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 »

The Cincinnati Reds have had a promising start to the 2025 season, which is at most a modest surprise considering how many talented young players the organization has stockpiled over the past several years. What is surprising is how much of that success is owed to the Reds’ rotation.

Coming out of the weekend, Cincinnati is 14th in position player WAR, 23rd in reliever WAR, and seventh in starting pitcher WAR. It’s not that any individual Reds pitcher has had a shocking month of April; it’s more that four of them — Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, and Brady Singer — have all gotten hot at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

“I’m so sick of this friggin’ guy,” is one of the greatest compliments one can pay an opposing athlete. And the Dodgers must be sick to death of Pete Crow-Armstrong. The Cubs and Dodgers, who opened the season together in Japan, just played five games in the span of 13 days to complete their season series. In those five games, Crow-Armstrong did his normal speed-and-defense act, but he also went 10-for-22 with four home runs.

In the two-game series that just ended, PCA went 3-for-5 with a home run and a double in the first game, and 3-for-4 with a home run and two stolen bases in the second. The Cubs won each game by one run; I don’t think it’s at all unfair to say that in a series that featured the Dodgers’ vaunted three-MVP lineup, plus Kyle Tucker, Dansby Swanson, Teoscar Hernández, and a partridge in a pear tree, it was the young PCA who singlehandedly turned the tide. Read the rest of this entry »

The worst part of a long rebuild is about a third of the way through, when the teardown is nearly finished and the daunting enormousness of the task starts to sink in. At that point, the old guard is gone but the core of the next good team is still in the minors at best — sometimes, the next superstar is still in ninth grade.

But someone has to go out there and log some minutes for the tanking ballclub. And in every rebuild — sometimes because of keen scouting or inspired development, but often as not just through sheer volume — one or two of those random unfortunates breaks out and survives into the next competitive window.

I’ve long been fascinated by players in this situation, because they fall into one of two categories. First, there’s the Rhys Hoskins class. Hoskins was an uninspiring college first base prospect who exploded into the one bright spot on some late-2010s Phillies teams that I cannot describe accurately on a family website. Read the rest of this entry »

Shelby Miller is so old… (“How old is he?”)… he got R.A. Dickey to ground out in his first major league inning. He’s so old he threw more than 200 innings for the Braves when they were bad. He’s so old he threw more than 200 innings in a single season, full stop.

I guess 34 isn’t that old, but Miller has lived and died a hundred times during his career in professional baseball, and if the first eight appearances of his second go-around with the Diamondbacks are any indication (10 innings, 10 strikeouts, only four total baserunners), he’s back to life again. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the 30-plus years that I’ve been following baseball, it seems like a collection of newfangled stats comes out every couple years. WAR, DiPS, wOBA, UZR, exit velocity, spin rate — America’s most rigorously empiricized sport has gone from scribblings in Henry Chadwick’s notebook to having more inscrutable acronyms than the Department of Defense.

My default position on new stats is one of interested skepticism. As a public-facing analyst, I don’t want to stake my reputation on a new metric that might still have serious flaws. It usually takes months or even years for people smarter than me — or at least, people who did more than barely pass their graduate statistics class — to iron out the kinks and figure out how to read and utilize the trendy new stats.

One example: I waited for ages for Justin Lawrence to be good. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox, coming out of the worst season in modern major league history, started 2025 with a bang: an 8-1 win over the Angels on Opening Day. They lost the next two games, then pounded the Twins into smithereens on the last day of March. Since then, the Sox have dropped 12 games out of 14 and once again settled like silt on the bottom of the American League standings table.

It’s not going to be their year after all. But I don’t think it’s going to be as miserable as it was in 2024, and Chase Meidroth is one reason why. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, I sat down to watch the Red Sox-Rays game, hoping to find the answer to a question that’s been bugging me for weeks: Who does Shane Baz look like?

I didn’t come close to an answer, because while watching Baz pitch, I was struck by the sparseness of the young right-hander’s uniform. Only three letters in his name; two digits in his uniform number, but represented by skinny numerals. It stood out on the Rays’ classy blue-on-white uniforms. (Some say it’s boring and/or derivative, but I disagree — it’s a color scheme that’ll never steer you wrong in baseball.)

Then I lost the plot a little. The Rays don’t have a jersey sponsor, and their sleeve patch doesn’t contain any script. Their team name is only four letters long. How close does Baz come to having the fewest characters on his uniform of any major league player? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve gotten prematurely excited about Nick Lodolo before. This is not that. I’ve consulted my physician and I’m working on the problem. But he’s such a weird pitcher I can’t completely forget him.

What’s he up to now? Well, believe it or not, El Cóndor del Río Ohio is not walking anyone. Maybe that’ll change when he starts against the Mariners tonight, but through his first three starts, Lodolo has faced 71 batters and walked only one. And while he suffers the same predilection for hitting batters that plagues many long-levered sidearmers, Lodolo has plunked just one opponent in 2025. Read the rest of this entry »