s needed two UCL surgeries in an American pro career of nine seasons and only 644 1/3 innings on the mound, including the playoffs and the World Baseball Classic. Nolan Ryan has an innings-to-ligaments ratio more than 25 times Ohtani’s. It’s not great. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is a team sport, but sometimes there’s only room for two faces on a poster.

Before every playoff series, the league, its broadcast partners, and anyone else with an interest in promoting the event will circulate something based on the poster for the 1997 John Woo film Face/Off.

Half Cage, half Travolta, all smoldering scene-chewing and cartoonish violence. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping I don’t want to know you. There’s more to each side of the matchup than just the one guy, but in baseball as in film you put the superstar’s mug on the promo material if you want to sell tickets. Read the rest of this entry »

On Opening Day, Paul Skenes had his worst start since at least high school. He threw 37 pitches, allowed five runs (not all of which were his fault) and lasted only two-thirds of an inning. Skenes left that outing with an ERA of 67.50; even for a high-volume starting pitcher, that’s a big hole to climb out of.

From that point on, the NL Cy Young race has been a heads-up contest between Jacob Misiorowski and Cristopher Sánchez; the former, with his big velocity and strikeout totals, seems to be the favorite at the moment. But a third pitcher has entered the race in the past seven weeks: Chris Sale. Read the rest of this entry »

In a team sport, everyone involved — players, media, fans — has their own outlook on individual awards. Personally, I think they mean a lot. Yes, the player’s ultimate goal is to serve the team, but when individual effort is only tenuously related to team success, I think it’s worthwhile to recognize outstanding individual performances when they come.

But even I struggle to get too worked up about MLB’s Player of the Week awards. I get the press release in my inbox every week, but I usually check the headline, mark it read, and forget about it forever. As far as I know, there’s no cash prize or physical trophy involved; winning Player of the Week is more like getting all A’s on your report card than winning an Olympic medal. Read the rest of this entry »