On Saturday afternoon, I sat down to watch the most important baseball game of the weekend: The Greenville Regional elimination game between East Carolina and Wake Forest. This game not only had NCAA Tournament survival on the line, it featured two of the top three college pitching prospects in this draft class: Wake’s Chase Burns and ECU’s Trey Yesavage.

In many respects, it mirrored last year’s College World Series semifinal between Wake and LSU, in which the two starting pitchers — Paul Skenes and Rhett Lowder — were the first two arms off the board in the draft. That was, for my money, the best baseball game played anywhere in 2023 and one of the best College World Series games of all time. Skenes and Lowder combined to allow five hits over 15 scoreless innings, and the only runs of the game were scored on the final play, a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 11th.

That was Mad Max: Fury Road, a bombastic, thrilling, and yet obviously virtuosic thriller that could not have been improved. ECU-Wake was more like Licorice Pizza: Clearly everyone involved was good at their craft, but the end result was weird and meandering and frustrating. Burns was a little disappointing; Yesavage was great, but after he was lifted in the eighth inning, ECU coach Cliff Godwin used seven pitchers to get the last five outs. In the meantime, Wake scored five runs in the top of the ninth to take a 6-4 lead, after which ECU struck back with five singles in the bottom of the ninth to walk it off. Read the rest of this entry »

If you read the 2,300-word NCAA Tournament preview from yesterday, you probably noticed that it only included eight regionals and 32 teams, which is only half the field. That’d leave newcomers woefully unprepared for the bacchanal of college baseball that is to come. So join me for a quick look at the other 32 teams that will set out to claim a spot in the Men’s College World Series. Remember: The goal is 150 words per region. Let’s see if I can do it this time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll start by conceding that one of the greatest strengths of college baseball, as an entertainment product, can sometimes be a weakness: There’s just so much of it. On the one hand, the first week of the NCAA Tournament is a baseball sicko’s paradise, with uninterrupted wall-to-wall action from noon to midnight all weekend, and stretching into Monday.

If one game is out of hand early, fear not — you can switch to any one of about six different streams on ESPN+, or you can camp out watching Squeeze Play and chant “Quad Box! Quad Box!” at your TV until Mike Rooney morphs into a kaiju and lays waste to downtown Omaha. Read the rest of this entry »

I think everyone has moments where they wonder just what the hell they’ve done with their lives. I’ve been blessed with the divine spark of human consciousness, and a body to tote those thoughts around in, and what have I accomplished? I had one of those moments recently while I was holding a friend’s baby, trying to make her laugh. What a delightful and important but most of all profound thing, to create a whole other person and cultivate her — from scratch — into a happy adult.

Or the next best thing, creating art. I’ll speak to what I know: music. I’m left in awe of songs that, through dynamic contrast and precision of rhythm and density of countermelody, seem to be carrying that divine spark themselves — the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony, or Typhoon’s “Prosthetic Love.” So much care and emotion went into such composition that it’s hard not to be bowled over by the emotional transference of the artistic process even as you’re astounded by how precisely the pieces have been crafted and how seamlessly they fit together.

Again: What am I doing with my life to show that I value this gift? How am I using this spark to shape the world into a better place? How am I passing this light on to others? This thought burst out and grabbed me recently when I was poking around our site’s pitcher defense leaderboards and noticed something interesting about Josh Fleming. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I was distraught to learn that Mike Baumann — my lovely, mild-mannered, Suits-loving, pineapple-curious distant cousin — had been designated for assignment by the Baltimore Orioles. Those no-good, rotten, perfidious, cold-hearted Baltimore Orioles. Did you know that Big Mike and Austin Hays had been teammates dating back to college? All those years, lost like tears in the rain.

To say I’m furious would be an understatement of biblical proportions, and the Mike Baumanns of the world are coming together to visit disproportionate vengeance upon the Orioles. I’ve already jinxed John Means, and I’ll take another pitcher every week until our thirst for retribution is sated. Which will probably be never. Francis Scott Key was a hack. The Wire is overrated. Neither I nor my descendants will ever eat crab again. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the dawn of time, there’s always been at least one elite major league closer who’s thrown the cutter almost exclusively. By “dawn of time” I mean the mid-1990s, of course, but I think we can all agree that civilization only truly began when humankind discovered frosted tips and cargo shorts. First there was Mariano Rivera, then Kenley Jansen, and now that everything from the ’90s is back in style, there’s Emmanuel Clase.

Clase has been a crucial part of Cleveland’s surprising run to first place in the AL Central; he’s recorded the win or the save in 18 of the Guardians’ 33 victories, and he’s fifth among relievers in WPA. Cleveland’s record in one-run games is 8-6, which isn’t particularly freakish, but the Guardians are 8-2 in one-run games when Clase pitches, and 0-4 when he doesn’t.

Here’s another fun one: Clase is on pace for the first 50-save season in MLB since Edwin Díaz in 2018, and 3.4 WAR, which would be the most by a Guardians reliever since 1988. WAR wasn’t even a stat back then! Read the rest of this entry »

Amid all the (mostly Gunnar Henderson-related, as I understand it) Orioles hoopla, John Means has a chance to do something unusual in his start later today against the Cardinals. Means is the only starting pitcher this season to make it through his first three outings without walking a batter.

That might not sound like much to all you folks who walked barefoot in the snow — uphill, both ways — to see Christy Mathewson shut out the Louisville Trench Foots every three days, way back when. But it’s pretty impressive by modern standards. Only four other starters — Mitchell Parker, Sonny Gray, Corbin Burnes, and Shota Imanaga — even made it through their first two starts without giving up a free pass in 2024. And if Means continues according to form this afternoon, he’ll join a surprisingly small group of pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

The Houston Astros are in an unfamiliar situation: five games under .500 with Memorial Day approaching in the distance like a looming mountain out an airplane window. And they’ve won nine of their past 11 to even get that close.

The Astros have had their ups and downs during their ongoing run of seven straight ALCS appearances, including a season in which they finished under .500 but came within a game of making the World Series anyway. But barring another pandemic — which might well happen if you jokers keep drinking unpasteurized milk — that isn’t going to cut it in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

I like to amuse myself by imagining a scenario in which Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane has to replace a departing Juan Soto. Now, if Moneyball came out in the 2020s, Soto would’ve been traded years ago and Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand would be heroically figuring out how to procure a block of taxpayer-funded stadium-adjacent condos for Steve, the cheapskate owner. But it’s my imagination, so it doesn’t have to be that bleak.

This is a kind of reverse-Six Million Dollar Man scenario: “We have to rebuild him; we don’t have the money.” Soto doesn’t provide any special value in the field or on the bases; even the cheapest team in the league can find an unremarkable defensive corner outfielder who steals 10 bases a year. The tricky thing about finding a poor man’s Soto is replacing his ability to get on base.

Guys who run a .400 OBP, or a walk rate in the high teens, are rare but not unique. Especially if you exclude those high-OBP guys who also bat near .300 and have 30-plus home run power, the tools that price the imaginary A’s out of Soto’s market. (Or Bryce Harper’s or Aaron Judge’s or Kyle Tucker’s.) Read the rest of this entry »

Clarke Schmidt has a thing for spin. This season, there are only 14 breaking pitches in the entire league that average 3,000 rpm or more; Schmidt throws two of them. To find another South Carolina alum with such mastery of spin, you’d have to go all the way back to Andrew Card, who was George W. Bush’s chief of staff during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Schmidt’s breaking balls would fit perfectly in a turn-of-the-century alt-rock milieu, alongside the Spin Doctors, or Lifehouse’s “Spin,” or the Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl.

Baseball Savant recently started publishing bat tracking data, and the public sabermetric community is currently working out what this new avalanche of data actually means. So it was in the early days of spin rate: How much is too much, and how little is not enough, and how does it vary pitch by pitch? It took a minute to actually sort this stuff out, and as ever, the characteristics of a pitch don’t matter very much if it’s poorly located.

For example: Last year, Schmidt spent his first full season in the Yankees’ big league rotation. And he was fine. His ERA was 4.64, his FIP 4.42. Even though he achieved that vanishingly difficult feat of starting 32 games and throwing 159 innings, he was only a 1.8 WAR pitcher on the season. Opponents hit .265 against him, and his two outrageous breaking pitches landed him smack dab in the 50th percentile for breaking ball run value. Read the rest of this entry »