Back in January, I expressed grave concern over the state and direction of the Washington Nationals. They’d followed their World Series title with four straight last-place finishes, jettisoned most of their good players, and watched a series of prospects flame out. It wasn’t just a matter of waiting for Dylan Crews and James Wood to hit the majors; I argued that Washington needed to build a foundation of strong supporting players. Wood and Crews could be the difference between the Nats winning 80 games a year and 90, but if the infrastructure wasn’t ready, they’d turn a 70-win team into an 80-win team. And at that point, why did we even bother?

I’m pleased to report that the Nationals — no doubt sobered and inspired by my pessimistic appraisal of the situation — have answered the call. They don’t stink anymore. I don’t know if they’re good right now, as 38-41 and fourth place in the division isn’t exactly reminding anyone of the Big Red Machine. But on the journey from cheeks to championships, mediocrity is the first waypoint. Besides, with the NL Wild Card race being what it is, the Nats look like they’re going to be within a couple games of a playoff spot halfway through the season. Read the rest of this entry »

As of this writing, Mason Miller leads all relief pitchers in K% and K-BB%. You’ve heard of him. He’s one of this season’s breakout stars. He’s so good, he’s convinced people who should know better that years of team control for a relief pitcher ought to be worth a lot in the trade market. High praise, indeed.

No. 2 is Jeremiah Estrada, a small (6-foot-1) right-hander whom the Padres plucked off the waiver wire last November. In his previous MLB experience — 16 1/3 innings over parts of two seasons with the Cubs — Estrada struck out 21 batters and walked 15 while allowing 10 earned runs, including five home runs. This year, Estrada has 48 strikeouts against 10 walks in 26 1/3 innings. His 43.6 K% is not only second in the league this year, it would be one of the 20 best all-time if he keeps it up for the rest of the season.

It’s like he’s not the same pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

JJ Wetherholt is in an unusual position. A third-year finance student at West Virginia University with an interest in math who once considered going to law school, Wetherholt is leaving college early, and says his parents couldn’t be more proud.

As prestigious and lucrative as a career in law or finance can be, neither holds a candle to professional baseball, and Wetherholt is one of the leading candidates for the top pick in this year’s draft.

In addition to academic All-Big 12 and All-American honors, Wetherholt hit .373/.471/.632 with 29 homers, 56 stolen bases, and more walks than strikeouts in 143 career college games. A compact, sinewy 5-foot-10, 190-pound second baseman with great bat speed from an open, left-handed stance, he’s a lock to become WVU’s highest draft pick ever. (The record is currently 11th overall, shared by Alek Manoah in 2019 and right-hander Chris Enochs in 1997.) Read the rest of this entry »

One advantage of living in an age where the wealth of human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is that no curiosity need go unsatisfied. I was just sitting around wondering idly about the relationship between how hitters get pitched and how well they do against certain types of pitches. So I ran a couple of Baseball Savant searches and played around in Excel over lunch and ended up with something that would surely have made Henry Chadwick soil his trousers.

Which probably overstates the impact of these findings, such as they are. One of my major takeaways is that Aaron Judge is a preposterously good hitter, which I feel like we all knew going in. Still, it’s a fun journey to go on, so let’s take it together. Read the rest of this entry »

J.T. Realmuto can no longer outrun the brutality of his chosen profession. The Phillies catcher, having battled knee discomfort all spring, is having right knee surgery. While Realmuto has dealt with knee pain for weeks, this is nevertheless startling news. Realmuto’s durability is the thing that makes him special; in 11 major league seasons, this is only his fourth stint on the IL (including a COVID quarantine period in 2021), and none of his previous trips have lasted longer than 22 days.

Moreover, Phillies Doomerism, as a mental health condition, is frequently comorbid with Sixers Doomerism. People who suffer from the latter probably heard the word “meniscus” flashed back to Joel Embiid collapsing in a heap and taking the Sixers’ season with him.

It’s not quite that bad. Realmuto is headed for the longest injury absence of his career, but absent some bizarre complication, he’ll be back well before the end of the regular season. Even if that weren’t the case, no baseball player is as important to his team as Embiid is to his. Nevertheless, the Phillies were built under the assumption that Realmuto would always be available. So even a brief absence is going to be problematic. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve written about the Colorado Rockies so many times over the past two years that I think we can all take the normal disclaimer as read. They’re not very good, and they’re probably not going to be very good in the short or medium term.

However, there is some good news. Colorado has put quite a bit of faith in two young players who put up monster defensive numbers at up-the-middle positions: center fielder Brenton Doyle and shortstop Ezequiel Tovar. The latter signed a seven-year contract extension this spring. These guys are so good defensively it almost doesn’t matter if they hit at all. And that’s a fortunate coincidence, because last year, they didn’t hit at all.

That part wasn’t the good news. This is the good news: In 2024, Doyle and Tovar are hitting a little. Read the rest of this entry »

Hurston Waldrep is one of my favorite pitchers in the minor leagues. Or rather, he was, because the Braves called him up this weekend and gave him his major league debut on Sunday. Waldrep was the no. 24 overall pick in the draft last year, and I was by no means alone in considering that selection a steal for Atlanta.

A year ago this weekend, Waldrep was pitching the University of Florida to the College World Series; on Sunday, his opponent, the Washington Nationals, was somewhat more challenging. Waldrep’s line in his debut ended up being extremely ugly: 3 2/3 innings, four hits, four walks, only one strikeout, and seven earned runs allowed. Atlanta lost the game 8-5, and Waldrep got charged with the decision, leaving him with a career record of 0-1 and an ERA of 17.18.

Waldrep’s first big league start ended in disaster, but up until the point where it all went wrong, the rookie showed incredible promise. So let’s look a little deeper, because amid the pile of runs, you can see why I’m still so high on Waldrep, and why he could end up being immensely important to the Braves later this year. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not as stridently anti-tanking as some people — in my youth, I was a Sixers blogger during The Process, so I can say from experience that rooting for a historically bad team has its moments — but there is one thing that bugs me about the Orioles and Astros and so on from the 2010s. They’ve broken the curve for bad teams.

Back in my day, it took some doing to lose 100 games. Teams that bad were special. Now, we don’t blink at having multiple 100-loss teams in the same season, and 110-loss teams or worse are pretty common. It takes an increasingly rare brand of ineptitude to catch our attention nowadays.

Enter the 2024 Chicago White Sox. Read the rest of this entry »

For a few years now, I’ve been waiting for Salvador Perez to break down.

There are three reasons for this. First, he’s at the intersection of two kinds of hitter who are at risk of precipitous decline: Big dudes who hit for a lot of power but don’t walk much and free swingers who need to make a lot of contact. Perez is one of seven players who have batted at least 4,500 times since the year 2000, with a career walk rate of 7% or less and a career ISO of .175 or more. The other six are Eduardo Escobar, José Abreu, Javier Báez, Nick Castellanos, Adam Jones, and J.T. Realmuto. That’s five guys who watched it go in a hurry and, well, stay strong, J.T., we’re all rooting for you.

The other point is that Perez plays the hardest position in the sport. Not only that, but he’s one of the biggest guys to ever play that position regularly (a man who weighs 255 pounds and crouches 200 times a day, six days a week has to have thighs the size of bike wheels) and he’s put in an unbelievable amount of time there. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday morning, Major League Baseball announced the suspension of five players for violating Rule 21, the prohibition on betting on baseball. Minor leaguers Jay Groome of the Padres, José Rodríguez of the Phillies, Michael Kelly of the Athletics, and Andrew Saalfrank of the Diamondbacks were all suspended for one season.

But the headline figure in the announcement is Padres utilityman Tucupita Marcano, who has been declared permanently ineligible after betting some $150,000 on baseball games — a mix of MLB and international contests — through legal sportsbooks. Marcano placed 25 bets on games involving the Pirates last summer while he was on Pittsburgh’s injured list and receiving treatment at PNC Park. While all five players placed bets on their parent clubs, the key distinction is that Marcano did so while assigned to the major league team. For that, he became the first player to receive a lifetime sanction for this offense since Pete Rose 35 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »