Max Fried is unusual; he’s a good homegrown Braves player who didn’t sign a team-friendly, million-year contract extension. (It feels like this team hasn’t had one of those since Johnny Sain.) As a result, Fried will be a free agent at the end of the season, but insofar as the Braves are preparing for life without Fried eventually, they very much need him now.

Now that Spencer Strider is out for the season, the Braves rotation consists of Fried, two aging big names (Chris Sale and Charlie Morton), one guy who was a reliever next year (Reynaldo López), and we’ll figure out the no. 5 spot when we get there. It’s a lot of upside, and all things considered it’s not that bad when every team seems to be down at least one starter. But suffice it to say that Atlanta has less wiggle room, pitching-wise, than it did two weeks ago.

Therefore it was a bit alarming when Fried came out of his first two starts having completed just five innings total. In those two outings, he allowed 12 hits and 11 runs, 10 of them earned, to bring his ERA up to 18.00. The Braves’ offense is good, sure, but no baseball team ever made could reliably provide 18 runs of support per game for its no. 1 starter. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, we finally got something approaching an official account of the biggest story in baseball. The details are, somehow, outrageous and astounding, while still presenting a version of events that follows the least salacious plausible narrative.

According to an affidavit filed by an IRS investigator in federal court, Ippei Mizuhara — until recently Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, confidant, and right-hand man — stole some $16 million from the Dodgers superstar to cover sports gambling losses. It makes the case that the 39-year-old Mizuhara should be arrested for, and charged with, bank fraud. The day before the affidavit began circulating publicly, The New York Times reported that Mizuhara is negotiating a guilty plea to that charge, which carries a statutory maximum of 30 years’ jail time. Read the rest of this entry »

Lance Lynn is my favorite player in baseball; I find it easier to just admit this up front and let readers view my work through that lens, instead of going through the trouble of trying to obfuscate this very obvious truth.

One of the things that drew me to the big man in the first place was his reliability. Lynn had been many things over his long and venerable big league career: A four-seam specialist, a sinkerballer, an ace, an innings eater, an underrated gem, a star, a national hero. But he’d never been bad before.

In 2023, Lynn still threw 183 2/3 innings, but he gave up about 183 2/3 home runs over that span. Not really, but the actual number — 44 — was so high I invoked the late Jose Lima when I wrote up Lynn’s signing in November. On a scale from zero to things you don’t want, it’s not what you want. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t really have strong opinions about the AL Central this year, either aesthetically or competitively. I picked the Tigers to win the division because I like their young pitchers, I had to pick someone, and I didn’t want to just choose the same 12 teams that made the playoffs last year. But if the Twins or Guardians, or even the Royals finished first, I wouldn’t be unduly surprised.

Mostly, I want to go the entire season without having to watch Byron Buxton leave the field on a gurney, for much the same reason I’d like to visit the Grand Canyon before I die. I’ve never actually seen it, but I’ve heard it’s wonderful. Apart from that, I’ve got an open mind.

Even so, the first two weeks of the season have brought some remarkable results. Stephen Vogt now has a better winning percentage than any manager in MLB history (minimum 10 games), as the Guardians jumped out to an 8-3 start. The Tigers and Royals are right behind, and Kansas City has had one of the best rotations in the league so far.

These three teams have one thing in common, other than their division: They’ve all played the White Sox. Read the rest of this entry »

I think Mitch Williams deserves at least some of the blame.

See, I’ve been contributing to ranked lists of ordered baseball players for most of my adult life, and in general, people like to see their favorite team ranked highly. Baseball fans are pretty solipsistic, like dog owners, and struggle to imagine a world in which their special attachment to a particular thing is not shared by every sapient being on the planet. How dare you say Clayton Kershaw is better than Aaron Harang, and other salutations.

When our positional power rankings declared the Phillies to have the best bullpen in baseball two weeks ago, I don’t want to say Phillies fans reacted badly. (Not least because I’m the last person on Earth who wants Phillies fans to be perceived as a monolith, to be judged by their noisiest members.) Rather than hostility, it was more like the bemused skepticism with which one greets a man who knocks on your door trying to sell you solar panels. Sure, it sounds nice… but what’s the catch? Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve known for almost a year that the Oakland Athletics are moving to Las Vegas. Eventually. Someday. And every excruciating step of that process has dominated the news.

Team and city waged a years-long cold war over the construction of a new Bay Area stadium, plans for which finally fell through last year. That tipped off 12 months of open conflict with fans and government in both Oakland and Nevada, stemming from the inconvenient reality that even if the club could finance a stadium in Sin City, it would not be ready before the team’s lease at the Coliseum expired at the end of the 2024 season.

After mooting various solutions, including a stopover in Salt Lake City or the world’s most awkward stadium lease extension, John Fisher’s club is headed for Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, currently home of the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, the Sacramento River Cats.

The team revealed the news on Twitter, with replies disabled. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, I had the privilege of attending a game in which the Reds’ best left-handed starter, Andrew Abbott, faced the Phillies’ best left-handed hitter, Bryce Harper, three times. Abbott got the better of Harper, who went 0-for-3 with a strikeout against the Cincinnati starter and 0-for-5 overall. But the qualities of each player got me thinking.

When Harper swings the bat, one of two things happens. In scenario no. 1, he squares it up and hits it so hard it causes bruising on the deceased ancestors of the workers who stitched the ball together at the Rawlings factory. Sure enough, Harper tagged Abbott’s teammates for three home runs just 24 hours later.

Otherwise, Harper misses it. He can miss it by a lot, in which case he just swings through it, or he misses it by a little. Those swings manifest themselves either in balls fouled straight back to the screen, or in fly balls that go straight up in the air and stay there long enough for the outfielder to take out his phone, and queue up Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” so the ball lands right at the climax of the second chorus. You know the part: “Like a sinner / before / the gates of Heaven / I’ll come crawling on back to you.” The loud one, like five and a half minutes into the song. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re in the mood to contemplate, contemplate this: A college pitcher becoming the subject of a New York Times story, especially a story that was indifferent to his results. Kent Emanuel did it. In 2013, Emanuel, the Friday night starter at the University of North Carolina, became the poster boy for a watershed moment in amateur baseball.

North Carolina, the no. 1 team in the country heading into that year’s NCAA tournament, had a slapstick run to that year’s College World Series. The Tar Heels found themselves in a winner-take-all game against Florida Atlantic with advancement out of their regional at stake. I vividly remember watching this game on TV, the way Boomers remember where they were for the moon landing or JFK’s assassination. What looked like a pretty routine game got turned on its wear when Florida Atlantic scored six runs in the top of the ninth. The two teams traded crooked numbers in both the ninth and 12th innings before the Tar Heels won by submission, 12-11, in 13 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

For my money, the best pitcher in the National League right now is Braves right-hander Spencer Strider. The 25-year-old with the Kurt Russell-in-Tombstone mustache struck out 281 batters last year, which is impressive in any context, all the more so because he did it in just 186 2/3 innings, while using two and a half pitches. He’s got an upper-90s four-seamer, an outrageous slider, and a changeup that he uses sparingly against lefties and basically not at all against righties.

Strider’s slider (which is a top-three Shel Silverstein poem) is clearly capable of serving as a secondary arsenal all on its own. That’s because Strider can add or subtract from the pitch at will. Last year, he threw more than 1,000 sliders in the regular season, and those pitches varied in velocity by 10 mph, in spin rate by more than 500 rpm, in gravity-adjusted vertical movement by 16 inches, and in horizontal movement by 10 inches. In short, it’s technically one pitch, but with a lot of room to change speed and shape.

Nevertheless, Strider has added a curveball this season, and after a soft launch in spring training, he threw it in anger for the first time on Friday. Read the rest of this entry »

It was the dawn of a new era in Baltimore, as the new owners made their first real impression on their new adoring public. Michael Arougheti bought a round at the bar. David Rubenstein visited the MASN booth and held forth on the Magna Carta with Ben McDonald; the conversation had to drift that far afield because Rubenstein’s two-inning television appearance was extended when Patrick Sandoval simply could not get out of the inning. Before Rubenstein left, he asked (I’m choosing to interpret this as a sick burn rather than a genuine point of inquiry) if MLB had a mercy rule.

The Orioles won 11-3. Every Baltimore starting position player reached base and either scored or drove in a run; eight of the nine recorded at least one hit. And only three of the 10 hits went for extra bases. This was one of those methodical conga line outings in which the Orioles won not so much by knockout as by submission. Had the norms of the game allowed the Angels to tap out without shame, they might’ve done so. Read the rest of this entry »