Penn Murfee was mentioned in the interview with Trent Blank that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. Discussing pitch profiles, Seattle’s director of pitching strategy recalled the erstwhile Mariners reliever being “a guy who had cut-ride” on his four-seam fastball.

Murfee is now with the White Sox, and Chicago’s South Side club is in Boston for a weekend series, so I took the opportunity to get his own perspective on the offering. What I learned talking to him at my home base of Fenway Park is that the movement he gets on his heater is circumstantial. Moreover, it’s legal.

“Back in 2021, in [Triple-A] Sacramento, my pitch profile changed from a running arm-side fastball,” explained Murfee, who was in the Seattle system from 2018-2023, the last year-plus of that span in the majors. “For whatever reason, I started choking the ball a little tight, and began throwing what was classified as a cutter. It went to zero inches of horizontal movement. My pitching coach at the time said, ‘Whatever you changed, don’t change it back.’ He said that I went from having a very average fastball to something unique.”

The reason behind the movement change? He stopped using sticky. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets upgraded their outfield in a big way this past winter simply by signing Juan Soto, but even with the $765 Million Man hitting reasonably well — if not up to his own high standards — the unit has been one of the majors’ least productive thus far. Now an injury has shaken up the roster, as Jose Siri has been sidelined by a fractured tibia, leading the team to test Jeff McNeil in center while he’s on a rehab assignment and setting up some further experimentation.

The Mets acquired the 29-year-old Siri in a trade with the Rays last November 19. Through the first two and a half weeks of the season, he shared time in center with Tyrone Taylor; both players are righties, so the Mets didn’t have a strict platoon in place. On Saturday, Siri fouled a ball off his left shin, and while initial X-rays were negative, a follow-up MRI taken two days later revealed a fracture. The Mets finally placed Siri on the 10-day injured list prior to Thursday’s game, but they haven’t given any indication as to when he’ll return. As manager Carlos Mendoza said, “[H]e’s going to be out for a while.”

“Awhile” will be measured in months. According to the Baseball Prospectus Recovery Dashboard, the few examples of position-player absences due to tibia fractures ranged from 86 days (Tommy La Stella in 2019) to 160 days (Andre Ethier in 2016), with Nick Gordon’s 137 days in 2023 representing the midpoint; one has to discount the 60-day absence of former Met Phillip Evans because the 2018 regular season ended before he could recover. Read the rest of this entry »

Trent Blank plays an integral role in one of baseball’s top pitching organizations. Now in his sixth season on the major league coaching staff, Blank is the director of pitching strategy for the Seattle Mariners. He’s well-suited for the job. The 35-year-old former minor league hurler holds an MS in Kinesiology and Exercise from Dallas Baptist University, and he previously worked at TMI Sports Medicine as a baseball performance specialist. Along with his current position, Blank has served as Seattle’s bullpen coach.

Blank sat down to talk about the Mariners’ pitching process prior to the start of the regular season.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with a pitcher the Mariners [purchased from the Cincinnati Reds] shortly before spring training. What made Casey Legumina an attractive acquisition?

Trent Blank: “Whenever we sign anybody, we look at them through a lot of different lenses, and he popped for both our player development and analytics groups. From my perspective, we really liked some of the unique things that he does with the baseball. He has good uphill plane since he kind of changed his delivery. With his spin profile, we think we can add a couple of pitches. We’re also thinking about bringing a couple of pitches back, and repurposing them. He has a lot of raw materials we feel we can put together in a different way.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on that?

Blank: “When we add stuff, it’s generally based on a certain spin profile we see. Then, when we talk about repurposing… with Casey in particular, it’s the sweeper. He’s had different versions of it, because he’s had different slots. We like the pitch. Adding some aggression is one thing. We’re still working through it, but the main thing is getting his fastball going at the top rail a little bit more.”

Laurila: Generally speaking, how does the organization approach introducing changes to a pitcher’s arsenal? Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres signed Nick Pivetta to a four-year, $55 million deal in mid-February, it marked an awakening from a sleepy and disappointing winter. With ownership embroiled in a battle over who would control the team in the wake of Peter Seidler’s death, San Diego had let several key free agents from last year’s 93-win Wild Card team depart, including Jurickson Profar and Ha-Seong Kim, but hadn’t spent more than $3.5 million or issued a contract longer than a year when it came to restocking. Pivetta was the exception, and while he was signed to be the fourth starter behind Dylan Cease, Michael King, and Yu Darvish, so far he’s been the stingiest rotation member on the hottest team in baseball.

On Wednesday afternoon at Petco Park, Pivetta spun six innings of one-run ball against the Cubs, allowing just four hits and striking out six, while Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. each drove in a pair of runs. Though reliever Wandy Peralta served up a solo homer to Pete Crow-Armstrong in the eighth inning — the rare lapse by a bullpen that’s been lights out so far — the Padres won 4-2. After beginning the season with seven straight wins over the Braves and Guardians, and winning their first 11 games at home before losing to the Cubs on Tuesday, they’re now a major league-best 15-4, outdistancing the world champion Dodgers, who have played just .500 ball since opening the season 8-0.

Though San Diego swept the Braves in the Wild Card Series last year and then went the distance with the Dodgers in the Division Series before getting eliminated, this season’s club wasn’t expected to be a particularly strong one in light of its offseason inactivity, which also included losing reliever Tanner Scott and catcher Kyle Higashioka to free agency. The Padres replaced Profar — who had followed up a career-worst season with a career-best one that earned him his first All-Star selection — in left field with a platoon built around 35-year-old Jason Heyward, whom they signed for one year and $1 million. They went light at catcher following Higashioka’s departure, cobbling together a tandem of Elias Díaz and Martín Maldonado, two backstops who were released by their respective teams last summer; San Diego had added Diaz after he was dropped by the Rockies in August, then retained him on a one-year, $3.5 million deal. The Padres appeared so geared toward reining in spending that the Pivetta move was initially presumed to be a precursor to trading Cease. Read the rest of this entry »

No player wants to suffer a significant, season-ending injury like Jung Hoo Lee did last May, especially in their rookie year. But when players do find themselves in that situation, they can at least use the time to reflect on their performance and make adjustments that they think will improve their game upon their return. Despite it being early in the season, it seems that is exactly what Lee has done.

The Giants center fielder’s offensive improvements warrant a look under the hood to see exactly what he has changed, because right now, he seems like a completely different player from the one we saw last year. So far this season, Lee is sporting a 192 wRC+, a .394 xwOBA (86th percentile), a 43.1% sweet-spot rate (87th percentile), and a .446 xwOBACON. Those are all big improvements compared to his limited 2024 sample. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Oneil Cruz is 26 years old and still has as much talent as just about any player in baseball. Here’s what I wrote back in August, when the Pirates moved him to the outfield and I eulogized Oneil Cruz the Shortstop: “Cruz is still just 25. I do think it’s more likely that he’ll be fine in center, and possibly even great. Quite simply, there’s more margin for error in the outfield. He’ll take some bad routes and make some bad reads, but he’ll be able to make the most of his speed…” The early returns are not exactly making either Cruz or me look great.

Cruz spent 23 games in center to end the 2024 season, and the results were mixed. His best grades came from Statcast, which had him putting up a very encouraging 2 OAA and 1 FRV. However, Cruz was credited with -3 DRS and -2.1 DRP. On a per-inning basis, the latter number made him one of the worst center fielders in baseball. Still, all those numbers included two errors, which loomed very large in such a small sample size. Outfielders tend not to make that many errors, but Cruz was brand new to the position. He was fast. He had a rocket arm. Even if all he did was cut out the errors, he’d be at the very least a decent center fielder. It was reasonable to assume that he would only get better out there.

He has not yet gotten better out there. Cruz is currently sitting on -8 DRS, -2 OAA and FRV, and -0.1 DRP. Among all outfielders, those numbers respectively rank worst, third worst, fourth worst, and fifth worst. The advanced defensive metrics work on different scales and they often disagree, but on this point they are unanimous: Cruz has been one of the very worst outfielders in all of baseball this season. According to DRS, Cruz is the least-valuable defender in baseball, full stop. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s never fun being the subject of a story that people call a saga. So when the Pete Alonso free agency saga transpired over the winter, I wondered whether he’d get off to a sluggish start as a result. Signing for less money than your agent told you you’d make, later than you expected to sign, and with a team offering you a smaller contract than they had the year before? It’s enough to make spring training a bit less of a ramp-up period and a bit more of a time for taking out frustration. If Alonso had started slow this season, I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

Turns out, Pete Alonso isn’t like me. Instead of sulking a little and coasting into the regular season, he’s come out like a man possessed. Through Tuesday’s action (17 games), he’s hitting an outrageous .356/.466/.729, the kind of batting line that doesn’t really make any sense and doesn’t need to. Suffice it to say, he’s not going to stay this hot unless he’s secretly Lou Gehrig, a development that would raise more questions than it answered. So we don’t need to ask whether this form is real – we can instead focus on what Alonso is doing the same and differently, and then go from there.

What is Alonso best at? That’s right, hitting the ball in the air with authority. That’s always been his calling card and it’s no different this year. Want a simple way of stating that? He leads the majors with 13 barrels, one ahead of Aaron Judge. That’s the kind of power you’d expect from a first baseman who averages 38 homers per 600 plate appearances (2020 makes “per year” stats pretty annoying). Even last season, Alonso’s worst in the bigs, he finished 13th in the majors in barrels. He plays a lot and he hits the ball very hard; those are things we’ve always known about Alonso. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

Randal Grichuk was ranked seventh when our 2015 St. Louis Cardinals Top Prospects list was published in March of that year. Acquired by the NL Central club in trade 16 months earlier, the then-22-year-old outfielder had been drafted 24th overall by the Los Angeles Angels out of a Rosenberg, Texas high school in 2009. The selection is a well-known part of his story. Grichuk was the first of back-to-back Angels’ picks that summer, the second being Mike Trout.

Grichuk has gone on to have a good career. Now in his 13th major league season, and his second with the Arizona Diamondbacks, the right-handed-hitting slugger has propelled 203 home runs while logging a 102 wRC+. Moreover, none of the 23 players drafted in front of him (in what was admittedly a pitcher-heavy first round) have homered as many times, nor have they recorded as many hits. AJ Pollock is the only position player with a higher WAR.

What did Grichuk’s 2015 scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think of it a full decade later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel wrote, and asked Grichuk to respond to it.

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“Grichuk was the Angels first rounder that they took one pick ahead of Mike Trout in 2009, though Grichuk has turned into a solid prospect in his own right.”

“That’s accurate,” replied Grichuk. “I was taken one pick before Trout, and I played well enough in the minor leagues to be looked at as a prospect.”

“They inexplicably basically gave Grichuk away in the Peter Bourjos–David Freese deal in 2013, and now Grichuk is knocking on the door.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s April, which means that here at FanGraphs we’re contractually forbidden from overreacting to small sample sizes. Overreacting to defensive metrics, which require especially large samples before they stabilize, is an even graver offense, grounds for a written reprimand and public shaming. According to Statcast’s Fielding Run Values, the best non-catcher was worth 16 runs on defense last year. On the other hand, according to Weighted Runs Above Average, the best hitter in baseball was worth 93.8 runs. The sample sizes on defense are a lot smaller and most of the chances are routine, which limits the impact even the best or worst defender can have on the game. However, we’re not forbidden from having fun. Although the small sample sizes make it dangerous for us to draw sweeping conclusions, they make it easy for us to get granular, and nothing says fun like statistical granularity. Today, we’re looking for one thing in particular: specific moments in which we can see a player’s defensive metrics jump or fall by an integer in real time.

Oneil Cruz has already been the most impactful defender according to DRS, racking up a shocking -8 runs over 126 1/3 innings. How did he fall into this abyss? You’d have to dig through every play he’s made this season. It would take a whole article. Maybe I will write that article soon enough, but for now, I’m interested in the other side of the spectrum. Welcome, once again, to Small Sample Size Theater. Read the rest of this entry »