Love ’em or hate ’em, the class of “expected” stats has utility when we’re talking about predicting the future. The data certainly inspire mixed feelings among fans, but they perform an important task of linking the things that Statcast and similar non-traditional metrics say to performance on the field. A hard-hit rate of X% or a launch angle of Y degrees doesn’t really mean anything by itself, without the context of what’s happens in baseball games.

I’ve been doing projections now for nearly half (!) my life, so outside of my normal curiosity, I have a vested interest in using this kind of information productively in projections. Like the Statcast estimates (preceded with an “x,” as in xBA, xSLG, etc.), ZiPS has its own version, very creatively using a “z” instead.

It’s important to remember these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and say, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass, and are more stable than the actual stats are for individual players. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. Sometimes that’s extremely important, as in the case of home runs allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, home runs are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future home runs allowed than are actual home runs allowed are. Also, the longer a pitcher “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes in the actual performance rather than the expected one. More information on accuracy and construction can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

With the caveat that his last outing was his worst of the 2025 campaign — seven earned runs over three innings against the Syracuse Mets — Cade Cavalli appears ready to return to the big leagues. Once he does, Washington Nationals fans will see a somewhat different pitcher than the one who made his last (and only) appearance in the majors on August 28, 2022. Going under the knife has a lot to do with that. After initially landing on the shelf with shoulder inflammation, Cavalli blew out and had Tommy John surgery in March 2023. At the time, the right-hander was his team’s top prospect and no. 63 on our Top 100 as a 50 FV. (Cavalli will be assigned a 45 FV on our forthcoming Nationals list.)

His return to full health was both long and arduous. After missing all of 2023, Cavalli made just a smattering of appearances a year ago, none above High-A, and he went through a dead arm phase this spring and didn’t take the mound until mid-April. Since then, he has been solid more often than not. While his ERA over 10 starts with Triple-A Rochester is 5.27, the now-26-year-old has gone five or more innings while allowing two or fewer runs on four occasions.

When we got reacquainted last month — I first interviewed him in July of 2021 when he was in Double-A — Cavalli explained how he has deviated from his pre-surgery days. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into 2025, you might not have expected Alejandro Kirk and Ernie Clement to play central roles on a playoff contender. Neither player was an above-average hitter last season; in fact, each hit for a 93 wRC+ while playing regularly for a team that won just 74 games. Yet the pair rank first and second in position player WAR on the Blue Jays, thanks not only to improved offense but exceptional glovework, with Kirk battling the Giants’ Patrick Bailey for the top spot in two catching metrics, and Clement ranking among the best third basemen while also posting strong metrics in limited duty at the three other infield positions. The pair have not only helped the Blue Jays to a 47-38 record and the top AL Wild Card position, but also the top ranking in my annual midseason defensive breakdown.

Kirk and Clement aren’t Toronto’s only defensive stalwarts. Second baseman Andrés Giménez and center fielder Myles Straw, a pair of light-hitting glove whizzes acquired from the Guardians in separate trades this past winter, have been strong at their respective positions, with the latter helping to cover for the absences of Daulton Varsho. A Gold Glove winner last year, Varsho missed the first month of this season recovering from right rotator cuff surgery, and returned to the injured list on June 1 due to a strained left hamstring. Even in limited duty, Straw, Varsho, and Giménez — who missed about four weeks due to a quad strain, with Clement filling in at second for most of that time — have all rated as three to five runs above average according to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value (FRV), and five to eight above average according to Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). Clement has totaled 12 DRS and 10 FRV at the four infield spots; in 359.2 innings at third, he’s second in the majors in both DRS (7) and FRV (5).

This is the third year in a row I’ve taken a midseason dip into the alphabet soup of defensive metrics, including Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our own catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages). One longtime standby, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), has been retired, which required me to adjust my methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

Junior Caminero has, as of this writing, grounded into 22 double plays in 333 plate appearances this year. The first year both the AL and NL counted double plays was 1939; since then, there have been some 9,295 individual player seasons of 300 or more plate appearances. Caminero’s current campaign is already in the top 300 in double plays.

Two months ago, Leo Morgenstern wrote an article titled “Carlos Correa Is Keeping the GIDP Alive,” which conceded, right in the lede, that even though Correa had grounded into an appalling six double plays in April alone, Caminero was leading the league. The Rays third baseman has only expanded that gap; Jacob Wilson is second with 15 double plays. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, the Angels made 22-year-old James Wood the first player to receive four intentional walks in a single game since Barry Bonds in 2004. You could argue the plan worked, too, as Wood came up with at least one runner in scoring position all four times, and the only one of those runners to score did so on a bizarre, inning-ending double play. If the Angels’ goal was to avoid the big inning, then they nailed it. If their goal was to win the game, well, hope springs eternal; the Nationals won, 7-4, in 11 innings. The obvious takeaway is the 6’7” Wood is a terrifying talent, but just as obvious is how out of step with current baseball thinking – or really any baseball thinking – this move was.

Wood is having an incredible season, launching 22 home runs, walking 14.5% of the time, and batting .283. His 156 wRC+ makes him the eighth-best hitter in the game this season and a genuine contender for the National League MVP. However, it’s impossible to argue that he’s in Bonds territory. Bonds earned four IBBs four different times that year. He was in the midst of his fifth straight 45-homer season and 13th straight 30-homer campaign. He held the single-season home run record and was closing in on the all-time one. He put up a 233 wRC+ en route to an absurd 11.9 WAR in 2004. He was in his own league. Moreover, the game has progressed in its thinking since 2004, and it’s now widely understood that an intentional walk is rarely the smart move.

Stathead, which uses Retrosheet data from back before intentional walks were an official stat, lists 12 instances in which a player received at least four intentional walks in a game. This John Schwartz article from the 1980 Baseball Research Journal can teach you even more about the earlier history of the IBB, including the contention that Mel Ott received five intentional passes during the second game of a doubleheader on October 5, 1929 (though Retrosheet only lists three of Ott’s five walks that day as intentional). So this is an extraordinarily rare feat, and fully a third of the times it has happened in baseball history, it was specifically happening to Bonds in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »

Love ’em or hate ’em, the class of “expected” stats has utility when we’re talking about predicting the future. The data certainly have mixed feelings among fans, but they perform an important task of linking the things that Statcast and similar non-traditional metrics say to performance on the field. A hard-hit rate of X% or a launch angle of Y degrees doesn’t really mean anything by itself, without the context of what’s happens in baseball games.

I’ve been doing projections now for nearly half (!) my life, so outside of my normal curiosity, I have a vested interest in using this kind of information productively in projections. Like the Statcast estimates (preceded with an x, as in xBA, xSLG, etc.), ZiPS has its own version, very creatively using a z instead.

It’s important to remember these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and say, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass, and are more stable than the actual stats are for individual players. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. Sometimes that’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than are actual homers allowed. Also, the longer a hitter “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one. More information on accuracy and construction can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

When Ozzie Albies signed his current contract, I decried it in such terms that, well, “decried” was an accurate description. This 22-year-old middle infielder, coming off a season of 24 home runs and 4.0 WAR, had signed away his prime earning years to the Braves for seven years at an average of $5 million per. Two option years could keep him in Atlanta through 2027 without increasing the contract’s AAV. It was an all-time swindle, I wrote. Esau got a better deal when he sold his inheritance for a bowl of stew.

Six years later, I sit here contemplating a question that once would’ve seemed unfathomable: Should the Braves pick up those option years?

Through his first 83 games, Albies is hitting .223/.297/.321, which is a wRC+ of 74. He has never before hit under .259, nor slugged under .450, nor posted a wRC+ under 100 in any previous healthy season. There’s probably a little bad batted ball luck in there, and some malaise from Atlanta’s comprehensively frustrating, injury-riddled season to date. Read the rest of this entry »

I still remember the first time I wondered, What if the colors I see aren’t the same ones that other people see? What if the color I perceive as red looks the same as what you perceive as yellow? I was 10 years old, and I felt like a budding scientist or philosopher, or perhaps a poet. Whichever one, I was already preparing my Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

I’ve since come to realize that my 10-year-old brain wasn’t asking anything that every stoned college freshman hadn’t asked before. I sounded less like a Nobel Laureate and more like John Kruk taking his role as the Phillies’ color commentator a bit too literally. That said, the idea that different human beings perceive colors in different ways isn’t just pot-fueled postulation or Krukian wisdom – it’s the truth. It would have blown my 10-year-old mind to learn the colors I see aren’t necessarily the colors everyone else sees, and it’s not just about rods, cones, and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. Sometimes, it’s a matter of language.

Take a look at the four swatches below. Think about what colors they are. And no, the answers aren’t Steven Kwan’s whiff rate, arm strength, bat speed, and sprint speed: Read the rest of this entry »

So there’s this thing called the old man test. It’s been around for at least five or six years, but it’s making the rounds on the Internet again. The idea is simple enough. You have to put on your socks and shoes without letting your feet touch the ground as you do so. You raise your left foot and keep it in the air while you reach down to the ground to grab your sock, put it on, reach down to the ground to grab your shoe, put it on, and tie it, then you do the same thing with your right foot. It tests your balance, strength, flexibility, and all those other things bodies are supposed to have. If you fail the test, then you’re an old man, I guess? Maybe you instantly turn into an old man? Maybe a healthy old man just appears right outside your window to point and laugh at you? That part’s less clear.

I tend to buy into the idea that the old man test is measuring something important, just because whenever I’ve had to do physical therapy, I’ve been forced to do a lot of one-legged exercises. If you’ve ever been in physical therapy, I bet you’ve had to do them too. There’s nothing physical therapists love more than turning up the difficulty level of an otherwise simple exercise by forcing you to do it while standing on one leg. Once you get good at doing it one-legged, they’ll make you stand on a bouncy ball or something, and if you nail that, they’ll literally just start shoving you to make it even harder. Truly, no one on earth is hornier for balance than physical therapists.

I bring all this up because I noticed something fun about Steven Kwan while playing around with Baseball Savant’s batting stance graphics the other day. The graphics take after ballroom dancing diagrams of old, showing fun little footprints for each player at three points: their resting batting stance, when the pitcher releases the ball, and when their bat actually intercepts the ball. Here’s Kwan’s 2024 graphic:

Kwan has one of the narrowest batting stances in the game, so his front foot moves out toward the mound quite a bit, but aside from that, nothing about it stands out all that much. He’s a little guy with a little stance, film at 11. But this is the calm before the storm. Here’s the same graphic for this month. Keep your eye on the blue footprint:

I was so confused when I watched this. Is Steven Kwan actually stepping on home plate as the pitcher releases the ball? It seemed like something I would’ve noticed before, but there was that blue footprint, right on top of home plate, clear as day. How could anyone start a swing with their body so closed off? And is it even legal to step on home plate in the middle of your swing? That definitely seems like it would be illegal. I pulled up the rulebook and started looking before I realized what was actually going on. If you’re familiar with Kwan’s swing, I’m sure you already know the answer, and it brings us back to the old man test.

Kwan doesn’t step on home plate, but he has one of the game’s most dramatic leg kicks, and right in the middle of it, he dangles his foot directly over the plate. There’s no way to indicate in a two-dimensional diagram that his foot is 18 inches off the ground. Sometimes, and I’m not exaggerating here, Kwan’s entire foot is inside the strike zone while the ball is already on its way to home plate. No batter has ever come closer to tying their shoe in the middle of a pitch:

I went back to Baseball Savant and watched every single qualified player’s batting stance diagram, hundreds of cleats dancing across the batter’s boxes, black to blue to red. I would very roughly estimate that half of today’s hitters don’t move their front foot all that much, but that still leaves scores and scores of players with dramatic leg kicks, their blue front feet moving every which direction. None of those players does what Kwan does. None of them does anything remotely resembling what Kwan does. When batting from the right side, Ozzie Albies does place most of his left foot outside the batter’s box, but that’s mostly because he sets up five inches closer to the plate than Kwan does, and his foot is still nowhere near home plate. Nobody’s diagram looks like Kwan’s because nobody’s leg kick looks like Kwan’s.

Here’s Kwan’s secret. He doesn’t just have a leg kick. He has a leg kick, and then, right in the middle of it, he has second leg kick. It’s a double kick. A normal leg kick just involves lifting your foot off the ground, and it’s maybe worth noting that this is a bit of a misnomer. Everywhere outside the baseball diamond, there’s a difference between raising your leg and kicking. In baseball, they’re one and the same. Regardless, Kwan does that, pulling his knee straight up until his femur is parallel with the ground, but he’s just getting going. At that point, he kicks his foot forward toward home plate and sweeps it out toward the pitcher in a circular motion as he puts it down:

Kwan has a leg kick, and then he has a foot kick. It would not be at all unfair to say that he puts his right foot in and shakes it all about. It’s an impressive display of balance, and so far as I can tell, it’s unique. I didn’t just watch all the diagrams. I watched the swings of every player I could think of who has a big leg kick. I watched YouTube videos that compiled huge leg kicks of the past. The closest leg kicks I could find belonged to Alek Thomas and Gary Sánchez, both of whom move their front foot while they get into their swing, but they’re far from doing a double kick. No one else does this.

Kwan didn’t start executing the double kick all at once. It seems like it’s been coming on for a while now. When he was drafted out of Oregon State in 2018, Kwan had a small, controlled leg kick, with no double kick in sight. I can’t find any video of him from the next two years, but he started 2021 with the very beginnings of a double kick:

It’s very subtle in the video above. By the time Kwan debuted in 2022, the double kick was there to stay, but it’s still evolving. As he told the MLB Network during spring training, he went into the 2024 season looking to impact the ball harder, and that meant a more aggressive leg kick. “Before, I’d get up and then I would just put it right back down,” he said. “So then my hands are able to work and I can manipulate the bat as I need to. But last year, I tried to – hitter leverage, early in the count – really try to get that stride out, and now I’m going out to get it. I can stay in the legs, and then now I can stay slotted, catch it out a little more in front.” The funny thing is that in the video, even as Kwan demonstrated the leg kick (which he called a leg lift), he wasn’t doing the double kick. He may not even know he’s doing it. It’s only in the heat of the game that the double kick happens.

This focus on going out and meeting the ball earlier is likely the reason it only started showing up on the Baseball Savant diagram this season. It has to do with his timing. This year, the second kick actually seems like it’s not quite bringing his foot as far forward or as high, but it’s also quicker. If Statcast could show us its full path, it would likely look nearly identical to the 2024 or 2023 path, but it’s only showing us its position at the moment the ball is released. At that point, Kwan is further along, so his foot is already over the plate. He’s also getting his foot down a fraction of a second earlier, and it’s possible that getting started that little bit earlier is part of the reason he’s running a career-low opposite field rate.

Watch any baseball game and you’ll see 18 different hitters with 18 different timing mechanisms. Nobody’s exactly the same, but they tend to fall in a couple of categories. There are players with quiet feet, players with toe taps, and players with leg kicks. Those leg kicks take their feet in pretty much every direction. Some players lift their leg straight up, some pull their foot way back as a cocking mechanism, some use the leg kick to true up a very open stance, some start narrow and push their foot toward the pitcher. But Kwan is the only one who just dangles his foot there, then kicks it out into the strike zone before he attacks the pitch. It’s a feat of ingenuity as well as a feat of balance. At the very least, he should be every physical therapist’s favorite player.

Cam Schlittler has emerged as the top pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization. His ability to overpower hitters is a big reason why. In four starts since being promoted to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on June 3, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound right-hander has logged a 1.69 ERA and a 40.2% strikeout rate over 21-and-a-third innings. Counting his 53 frames at Double-A Somerset, Schlittler has a 2.18 ERA and a 33.0% strikeout rate on the season.

The 2022 seventh-rounder out of Northeastern University is averaging 96.5 mph with his heater, but more than velocity plays into the offering’s effectiveness. As Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, Schlittler’s “size and arm angle create downhill plane on his mid-90s fastball akin to a runaway truck ramp, while the backspinning nature of the pitch also creates riding life.”

I asked the 24-year-old Walpole, Massachusetts native about the characteristics our lead prospect analyst described in his report.

“Arm slot-wise it’s nothing crazy,” Schlittler said in our spring training conversation. “I’m more of a high-three-quarters kind of guy, but what I didn’t realize until looking at video a couple months ago is that I have really quick arm speed. My mechanics are kind of slow, and then my arm path is really fast, so the ball kind of shoots out a little bit. With my height, release point— I get good extension — and how fast my arm is moving, the ball gets on guys quicker than they might expect.” Read the rest of this entry »