There’s no way to say this without sounding snarky, so I’m not going to try: The Oakland A’s, who were supposed to be abysmal, have shocked the baseball world by being merely mediocre. They’re in third place in the AL West, with a full series’ worth of buffer between them and their pursuers. The Angels are suffering the mother of all post-breakup hangovers, and it appears that the Astros have finally been caught by Mephistopheles. Reports say a sinister-looking goateed man has been seen pounding on the door to Minute Maid Park, saying, “I gave you your two World Series, now I’m here for your soul!”

Nothing gold can stay.

The key — or at least one key — to Oakland’s surprising ascent to averageness has been a superb bullpen. Closer Mason Miller has grabbed most of the headlines; some people are saying he’s the best reliever in baseball now. I don’t know if that assertion will hold up over a full season, but the hyperbole will continue until the FIP doesn’t start with a minus sign.

Miller’s emergence has sucked up all the air in the room — insofar as there was ever a ton of air in the room for discussing Oakland’s bullpen — to the detriment of his teammates. So I wanted to highlight Lucas Erceg, who’s been very good this season, and is also kind of weird.

The first thing to know about Erceg is that he was, until very recently, a third baseman. As a sophomore at Cal, Erceg hit .303/.357/.502 with 11 home runs in 57 games, but was ruled academically ineligible the following season, which kicked off a circuitous path to the majors. First: A year at NAIA Menlo College, alma mater of former MLB… standout is probably too strong a word, even if he won a World Series and made an All-Star team… Gino Cimoli. Erceg went in the second round to Milwaukee, becoming Menlo’s highest draft pick ever in the process, and slowly worked his way through the minors with a series of unremarkable batting lines.

In 2021, the Brewers gave Erceg, who’d pitched occasionally at Cal, a shot as a reliever, and by that summer he was good enough to get an honorable mention on Milwaukee’s prospect list. (Even if it was only one sentence in a section labeled “Arm Strength.”)

In 2023, the A’s — who have had some success with converting college infielders into relief pitchers, or who at least brought Sean Doolittle through — purchased Erceg from Milwaukee. This furthers my long-held belief that everyone who plays for the Brewers will one day play for the A’s, and vice-versa. We’d save a lot of hassle by merging the two franchises and having them play on a barnstorming circuit called the John Jaha Highway.

But I digress.

Erceg’s surface stats look pretty pedestrian right now, but about half of his 3.38 ERA comes from one three-run blown save against the Rangers on May 6. At the end of April, he was on a run of nine consecutive scoreless appearances, the last eight of which were also hitless. It’s not as impressive as a hidden perfect game, but Erceg did throw a hidden no-hitter (with 13 strikeouts and three walks on 120 pitches) from April 11 to April 30. I regret not getting to this topic two weeks ago, because I would’ve hammered the “more like Lucas Goose-egg” joke until you all started sending me rotten vegetables in the mail.

Puns and unusual development plan withstanding, there are two things I want to highlight about Erceg: His unusual repertoire and the significant step forward he’s made in missing bats from last year to this year.

As you might expect from a conversion project, there are elements of Erceg’s game that might be considered crude. He’s a hard-throwing one-inning reliever, to start, and even after taking a substantial step forward in this department, his walk rate this year is 11.9%. That’s in the “survivable, but not ideal” bucket for a pitcher, even a reliever.

Nevertheless, Erceg has a legitimate four-pitch repertoire. And this isn’t some fastball-slider guy who has a show-me curveball and a changeup he occasionally throws to opposite-handed batters. He throws four pitches between 18.9% and 30.5% of the time, and while he has specialist offerings to both righties and lefties, he throws his four-seamer and slider against everyone, giving him a three-pitch repertoire against any opponent.

There are 15 pitchers this year who qualify for Baseball Savant’s leaderboards, throw at least four pitches 15% of the time, and have no more than a 20-percentage point spread between their most-used pitch and their least-used pitch. (Erceg’s spread is 11.6 percentage points, the third-lowest of his cohort.) Of those 15 pitchers, 10 have thrown most or all of this season out of the rotation. That makes sense, because the more times a pitcher goes through the lineup, the more pitches he needs.

Here are the five relievers, with the number of pitches they throw, the spread between their highest and lowest pitch usage rate, and the average velocity of their hardest fastball. (Hardest, because all five of these pitchers throw at least two types of fastballs.)

These guys aren’t soft-tossers — Brent Suter came up in the net I originally cast before I narrowed the parameters some — but Erceg is on a different planet, velocity-wise. His changeup is averaging 91.4 mph, which is just 0.3 mph slower than Farmer’s sinker. That changeup is getting knocked around — five of the seven extra-base hits Erceg has allowed this season have come off the changeup, including his only home run — but it’s also missing bats at a rate of 37.5%.

In fact, I’m going to combine arbitrary-endpoint theater and small-sample-size theater to give you a fun fact: Through the weekend, only three pitchers in baseball were running whiff rates of at least 28% on four different pitches they’d thrown at least 49 times: Zack Wheeler, Pablo López, and Erceg.

Now to the really fun part. Erceg has experienced a massive uptick in chase rate, from 23.2% to 31.0%, while at the same time lowering his in-zone swing rate from 62.9% to 56.1% and his in-zone contact rate from 79.3% to 67.2%.

In other words, hitters are swinging less at pitches in the zone, and when they swing they’re not making as much contact. And simultaneously they’re chasing pitches a third more than they did last year. It’s not immediately clear to me why this is happening; Erceg’s in-zone rate is down a couple percentage points, and while his overall opponent swing rate is up, it’s by about two swings at this point in the season. That’s nothing.

As with any reliever performance before the All-Star break, it bears monitoring before we start to count on it going forward. But for now, Erceg is getting whiffs on four different pitches, and is one of the best relievers in baseball both at missing bats and avoiding hard contact. Not bad for a converted infielder, and at best the second-most important reliever on the Oakland A’s.

When the Braves signed Reynaldo López to a three-year, $30 million contract last winter, I was confused. Like most people in baseball, I thought López and Lucas Giolito had an E.T.-and-Elliott thing going on, where they couldn’t be separated. They’d come up together as minor leaguers with the Nationals, before being traded together to the White Sox, then traded again to the Angels, then waivered over to Cleveland, all without breaking the telepathic link.

Denuded of his longtime colleague, López cut a curious figure. The White Sox had tried to make him a starter in the late 2010s and it went badly. The only time López has ever led the league in anything was when he led the league in earned runs allowed in 2019. Since the dawn of the 2020s, he’s been a reliever, and a good one, but it was unlikely he’d return to the rotation, let alone for a team with standards as high as Atlanta’s.

But starting pitching is harder to come by than ever these days, and a major theme of the 2023-24 free agent class was, “OK, but let’s make absolutely sure this guy can’t start.” Jordan Hicks, Jakob Junis, Nick Martinez, Michael Lorenzen, and López, of course. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re far enough into the 2024 regular season that a lot of the extreme flukes and outliers have tumbled back to Earth. Mookie Betts leads the league in position player WAR; Shohei Ohtani leads in wRC+; Patrick Corbin doesn’t quite lead the league in earned runs allowed, but he’s close, and everyone ahead of him on the leaderboard has made more starts.

Nevertheless, we do have a few surprises hanging around at or near the top of various leaderboards. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few before they disappear. These (mostly) aren’t surprising rookies; rather, they’re players you’ve probably heard of, but might have forgotten about in the past few years while they sorted some stuff out. Read the rest of this entry »

Davis Schneider is a throwback. Not because he’s 5-foot-9, and fought his way through the minor leagues after signing for $50,000 as a 28th-round pick. Or because he has featured at three positions in his brief major league career, or because he hides half his face behind a bushy mustache twice the size of Tom Selleck’s.

We’re not throwing things back that far. Schneider is a throwback to about eight years ago, when the swing plane revolution was in full, um, swing. Back when the baseballs were juicier and fastballs had more sink, undersized infielders with strength and hit tool to burn were taught to uppercut, in contravention of 100 years of baseball orthodoxy. And thus stars were made out of Daniel Murphy, Ozzie Albies, and Schneider’s new Toronto teammate Justin Turner, among others.

Schneider was drafted in 2017, took two full years to make it out of rookie ball, had his first double-digit homer season as a pro in 2022, and only broke out last year. Schneider hit 29 home runs in 122 combined games in Triple-A and the majors, and emerged as a fan favorite in Toronto. Which you would expect, given that the Berlin, NJ, native got off to one of the hottest starts in major league history. Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Soto is a tricky player for me to write about, because the numbers speak for themselves — no literary flourish needed. Trying to get cute while writing about a guy performing miracles isn’t baseball blogging, it’s the Gospel of John.

Nevertheless, Soto is operating on such a level (he’s hitting .316/.421/.559 through the weekend — all stats are current through Sunday’s games) that it begs examination. Soto has the best batting eye of his generation; therefore, for him, every year is a walk year. But this season, specifically, is his final one before he hits the open market in search of a record long-term contract.

It’s been a complicated couple years for us Soto zealots. How can this player demand more money than the (deferral-adjusted) Shohei Ohtani deal? He’s never won an MVP and only finished in the top three once. He’s never recorded a 7-WAR season, never hit 40 home runs. He’s a bad defender, and in the past two seasons, he hit .242 and .275 respectively. If he’s such a uniquely valuable player, how come two teams gave up on him before he turned 25? Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday afternoon, Charlie Condon hit a home run off Texas A&M starter Tanner Jones. Condon, who’d already reached on a fielder’s choice and scored earlier in the inning, put Georgia up 9-0 on the Aggies in the top of the first inning. Even on the road against the no. 1 team in the country, a nine-run first-inning lead seems like a good omen.

Unfortunately for Condon, Jace LaViolette homered in the bottom of the first, and Braden Montgomery added a dinger in the bottom of the third. After one inning, the Aggies had cut the lead to 9-8; by the seventh, they’d scored 19 unanswered runs, enough to invoke the SEC’s mercy rule and end the game. (This was the first game of a doubleheader, by the way, and there were 17 runs in the first inning.)

Condon, LaViolette, and Montgomery are engaged in a historic five-player home run chase. As recently as 2015, Andrew Benintendi of Arkansas wowed the country by leading Division I with 20 home runs. In 2024, 13 players ended April with at least 20 home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re going to spend big on a free agent closer, you should probably shop at the top of the market. That’s what the Astros did this past offseason, shelling out $95 million over five years to bring Josh Hader home. Last season, Hader was unhittable, with a 1.28 ERA in 61 appearances and 33 saves in 38 opportunities.

This year, not so much. His ERA is 6.39, and was over 9.00 on Tax Day. He’s only had two saves, which is partially his teammates’ fault, but Hader has also blown a save and taken a loss. The Astros, meanwhile, have struggled to find spots to use him. He’s had only one save opportunity since the first week of April, including a weeklong stretch in which he didn’t pitch at all. Tuesday night, Hader had his first two-inning regular-season relief appearance since 2019. Not the start either Hader or the Astros envisioned, I think we can all agree. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy to take a totally nihilistic view of pitching prospects in general. You’ll get your hopes up over a 13-strikeout start at the College World Series, twiddle your thumbs as innings limits and service time shenanigans delay the path to the majors by two years, and be left scratching your head when the pitcher’s UCL gives out anyway, just two months after his big league debut. Next thing you know, you’re watching a 29-year-old, whose coming was once as breathlessly anticipated as the Messiah’s, toodle around for 140 lackluster innings a year.

Such a viewpoint would be facile, the type of cynicism that, to quote the author Joe Klein, “passes for insight among the mediocre.” But baseball fans come by their pessimism honestly; as anyone who’s read a Nick Hornby novel knows, nothing fosters obnoxious nihilism like repeated heartbreak.

MacKenzie Gore was the high schooler with the big leg kick and unreal velocity for a lefty. Then he was arguably the top pitching prospect in baseball. Then he was trade fodder — but still a key component of the deal that brought Juan Soto from Washington to San Diego. And in 2023, Gore was fine. He made 27 starts, threw 136 1/3 innings, and posted a 4.42 ERA. Did he look like a future Cy Young winner? No. Was this worth giving up on Soto and risking sending the franchise into a tailspin? No. But he was competent in a big league rotation, and not all pitching prospects even achieve that. Read the rest of this entry »

Pat Murphy is nominally in his first season as a full-time MLB manager, having previously helmed the Padres for a 96-game interim stint in 2015. But it’s not like he just fell off the turnip truck; he started coaching so long ago I’m not sure they even had trucks or turnips back then. Murphy had been Craig Counsell’s bench coach for eight seasons when he got promoted this past winter. When he took that job, he’d already been working in baseball for 33 seasons, all but one of them as either a minor league manager or college head coach.

Murphy’s seen some stuff.

About halfway through spring training, when Murphy named Brice Turang his starting second baseman, he accompanied the announcement with some glowing praise: “I think this kid’s gonna make a quantum leap… His swing decisions will be better, his contact will be better, and his damage will come.”

At the time, it seemed like puffery, an attempt to build confidence in a former first-round pick who’d been sub-replacement level in his first major league season. Now, it looks like Murphy, endowed with the wisdom of four decades’ experience, can predict the future. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve become increasingly convinced that a lot of the subtle roster construction hacks some teams use to get the most out of their prospects — service time manipulation, extremely restrictive pitcher workload management, drafting by bonus demand rather than picking the best player available — are too cute by half. Sometimes it pays off, but in most cases, players are going to be good, or they’re not. They’re going to stay healthy, or they’re not. And fixating on the externalities is ultimately self-defeating.

Consider Jordan Walker. The St. Louis Cardinals, to their immense credit, brought Walker north from spring training last year. The no. 12 global prospect that offseason, Walker was only 20 at the time, and hadn’t had so much as a sniff at Triple-A. But he was athletic for his 6-foot-5 frame, which promised so much power the question was whether scouts could accurately report it before they ran out of pluses.

Did it matter that the Cardinals had an extremely crowded outfield at the time? No. Did it matter that if Walker lived up to his potential, he’d hit free agency at age 26? No. The only thing that mattered was whether he’d sink or swim. Read the rest of this entry »