I don’t really have strong opinions about the AL Central this year, either aesthetically or competitively. I picked the Tigers to win the division because I like their young pitchers, I had to pick someone, and I didn’t want to just choose the same 12 teams that made the playoffs last year. But if the Twins or Guardians, or even the Royals finished first, I wouldn’t be unduly surprised.

Mostly, I want to go the entire season without having to watch Byron Buxton leave the field on a gurney, for much the same reason I’d like to visit the Grand Canyon before I die. I’ve never actually seen it, but I’ve heard it’s wonderful. Apart from that, I’ve got an open mind.

Even so, the first two weeks of the season have brought some remarkable results. Stephen Vogt now has a better winning percentage than any manager in MLB history (minimum 10 games), as the Guardians jumped out to an 8-3 start. The Tigers and Royals are right behind, and Kansas City has had one of the best rotations in the league so far.

These three teams have one thing in common, other than their division: They’ve all played the White Sox. Read the rest of this entry »

A month after signing starting pitcher Brayan Bello to a six-year extension, the Boston Red Sox are at it again, this time extending rookie center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela on an eight-year deal worth $50 million. If Rafaela sticks in the majors long enough this season to earn a year of service time, this extension will prolong his free agent eligibility for two years; either way, he’ll be paid a guaranteed salary through the 2031 season.

How you feel about Rafaela comes down to just what you think about his defense. Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin rated Rafaela as the only prospect on THE BOARD last year with a 70 present value for defense and the only one with a future value of 80. They were hardly alone in their praise for his glove, either, as other outlets such as Baseball Prospectus and MLB Pipeline also gave complimentary reviews to his leathercraft.

While prospect writers have occasionally missed on the eventual defensive performance of prospects – Gregory Polanco comes to mind – Rafaela certainly hasn’t shown anything in his limited time in the majors that refutes these views. Measuring minor league defense, as opposed to viewing it, is fraught with obvious peril, but the defensive estimates that ZiPS uses for minor leaguers also love his glove. ZiPS uses a Total Zone-esque measure from Gameday hit locations, similar to Sean Smith’s methodology from nearly 15 years ago. Yes, we’d prefer to have something like OAA or DRS or even UZR for minor leaguers publicly available, but we don’t, so we have to generally be more conservative about conclusions drawn from the data. But for what it’s worth, these estimates, which I call zDEF, had Rafaela as an elite defensive center fielder in the minors in 2023.

Incidentally, zDEF had Rafaela at +3 as a shortstop total for his minor league career, so if the circumstances warranted it, it wouldn’t necessarily be the craziest thing to see him follow in the footsteps of another former Red Sox prospect, Mookie Betts, and move back to shortstop at some point, though that certainly is not why Boston signed Rafaela long term.

Let’s run the eight-year ZiPS for Rafaela.

All told, ZiPS would happily offer him an eight-year, $67 million — $17 million more than what the Red Sox gave him.

One thing to take into consideration: So long as Rafaela’s glove is excellent, he doesn’t need to take a big offensive step forward to be worth his contract. ZiPS has Rafaela hitting for a skosh more power, enough to get his OPS+ and wRC+ into the 100 range during his peak years, but not sufficient to make him a superstar. As a result, his projections keep him in the solidly above-average territory – he’ll likely have an All-Star appearance or two during an up year – but comfortably below star status. These offensive numbers make him slightly better offensively than the inevitable comp given for him, Jackie Bradley Jr., who put up a 93 OPS+ over parts of eight seasons in Boston and was a few runs better defensively than Rafaela’s projections. Suffice it to say, if ZiPS’s natural conservatism with minor league defensive numbers ends up lowballing Rafaela, he’d be a steal at this price and put up WAR numbers in the range of Kevin Kiermaier’s best years.

As an offensive player, Rafaela remains a work in progress. In nine games this season entering Tuesday, he’s hitting .233/.286/.400 with two triples and an 85 wRC+. He’s actually gotten better at making contact, going from a 69% contact rate at Triple-A last year to 73% in the majors so far. Admittedly, this improvement has come in a small sample — he’s made just 124 big league plate appearances combined between his 2023 late-season debut (72.1% contact in 89 PA) and this year (76.3% in his 35 PA) — but it is still encouraging.

That said, he remains far too aggressive at the plate, especially when you consider his specific profile as a hitter. Unlike his teammate Rafael Devers, who also swings at a pretty high rate of pitches out of the zone, Rafaela doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard; Devers has power to spare, so even though he doesn’t make as much hard contact on pitches out of the zone — his average exit velocity drops to 85.5 mph, down from 94.9 mph on in-zone pitches — he can still do damage. Rafaela doesn’t have that luxury. Instead, he is a speedster (ranking 28th in sprint speed this season among 202 qualified players) who plays his home games at Fenway Park, one of baseball’s best parks for batting average. He should be incentivized to have a more contact-oriented game than most other batters. His contact skills appear to be improving, but he won’t get the most out of his game if he keeps chasing pitches that’s he unlikely to hit.

The Betts trade and the departure of Xander Bogaerts are still, rightfully, pain points for Boston fans. But since then, the Red Sox seem to be making a better effort to retain the players they develop, first with the Devers extension in January 2023 and now with Bello and Rafaela. Ultimately, winning is the only thing that will make things better in Boston. Keeping Rafaela in town should be an important step toward that.

It’s been a hot start to the 2024 season for the Boston Red Sox. They started the season with a 10-game road trip to the West Coast and arrived home Monday at 7-3 after a four-game split in Seattle, a three-game sweep in what will likely be their final trip to play the A’s in Oakland, and a 2-1 series win over the Angels. While Boston hasn’t exactly met the highest of competition yet — this week’s home-opening series with Baltimore should be a serious test — the Sox entered Tuesday with the second-best run differential in the majors, at +26. Aside from the Trevor Story’s injury, which as Jon Becker explained yesterday is going to test Boston’s uninspiring middle infield depth, it’s been an encouraging first two weeks for Alex Cora’s club.

Somewhat unexpectedly, pitching has been the story of Boston’s early success, after the Red Sox redesigned their pitching infrastructure over the offseason. In this regard, two of the most important additions to the club are not current players but former big league pitchers: Craig Breslow, who replaced Chaim Bloom as the team’s chief baseball officer, and Andrew Bailey, the new pitching coach. After pitching as a reliever for 12 years in the majors, including parts of five seasons with the Red Sox, Breslow spent five years in the Cubs’ front office working to overhaul their pitching program. One of Breslow’s first moves was to hire Bailey, his former Red Sox teammate. Bailey, a two-time All-Star and the 2009 American League Rookie of the Year, came over from the Giants, where he held the same role and helped to develop the likes of Logan Webb, Kevin Gausman, and Carlos Rodón into some of baseball’s top pitchers recent years. Boston also hired Justin Willard to a role it titled “director of pitching.”

Entering Tuesday, Red Sox pitchers lead the majors with a 1.49 ERA, a 2.92 FIP, a 3.08 xFIP, 10.49 strikeouts per nine, and 2.4 WAR. Two times through the rotation, Tanner Houck hasn’t allowed a run, and Nick Pivetta, Kutter Crawford, and Garrett Whitlock have allowed one earned run each. The bullpen has supported this rotation capably, too — in 37.1 innings, Boston relievers rank second in baseball with 0.8 WAR, third with a 1.45 ERA and 3.40 xFIP, and fourth with a 3.18 FIP. All of this from a staff that features mostly the same members from a group that struggled last season. It’s too early to know for sure if 2024 will be any different, but this is an auspicious start. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2022, Jordan Hicks briefly converted from relieving to starting for the Cardinals. The experiment didn’t go particularly well. He made eight starts and lasted a combined 26.1 innings with an ERA of 5.47. He walked nearly 20% of the batters he faced, barely struck anyone out, and seemed to struggle to adjust from his old role. He threw sinkers or sliders 94% of the time, didn’t dial down his velocity much, and looked exactly how you’d expect a closer cosplaying as a starter to look. So much for that experiment; he promptly returned to late-inning duty.

When the Giants signed Hicks this offseason, rumors of his return to the starting ranks bubbled up, but I didn’t believe it. After all, we’d already seen this exact experiment before. But fast forward to today, and Hicks looks like a revelation. Through two starts, he’s thrown 12 innings and allowed a single earned run. His strikeout rate has barely budged from his career average, and he’s only issued two free bases (one walk, one HBP). It’s a remarkable turnaround, and one that I can’t help but dive into. How has he done it? Read the rest of this entry »

I think Mitch Williams deserves at least some of the blame.

See, I’ve been contributing to ranked lists of ordered baseball players for most of my adult life, and in general, people like to see their favorite team ranked highly. Baseball fans are pretty solipsistic, like dog owners, and struggle to imagine a world in which their special attachment to a particular thing is not shared by every sapient being on the planet. How dare you say Clayton Kershaw is better than Aaron Harang, and other salutations.

When our positional power rankings declared the Phillies to have the best bullpen in baseball two weeks ago, I don’t want to say Phillies fans reacted badly. (Not least because I’m the last person on Earth who wants Phillies fans to be perceived as a monolith, to be judged by their noisiest members.) Rather than hostility, it was more like the bemused skepticism with which one greets a man who knocks on your door trying to sell you solar panels. Sure, it sounds nice… but what’s the catch? Read the rest of this entry »

If last week’s news that Eury Pérez would need Tommy John surgery was bad, Saturday was a whole lot worse. Within a span of five hours, the baseball world learned that the Guardians’ Shane Bieber, the Yankees’ Jonathan Loáisiga, and the Braves’ Spencer Strider have all incurred significant damage to their ulnar collateral ligaments, with Bieber headed for Tommy John surgery, Loáisiga set to undergo season-ending surgery as well, and Strider headed to see Dr. Keith Meister, the orthopedic surgeon who will perform the surgeries of the other two.

The losses of those pitchers is a triple bummer, not just for them and their respective teams — each of which leads its division, incidentally — and fans, but for the sport in general. Underscoring the seriousness of the issue, by the end of Saturday both the players’ union and Major League Baseball traded volleys regarding the impact of the introduction of the pitch clock on pitcher injuries in general.

Bieber, a two-time All-Star, won the AL Cy Young award and the pitchers’ Triple Crown during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but missed significant time in two out of the past three years due to injuries. In 2021 he was limited to 16 starts due to a strain of his subscapularis, the largest of the four muscles that make up the rotator cuff, and last year he made just 21 starts, missing 10 weeks due to elbow inflammation. He had pitched very well this season, with a pair of scoreless six-inning outings, each totaling just 83 pitches. He struck out 11 A’s in Oakland on Opening Day and then nine Mariners (without a single walk) in Seattle on April 2.

Bieber experienced more soreness than usual while recovering from the Opening Day start, but the 29-year-old righty and the team decided to proceed without extra rest, according to MLB.com’s Mandy Bell, who wrote, “Bieber wanted to see if he could push through this, considering he hadn’t felt any pain in Spring Training.”

The discomfort persisted during Bieber’s second start, after which the team ordered additional testing, “which revealed the injury to the same ligament he had problems with last year,” wrote Bell. If I’m not mistaken, that last bit of information is new, as previous reports of last year’s injury did not specify as to the inflammation’s cause. “He really put in a ton of work this winter and throughout spring training, and we all felt he was on a good path to stay healthy and contribute for the balance of the season,” said president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti on a Zoom call with reporters. Antonetti additionally lauded the pitcher’s “sheer toughness and grit” in maintaining a high level of performance, while manager Stephen Vogt sounded a similar note in saying, “The amount of work that this guy’s put in over the last few years, the things that he’s pitched through, that’s a testament to who he is.” But those supportive statements raise the question of whether this juncture could have been avoided had Bieber taken a longer time to heal from the damage found last summer, as teammate Triston McKenzie did. Missing from that comparison, however, is information regarding the severity of the two pitchers’ tears, details to which we’re not privy.

As a pending free agent, Bieber is in a tough spot, as he’ll enter the market under a cloud of uncertainty, likely cutting into a payday that’s ceiling has already been reduced by his previous outages. As for the Guardians, their remaining rotation looks so shaky that it ranks 27th in projected WAR via our Depth Charts, and their Playoff Odds have decreased since Opening Day (from 33.5% to 32%) despite the 7-2 start that has put them atop the AL Central.

The 26-year-old McKenzie, who was limited to four starts last season by a teres major strain as well as his UCL sprain, was rocked for five runs (four earned) in 3.1 innings in his first outing on Monday against the Mariners. His four-seam fastball averaged just 90.5 mph, down two miles per hour from 2022, when he was fully healthy. Carlos Carrasco, now 37, is coming off a 6.80 ERA in 20 starts with the Mets. Both Tanner Bibee, a 25-year-old righty, and Logan Allen, a 25-year-old lefty, are coming off strong rookie seasons and have pitched well in the early going, but Gavin Williams, a 24-year-old righty who posted a 3.29 ERA and 4.05 FIP in 16 starts as a rookie last year, began the year on the injured list due to elbow inflammation himself and has not yet been cleared to begin a rehab assignment. Out on rehab assignments are 25-year-old righty Xzavion Curry, and 32-year-old righty Ben Lively, both of whom were sidelined by a respiratory virus during spring training. Both split time between starting and relieving last year but turned in ERAs and FIPs over 5.00, the former with the Guardians, the latter with the Reds. Joey Cantillo, their top upper level pitching prospect, is out for 8-10 weeks with a left hamstring strain.

As for the 29-year-old Loáisiga, he’s been so beset by injuries throughout his career — including Tommy John surgery in 2016 — that he’s thrown 50 innings in a major league season just once (70.2 in 2021) and has totaled 50 innings between the majors and minors just two other times, in 2018 (80.2, mostly as a starter) and ’22 (50 exactly). He was limited to 17.2 innings last year due to in-season surgery to remove a bone spur in his elbow, then less than five weeks after returning was sidelined by inflammation in the joint. Three appearances into this season, he was diagnosed with a flexor strain and a partially torn UCL, though based upon the reporting, it sounds as though he’s a candidate for the internal brace procedure that requires less recovery time. Via MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch:

Meister’s initial reading of an MRI performed on Thursday in New York suggests that Loáisiga could avoid undergoing what would be his second career Tommy John surgery, with the estimated recovery for Meister’s preferred procedure spanning 10-12 months.

It was Dr. Jeffrey Dugas who invented the internal brace procedure, in which collagen-coated FiberTape suture is used to anchor the damaged UCL, speeding up recovery by eliminating the time needed for a tendon to transform into a ligament. Meister has pioneered the combining of traditional Tommy John surgery with the use of the internal brace; when it’s referred to at all as different from traditional Tommy John, it’s as a “hybrid” procedure. It’s what Jacob deGrom had last year (with Meister performing the procedure), and it sounds like what Shohei Ohtani (who was operated on by Dr. Neal ElAttrache) underwent last fall as well. In a March 7 piece in the Dallas Morning News, Meister said he’s done over 300 hybrid surgeries since 2018, which suggests the distinctions are being blurred when we track such surgeries.

Regardless of the type of surgery, Loáisiga’s absence has dealt a significant blow to a bullpen that already looked considerably less formidable than in years past. After ranking third in the majors with 7.2 WAR in 2021 and fifth with 5.9 in ’22, the unit slipped to 16th (4.2 WAR) last year, and ranked 19th in our preseason positional power rankings; Yankees relievers are now down to 22nd. Beyond closer Clay Holmes and setup man Ian Hamilton, it’s a largely unfamiliar if not untested cast, featuring a pair of ex-Dodger southpaws (Victor González and Caleb Ferguson), a trio of righties with career ERAs above 5.00 (Nick Burdi, Dennis Santana, and Luke Weaver). Moreover, the 31-year-old Burdi has never thrown more than 8.2 innings in a major league season, and another righty, Jake Cousins, has just 55.2 career innings, 30 of which came in 2021. Maybe pitching coach Matt Blake and company can find some diamonds in the rough, and maybe the likes of Tommy Kahnle, Lou Trivino, and Scott Effross can recover from their various injuries and surgeries to provide help later this season, but this is a clear weakness for a team off to an 8-2 start.

Strider is coming off a stellar season — his first full one in the rotation — in which he led the NL in strikeouts (281), strikeout rate (36.5%), FIP (2.85), and wins (20) while making his first All-Star team and placing fourth in the Cy Young voting. After throwing five innings of two-run ball while striking out eight on Opening Day against the Phillies, he surrendered five runs in four innings against the Diamondbacks on Friday, then complained about elbow discomfort afterwards. The Braves sent the 25-year-old righty for an MRI, after which the team’s official Twitter account shared the bad news:

Spencer Strider today underwent an MRI that revealed damage to the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He will be further evaluated by Dr. Keith Meister in Arlington, TX, at a date yet to be determined.

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) April 6, 2024

Strider already underwent his first Tommy John surgery as a sophomore at Clemson in 2019. While it’s not a guarantee yet that he’ll need a second one, the Braves sound resigned to it, with manager Brian Snitker telling reporters, “The good news is he’s going to get whatever it is fixed and come back and continue to have a really good career.” Strider at least has security even if he’s never the same, having already signed a six-year, $75 million extension in October 2022, the largest pre-arbitration extension ever for a pitcher.

The Braves will certainly feel his loss. Of their remaining starters, 40-year-old righty Charlie Morton has been reliable and durable, taking the ball at least 30 times in each of the past three seasons, but 30-year-old lefty Max Fried was limited to 14 starts last year by hamstring and forearm strains as well as a blister on his index finger. Lefty Chris Sale, 35, missed 10 weeks last year due to a stress fracture in his scapula, which limited him to just 20 starts — nine more than he totaled over the three prior seasons combined while missing time due to Tommy John surgery and a stress fracture in his rib. Thirty-year-old righty Reynaldo López is starting again after spending nearly all of the past two seasons as a reliever. Twenty-four-year-old righty Bryce Elder was an All-Star last season but was optioned to Triple-A Gwinnett to start the year after a second-half fade and a rough spring. Prospects AJ Smith-Shawver, a 21-year-old righty, and Dylan Dodd, a 25-year-old lefty, are also at Gwinnett; the former was no. 63 on our Top 100 Prospects list. Ian Anderson and Huascar Ynoa are both recovering from Tommy John, the former from April 2023 and the latter from September ’22. One way or another, the Braves will cobble things together, but they can’t afford too much else to go wrong.

Saturday’s flood of UCL-related headlines followed a week that featured the bad news about Pérez as well as Tommy John surgery for A’s reliever Trevor Gott. On Saturday evening, Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark released a statement that targeted the pitch clock as the culprit for so many arm injuries:

Despite unanimous player opposition and significant concerns regarding health and safety, the Commissioner’s Office reduced the length of the pitch clock last December, just one season removed from imposing the most significant rule change in decades.

Since then, our concerns about the health impacts of reduced recovery time have only intensified.

The league’s unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset – the players.

The league quickly countered:

This statement ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries. Nobody wants to see pitchers get hurt in this game, which is why MLB is currently undergoing a significant comprehensive research study into the causes of this long-term increase, interviewing prominent medical experts across baseball which to date has been consistent with an independent analysis by Johns Hopkins University that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries. In fact, JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average. JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not.

Particularly in the wake of the recent in-house drama that resulted in a challenge to his leadership of the union, Clark’s statement is probably better understood as a political one than a scientific one. The majority of the players he represents are pitchers, and they may be looking for a target for their anger and fears regarding increased injury rates. It’s worth noting that those players — or at least the major leaguers who were part of the union when the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement was hammered out in March 2022 — agreed to the structure of the Joint Competition Committee, which contains six owners, four players, and one umpire; “unanimous” is more likely referring to those four players rather than the 6,000-plus the MLBPA now represents.

As the league’s statement notes, and as The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh reported last week, MLB has been conducting a comprehensive study of pitcher injuries since October, and once it’s done (perhaps later this year) “intends to form a task force that will make recommendations for protecting pitchers.” The group will “try to come up with some solutions and implement some solutions,” according to Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who as the biomechanics research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute and as an injury research adviser for MLB is one of the experts being consulted.

To varying degrees, Fleisig, Meister, ElAttrache and the now-retired Dr. James Andrews have all publicly pointed to the extra stress on arms induced by the quest for increased velocity, increased spin, and maximum effort as the primary causes of increased pitcher injury rates, a quest that starts in youth baseball, while players’ bodies are still developing. Leaguewide data from the pitch-tracking era particularly points to the way major league players and teams have chased velocity:

The average four-seam fastball velocity has consistently crept up by 0.1–0.2 mph per year, with a couple jumps of 0.3 mph; while it’s down thus far this year, velocities tend to increase once the weather warms up. The percentage of four-seamers 97 mph or higher more than tripled from 2008–23, and shot up 54% from 2019–23. The average spin rate for four-seamers increased by only about 2% from 2015 — the first year of Statcast — to ’23, and while the average spin rate for all breaking pitches combined increased by about 12% in that span, most of that jump was in the first two seasons. Those spin rates have been pretty consistent since then, but the total volume of breaking balls has increased.

The idea that the pitch clock could be contributing by making pitchers dial up to maximum intensity with less time to recover between pitches has intuitive appeal, but injury rates had already risen before the clock’s introduction last year. As Baseball Prospectus’ Derek Rhoads and Rob Mains noted, the total of 233 pitchers who landed on the injured list last year was about the same as in 2022 (226) and ’21 (243), up from ’19 (192). Likewise for the number of Tommy Johns as measured by year, starting with the day that pitchers and catchers report (as opposed to a calendar year): 28 for last season, compared to 26 for 2022, 31 for ’21, 27 for ’20, and 16 for ’19. In a study published last June, my colleague Dan Szymborski found no meaningful relationship in injury rates with regards to the pitchers whose pace increased the most from 2022 to ’23, at least to that point. The Hopkins study that MLB cited has yet to be published, though it’s hard to believe that the league hasn’t shared its preliminary findings with the union. Notably, Clark did not point to any study that produced a result that reflected his constituency’s concerns.

On the subject of velocity, the link between Strider’s high velo and the propensity for such pitchers to require Tommy John is hard to miss. Of the top 15 starting pitchers in terms of average four-seam fastball velocity from 2021–23, 10 have undergone at least one surgery to repair their UCLs, and Strider is in danger of becoming the fourth to need a second:

Some of those pitchers have had little trouble recovering and maintaining their elite velocities after their first such surgery, but as the sagas of deGrom and Ohtani illustrate, that hardly makes them immune from needing a second procedure. As the big contracts of so many of the pitchers above remind us, velocity gets pitchers paid, and so discouraging them from throwing at maximum effort with such frequency may be a tough sell, particularly when the next guy is willing to do so, damn the consequences.

This is all one big, thorny mess that won’t be solved overnight. The sad fact is that dozens or even hundreds more pitchers will be injured before we see if MLB can introduce meaningful steps to curb injury rates. In the meantime, teams will just turn to the next man up — and if he gets hurt, the next man up after him — to get by.

It’s been an eventful start to the regular season and not all of it good. A rash of injuries to some of the game’s biggest stars has marred the first week and half of play, and a number of teams now have to face the rest of the spring and summer without some of their best players. The conversation around these injuries, particularly those to pitchers, and their root causes has drowned out a lot of the exciting action we’re seeing on the field.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s now defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution, one that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing the weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — I’ve taken some editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.

…

The Braves’ strong start has been overshadowed by the news about Spencer Strider’s elbow. After experiencing discomfort on Friday, the right-hander underwent an MRI over the weekend that revealed damage to his UCL; he was placed on the 15-day IL. A course of treatment has yet to be determined, and there’s no specific timeline for his return, but Atlanta should be prepared to play on without him for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, the Braves offense is already firing on all cylinders; they’ve scored nine runs or more in half of their games so far and had a couple of dramatic come-from-behind wins against the Diamondbacks this past weekend.

The Yankees started off the season with a four-game sweep of the Astros in Houston and a pair of series wins against the Diamondbacks and Blue Jays. Juan Soto was sensational during that opening series, and the powerful bats of Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have provided plenty of pop behind him. So far, the Yankees haven’t missed Gerrit Cole. Luis Gil has done a commendable job filling in for their injured ace, striking out more than a third of the batters he’s faced in two solid starts.

The Astros have gotten off to a pretty lousy start. Their vaunted bullpen has blown leads in half of their games played so far and their offense is still in startup mode. Luckily, they’ve had a few brilliant moments sprinkled in through their misery. In their three wins this season, they’ve allowed a total of four hits, including a no-hitter spun by Ronel Blanco, who followed that performance with another 5.2 innings of no-hit ball on Sunday night.

No matter how good their offense is, the Rangers were always going to face a tough uphill battle during the first half of the season while they waited for their injured starting pitchers to return. At least they’ve gotten off to a hot start, with a pair of series wins over the Cubs and Rays. Unfortunately, they’ll have to keep things going without Josh Jung in the lineup; he broke his wrist a week ago and could be out until the All-Star break. With their two rookie outfielders, Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter, still getting up to speed this season, Texas’ margin for error in the competitive American League West is even slimmer now.

The Guardians have also seen their excellent start to the season marred by terrible injury news. After making two brilliant starts, Shane Bieber tore his UCL and will undergo Tommy John surgery, forcing him to miss the rest of the season. After graduating three of their top pitching prospects to the majors last year, there isn’t really an in-house option ready to step into Bieber’s shoes. The Guardians will have to make do as they try and keep their momentum going in a wide open AL Central race.

It’s hard to argue with the Pirates’ 8-2 start, especially when it was capped off by a pair of walk-off wins against the Orioles this weekend. Their youngsters are having fun, their veterans are producing, and things are looking up in Pittsburgh. And even if the good times come to an end in the near future, the exciting debut of Jared Jones is another reason for optimism. Along with Paul Skenes, Jones should give the Pirates two fantastic starters to anchor their rotation.

The Twins have gotten off to a rough start, one made all the worse by the injury to Royce Lewis on Opening Day. Their lineup just hasn’t been able to hit consistently — Lewis hit one of their three home runs on the season — with Carlos Correa essentially the only batter enjoying any kind of sustained success thus far. That’s a good sign for their star shortstop, but he’ll need help from the rest of the lineup soon.

Likewise, the Rays have struggled in the early going, though it’s their pitching staff that bears the brunt of the blame. The Rays have the third-worst team ERA in the majors thus far, though series against the Rangers and the Rockies in Colorado didn’t help in that regard.

The Mariners have already used a position player to pitch twice if that gives you any indication of how their season has started. It feels like they’re pretty lucky to be 4-6. As a team, they’re striking out at the second-highest rate in the majors, while their ISO is the second lowest. That’s a bad combination, and they’ll need their lineup to wake up soon if they want to keep pace in the AL West.

The Padres wound up losing a dramatic three-game set against the Giants over the weekend thanks to two bullpen meltdowns. Dylan Cease has been great in his first two starts for San Diego and Yu Darvish has been solid, but the rest of the pitching staff looks a little shaky. The lineup looks good, however, with plenty of contributions from both their stars and role players. Fernando Tatis Jr. seems to have put his injury issues behind him and looks like he’s back on the ascendant path he was on a few years ago.

The starting rotation with the second-best park- and league-adjusted ERA and FIP in baseball is none other than the Royals. (Let’s also pause here for a moment and recognize just how good the Red Sox pitching staff has been so far.) Cole Ragans looks like an ace, Brady Singer has spun two brilliant starts, and Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, signed as free agents this offseason, have looked good as well. After losing their first two series by razor thin margins, the Royals swept the White Sox in four games over the weekend.

The Marlins finally got into the win column on Sunday, snapping an 0-9 skid to start the season. Of course, they’re more worried about the health of Eury Pérez; he’s slated to undergo Tommy John surgery and will be sidelined for the season. It’s a brutal blow to a pitching staff that was already missing Sandy Alcantara and two other starters, Edward Cabrera and Braxton Garrett. With reports that manager Skip Schumaker is now a lame duck after his contract option for 2025 was voided this offseason, it’s pretty apparent that this season is already considered lost by the brass in Miami.

Another shoe finally dropped in the ongoing relocation saga in Oakland. While there hasn’t been much progress towards constructing a new stadium in Las Vegas, the Athletics announced that this will be the final year they’ll call Oakland home. The team will be moving to Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park, currently the home of the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, for the next three years (or possibly longer if their new stadium isn’t finished in time). It’s an ugly end to the franchise’s long and storied tenure in the East Bay.

Adam Cimber is one of those pitchers that you notice, yet don’t spend too much time thinking about. The arm angle catches your attention, but at the same time, the side-slinging right-hander is neither overpowering nor a prolific ninth-inning arm. Working most often in the seventh and eight innings throughout his career, Cimber has a pedestrian mid-80s fastball and a meager 18.0% strikeout rate. Moreover, he’s been credited with just 23 wins and seven saves since debuting with the San Diego Padres in 2018.

Amid little fanfare, and with the exception of an injury-hampered 2023, he’s been one of the most reliable relievers in the game. Now 27 years old and with his fifth team — Cimber signed a free agent deal with the Los Angeles Angels over the winter — the University of Washington product has made 327 appearances, more than all but 13 hurlers during his big-league tenure. Killing a lot of worms along the way — his ground ball rate is north of 51% — he’s logged a 3.46 ERA and a 3.81 FIP over 304 innings.

Speaking to Cimber during spring training, I learned that he began throwing sidearm when he was 14 years old, this at the suggestion of his father, who felt he’d need to do something different if he hoped to make his high school team. Role models included Dan Quisenberry and Kent Tekulve — “my father grew up in that era of baseball, the 1970s and 1980s” — as well as a quartet of more-recent sidearmers and submariners.

“For the longest time it was Darren O’Day, Joe Smith, and Steve Cishek,” said Cimber, who has made four appearances this year and allowed one run in four-and-two-thirds innings. “But the pitcher I grew up watching that really helped me after I dropped down was Brad Ziegler. That was way back in the day. They’re all different in their own way — they went about it in a different way — but it’s always great to learn from guys that went before me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Though they made the playoffs last year for just the fourth time in franchise history, the Marlins’ chances of repeating that feat took a pair of significant hits even before the World Series began. First Sandy Alcantara underwent Tommy John surgery, and then just over a week later, general manager Kim Ng departed after owner Bruce Sherman announced his intent to move her down the pecking order. Following a very quiet offseason and a rash of pitcher injuries this spring, the Marlins are off to their worst start in franchise history at 0-8, making them the majors’ only team without a win. Adding injury to insult, on Thursday the team announced that Eury Pérez would undergo Tommy John surgery as well.

The loss of Pérez is a serious gut punch, particularly given Miami’s efforts to monitor his workload. Signed out of the Dominican Republic for a $200,000 bonus on July 2, 2019, he rocketed through the minors, growing from 6-foot-5 and 155 pounds to 6-foot-8 and 220 pounds by last spring, when he placed fourth on our Top 100 Prospects list while still seven weeks shy of his 20th birthday. After striking out 42 hitters across 31 innings in six starts at Double-A Pensacola, he was called up by the Marlins. He debuted on May 12, made 11 major league starts, then spent most of July and early August back at Pensacola so the team could limit his innings. After returning to the majors on August 7, he wasn’t as effective, and was shut down following his September 20 start due to inflammation in his sacroiliac joint. He finished his rookie season with a 3.15 ERA, 4.11 FIP, and a 28.9% strikeout rate in 91.1 innings. His four-seam fastball averaged 97.5 mph and touched triple digits a handful of times, while his slider, curve, and changeup each produced whiff rates of 46.2% or better and xwOBAs of .227 or lower. That’s a recipe for dominance.

As that midseason interlude suggests, the Marlins handled Pérez with care. He threw just 78 innings split between two levels of A-ball in 2021 and 77 innings (all but two at Double-A) in ’22. He never threw more than six innings or 93 pitches in any of his professional starts and broke 90 in just three at the major league level. Fourteen of his 19 major league starts were made on five or six days of rest, with only five on four days. He threw a total of 128 innings last year, and the Marlins planned to limit his innings this year as well, though they hadn’t publicly disclosed the target.

Pérez was slowed early in the spring by a broken nail on his right middle finger, which forced him to exit his Grapefruit League starts on March 2 and March 13. After the latter, he reported soreness in his elbow and underwent an MRI. The Marlins soon decided he would begin the season on the injured list due to mild elbow inflammation, though they didn’t shut him down from throwing. After experiencing elbow tightness that cut short a bullpen session on Tuesday, he made a second visit to Dr. Keith Meister, who recommended surgery.

Apparently, Pérez had gotten something less than a fully clean bill of health at his previous visit. Here’s what Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix told reporters on Thursday:

“It’s been a bit of a roller coaster… Initially having the frustration of the elbow soreness and followed by the positive outlook on you don’t need surgery right now. There was an understanding that the ligament was not in great shape and essentially, you can pitch with it until you can’t, and nobody knows when that’s going to be. You have to try and see when the symptoms return. And unfortunately, that happened now. Better now than in the middle of the season.”

Ugh. For as careful as the Marlins were, some arms just don’t stand up to throwing in the high-90s 40 or 50 times a night. Pérez will undergo surgery and miss all of this season and likely a good chunk of 2025. Unfortunately, his injury is just the latest in a wave of them among Miami starters dating back to last fall, a significant blow even to a franchise whose strength in recent years has been founded in its deep stockpile of young arms. From 2018–23 — a time period that dates back to the arrivals of Alcantara and Pablo López — no team has even come close to the 35.0 WAR generated by Marlins starters in their age-25 or younger seasons, with the Guardians second in the majors at 27.9. The gap is even larger if you shorten that window; those starters’ 28.2 WAR from 2020–23 is 11.1 more than the second-ranked Mariners.

The thing about young pitchers is that keeping them healthy is as challenging as herding cats. Alcantara won the 2022 NL Cy Young on the strength of a 2.28 ERA, 2.99 FIP, and 207 strikeouts in 228.2 innings, the highest total by any pitcher in six years, but he took a step backwards last year in terms of stuff and performance. He threw 184.2 innings with a 4.14 ERA and 4.03 FIP before being shut down in early September with what was initially diagnosed as a flexor strain. After reporting renewed tightness in his forearm following a September 21 rehab start, he was diagnosed with a sprained ulnar collateral ligament, and underwent surgery on October 6.

As Michael Baumann detailed a couple weeks ago, this spring 26-year-old lefty Braxton Garrett and 25-year-old righty Edward Cabrera both joined Alcantara and Pérez on the sidelines, though thankfully they’re on their way back. Garrett, who made 30 starts and threw 159.2 innings last year with a 3.66 ERA and 3.68 FIP, showed up to camp with a sore shoulder. He’s scheduled to begin a rehab assignment with Triple-A Jacksonville on Sunday and will probably need at least two starts to build up his pitch count before joining the Marlins. Cabrera, who made 20 starts and threw 99.2 innings for the Marlins with a 4.24 ERA and 4.43 FIP, was scratched from his March 10 start due to shoulder tightness and was diagnosed with an impingement, a condition that cost him a month last year. He’s already made one 43-pitch rehab start for Jacksonville and is scheduled for a second on Friday, with a third likely to follow.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that these outages have allowed for the major league returns of a couple pitchers we haven’t seen enough of lately, namely 25-year-old righty Max Meyer and 26-year-old lefty Trevor Rogers. The third pick of the 2020 draft out of the University of Minnesota, Meyer reached the majors just two years later but started just twice before tearing his UCL and undergoing Tommy John surgery on August 9, 2022. He hadn’t pitched in another competitive game until Monday, when he threw five innings and allowed two runs against the Angels. Rogers, who made the NL All-Star team in 2021 but slipped to a 5.47 ERA in ’22, was limited to four starts last year due to biceps and latissimus dorsi strains. His March 31 start didn’t go great, as he allowed four runs in five innings against the Pirates, but he lived to tell the tale.

Also checking in for the first time since 2020 is righty Sixto Sánchez, who’s now 25 years old. Sanchez made seven starts totaling 39 innings with a 3.46 ERA for the Marlins in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, then missed all of the next two seasons due to shoulder surgeries, first a posterior capsule repair in July ’21 and then a bursectomy in October ’22. After rehabbing he closed the 2023 season by throwing a single inning for Pensacola on September 12. Out of options, he made the team as a reliever thanks to an impressive spring training, but he’s been scored upon in all three of his appearances thus far. On Thursday against the Cardinals, he retired just one of four batters he faced, with Paul Goldschmidt reaching base on a Luis Arraez error, and Nolan Arenado and Iván Herrera following with singles. All three runners eventually scored, turning a 5-3 lead into a 6-5 deficit; Sánchez was charged with the loss. While his four-seamer was clocked as high as 98.2 mph in his March 28 debut, he maxed out at 94.2 mph in his next appearance two days later, and at 95.2 on Thursday. It’s great to see him back, but it could be a bumpy ride.

For as welcome as all these returns have been, the Marlins’ staff is carrying a 6.00 ERA (27th in the majors) and 4.94 FIP (24th), this after the rotation and bullpen respectively ranked 10th and 14th in our preseason positional power rankings, accounting for two of the three spots where they landed in the majors’ upper half; center field, where Jazz Chisholm Jr. and friends ranked 12th, is the other. Thus far the starters (Rogers, Meyer, Jesús Luzardo, A.J. Puk, and Ryan Weathers) have combined for a 5.35 ERA and 4.76 FIP, with Puk, who had previously spent the entirety of his career in the bullpen, getting rocked for a 9.00 ERA and 5.76 FIP in a total of just six innings in his first two starts. The bullpen has a 6.50 ERA and 5.10 FIP, and ranks in the majors’ bottom third in walks (11.6%), strikeouts (19.6%), and home runs (1.36 per nine). Closer Tanner Scott hasn’t had a single save opportunity yet, but has been charged with two losses; entering in the 10th inning on March 31 against the Pirates, he bobbled a leadoff sacrifice bunt and gave up two runs, and then the next day against the Angels, entered a tied game at the start of the eighth inning and walked Anthony Rendon, Nolan Schanuel, and Mike Trout before generating a groundout that brought home the go-ahead run.

The Marlins’ offense hasn’t helped, scoring just 3.63 runs per game and hitting a combined .204/.276/.313; their 60 wRC+ is 28th in the majors. Jake Burger is their only batter with a wRC+ above 92 or a WAR above zero, and even Arraez is hitting just .188/.316/.219.

Maybe Bendix, whom the Marlins hired away from the Rays after a 15-year run in Tampa Bay, the last two as GM, should have upgraded an offense that ranked dead last in the NL in scoring (4.11 runs per game) and 10th in wRC+ (94). He signed just one major league free agent all winter: Tim Anderson, who inked a one-year, $5 million deal after a dismal end to his eight-year run with the White Sox. He didn’t do anything to replace slugger Jorge Soler, whose 36 homers led the team and whose 126 wRC+ ranked third, after he opted out. Bendix has made just three trades since taking the reins, acquiring utilityman Vidal Bruján and righty reliever Calvin Faucher from the Rays in exchange for a trio of prospects in November, adding Nick Gordon from the Twins in exchange for lefty reliever Steven Okert in February, and — taking advantage of Brujan’s and Gordon’s versatility — dealing everyday utilityman Jon Berti to the Yankees last week. Miami’s current $99 million payroll ranks 25th according to RosterResource.

That minimal upkeep follows last fall’s drama. Ng presided over the Marlins’ first full season above .500 since 2009 with a team that made the playoffs despite having just a $110 million payroll, the majors’ eighth-lowest and the lowest of the six NL teams that made the postseason. But instead of granting her the latitude to expand and reshape the front office under her own vision, cutting ties with holdovers in the scouting and player development department that she didn’t mesh with, Sherman planned to bring in a president of baseball operations above her, which wasn’t what she had in mind. She declined her end of a mutual option for 2024, ending her groundbreaking three-year run. Bendix did fortify the front office by bringing in former Giants manager Gabe Kapler as an assistant GM, former Yankees Single-A affiliate manager Rachel Balkovec as director of player development, and former Rangers assistant direct of baseball operations Vinesh Kanthan as director of baseball ops, but when set against his management of the roster of a team that had playoff hopes, it looks like another cycle of kicking the can down the road.

Indeed, given this start — which not only has doubled the Marlins’ previous longest season-opening losing streak (from both 1995 and 2001) but also ranks as the majors’ longest since 2016 — more trades are likely in the offing if the losing continues, as The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal detailed earlier this week. Scott is a pending free agent, as is Josh Bell, who at $16.5 million is the team’s highest-paid player, but Bendix could look to make impact moves by dealing Arraez, who has one more year of arbitration eligibility, as well as Luzardo, who has two. It’s all par for the course in Miami. As we’ve seen throughout the history of the Marlins, regardless of owners, executives, or high-quality young players, this is a franchise where nothing good ever lasts long.

With a new baseball season comes a fresh set of box scores to pick apart daily, but the ink on the first one wasn’t even dry, so to speak, when it lodged itself in my brain at an ungodly early hour on March 20 and stuck there like a flashing neon sign: EIGHT SHORTSTOPS! On Opening Day in Seoul against the Dodgers, the Padres fielded a lineup that except for its battery of Yu Darvish and Luis Campusano was entirely made up of shortstops past and present; by contrast the Dodgers had resorted to placing six-time Gold Glove-winning right fielder Mookie Betts at short to accommodate their own uneven roster. To this baseball-addled mind, it felt like a collision of four decades worth of reading about scouting philosophies and sabermetrics, from Dollar Sign on the Muscle and Future Value through Bill James’ defensive spectrum and the basic construction of WAR, with its positional adjustments. It took a remarkable confluence of circumstances to arrive at this arrangement, which to be fair was never intended to be permanent, though manager Mike Shildt has used that same lineup more often than any other since then.

Shortstops tend to be some of the most gifted and athletic players on the diamond. As Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel put it in Future Value, the requirements for the position include “an above-average arm, plus speed/range, plus footwork, and average hands/action.” A very high percentage of right-handed players were shortstops at some point as amateurs; indeed, playing the position at that stage is “a strong indication of a player’s all-around athleticism,” as Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper wrote last month when noting the Padres’ increasing stockpile. Most of those amateur shortstops migrate across the defensive spectrum to less demanding positions as their bodies grow and they progress through the minors and into the majors, with the development of their offensive skills helping to determine where they might find homes. As James observed long ago, the more difficult the defensive position, the lower the bar for offensive production.

Here’s the lineup in question:

That’s a collection of parts that don’t yet look like they make up a whole. The lineup shows the contours of the boom-and-bust cycle weathered by general manager A.J. Preller, who has committed nearly $1 billion to Machado (11 years, $350 million after the six-time All-Star opted out of his original 10-year, $300 million deal), Tatis (14 years, $340 million), and Bogaerts (11 years, $280 million) alone. While the Padres reached the NLCS in 2022 after knocking off both the 101-win Mets and 111-win Dodgers, Preller’s vision hasn’t translated into full-blown success; after winning just 82 games with a club record $255 million payroll ($280 million for tax purposes) in 2023, he’s been forced to retool — most notably by dealing away late-’22 acquisition Juan Soto — and may be nearing the end of his rope.

Long story short, Preller invested a whole lot of money while packing the Padres’ roster not just with stars, but with stars of a certain type (most of them in line with the trend toward increasingly large but athletic men playing the position), then moving them around as they began to crowd each other. With the team now stretched thin, he’s filling in the gaps with light-hitting utilitymen and an interesting experiment. It’s worth a look at how the Padres got to this point.

The Fringe Guys

Likely the most transient member of this lineup is Wade. A former Yankees prospect, he grazed the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 Prospects list at no. 101 in 2017, following a .259/.352/.349 season at Double-A Trenton and then a stint in the Arizona Fall League learning to play the outfield. Vice president of player development Gary Denbo and others in the organization envisioned Wade as the Yankees’ answer to superutilitymen Ben Zobrist and Brock Holt, but his complete lack of power and failure to make consistent contact prevented him from realizing that lofty goal. Seven years and four DFAs later, the 29-year-old lefty swinger is the owner of a career .220/.297/.302 (68 wRC+) batting line with a 1.7% barrel rate and 24.7% strikeout rate in 726 plate appearances. Signed to a minor league deal in November after getting just 55 PA with the 112-loss A’s last year, Wade has started five of the Padres’ nine games at third base in place of Machado, who’s still recovering from October surgery to repair his right extensor tendon in his elbow. Of the four games Wade hasn’t started, two apiece have been started by 24-year-old righty rookie Eguy Rosario (who has pinch-hit for Wade three times and who himself has played 130 minor league games at shortstop) and 23-year-old lefty-swinging third base prospect Graham Pauley, who finished last season with 20 games at Double-A, but whose infield defense was described as “currently untenable.”

Also on the fringe is Profar, who goes further back with Preller than any other Padre, having been signed out of Curaçao by the Rangers on July 2, 2009, when Preller was the team’s director of professional and international scouting. By 2013, the 20-year-old Profar was the game’s top prospect, but with a trio of All-Stars — Ian Kinsler, Elvis Andrus, and Adrián Beltré — blocking his path to regular playing time in the Texas infield, he was limited to utility duty as a rookie. His trajectory shifted once he lost nearly two full years to right shoulder injuries, first a torn teres major that cost him all of 2014, then a torn labrum that required surgery and limited him to a rehab stint in late ’15. He’s tasted only intermittent success since, finishing with least a 100 wRC+ and 1.0 WAR just three times in the last seven years while more or less playing himself out of the infield; in 2022–23, he logged one inning at second base and 151.1 at first.

After hitting 15 homers with a 111 wRC+ and a career-high 2.5 WAR in 2022, Profar opted out of the final year of his three-year, $21 million deal with the Padres, then went unsigned into mid-March ’23 before catching on with the Rockies. His season was such a disaster that the team released him in late August, and while he enjoyed a bit of September success upon being picked up by San Diego, he finished with a 76 wRC+ and -2.0 WAR. Yet he’s back on a one-year, $1 million-plus-incentives deal, starting in left field because of the team’s lack of outfield depth.

The Cornerstone

As for the other six (former) shortstops, they’ve basically been shoehorned into the lineup by whatever means necessary in a process that dates back to 2019, when the team signed Machado to a 10-year, $300 million deal with the intention of returning him to third base after he had spent most of the previous season at shortstop for the only time in his major league career.

When the Orioles drafted Machado out of a Miami high school with the third pick in 2010, he had already played shortstop for the legendary 2009 under-18 U.S. national team that won a gold medal at the Pan American Junior Championships. Machado played almost exclusively at shortstop in his three minor league seasons (the first of which was only five games long). By the spring of 2012, the 19-year-old phenom was the no. 11 prospect in the game according to Baseball America, drawing comparisons to Alex Rodriguez but also concerns that he might physically outgrow the position. Meanwhile, the Orioles already had a shortstop they were quite satisfied with in 29-year-old J.J. Hardy, who was coming off a 30-homer, 4.5 WAR season and who had recently signed a three-year, $22.5 million extension. Machado began that season at Double-A Bowie, but when the Orioles, who had gone 69-93 in 2011 — their 14th consecutive losing season — found themselves in contention, they called up Machado in early August and stuck him at third base, where he had just two games of professional experience. He quickly proved to be a spectacular defender, a major upgrade over incumbent Wilson Betemit, who was soon lost to a wrist injury anyway. The Orioles won 93 games and claimed a Wild Card spot in 2012, and the Machado-Hardy left side remained in place through two more playoff appearances over the next four years before the latter’s body broke down.

During Hardy’s injury-related absences in 2015–16, Machado filled in at shortstop, playing a total of 52 games there. After Hardy retired following the 2017 season, Machado returned to his old position, first with the Orioles, who were amid a tear-down phase, and then with the Dodgers, who traded for him on July 18, 2018. Though he produced 7.0 WAR in his walk year, Machado’s metrics at shortstop weren’t great (-10 DRS, -6.5 UZR, 1 RAA), and by the time he signed with San Diego in February 2019, the 20-year-old Tatis was on the cusp of the majors, ready to make the jump from Double-A. Back at third, Machado has made two All-Star teams and had two top-three finishes in the MVP voting while emerging as a team leader — so much so that the Padres lavished a new extension on him after he opted out of his original deal at the end of the 2022 season. As for when he’ll return to the field — thereby trimming the shortstop total down to a reasonable (?) seven, with Machado replacing Wade at third and a better hitter than Wade starting at DH — the timeline is tentative at best, “possibly by the end of April.”

The Prodigy

While Machado didn’t have a great first year with the Padres in 2019, Tatis was a revelation on the offensive side, hitting .317/.379/.590 (151 wRC+) in 84 games before a stress reaction in his lower back ended his season in mid-August. His defensive metrics were another story, in the red across the board (-3 DRS, -5.8 UZR, -12 RAA); while Machado’s were somewhat better during a 37-game stint at shortstop when Tatis missed nearly six weeks due to a hamstring strain, the Padres opted to restore their previous configuration during the shortened 2020 season. Both players performed well; Tatis’ defensive numbers even improved across the small sample, and the team went 37-23, making the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, albeit via an expanded field.

With the infield getting increasingly crowded due to the arrivals of Cronenworth (in a December 2019 trade with the Rays along with Tommy Pham) and Kim (from the KBO in the winter of 2020–21), the Padres inked Tatis to a massive extension in the spring of 2021, then experimented with him in center and right field while he was in the midst of a monster 42-homer, 158 wRC+ season that again included mostly below average defensive metrics at shortstop (-7.5 UZR, -6 DRS, 2 RAA). The plan to go forward with him as an outfielder in 2022 was interrupted by Tatis’ misadventures, first a fracture in his left wrist that required surgery and may have occurred during one of the multiple motorcycle accidents he was involved in while in the Dominican Republic that offseason, and then an 80-game PED suspension that landed while he was on a rehab assignment. When he finally returned last year, it was as a right fielder, and while his offense wasn’t up to his usual level, his defense was elite. He led all right fielders with his 29 DRS, 13.8 UZR, and 10 RAA, taking home not only a Gold Glove but the NL Platinum Glove.

The Swiss Army Knife

Drafted as a second baseman out of the University of Michigan — where he pitched and played first, second, third, and left field but not shortstop — in 2015, Cronenworth spent most of the next four seasons playing short in the Rays’ organization, albeit with healthy servings of second base and third base. He even pitched in seven games at Durham in 2019, and might have continued to do so if not for MLB’s dumb rule changes, which included one that set a 20-inning bar for someone to be considered a two-way player; otherwise, he could only enter when his team was winning or losing by more than six runs.

As a rookie in 2020 he hit a robust .285/.354/.477 (126 wRC+) while playing mainly at second base, but he started at shortstop in the three games Tatis did not, and served as a late-inning replacement in eight others. During Tatis’ initial outfield foray, it was Cronenworth who took over at shortstop, starting 31 of 34 games and performing right around average according to the metrics.

He held the second base job in 2022, and was a Gold Glove finalist while hitting for a 110 wRC+ with 4.2 WAR, but the arrival of Bogaerts the following winter pushed him to first base, a position where the Padres had long struggled for offensive production due to their misguided belief in Eric Hosmer, who netted 0.4 WAR in four and a half seasons before being traded. Unfortunately, Cronenworth’s offense has declined since the move, putting the Padres at a deficit offensively; he slipped to a 92 wRC+ and 1.1 WAR last year.

The (Kiwoom) Hero

The infield got even more crowded in 2021 with the arrival of Kim, who had starred as a shortstop for the Nexen (later Kiwoom) Heroes in the KBO. When he first came stateside via a four-year, $28 million deal, he scuffled at the plate, hitting .202/.270/.352 (71 wRC+) while backing up at second, short, and third. He filled in for Tatis during a COVID-related IL stint in May, but was mainly consigned to pinch-hitting duty during Tatis’ outfield experiment.

Once the Padres committed to making Tatis an outfielder, it was Kim they chose to play shortstop for 2022. He rewarded their faith by doing standout work (10 DRS, 4.9 UZR, 4 RAA), becoming a Gold Glove finalist while improving to a 106 wRC+. He accommodated the team by moving to second base with the arrival of Bogaerts in 2023, winning a Gold Glove while hitting 17 homers with a 112 wRC+ and 4.4 WAR. In February, the Padres decided they would be better with the smaller, rangier Kim at shortstop and Bogaerts at second, a move that not only makes sense on paper but seems geared to keeping Kim around past his current deal (he has an $8 million mutual option for 2025).

The Interloper

Signed out of Aruba just shy of his 17th birthday in 2009, Bogaerts played exclusively at shortstop until he reached Triple-A four years later. Following a quick initiation at Pawtucket, the Red Sox squeezed the 20-year-old prospect into their lineup as a third baseman alongside shortstop Stephen Drew, and won the World Series with that combination. When Drew opted out, Bogaerts began the 2014 season at shortstop; he shifted back to third when Drew belatedly re-signed, but when the veteran didn’t hit a lick, the Red Sox foisted him on the Yankees in a July 31 trade and reinstalled the rookie at short. Over the next eight seasons he emerged as one of baseball’s best shortstops, hitting for a 125 wRC+ with 34.0 WAR (second at the position) from 2015–22 and signing a six-year, $120 million extension in ’19. Even so, he accumulated -50 DRS and -25 RAA in that span.

Bogaerts exercised an opt-out in his contract after 2022 and signed a massive deal with the Padres with the understanding that a position switch might happen down the road. He was solid defensively in his first season in San Diego (-4 DRS, 2 RAA, 0 UZR) while hitting for a 120 wRC+, but during spring training, the Padres convinced him to swap places with Kim. “I signed here as a shortstop,” Bogaerts said in late February. “But to me, I just live and die baseball… I’m just doing it in the best interests of the team, and in the end, I feel like I’m at peace with moving off.”

The Latest Experiment

Given the flimsiness of their outfield and the logjam in the infield, the Padres decided late last year to try Merrill, their 2021 first-round pick, in the outfield; as Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote when they placed him 30th on this year’s Top 100 Prospects list, his below-average hands suggest that he’ll permanently move off shortstop eventually. Merrill played five games in left field at Double-A San Antonio, and the Padres prepared him for the likelihood of continuing down that path. They tried Merrill in both left and center field this spring, and the 20-year-old (whose birthday is April 19) impressed them enough to open the season at the latter spot. So far, he’s hit a respectable .240/.321/.440 while starting seven of nine games there and taken over after pinch-hitting for the light-hitting José Azocar in the other two. If Kim leaves after this season, Merrill could be back in the shortstop mix, but for now, this is how the Padres are rolling.

Will it all work? The early returns are mixed, as the Padres are just 4-5. Their offense has been robust, scoring 5.78 runs per game (sixth in the NL), but their shaky pitching has allowed an even six runs per game (10th). It’s far too early to get a read on defensive metrics, but for now we’ll note that the team’s .651 defensive efficiency is 11th, 24 points below the league average. Stay tuned.