The Kansas City Royals have an excellent starting rotation. Starting pitching (along with Bobby Witt Jr. turning into Honus Wagner with a mullet, I guess) carried the Royals to the ALDS last year. It’s also why the Royals will be well-positioned in the AL Central race if the Tigers ever realize that they’re not actually the 1975 Reds.

But even in such a deep, well-rounded unit, one man must lead the charge. Is it ace Cole Ragans? No. Is it one of Seth Lugo, Michael Lorenzen, or Michael Wacha, Kansas City’s army of rejuvenated Millennials? Again, no.

It’s Kris Bubic! Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox bandwagon was crowded beyond the capacity limit this offseason, as you’d expect for a team that added Alex Bregman and Garrett Crochet over the winter, and put two near-majors prospects in the top seven of the preseason Top 100. I confess I was a passenger on this bandwagon; it was incredibly sweaty and at least one stranger sat on my lap for a couple stops.

But for all that hype, a quarter of the way through the season the results have been a bit of a let down. Boston is right where it was last year: around .500. Disappointing as that may be, most of the individual performances by Red Sox players have been within the realm of expectation. Surely it’s a bummer that Jarren Duran and Walker Buehler have only been about average this year, for instance, but I don’t know that it’s a monumental shock in either case.

The one player whose numbers are really knocking me out of my chair right now is Tanner Houck. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Rockies fired Bud Black on Sunday, the immediate reaction — a sarcastic “Oh, sure, that’ll solve everything” — missed… not all the point, but some of the point.

Last year, we watched the Chicago White Sox lose more games than any major league team in history, and if the White Sox hadn’t gotten white hot in the last week of the season, the final number would’ve been much more embarrassing than 121. This year’s Rockies are worse. Maybe a lot worse. Read the rest of this entry »

A papal conclave is the ultimate news story. It’s an event shrouded in ceremony and secrecy, which takes place incredibly rarely; only three times in the past 40 years, in fact. Even in this era when seeing everything has made the mysterious mundane, the world is left waiting in total ignorance for news of white smoke. Billions of observers, Catholic or not, look on in rapt fascination. And when the conclave produced the first American-born pope, Leo XIV, things only got more fascinating.

I come from a Catholic extended family, but for the most part, I was a devoted low-church protestant in my youth and am largely irreligious now. Nevertheless, I’ve always held the Vatican in a certain esteem. Its grandeur, its rituals, its dense and ancient jargon — all of that looks mystical and romantic from a distance. Is it the sole conduit to Almighty God? Perhaps not, from where I sit. But it’s a fascinating institution nonetheless.

That cloud of fairy tale wonder evaporated in an instant on Thursday, when the cardinal electors chose Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago to inherit St. Peter’s throne. Read the rest of this entry »

Charlie Morton has been about to retire for a while now. The lanky curveball specialist first made headlines in the early 2010s; he’d been struggling over his first three major league seasons, so he came up with a novel, but hilariously simple, solution: Copy what Roy Halladay was doing. It worked for a while, but injuries piled up, and it wasn’t until Morton landed with the Astros in 2017 that he really, truly put it together.

In the first season of a two-year deal with the Astros, Morton set new career highs in wins, WAR, and strikeouts. He not only won a championship for the first time in his career, he was the winning pitcher in Game 7 of both the ALCS and the World Series, and got the last out of the season in the latter case. He turned 34 five days after the Astros’ championship parade, and by the following spring he was already musing publicly about hanging up his spikes. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, Paul Skenes — the most electric pitcher in baseball, the future face of the sport, the only reason (apart from potatoes or metallurgy) that anyone would want to go to Pittsburgh — took the mound and did his stuff. He struck out six Cardinals in six innings pitched, allowed just two runs, and threw 22 four-seam fastballs that clocked between 98.0 and 99.1 mph. If you watched the game, you got what you were promised.

But Skenes was outdueled on the evening, by a pitcher whose developmental track took substantially longer than Skenes’. Matthew Liberatore struck out eight batters over seven innings, allowed only one run, put six baserunners on to Skenes’ seven, threw 70 strikes on 99 pitches to Skenes’s 60 out of 102, and got 17 whiffs to Skenes’ 13. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Yankees lost Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil before the season started, I thought they were screwed. Turns out, at least so far, that New York’s stripiest sports team is right where it ended last year: First place in the AL East. That’s because the Yankees, as of this writing, lead the league in home runs, OBP, SLG, and (by a pretty big margin) wRC+. It helps that the rest of the AL East (especially the Orioles) has started slow, but the best defense is a good offense and all that.

And it’s not just Aaron Judge, who is 20% of the way through an offensive campaign that makes Babe Ruth look like Rey Ordonez. Judge can only bat four of five times a game; even he can’t do it alone. But even with Giancarlo Stanton hurt and Austin Wells and Jasson Domínguez offering only token offensive contributions, Judge has had the running buddy he needs. It’s… Ben Rice, believe it or not. Read the rest of this entry »

Going from Cincinnati to Louisville would’ve sounded like a rip-roarin’ good time to Mark Twain. Riverine navigation, heartland American culture, brown liquor and such. Sounds like a good time to me, too. Probably less so for Alexis Díaz, who got demoted to Triple-A on Thursday morning.

Díaz became one of baseball’s most valuable high-volume, high-leverage relievers the moment the Reds called him up in 2022. And while some of the juice from his incredible rookie season faded, he was still closing games through the end of 2024. Now, in the span of about nine regular-season appearances, Díaz has gone from the top of the bullpen ladder to off that ladder entirely. I don’t know if you’ve ever fallen off a ladder, but trust me, it’s not fun. Read the rest of this entry »

Sandy Alcantara was supposed to be the last bastion of the traditional starting pitcher, the guy who pumps gas seven innings a start come hell or high water. The stoic, hirsute antidote to the effete, three-ply soft five-and-dive starter of today. In his 2022 Cy Young campaign, Alcantara threw more innings than any other National League pitcher since 2015, and he did it while throwing harder than any other starter in the league that year. Oh yeah, man, that’s the stuff.

A mildly disappointing 2023 ended in a torn UCL, which prevented Alcantara from participating in a rare Marlins postseason appearance. But he’s back now, ready to remind the world what 220 innings a year looks like.

Through six starts, the Miami ace has an ERA of 8.31. His strikeout rate is down to 15.8%, which is about two-thirds of what it was at his peak, and his walk rate is 14.2%, which is so bad you don’t need context to appreciate it.

Hachi machi. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Scott is 15 appearances into the season, and by extension 15 appearances into his four-year, $72 million Dodgers contract, and a lot of things are working as normal. He has a 2.40 ERA, almost exactly the same as the 2.31 he posted in a breakout campaign with Miami two years ago. He has a 2.93 FIP, just one hundredth of a run up from his mark last season. He has eight saves, which is commensurate with his role: Closer on a really good team.

But he hasn’t walked anyone. In 15 innings, having faced 54 batters, he hasn’t walked anyone. This falls into the most annoying April blog category of: “Please don’t mess with my premise before this article runs,” but as of this writing, Scott has thrown more innings than any pitcher in the league with zero walks. Only three pitchers with two or fewer walks on the year have thrown more innings than Scott.

That’s because he’s pounding the zone. Scott’s first-pitch strike rate is an astounding 85.2%, the highest number in baseball. That’s helped by a 45.1% chase rate, which is the highest mark in the league among pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. But Scott is also throwing in the zone a career-high 57.1% of the time, which is in the 87th percentile for pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »