With the season the Atlanta Braves are having, there isn’t that much spotlight to go around. Ronald Acuña Jr. is rewriting the record book, Matt Olson has an outside shot at 60 home runs, and beyond that Atlanta literally has an above-average starter at every position on the field:

And because these guys never seem to get hurt or take a day off, there hasn’t been a story about an unsung hero picking up the slack when a star goes down. So Michael Harris II, a 22-year-old center fielder with a plus-plus glove and a 115 wRC+, goes under the radar a little. Read the rest of this entry »

All season, the Rangers have been fighting gravity. They stormed out to a lead in the AL West, but they lost Jacob deGrom in the interim. The Astros lurked not far off the pace. But the Rangers persevered and held their lead until the trade deadline. Reinforcements were on the way! Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Aroldis Chapman — they made more improvements than any other team in the league.

They needed it, too, because Nathan Eovaldi hit the IL the next day. Josh Jung followed not long after. As they slogged through August, the Mariners charged into the AL West race, making it a three-way fracas. No sooner did Eovaldi return than Adolis García succumbed to injury. And now, with the playoffs hanging in the balance and every win at a premium, this:

Right-hander Max Scherzer is expected to miss the remainder of the regular season with a strained teres major — a muscle that connects the scapula to the humerus. Scherzer is, Texas GM Chris Young told reporters, "unlikely" to pitch in the playoffs.

Brutal news for the Rangers.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 13, 2023

What rotten luck. For those of you who aren’t anatomists, the teres major is a muscle in the rear shoulder that gets stressed by pitching. It’s been in the news quite a bit this year, in fact. Justin Verlander missed the first month of the season with a low-grade teres major strain. Triston McKenzie missed the first two months of the season with a strained teres major. John Means’ return from Tommy John surgery was delayed by a teres major injury. None of these injuries have seemed to linger, and none required surgery, but the timeline is unfortunately immutable: there’s no chance of Scherzer making it back for the regular season, and little shot of him pitching in the playoffs either. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Jay Jaffe wrote about the NL Cy Young race and its lack of a clear frontrunner. What struck me about the NL crop of pitchers is that each top candidate has excelled in a specific category that could cater to a certain class of voters. Do you heavily weigh peripheral stats like FIP and strikeouts? If so, you’d probably vote for Spencer Strider, who leads the NL in K/9, K%, K-BB%, FIP, xFIP, SIERA, swinging-strike rate, and CSW%. If you value run prevention over all else, then Justin Steele and Blake Snell, the only big league pitchers with ERAs below 2.50, are your guys. Voters who value both excellence and volume may choose to select Logan Webb or Zac Gallen, who lead the way in innings pitched with solid ERA and FIP numbers. While they (along with NL WAR leader Zack Wheeler) are all close in pitching prowess, odds are I could guess who would come first on your ballot if you gave me a pie chart of your perceived importance of ERA, peripherals, and volume.

The AL race is a bit different. There are deserving candidates who are strong in individual areas of the game, but none stand out as elite compared to top pitchers in previous seasons. Consider Gerrit Cole, whose 187 innings and 2.79 ERA (66 ERA-) pace the AL. He’s on pace to reach the 200-inning threshold for the sixth time in his career, but just last year, 19 qualified hurlers averaged at least as many innings per start as Cole, including several guys who came nowhere near award contention. And while his 66 ERA- is impressive, it’s the worst AL-leading ERA- since 2016, when Rick Porcello led with a mark of 71 as one of the more underwhelming Cy Young winners in recent memory. Before that, you have to go back to 2007 to find a worse top of the class in the junior circuit.

Even though Cole doesn’t compare to premier seasons of yesteryear (including many of his own), he’s still locked in as a top candidate this year and the likely frontrunner. He hasn’t had a better single-season ERA since his legendary 2019 campaign, when he struck out 326 batters and lost a narrow Cy Young race to Justin Verlander. But he’s kept runs off the board despite fewer strikeouts than is custom for him. For the first time since discovering the power of his elevated fastball, Cole has struck out fewer than 30% of batters faced. And while no ERA estimator has him below 3.30, the batted ball data suggests that may not be a fluke. His barrel rate, which has sat between the 15th and 25th percentile over the past three years, has been almost exactly average in 2023, along with his hard-hit rate allowed. Because of this, he’s kept a greater share of fly balls in the yard of any season since his days in Pittsburgh. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde stood in the visiting dugout at Chase Field and cast a furtive glance toward the warning track where his players began to warm. “I haven’t seen a baseball thrown today and it’s already 3:15,” he said. Even here, three time zones away from the comfortable climes of Camden Yards, the duties of a big league manager had pulled him in every direction. So many people had popped into his office – front office members, coaches, reporters, players – he’d barely found time to shed his street clothes and don his uniform.

At the helm of the team with the best record in the American League, Hyde is a clear frontrunner to be named AL Manager of the Year, an award for which he was the runner-up last season. His candidacy, then and now, bears many hallmarks of a winner. As the leader of a long-dormant team now in the postseason hunt, he makes for a good narrative. That the Orioles lead baseball’s toughest division, despite a young and inexperienced roster and a mediocre pitching staff, would seem to attest to Hyde’s managerial skill. If he wins, it will be hard to say he doesn’t deserve it.

It will also be almost impossible to say, definitively and concretely, that he does. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have much in the way of groundbreaking analysis for you today. I’m here to write about something that’s pretty obvious: Brandon Woodruff is still awfully good. You probably knew that already without fancy stats or gory math. The Milwaukee right-hander owns a career 3.08 ERA and 3.18 FIP. He has been good at just about every point since his rookie year in 2017. Still, I’d like to address a few of the reasons that his continued success is a big deal. So until I get to the part where I can dazzle you with numbers, I will at least try to drop in some fun facts here and there.

Woodruff originally hit the IL with shoulder inflammation back in April, after making just two starts that were — stop me if you’ve heard this before — very good. His shoulder inflammation turned out to be a Grade 2 subscapular strain. The subscapularis is the largest muscle in your rotator cuff, and doctors can diagnose a subscapular tear using three tests with excellent names: the lift-off test, the bear hug test, and the belly press test. Sadly, none of these tests is quite as fun as it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

In the moment, the home run was huge. With the Mariners trailing 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning against the Angels on Monday night, needing a win to stay half a game ahead of the Rangers in the race for the third AL Wild Card spot, Julio Rodríguez chased a low sinker from José Marte and swatted it over the center field wall into the No Fly Zone, the personal cheering section of T-Mobile Park where the J-Rod Squad sits. The 402-foot blast was Rodríguez’s 30th of the year, meaning that it not only tied the game, it made the 22-year-old center fielder the third-youngest player to join the 30-homer, 30-steal club.

Counting to the point where the players joined the club by reaching the second milestone, only Mike Trout (21 years, 54 days in 2012) and Ronald Acuña Jr. (21 years, 248 days in 2019) reached 30 homers and 30 stolen bases in the same season at a younger age. Alex Rodriguez, like Julio Rodríguez, reached the mark in his age-22 season — and is the only other Mariner to accomplish the feat, but he was 23 years and three days old when he notched his 30th steal in 1998. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you at the start of this: I never quite bought into what Luis Arraez was doing. When he won the batting title last year, I was skeptical. When he was traded from Minnesota to Miami before the season, I loved the Twins’ side of the deal. When he was flirting with a .400 batting average at the All-Star break, I relegated him to Honorable Mention status on our top 50 trade value list. He just perpetually flummoxed me, slapping singles while I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Arraez has been downright putrid of late. He’s been below replacement level since the start of August. He’s batting .262 with a .282 OBP in that span, which is hard to fathom for a guy who is still only striking out 6.7% of the time. This isn’t a victory lap article, though. It won’t last. It can’t last. I don’t believe in this version of Arraez any more than I believed in the .400 hitter from June.

In trying to solve this mystery, I let other people guide me. Honestly, I’m not the person to figure out what Arraez is doing wrong, because I never quite understood what he was doing right. So instead, I read a bunch of articles about the good times. Then I looked to see whether Arraez had stopped doing the things that had so recently made him special. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Rockies and starting pitcher Germán Márquez agreed on terms to a two-year contract extension worth a guaranteed $20 million. This was a lost season for Márquez, as an elbow injury and eventual Tommy John surgery resulted in him only making four starts. Unsurprisingly for a pitcher suffering a major injury, the second year of his new deal is heavily incentivized, with two roster bonuses and three inning bonuses. Márquez is expected to miss the first half of the 2024 season, but if he throws 160 innings in 2025, he’ll net a cool $22 million for the season. The contract also includes a $1 million assignment bonus, paid by his new team if the Rockies should trade him.

An elbow injury that requires a scalpel is never a welcome sign for anyone, but for Márquez, originally a free agent this fall, it was a particularly hard blow. The hope had been that he would bounce back from a pedestrian 2022 season that saw his FIP balloon to nearly five and his strikeout rate fall about 10% from 2021. While my thoughts on how the Rockies have been run since, well, 1993 are well-known, he was one of their biggest coups in franchise history. It’s hard to prove the Rays wrong on a young pitcher, but that the Rockies did, picking up Márquez and Jake McGee from Tampa Bay for Corey Dickerson and Kevin Padlo in 2016. Despite being only 28, he already looms large in Rockies history.

Jiménez’s three-year peak as an elite pitcher makes him the king of the mountain, but Márquez is only a couple good months behind him. When you consider offense as well (Márquez was once a Silver Slugger), the latter is already the leader. And while I can’t expect anyone in Denver to appreciate this, it certainly matters to me that my most recent memory of Márquez isn’t Buck Showalter throwing him into a playoff game for no particular reason.

Lest you think Márquez’s lofty standing is me damning the Rockies with faint praise, he’s long been one of the best-projected young pitchers in ZiPS WAR:

Naturally, his position in the rankings dropped as he failed to maintain his 2018 strikeout rate, but some of the decline is natural due to having fewer tomorrows remaining. With the kind of bounceback that ZiPS expected, he would have been looking at a pretty good payday in free agency. Here’s what his long-term projections for 2024 and beyond looked like before the start of 2023. I’m using a neutral park for this one since Coors Field is… complicated.

Based on that projection, ZiPS recommended a seven-year, $126 million extension or $116 million over six years. That’s not Gerrit Cole money and reflects the increased risk stemming from his 2022, but nine figures can buy an impressive haul of goods and/or services. It certainly would have been a better use of money than, say, signing an aging third baseman from the Cubs to play left field for $182 million.

I went ahead and told ZiPS that Márquez has missed time due to Tommy John surgery (I normally do this after the season) and re-ran the numbers.

ZiPS would have suggested two years at $18.2 million, but the difference between that and $20 million, in the context of MLB, is basically nothing. In any case, the fact that he is a pitcher who has survived Coors Field is almost certainly worth a bit more cash, even if ZiPS isn’t specifically valuing that here. In other words, the Rockies made a move that I cannot complain about.

Where does Márquez fit into the future of the Rockies? That’s a much trickier question. While the best result for him is that he makes a grand return next July and returns to his 2017–21 peak form, resulting in him getting that $100 million contract in a couple of years, I’m not sure the Rockies will take fullest advantage of this sunny scenario. If the organization is going to become competitive again, it has a lot of work to do, and Márquez rocking the NL inside out in 2025 likely makes him more valuable to the Rockies in terms of who they can acquire for him rather than his actual performance.

Trading veterans, especially veterans who had an important past in the story of the franchise, always appears to be psychologically difficult for Colorado’s ownership. But that’s a problem for the future Rockies. The team made a good move in extending Márquez to a low-risk, high-upside contract, and that’s good enough for me to pause my grumbling.

Apparently, the Yankees can’t have nice things even after shifting their focus to next season. Less than two weeks into his major league career, and just two days after he hit the fourth home run of his brief stay with the Yankees, long-awaited prospect Jasson Domínguez — nicknamed “The Martian” for his otherworldly collection of tools — has been diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He’ll soon undergo season-ending surgery that will likely sideline him for part of 2024 as well.

The 20-year-old Domínguez, who has been on prospect hounds’ radars since he signed out of the Dominican Republic for a $5.1-million bonus in 2019, entered the season ranked 50th on our Top 100 Prospects list and third on the Yankees list as a switch-hitting 50 FV prospect with a projected ETA of 2025. He did not figure in the Yankees’ immediate plans for this season, having split his 2022 campaign between A-level Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. He finished the year with a 10-game cameo at Double-A Somerset; the last five of those games were in the Eastern League playoffs, capped by a two-homer, six-RBI performance in the championship series clincher.

This season, Domínguez hit .254/.367/.414 (117 wRC+) with 15 homers, 37 steals, and a 15.2% walk rate at Somerset, albeit with a dramatic improvement from the first half to the second. Before the All-Star break he scuffled, batting just .204/.345/.346 (95 wRC+) with 10 homers, 23 steals, and a 28.4% strikeout rate, numbers mitigated somewhat by his plate discipline (17.7% walk rate) and his age in a league where he was nearly four years younger than the average position player. He caught fire after the break, doing a better job of making contact and translating his 65-grade raw power into game power, hitting .354/.416/.549 with five homers and 13 steals from July 14 through August 20 while trimming his strikeout rate to 19.3%. He not only netted Player of the Week honors in the final week of his run at Somerset, he earned a promotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Read the rest of this entry »

You already know the deal with the Blue Jays, so much so that I barely have to mention it. The good players on their team? They’re major league legacies. As kids, they were in major league clubhouses. There are cute pictures of them, chubby-cheeked, watching their famous parents win various accolades. Their major league success was hardly preordained, but let’s just say it didn’t come out of nowhere.

That lazy narrative had already sprung a few leaks, even before this year. Matt Chapman and George Springer don’t quite fit the bill. Kevin Gausman and Jordan Romano don’t either. Cavan Biggio isn’t even a starter. But there’s perhaps no better counter-example than Davis Schneider, the Jays’ newest star. Schneider flew so far under the radar that the metaphor doesn’t work; he was almost subterranean. He was a 28th-round draft pick in 2017, a round that doesn’t exist anymore. He didn’t reach Double-A until the end of the 2022 season. Now he’s the best hitter on the Jays, and in at least a few contrived ways that I’ll endeavor to show you in this article, he might be the best hitter of all time.

I know what you’re thinking. “Really, Ben? The best hitter of all time? He’s not even the best hitter on his own team right now.” To that I say, sure, you might think that. But that’s based on your perception of the future. If we limit our analysis to merely what has happened on the field, no Blue Jays hitter even approaches Schneider’s magnificence. Read the rest of this entry »