In early April, an article titled “Astros Pitching Prospect Spencer Arrighetti Is All in With Analytics” ran here at FanGraphs, and given what the 24-year-old right-hander had to say, the headline was wholly accurate. In a conversation that took place during spring training, Arrighetti displayed nuanced knowledge of his pitch metrics while comfortably addressing topics like seam-shifted wake and vertical approach angle. He presented as a bona fide pitching nerd.

Four months into his rookie season — he made his major league debut with Houston on April 10 — Arrighetti is a nerd with an altered approach. The evolution of his M.O. has taken place over the course of an up-and-down campaign that currently has him on a high. Over his last two starts, the 2021 sixth-round pick out of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has allowed just three runs while fanning 25 batters in 13 innings. On the year, he has a 5.14 ERA, a 4.18 FIP, and a 27.9% strikeout rate in 105 innings.

Arrighetti explained how and why his approach has changed when we sat down to chat at Fenway Park this past weekend. My first question elicited an expansive, five-minute response, after which we shared a handful of additional exchanges.

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David Laurila: What’s changed since we talked in spring training?

Spencer Arrighetti: “I have a much better perspective now. When we talked in Lakeland, I was speaking with three big league spring training games under my belt. This is a very different game than I thought at that time. The conversation we had, as great as it was, left out a really big piece of what successful pitching is in the modern era. Obviously, shapes and velocity are really important. Arsenal design is really important. There are people who believe those are primary, but after my time up here, I’m not convinced that chasing shapes is the way to go. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s quite a lot of bickering in sports, and not many things bring out more vehement disagreement than discussions involving who should get various awards. Even now, nearly 30 years later, when I think about Mo Vaughn beating out Albert Belle for the 1995 AL MVP, or Dante Bichette finishing second in that year’s NL race despite putting up just 1.8 WAR, I have to suppress a compelling desire to flip over a table. This year, thankfully, it’s hard to imagine the MVP voting results will be anywhere near as egregious as the ones we saw in ’95. That’s because the way MVP voters in the BBWAA evaluate players has changed dramatically since then.

Aaron Judge has easily the best traditional case for the AL MVP award if the season ended today. He leads the league in two of the main old-school batting stats: home runs and RBI. Bobby Witt Jr. and his .347 batting average is all that would stand between Judge and the Triple Crown. For what it’s worth, Judge would win the MLB Triple Crown, with twice the emeralds, rather than the AL one.

For most of baseball history, beginning with the first time the BBWAA handed out the award in 1931, numbers like these usually would’ve been good enough to win MVP honors. It also would’ve helped Judge’s case that the Yankees have one of the best records in baseball. If this were 30 years ago, Judge would all but officially have this thing wrapped up, barring an injury or the worst slump of his career.

But it’s the 2020s, not the 1990s, and I doubt anyone would dispute too strenuously the notion that ideas on performance, and their related awards, have shifted in recent years. Now, when talking about either an advanced offense statistic like wRC+ or a modern framework statistic like WAR, Judge certainly is no slouch. He currently leads baseball with 8.3 WAR, and his 218 wRC+ would be the eighth-highest seasonal mark in AL/NL history, behind only seasons by Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. But by WAR, his lead is a small one, roughly two-tenths of a run (!) over Bobby Witt Jr., who has surged since the start of July (.439/.476/.803, 247 wRC+ in 33 games) to supplant Gunnar Henderson as Judge’s main competition for the award. Henderson was right there with Judge for much of the early part of the season, and though he’s fallen off a bit, he’s still fourth in the majors with 6.4 WAR and capable of catching fire again at any time. With a month and a half left, Juan Soto can’t be completely counted out either.

A similar dynamic persists in the NL. Shohei Ohtani has looked a lot like the obvious MVP choice for much of the season, as he’s done, well, one half of the Shohei Ohtani thing: He is murdering baseballs and pitchers’ dreams. But as with Judge, there’s some serious competition when you look at WAR. Ohtani stands at the top, but by a fraction of a run ahead of Elly De La Cruz. Ketel Marte and Francisco Lindor are both within five runs of Ohtani, and nobody serious has ever claimed you can use WAR to conclusively settle disputes on differences that small. De La Cruz has more WAR than Ohtani since the start of June, and the latter two have more than the Dodgers slugger since the beginning of May. Marcell Ozuna, who has strong traditional stats (.302 BA, 35 HR, 90 RBI) shouldn’t be completely discounted if the Braves show signs of life; those numbers still matter, just not to the extent that they once did. With a fairly wide open race, there are plenty of stars with name power lurking just behind the leaders, such as Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman.

The answer of who should win the MVP awards is one we probably can’t answer beyond me giving my opinion, which I won’t do given the likelihood that I will be voting for one of the awards. But who will win the MVP awards is something we can make a reasonable stab at predicting. It’s actually been a while since I approached the topic, but I’ve long had a model derived from history to project the major year-end awards given out by the BBWAA. It was due for some updates, because the voters have changed. Some of the traditional things that voters prioritized, like team quality, have been de-emphasized by voters, though not completely. And the biggest change is the existence of WAR. Whatever flavor you prefer, be it Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, or the smooth, creamy swirl that can be scooped by our display window, this general stat has changed a lot about how performance is perceived.

There have been 47 MVP awards presented to position players who finished their seasons with fewer than 6.0 WAR; that’s more than a quarter of all hitter MVP seasons. However, excluding 2020, a hitter has not won an MVP without reaching that threshold since ’06, when both winners fell short: the NL’s Ryan Howard had 5.92 WAR, while AL winner Justin Morneau had 3.77 WAR.

When modeling the data, I use all the votes, not just the winners, and WAR is a pretty lousy variable when predicting voter behavior throughout most of history. That’s not surprising on its face since we’ve had WAR to use for only the last 15 years or so, making it impossible for most awards to have explicitly considered it. But there also appears to be only marginal implicit consideration, in which voters based their votes on the things that go into WAR without using the actual statistic. There’s a great deal of correlation between winning awards and high WARs in history, but that’s only because two of the things that voters have really liked, home runs and batting average, also tend to lead to higher WAR numbers. As an independent variable, WAR doesn’t help explain votes very well. That is, until about the year 2000.

If you only look at votes since 2000, all of a sudden, WAR goes from an irrelevant variable to one of the key components in a voting model. Voters in 2002 may not have been able to actually look at WAR, but even before Moneyball was a thing, baseball writers were paying much more attention to OBP, SLG, and defensive value at least partially because of analysts like Bill James, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, depending on your approach, once you deal with the correlations between variables, WAR comes out as one of or the most crucial MVP variable today. Could you imagine a world, even just 20 years ago, in which owners would propose paying players based on what sabermetrics nerds on the internet concocted?

The model I use, which I spent most of last week updating, takes modern voting behaviors into consideration. I use all three WAR variants listed above because it’s not clear which one most voters use. Here is how ZiPS currently sees the two MVP races this season:

This model thinks Judge is the favorite, but his odds to lose are nearly a coin flip. Witt is the runner-up, followed by Soto, Henderson, and the somehow-still-underrated José Ramírez. If we look at a model that considers all the BBWAA-voting years rather than just the 21st century results, this becomes a much more lopsided race.

Over in the NL, the updated ZiPS model sees a race that’s far more uncertain than the one in the AL.

Ohtani comes out as the favorite, but he has less than a one-in-three chance to win it. Behind him are the other WAR leaders, plus Ozuna.

Some of the WAR leaders without strong Triple Crown numbers, like Lindor, drop off considerably based on the entire history of voting, while Ozuna becomes a co-favorite with Ohtani. I haven’t talked about pitchers much in this article; they’re still included in the model, but none make the top 10 in the projected probabilities. Simply put, the willingness to vote pitchers for MVP seems to have declined over time. ZiPS doesn’t think any pitcher has been as dominant this season as the two most recent starters to win the award, Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Justin Verlander in ’11, and closers these days typically can’t expect to get more than a few stray votes at the bottom of ballots.

It’ll be interesting to see how voting continues to change moving forward. In any case, no matter who you support for the MVP awards, strap in because there’s still plenty of baseball left to be played.

What a wild ride it’s been for Jake McCarthy the past three seasons. In 2022, he finished fourth in NL Rookie of the Year voting, seemingly the right fielder of the future for the Arizona Diamondbacks. It wasn’t the kind of performance that would make anyone think that he — and not Corbin Carroll — was Arizona’s franchise player. But it was the kind of performance that could tempt inveterate contrarians into saying, “You know, Carroll gets all the attention, but McCarthy is the one who really makes this team tick.”

Then, in 2023, McCarthy was total buttcrack. He barely kept his head above replacement level as he lost playing time to Alek Thomas, Pavin Smith, Tommy Pham, and a partridge in a pear tree. Then, because when it rains it pours — even in the desert — McCarthy suffered an oblique injury that kept him from playing any part in the Diamondbacks’ run to the World Series.

But in 2024, he’s reclaimed his rightful place in the lineup, and he’s hitting .303/.375/.451. With almost two months left in the regular season, he’s set new career highs in games played and WAR. All is well once again. Read the rest of this entry »

I typed the command “high-leverage reliever fangraphs.com” into Google over the weekend and set the search range to the past month. About 130 results came up. Next, I ran the same search, except with “low-leverage reliever” instead. This time, Google told me there weren’t “many great matches” for my search and suggested I try “using words that might appear” on the page I was looking for. Message received, Google. Apparently, our coverage here at FanGraphs is biased toward players who actually hold meaningful influence over the outcomes of games. That just won’t do!

All joking aside, there’s a very simple reason we don’t write about low-leverage relievers that often. Low-leverage relievers don’t really exist, at least not in the same way high-leverage relievers do. For one thing, relievers are naturally going to enter games in higher-leverage spots because pitchers are more likely to exit games in higher-leverage spots. The average leverage index when entering games (gmLI) for relievers this season is 1.12; that’s 0.12 higher than a perfectly average-leverage spot. Moreover, the low-leverage relief opportunities do exist are more likely to go to the revolving door of replacement-level arms at the bottom of each team’s bullpen depth chart, rather than an established pitcher whose full-time job is that of a low-leverage reliever. Consider that the median gmLI for active, qualified relievers this season is 1.21. By design, most relievers who stick around long enough for you to know their names are going to be pitching in higher-leverage spots. Yet, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any full-time low-leverage relievers. If anything, it just means those guys are more unusual – and therefore pretty interesting.

With all that in mind, I set out to find a low-leverage arm worth writing about. The qualified reliever (0.3 IP per team game) with the lowest gmLI this season is Thyago Vieira, with a 0.29 gmLI. That would be the lowest gmLI in a season for a qualified reliever since rookie Johan Santana’s record-setting 0.27 gmLI in 2000. Yet, with all due respect to Vieira, he’s hardly the most fun part of that fun fact. (Although, if Vieira goes on to win two Cy Young awards and a Triple Crown I will gladly eat my words.) The 31-year-old Vieira perfectly fits the mold of the replacement-level/revolving-door reliever I described above. He has played for the Brewers, Orioles, and Diamondbacks this season, and he’s currently on the restricted list at Triple-A in the D-backs organization. It seems highly unlikely he’ll get back to majors and pitch the necessary 10.2 innings he would need to remain qualified at season’s end. And, unfortunately, his 0.29 gmLI isn’t nearly as noteworthy without the “qualified” qualifier. If I lower the threshold to 30 innings pitched, 25 other relievers have had a lower-leverage season on record (since 1974).

Funnily enough, however, it was when I looked just beyond the qualified names that I struck gold iron (help me out here metal enthusiasts, is that the right metaphor?) in my search for low-leverage relievers. Tanner Rainey of the Nationals is in the midst of what could be the lowest-leverage relief season of all time: Read the rest of this entry »

I have a secret to tell, one that might surprise you. I think that baseball analysis is too complex. I can’t keep track of it all. There are too many numbers, too many ways to approach things, too many parts of the game that might be good in one context, bad in another, and neutral in a third. My whole job is to analyze baseball, and yet I find myself drowning in data more often than controlling it. My solution is to simplify. I look for players’ superpowers – carrying tools, in baseball parlance. Aaron Judge is power personified, with the rest of his game building off of that. José Ramírez is a bat control genius. Mookie Betts is the most coordinated man alive. Luis Arraez could hit soft line drives the other way in his sleep. These shortcuts help me think about how the rest of a player’s game fits in. But I have a problem: I’m trying to analyze Jackson Chourio, and I can’t figure out what his superpower is.

You might think it’s his speed. You wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. He’s one of the fastest players in baseball, and he uses that to his advantage all over the place. He’s an excellent baserunner and defender. He eats up ground in the outfield in huge loping strides, the kind of quick you only notice after the fact. I watch him and think he’s an above-average center fielder. The Brewers have only played him in the corners this year, since they’re overrun with excellent defensive outfielders and Chourio has the least experience, but he’s so good that if he ends up in a corner, he might be peak Jason Heyward there.

I guess we could stop the article there, but speed isn’t really a superpower for many great players. Sure, Bobby Witt Jr. and Elly De La Cruz are the current kings of sprint speed, but you don’t look at their games and say, “Oh, the main thing about them is that they’re fast.” That’s the territory of Billy Hamilton or Victor Scott II, and those guys just aren’t stars in the way that I think Chourio will be. I’m looking for an offensive weapon that makes everything work for him, one that explains how he’s hitting major league pitching at age 20. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas White is having an impressive first full professional season. Drafted 35th overall last year by the Miami Marlins out of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the 19-year-old left-hander has a 2.84 ERA, a 2.99 FIP, and a 29.6% strikeout rate over 76 innings between Low-A Jupiter and High-A Beloit. His late-May promotion to the higher of those two levels came for a simple reason. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen explained when assigning him a 45+ in early June, White’s stuff was simply too good for the Florida State League.

I had an opportunity to talk to the promising youngster when Beloit played at West Michigan earlier this week, and one of the things I made it a point to learn about was the mindset that augments his arsenal. I began by asking him how much of a role analytics are playing in his development.

“I’m starting to learn more about the actual numbers and how all that stuff works,” White told me. “At the end of the day, I like to just go out and get outs — I’ve never been a big tech guy — but I definitely know a lot more about my pitches now that I have access to all the data. So, I’m still learning, and I want to learn, but the best measurement for me is how hitters react to them.”

The pitches that hitters are reacting to include a four-seam fastball that has been averaging, according to White, 95.6 mph and 17.5 inches of vertical ride. He is also throwing a two-seam changeup and a sweeper-slider. Currently in the works, but not yet part of his repertoire, is “a shorter gyro pitch,” either a cutter or a hard slider. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles have had their ups and downs lately. Since July 7, a point at which they led the American League East by three games, they’ve gone 11-15, briefly dropping out of the top spot; as of this writing, they’re currently tied with the Yankees at 68-48. They were among the busiest teams ahead of the trade deadline, but their approach was geared more towards quantity instead of quality, as none of their additions rate as an impact player. They’ve dealt with a handful of injuries lately, but in the absence of infielders Jorge Mateo and Jordan Westburg, top prospect Jackson Holliday has gotten another look, and so far he’s been quite impressive.

Recalled on July 31, more than three months after his abortive first stint in the majors ended, Holliday made an immediate impact by hitting a 439-foot grand slam off the Blue Jays’ Yerry Rodríguez for his first major league home run. He went hitless the next day, then peeled off three straight two-hit games against the Guardians; in the last of those, on Sunday, he hit a solo homer off Gavin Williams. He homered in his next two games as well, with a solo shot off the Blue Jays’ Chris Bassitt on Tuesday and a two-run blast off Ryan Burr on Wednesday:

That last homer turned a 3-2 deficit into a 4-3 lead in what wound up as a 7-3 victory. It also made Holliday the youngest player in AL history to homer in three consecutive games, at 20 years and 247 days old. His streak ended on Thursday with an 0-for-4 night against the Blue Jays, though Holliday did collect an RBI for the sixth game in a row, driving in a run on a ninth-inning groundout.

Like teammates Adley Rutschman in 2022 and Gunnar Henderson in ’23, the 20-year-old Holliday entered the year as the consensus no. 1 prospect. He appeared on track to break camp with the Orioles given a strong performance in the Grapefruit League, but the team instead optioned him to Triple-A Norfolk in late March, with his limited experience at that level (18 games last year), at second base (26 games), and against upper-level left-handed pitching all apparently factoring into decision, as did a roster crunch.

Some of that may have been typical front office lip service, however, as Holliday didn’t have to wait long for his first opportunity. With a stretch of facing five lefty starters in their first nine games behind them, the Orioles called up Holliday, who had hit .333/.482/.595 through his first 10 games at Norfolk. He debuted on April 10 with an 0-for-4 showing against the Red Sox, striking out twice but driving in a run on an RBI groundout. Unfortunately, things didn’t get much better; in fact, he was utterly overmatched, going 2-for-34 with two walks and 18 strikeouts in 10 games. While general manager Mike Elias and manager Brandon Hyde both publicly expressed confidence that Holliday would still become an impactful player soon, the Orioles optioned him to Norfolk on April 26.

“I think the bright side of this is he got very intense, very specific feedback from major league pitching,” Elias said at the time. “He’s a brilliant talent and a very sharp kid, and I expect he’s going to go implement those adjustments really quickly. But we felt that Triple-A and steady playing time in Triple-A was the place for that.”

Back at Norfolk, Holliday put up respectable numbers (.252/.418/.429) before missing two weeks in June due to elbow inflammation. Just days after he returned, colleague Eric Longenhagen noted some disconcerting aspects of his performance:

In a way, the IL stint was comforting because it offered a potential explanation for why Holliday’s performance and ferocious bat speed had tapered off a bit. Holliday’s spray chart shifted away from his pull side and moved toward left field and the third base line in the weeks leading up to his shelving. He was inside-outing lots of contact the opposite way, including pitches on the inner third of the plate that he typically turns on, and it was taking what appeared to be an uncomfortable and excessive amount of effort for him to swing hard.

Once he came off the IL at Norfolk, Holliday showed more power, but he was limited to DH duty until after the All-Star break. On July 29, a day before the trade deadline, Longenhagen further noted some defensive concerns, writing in his Top 100 Hitting Prospects Update, “He looks rather rusty and uncomfortable, if not still compromised to some extent. He’s making a lot of routine plays look harder than they need to be, and the quality of his hands has backed up.”

“[H]e does look like a 20-year-old lost in a sea of adults, and it’s become tough to make a strong argument for Holliday over James Wood right now,” concluded Longenhagen, who downgraded Holliday from a 70 FV prospect to a 65, which allowed Wood to take over the top spot on The Board.

While all of that was going down, so were Orioles infielders. On July 23, Mateo — who has made a team-high 52 starts at second base plus three at shortstop and two in center field — injured his left arm in a collision with Henderson. The 29-year-old infielder was diagnosed with an elbow subluxation and placed on the IL, while prospect Connor Norby was recalled from Norfolk. Five days and five starts at second base later, Norby was traded to the Marlins in a deal for Trevor Rogers; that same day, Mateo was transferred to the 60-day IL.

The next day, Holliday returned to the majors, but immediately before he hit his grand slam, Rodríguez drilled Westburg — who has made 64 starts at third base, 35 at second, and one at shortstop — in the right hand with a 95-mph fastball. The 25-year-old infielder suffered a fracture, interrupting a breakout season in which he’s hit .269/.317/.497 (129 wRC+) with 18 homers and earned All-Star honors. The hope is that he’ll be back in mid-September, in time to get tuned up for the postseason, but even given the Orioles’ depth, his absence looms large.

Those injuries have cleared a path for Holliday to get a long look at second base. As he’s still climbing out of the statistical hole he dug in April, his overall slash line looks pretty grim (.177/.239/.387, 76 wRC+ in 67 plate appearances), and the sample sizes for his splits are even smaller. But with the caveat that these numbers mostly haven’t reached the point of stabilizing, within those numbers we can at least discern some positive trends:

The first big thing to note beyond the fact that he’s been productive since returning is that Holliday has gotten his strikeout rate under control. Mind you, he has struck out at least once in all 18 of his games, putting him one short of Austin Jackson’s 2010 record of 19 consecutive games with strikeouts to start a career.

The second thing to note is that Holliday has taken a more aggressive approach at the plate since returning. While he’s swinging at more pitches both in and out of the zone, he’s coming up empty less often:

I don’t think there’s much to be gleaned from his pitch-type splits since returning given that Holliday has seen fewer than a dozen examples of every offering besides four-seamers and sliders. His four homers have each come against a different pitch (four-seamer, slider, curve, cutter), so that’s something.

The third thing to note is that Holliday’s contact since returning has been loud:

Of Holliday’s 20 batted balls since returning, 14 have been hard-hit balls with exit velocities of 95 mph or higher, 11 of them 100 mph or higher. Granted, six of those hard-hit balls have been grounders (five of at least 100 mph), but he’s turned three into singles, and even with his high groundball rate, he’s barreled half a dozen balls in this short time. His total of 36 batted balls is still short of the point of stabilization, but those barrel and hard-hit rates would both rank among the top half-dozen if they were maintained over (much) larger samples.

One more note on batted balls: Where Longenhagen was concerned with how often Holliday was hitting to the opposite field, his 55% pull rate and 20% oppo rates since returning — not to mention the fact that all four homers were to his pull side — suggest he’s moved past that issue. As for his defense, Holliday did make a nice pick to start what upon review proved to be a game-ending double play on July 31, but the jury is still out on his transition.

It’s premature to suggest Holliday has everything ironed out, but at the very least, he’s given the Orioles a most welcome boost. That still leaves them with numerous issues, however. Prospect Coby Mayo, who is no. 12 on The Board, was called up on August 2 to play third base, but so far he’s 0-for-13 with eight strikeouts; this week’s signing of free agent J.D. Davis, who hit just .218/.293/.338 (85 wRC+) for the A’s and Yankees, to a minor league contract suggests Mayo’s leash may not be long. Heston Kjerstad, who landed on the 7-day concussion IL after being beaned by a 97-mph Clay Holmes fastball on July 12, is back on the IL with lingering concussion symptoms after going just 2-for-18 upon returning. The reserve outfielder fitting into his roster slot, Austin Slater, has hit just .205/.331/.250 (77 wRC+) in his three-team odyssey this year.

More concerning is the rotation, which has already lost Kyle Bradish and John Means to Tommy John surgery and Tyler Wells to UCL brace surgery, and which has been lit for a 5.19 ERA and 4.66 FIP since the start of July, and has a 5.10 ERA even after the acquisitions of Rogers and Zach Eflin. Earlier this week, Grayson Rodriguez landed on the IL due a mild right lat strain. “He’s going to miss some time,” said Hyde. “We’re going to shut him down for a little while, get him some rest and recovery, get him some rehab. I think we’re optimistic about it.” His absence leaves a rather unimposing rotation behind ace Corbin Burnes, with Rogers and Eflin joined by Dean Kremer and swingman Albert Suárez. Of that group, only Burnes has an ERA below 4.00 since the start of July, with Kremer and Suárez well above 5.00. Fortunately for the Orioles, the Yankees have problems of their own, including a rotation that’s been even worse (5.59 ERA, 4.81 FIP) since the start of July, and unlike Elias, Brian Cashman did nothing to try to fix it at the deadline.

At this point, the division race looks like one between two rather flawed teams, and any advantages with regards to depth and player health could swing the balance. After a rough start, Holliday is not only fitting in but making an impact, and that can only help the Orioles.

If you know a Mets fan, you’re probably familiar with the speech. The speech starts like this: “Francisco Lindor is the most underrated player in baseball.” The pronunciation is really important here. You have to pronounce the so that it rhymes with he, and you have to put a big long pause between under and rated. Those are the rules. From that starting point, the speech generally continues for somewhere between 30 seconds and six hours, touching on offense, defense, MLB Network rankings, and at least two versions of WAR. I’ve never been all that sure whether the speech was necessarily true. Lindor’s greatness has always struck me as impossible to ignore. As one of the game’s premier defenders, according to both the advanced metrics and the eye test, he’s always on the highlight reels. He’s received MVP votes in six different seasons and won two Gold Gloves, one Platinum Glove, and three Silver Sluggers. He’s just 30 years old, and he’s already got the 25th-best JAWS score among all shortstops. He’s still adding to his seven-year peak, too. When I started writing this article yesterday, he ranked 26th.

But maybe I’m part of the problem. Maybe while I’ve been taking it for granted that everyone knows about Lindor’s greatness, other people have actually been taking Lindor’s greatness for granted. That would be uncool. As such, this is your annual reminder of just how great Francisco Lindor is. Because we’ve done this before, we’ll take a different tack and focus on things Lindor hasn’t done.

Be an Average Hitter

Lindor is now in his 10th big league season, and he’s never once put up a wRC+ below 101. We’ve seen Lindor have a down year at the plate, but even at his worst, he’s still been an above-average hitter. He graced the pages of FanGraphs for the first time in 2012 in an article with a title that fit perfectly with the auspiciousness of the moment: Midwest League Prospect Update. In it, Mike Newman called Lindor “A gold glove shortstop in the making,” but also wrote, “Lindor may wind up being a bit BABIP dependent.” As it turns out, even in 2021, when Lindor’s BABIP fell all the way to .248, seventh lowest among all qualified players, he managed to be an above-average hitter. I don’t bring that up to rag on Mike. If you remember the beginning of Lindor’s career, you know that although he hit throughout the minors, the hype around his glove was understandably louder. But the consistency is remarkable, especially from a switch-hitter. His career wRC+ is 126 from the right side and 115 from the left side. He’s only put up a below-average wRC+ from either side of the plate twice: He had a 94 wRC+ from the right side in 2016, and a 96 mark in ’21. According to our database, there have been 549 primary shortstops who made at least a thousand plate appearances in the AL and NL since 1903. Lindor’s career 119 wRC+ ranks 19th.

This season, Lindor’s 125 wRC+ puts him on pace for his fifth career season above 120. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Last week, I explained how players can still change teams even as trades are no longer allowed. Now that we’re a week-plus into August, I’d like to run down the list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers before the month ends, which is the latest that a team can claim them and still have them be eligible for the playoffs. Players placed on waivers are first offered to the worst team in the league, then to the other clubs in ascending order all the way up to the one with the best record at the time of the waiver placement.

I’ll be focusing on teams with playoff odds below 5%, though contending teams teams could see if a rival wants to bite on an onerous contract. (Spoiler alert: they will not.) As a reminder, when a player is claimed off waivers, it’s a straight claim. The team that loses the player gets nothing more than salary relief, as the new team is responsible for the remainder of the contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Bell has only been a Diamondback for a little over a week, but in that short time, he’s made his presence felt. Acquired just ahead of the trade deadline in a deal with the Marlins, Bell stepped in for the injured Christian Walker and homered twice in his debut against the Pirates on August 2. On Wednesday he did it again, bashing two homers in the nightcap of a doubleheader against the Guardians in Cleveland. The Diamondbacks swept the pair of games, moving them into a tie for the National League Wild Card lead and into second in the rapidly tightening NL West race.

Indeed, the Padres aren’t the only NL West team that has gained traction in both races lately. With the sweep, the Diamondbacks have now won 18 of their last 23 games, a run that has rocketed them from two games below .500 to 11 games above while nearly tripling their odds of making the playoffs:

That 18-5 record is the majors’ best in that span, 2.5 games better than the Padres (14-6). The Diamondbacks have done it against a mix of good teams (the Braves, Guardians and Royals occupy playoff positions at this writing, and the Pirates have been right around .500) and not-so-good ones (the Blue Jays, Cubs, and Nationals). Not only are the Diamondbacks now tied with the Padres for the Wild Card lead, they’ve trimmed the Dodgers’ division lead to three games — as close as they’ve been since April 24 — which has really goosed their Playoff Odds. Read the rest of this entry »