An increase in stolen bases wasn’t the primary aim of MLB’s offseason rule changes, but it was expected to be a happy side effect of new timing rules and bigger bases. Baseball fans will argue about just about anything, but stolen bases enjoy near-universal popularity. They’re exciting to watch, and they reward athleticism and initiative. The only drawback: They’re risky. And the new rules would mitigate that risk.

Over the first weekend of the season, the Orioles brought forth a new golden age of basestealing in the span of two days. In 10 attempts, they stole 10 bases off the Red Sox, and they did so without coming particularly close to getting thrown out.

“We just knew we needed to do a better job with the run game after that series,” Red Sox catcher Connor Wong says. “You can’t let guys run all over you and get into scoring position all the time.” Read the rest of this entry »

On July 16, 2013, Tom Seaver threw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game at Citi Field in New York. It was an unforgettable moment in isolation, but the context thickened the atmosphere to mugginess with implication.

Warming up in the bullpen was Matt Harvey, a 24-year-old from Connecticut who’d been chosen to start the game for the National League. Ten days shy of a year in the majors, Harvey had become one of the most effective, and most-discussed, pitchers in the sport. From the day of his debut until the day of his All-Star start, he was fifth among qualified starters in WAR, third in K%, and sixth in ERA-.

But he wasn’t just effective; he was electric. He overpowered hitters with his upper-90s velocity and cruel breaking pitches. And he was doing it in a Mets ecosystem that, after several years of being squished by division rivals, cried out desperately for… actually, it just cried out desperately in general. Harvey wasn’t just branded a future Cy Young winner, but the next great New York baseball star. Seaver was genuinely handing the ball to his heir presumptive. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, the University of Alabama abruptly fired head baseball coach Brad Bohannon for his involvement in a pair of suspicious bets involving the Crimson Tide’s game against LSU last Friday. That night, a bettor at the sportsbook at Great American Ball Park — home of the Reds — placed two suspiciously large bets on LSU to win, large enough to draw the attention of U.S. Integrity, the company retained by the Ohio Casino Control Commission and the Southeastern Conference to monitor sports wagering in the state’s casinos.

On Monday, the OCCC instructed Ohio bookmakers to take Crimson Tide games off the board. Regulators in other states followed suit, as have several major online sportsbooks. And in the wake of Bohannon’s firing three days later, ESPN reporter David Purdum revealed that surveillance cameras within the sportsbook had recorded the suspicious bettor communicating with Bohannon at the time he was placing the bets in question. Read the rest of this entry »

Things aren’t going well in Oakland at the moment. Ownership, after years of quiet quitting, is up and moving the team. (Or maybe not, if owner John Fisher and his confederates turn out to be worse at lobbying than they are at pest control.) That leaves a last-place club to play out the string in front of “SELL THE TEAM” banners, probably for multiple years to come. The most obvious simile for this situation would be something along the lines of “like the waning days of a loveless marriage,” but that would be an insult to loveless marriages.

Still, a few dozen unfortunates are obliged to put on the storied green and gold colors of the Athletics and perform baseball six days a week. And they’re trying, albeit not too successfully, to win. It could happen! All the time we see a team made up mostly of youngsters, or with a payroll out of the mid-90s, get hit by lightning and make a run at the playoffs. Frequently that has even been the A’s in recent years.

Unfortunately, this year’s Athletics probably needed five or six different lightning strikes to turn their 100-loss roster into a contender. One break the A’s needed — following on the team’s biggest offseason move — involved outfielder Esteury Ruiz. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday evening, Zac Gallen will take the mound in Arlington with zeroes on his mind and history at his fingertips. You see, South Jersey’s second-best ballplayer is on a bit of a heater: 28 consecutive scoreless innings pitched, including zero runs allowed in his past four starts.

Now, I can tell some of you are already scrolling back up to the top of this page to check the date on the post. It’s the same feeling you get when you lose track of where you were on your backlog of DVR’d Law & Order reruns. “I feel like I’ve seen this one already. Did I actually watch it or did I doze off on the couch? Is that Lance Reddick?”

Run a show for 20-plus seasons and you’ll recycle a plot point or two. No, you’re not losing your mind: Zac Gallen is on a second extended scoreless innings streak in a matter of just nine months. Last fall, he strung together 44.1 scoreless innings, and now he’s at it again. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates, you might have heard, are in first place at the end of April. Not only that, they’ve played like a first-place team and then some, outscoring opponents by 48 runs in 29 games. Heading into Sunday, their pitching staff had the second-best ERA and FIP in the National League. Their offense had posted the second-best wRC+ in the NL as well; based on the first month of the season, the only thing fluky about them has been the names on the backs of their jerseys. Maybe they’ll cool off, maybe they won’t, but full credit to them for an exceptional first month of the season.

So why am I singling out David Bednar?

Heading into the season, Bednar was one of the few Pirates who it was safe to assume would be good. Carlos Santana and Andrew McCutchen are big names, but they’re getting up there in years. Bryan Reynolds would be good, most likely, but perhaps not in Pirates colors. But Bednar is a rock. He was an All-Star last year, for God’s sake. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the most important thing for a pitcher to do? That’s right, don’t leave the ball up in the zone for Aaron Judge. The second-most important thing for a pitcher to do is throw strikes. Throw strikes to get ahead in the count, throw strikes to challenge hitters, throw strikes to force action early in the count and keep your pitch count down… pitchers talk about throwing strikes the way health nuts talk about kale. It’s good for you. How? Let me count the ways.

Except, nobody actually throws strikes. Last season, 347 pitchers threw at least 50 innings in the majors; nobody threw more than 58.5% of their pitches in the strike zone. Devin Williams, one of the best in the business, worked inside the zone just 42.4% of the time. “It’s good to throw strikes,” then, is something to be taken seriously but not literally.

Seattle Mariners right-hander George Kirby is a greater adherent of the zone than most. Last season, he broke a big league record by throwing 24 consecutive strikes to start a game. This year, he’s working in the zone more than any other pitcher with at least 20 innings under their belt. It was not always thus. Read the rest of this entry »

A big part of this gig early in the season has to do with identifying outliers and regression candidates, either to celebrate the former or warn about the latter. The Statcast-based expected statistics have made this job many orders of magnitude easier than it was a decade ago, so I’ve spent much of the past month looking at the league leaders for xwOBA and the like.

Ryan Mountcastle has been up there. Through Monday’s games, he’s 42nd among qualified hitters in xwOBA, one spot ahead of his teammate Adley Rutschman and two ahead of Alex Bregman. More to the point, his actual wOBA (.298) is 92 points lower than his xwOBA, which is the sixth-biggest discrepancy in the majors among qualified hitters.

Mountcastle has been at least a league-average hitter, by wRC+, in every season of his major league career. Is he just getting unlucky in a small sample? I mean, probably, but that’s not the only reason he’s having a weird year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday afternoon, a friend of mine was straight up not having a good time watching his favorite baseball team. The Phillies, defending NL champions and consensus favorites to return to the playoffs this year, were losing to the Rockies. They’d already done that once this weekend and are heading into the last week of April under .500. So he came up with an interesting theory: With so many players leaving Phillies camp to play in the World Baseball Classic, perhaps the interruption in spring training had a deleterious effect on the team’s preparation and/or chemistry.

Then he asked me if I knew of anyone who’d studied the issue. I said no and almost let the matter drop right there. Looking at the statistical leaderboards, playing in the WBC didn’t throw Shohei Ohtani off his schwerve. (Or Ronald Acuña Jr., or Randy Arozarena, or Xander Bogaerts)

Most of all, there are more direct explanations for the Phillies’ slow start: Bryce Harper is hurt, they’re down to something like their fourth-string first baseman, and there’s a specific Phillies fan who’s done something to anger the baseball gods and call down their wrath. His name is Nick, he lives in Christiana, Delaware, and the baseball gods will not relent until he is found and sacrificed upon a stone altar. Hurry, there’s no time to lose. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the Oakland Athletics revealed that they’ve taken a concrete step toward building a ballpark in Las Vegas. Well, not “concrete” in the literal sense, but the A’s have “signed a binding agreement to purchase” a place to put concrete, a 49-acre plot near Allegiant Stadium (home of the NFL’s Raiders) and the Las Vegas Strip. Pending approval of a “public-private partnership,” A’s president Dave Kaval told the San Francisco Chronicle, a stadium could be completed in time for Opening Day 2027.

There are still plenty of components to be juggled, but this is the biggest indication yet that the years-long effort to find a new home for the A’s in California is doomed to fail. Should the A’s relocate, they’ll become the first team to do so since the Montreal Expos moved to Washington in 2005, and the first team in the AL-NL era to move three times. Read the rest of this entry »