Just to get this out of the way: I really have no idea if this gimmick is funny to all of you, and I don’t care. I think it’s funny, and so does Mike Baumann. The Orioles righthander and I have known of each other since he was playing at Jacksonville University and I was covering college baseball; I’d interviewed him twice for the Ringer MLB Show, once when he was drafted in 2017 and once more after he made his big league debut in September 2021. But both those interviews were done remotely; it wasn’t until this week that we met in person.

The Orioles just came to Philadelphia for a three-game series, so I made a point to go meet the other Michael Baumann. (I scanned the BBWAA badge list and didn’t spot any other current members who share a name with an active MLB player, but it’s possible I missed someone.)

So I put the following proposition to the other guy: I’d ask him a series of (more or less randomly ordered) questions covering everything from baseball technique to music to food. When there’s a major league reliever going around using your name, you want to look him in the eye and see what he’s all about. He agreed, and what follows is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. Read the rest of this entry »

As the Orioles emerge from their long hibernation, it’s easy to see the things they’ve done well as an organization. They’re great at developing relief pitchers. They can walk through a public park and pluck a future star infielder from a tree. But starting pitching has not come as easily. The front end of the rotation lacks a pitcher like Gerrit Cole or Kevin Gausman, and they’ve had to bring in veterans like Cole Irvin and Kyle Gibson to carry some of the load. No doubt this is part of the reason they’re being linked to Shohei Ohtani, who for all the dinger sockin’ he does is still the best pitcher on the trade market at the deadline.

But the cupboard is hardly bare, thanks to pitchers like Kyle Bradish. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I published in rapid succession articles exploring the fascinating seasons of Spencer Strider (sort of) and Blake Snell. Both pitchers then went out and had outlier performances in their respective ensuing starts; Strider recorded 12 of his first 15 outs by strikeout, and Snell walked seven in just five innings but allowed merely a single run. So I joked on Twitter (I’m not using the new name, it’s silly) that if anyone wanted a pitcher to become newsworthy, pass along a name and I’d write about him.

The best kind of joke is the kind that lets you outsource coming up with ideas for posts, and sure enough, I encountered a reply that caught my attention.

Someone may have done it already, but Bailey Ober is pretty interesting in how uninteresting he is. Pretty much a lock for a quality start every time he pitches; nothing more, nothing less

— charlie (@stupidtwinsfan) July 20, 2023

You’re selling yourself short with your handle there, Charlie. You bring up a fascinating point. Read the rest of this entry »

If you watch a random pitch from a major league game, there’s a better than even chance you’re going to end up picking out a fastball. The fastball is the core concept upon which pitching is understood, the theme upon which all variations, from changeup to knuckle-curve, are composed. Our society has three great establishments: “establish the fastball” in baseball; “establish the run” in football; and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

They are all, to some extent, going out of style.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you remember my writing earlier this season about Brent Honeywell Jr.’s changeup-screwball combo or Hurston Waldrep’s splitter, you can probably imagine how much I love a weird-ass changeup-like thing. So much so I’m starting to wonder if it might be worth it to ask Meg for a “Weird-Ass Changeup World Tour” tag in the CMS.

Until then, consider Logan Allen. No, the other Logan Allen. The one who came back up from the minors to replace Shane Bieber in Cleveland’s rotation and completely barbecued the Pirates on Tuesday night. Seriously: Five innings, no runs, one hit, one walk, eight strikeouts. That’s some heavy stuff.

The key to Allen’s whole shtick is his changeup, which is unlike any other pitch in baseball. It’s slow, even by the standards of a pitch that’s defined by its slowness: just 82.9 mph on average, though since he doesn’t throw very hard by modern standards, that’s not as extreme a number as it seems on first glance. What is extreme is the way the pitch moves. Read the rest of this entry »

For the next two weeks, we’re going to spend a lot of time and energy debating Shohei Ohtani’s trade market, just in case the Angels continue to backslide and Arte Moreno can be extricated from his fortress of solitude and cajoled into trading his franchise player. And it should be so; Ohtani is the most interesting player in baseball, and once the trade deadline passes, I’m sure we’ll move on to talking about where he’ll land next year and how many hundreds of millions of dollars he’ll earn over the next decade.

But Ohtani is not the only free-agent-to-be who’s playing out the string on a disappointing team. As much as the Angels are taking on water, they’re not sunk yet. And the Padres are even less sunk than the Angels are. With that said, I’m sure they’re not happy to be in fourth place in their division during the last week of the Tour de France, with open questions about whether Blake Snell will be a part of the team’s future.

Snell obviously can’t do all that 60-homer pace stuff Ohtani does, but he’s going to be one of the most sought-after pitchers in the forthcoming free agent class. Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Strider currently leads all qualified starters in strikeout rate. When I learned that bit of information, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, that tiny little guy’s on track to throw enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, good for him!”

But Strider is way out in front of the field. His K% is 38.9%; Kevin Gausman is second at 32.6%, with a small group of pitchers clustered behind him in the low 30s. Strider isn’t particularly walk-averse — his BB% is 40th-lowest among 67 qualified starters — and yet his K-BB% of 31.4% would be the fifth-best strikeout rate in the league.

I don’t want to say this is happening without anyone batting an eye — here we are, after all, batting our eyes at Strider’s strikeout rate. But we’ve become so inured to this kind of performance, and so quickly, that it’s worth taking a step back to consider the gravity of what he’s doing. Read the rest of this entry »

I write to you, dear readers, during the interregnum between the All-Star Game and the second half of the season. Soon enough, the focus of every baseball writer in North America will be on the trade deadline, and after that, the stretch run before the playoffs. The season is basically over already; goodness, how the time flies.

Having spent most of the past month concentrating on the draft and the NCAA tournament, I’m not quite ready to let go of that fun midseason diversion. So I’ll spend that interregnum the way I spent the rest of the All-Star break: working the draft query tool on Baseball Reference. Today, we’re going to talk about shortstops.

In Wednesday’s column on first-round catchers, I discussed at some length the logic behind spending early picks on up-the-middle prospects. If the player hits and stays at a premium position, that’s great. If he can only contribute on one side of the ball, that’s still frequently a useful big leaguer. There’s just so much more room for developmental error for shortstops and center fielders than there is for first basemen. And it seems MLB teams agree; in the first round of this past week’s draft, 14 shortstops went off the board, an all-time record. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite picks in the first round of this year’s draft was the 14th overall selection, when Virginia catcher Kyle Teel fell into Boston’s lap and the Red Sox gobbled him right up, thank you very much. The New Jersey native has backstopped the Cavaliers to two trips to Omaha in three seasons of college ball. He’s a winner, he’s a grinder, and WEEI callers are going to fall in love with this kid within about 30 minutes of his big league debut. “This is the leadahship the Sawx have needed since Pedroia, Murph!” and so on.

All that would be perilous enough to national mental hygiene on its own, but Teel is also really good. He’s going to stick behind the plate. He’s also going to hit — maybe not 20-homer power, but a ton of doubles and line drives that rattle around in the nooks and crannies of Fenway Park’s unique outfield. I’m surprised he fell into the teens, but great work by Boston for stopping the slide when he got to them.

Teel was one of three catchers taken in the first round on Sunday. A pair of high schoolers, Blake Mitchell and Ralphy Velazquez, went eighth to Kansas City and 23rd to Cleveland, respectively. (Teel to the Royals as heir presumptive to Salvador Perez was a popular prediction in the days before the draft, but it was not to be.) Both Mitchell and Velazquez (20th and 45th on the pre-draft Board) are bat-first prospects. Neither is a lock to stay behind the plate, but both can hit the ball a long way when they make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

Come with me, friends, and let’s talk about Hurston Waldrep. When the Braves took the former Florida Gator 24th overall on Sunday night, no less an authority than Eric Longenhagen called the pick “a huge coup.” As a college starter, Waldrep struggled to throw strikes, but he has the most eye-watering repertoire of any college pitcher in this draft, Paul Skenes excluded. Behold, Waldrep’s start against South Carolina in Game 2 of the Gainesville Super Regional.

As a South Carolina partisan, I couldn’t muster the energy to be upset at suffering a season-ending loss. Waldrep allowed three hits and struck out 13 over eight scoreless innings, and honestly the Gamecocks could’ve kept going up there and hacking until the following Tuesday afternoon and they still wouldn’t have scored off Waldrep. Every fan has seen their team lose games like that. It’s a humbling experience.

Waldrep can be so unhittable because he possesses skills that are relatively common in isolation (with one very important exception) but unusual in combination. And it’s hard to imagine professional hitters faring much better against him. Read the rest of this entry »