It’s pretty unusual, three days before the trade deadline, to have a different news story rocking the baseball world. But these are unusual times.

On Monday, Major League Baseball placed Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase on non-disciplinary paid leave through August 31, pending the results of a sports betting investigation. As the name suggests, Clase will still draw a check, and can still have contact with the organization, but for the next five weeks, he is persona non grata at major league facilities. Clase’s teammate, Luis Ortiz, has been on leave under the same designation since July 3, and is slated to come off leave the same day as Clase.

This is the latest in a series of embarrassing gambling-related scandals for baseball in general and MLB in particular. But with the exception of the Ippei Mizuhara Affair, in which Shohei Ohtani was involved but never accused of wrongdoing, all the players involved had been (at the risk of sounding impolite) relative unknowns. Read the rest of this entry »

The weekend before the trade deadline was light on big names moving — poor Eugenio Suárez has probably had to take his phone charger out of his go bag a dozen times this month — but we did see plenty of preliminary action. The Orioles began their sell-off by shipping hard-throwing left-hander Gregory Soto up to the Mets. Meanwhile, the Royals sought to maintain their spot on the postseason wait list by picking up a right-handed bat from Arizona: not Suárez, but Randal Grichuk.

Finally, the Braves picked up some reinforcements for their injury-riddled rotation, tossing the Cardinals a player to be named later or cash in exchange for the right to jump the waiver line on recently DFA’d right-hander Erick Fedde. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past month, every red-blooded American with a phone and a passing familiarity with baseball has posted some version of the following sentiment: This crop of trade candidates stinks. It’s true.

Somewhat conveniently for the purposes of my argument, Ben Clemens wrapped up his annual Trade Value series this morning. He has 50 players on his rankings proper, plus 65 more in the Honorable Mentions post. I’ve seen persistent, at least semi-credible trade rumors about one player on the top 50: Byron Buxton. Buxton is one of the most talented baseball players who ever lived, but his injuries and maddening inconsistency have become his reputation. This is reflected not only in his incredibly incentive-laden Twins contract, but his spot on the trade value list: no. 41.

More to the point, Buxton recently declared that he has no interest whatsoever in waiving his full no-trade clause to allow a move to a contender. His exact words: “I don’t want to play anywhere else.” It doesn’t get more unequivocal than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Those of you who listened to Episode 2351 of Effectively Wild can skip this preamble. You already know where I’m going.

Ben Lindbergh is on vacation, so Meg asked me to keep his seat warm for one episode of the podcast. And she was even kind enough to pick out a listener email that would give us something to talk about. I’ll skip over some extraneous context; if you want to hear the whole question go listen to the episode. The question comes down to this: If I were given the power to negotiate on the MLBPA’s behalf in the next CBA negotiation, what would it take for me to agree to a salary cap? Read the rest of this entry »

Every baseball season, we see something unexpected. “You can’t predict baseball,” in the words of an axiom from a decade ago. And it’s true. But because baseball occurs in such great volume, over such a long period of time, unexpected things can happen in different ways, and at different rates. Sometimes, an overachieving team picks up one extra game every two weeks, gently floating to the top of the standings with minimal fuss. We get drip-fed this surprise gradually, like an irrigation system designed not to drown your basil plants.

And sometimes you fall into a lake.

On either side of the All-Star break, the Milwaukee Brewers won 11 games in a row. Even after that streak ended with a paper-thin 1-0 loss in Seattle on Tuesday, they are the hottest team in baseball right now. They’re red hot. No, white hot. They are, to quote the poet, so hot it’s hurting everyone’s feelings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Arizona Diamondbacks, like King Solomon confronted with a baby, split their first 100 games straight down the middle. With the trade deadline looming a week from Thursday, the Diamondbacks could use a little wisdom right now, because it’s tough to tell whether they should buy or sell.

As of this writing, Arizona sits in fourth place in the NL West, nine games behind the Dodgers. Even after sweeping the Cardinals, a direct Wild Card rival, over the weekend, the Snakes still need to leapfrog four teams — including St. Louis — in order to slither in to the National League’s final Wild Card position. Five and a half games out of the playoffs with 61 games to go is a substantial hill to climb, especially for a team that’s been devastated by injuries. And the Diamondbacks, with their plethora of impending free agents, could command the market if they chose to sell.

Selling is the pragmatic move, the temperate move, the sustainable move, the move for the guys with the longest view in the room, and all the other business school-informed malarkey that gets spouted by the quarter-zips upstairs.

Poppycock, says I. Don’t listen to them, or my colleague Jay Jaffe. The Diamondbacks should go the other direction, and buy at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

With the draft and the All-Star Game out of the way, the next waypoint on the baseball calendar is the trade deadline. In other words, it is officially Trade Season. And the Royals and Pirates kicked it off on Wednesday morning with the first deadline deal. I got a little excited; sometimes, when the Royals and Pirates make a deal, you end up with Sir Francis Drake’s invaluable contribution to the defeat of the Spanish Armada at the Battle of Gravelines in 1588.

This was not one of those times. Kansas City sent minor league infielder Cam Devanney to Pittsburgh in exchange for Adam Frazier. Read the rest of this entry »

Longtime readers of this site might remember my tremendous affection for Pittsburgh reliever David Bednar. It’s OK if you don’t; I last wrote about him in May 2023, which is so long ago the Pirates were in first place at the time. Bednar was a rock back in the day, a top-class closer for a team that frequently disappointed. But from 2021 to the end of 2023, he was terrific: ERAs in the low-to-mid-2.00s every year, with strikeout rates in the high 20s and low 30s.

That trend stopped abruptly in 2024. Again, this wasn’t front-page national news; wise fans had by this point learned to ignore any Pirate shorter than 6-foot-6. But Bednar posted a 5.77 ERA, blew a career-worst seven saves, and saw his strikeout rate plummet to 22.1%, more than 10 percentage points from where it was two years earlier.

A sad development, but not an unforeseeable one. Relief pitchers, even good ones, even reliable ones, have a shorter shelf life than most condiments. But he’s back this year; in 36 games, Bednar has a 2.53 ERA, a career-high 34.6% strikeout rate, a 6.9% walk rate (his lowest since he joined the Pirates five years ago), a 2.02 FIP, and 13 saves out of 13 opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »

As the draft comes to an end, I find that even after writing a number of articles about this class, I still have more to say. So now that the tables are being folded up and the bartender is cleaning out the taps, here’s an offering of potpourri from draft season: Stray anecdotes and quotes from the combine, or bits of analysis, that never found a home in an article.

Last week, I wrote about the top of this draft being loaded with Tennessee players, and sure enough: Three Vols went off the board in the first round, with four more going between picks no. 33 and 72.

But you could argue that the real school of the draft was Corona High School of California, which had right-hander Seth Hernandez go to the Pirates sixth overall, shortstop Billy Carlson go to the White Sox at pick no. 10, and third baseman Brady Ebel go to Milwaukee at pick no. 32. (In an amusing coincidence, Carlson is committed to Tennessee, though after he went in the top 10, I doubt we’ll ever see him in Knoxville except as a tourist.) Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball players can be pretty big. I knew this going in. Even so, I was not prepared for Noah Yoder. The 18-year-old pitcher from Mechanicsville, Virginia, draped himself onto the chair I’d set out for him, and then he started to overflow his container, like an overproofed bread dough liberating itself from a too-small pan.

Yoder explained that, having little showcase experience other than an eye-catching performance at East Coast Pro, he was enjoying his fancy surroundings at the MLB Draft Combine. Having a shuttle bus from the hotel to the ballpark was a particularly nice surprise.

As he settled into his seat and stretched out his legs, I was quickly coming to the realization that I had not left nearly enough space between his chair and my own. My previous interview had been with a compact college relief pitcher, and I hadn’t thought to rearrange the furniture for my next guest. Read the rest of this entry »