If you enjoyed last week’s Buntpalooza, you’re going to love this, because I’m making up new stats again.

Let’s start with Rickey Henderson. You probably know that in 1982, Rickey set a still-unchallenged single-season record of 130 stolen bases. Which is a lot. Of course it’s a lot; this was the highest-volume season by the best basestealer who ever lived. I just referred to him as “Rickey,” because he was so great he can go by his first name on first reference, like “LeBron” or “Tiger” or “Weird Al.”

Nevertheless, I worry that we don’t appreciate how extremely a lot 130 stolen bases is in one season. One way to look at it is in distance; 172 stolen base attempts (Rickey also got caught a league-high 42 times that year), at 90 feet each, constitutes almost three miles of ground covered. The man ran the best part of a 5K in stolen base attempts alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, in a piece titled “Royce Lewis Has Arrived in Grand Fashion,” Jay Jaffe noted that the Minnesota Twins third baseman had “clubbed his third grand slam in an eight-game span” in the team’s contest against the Cleveland Guardians that Monday. My colleague added that, per the Elias Sports Bureau and MLB.com’s Sarah Langs, Lewis joined Lou Gehrig, Jim Northrup, and Larry Parrish as the only player in MLB history to “bunch three such hits so closely.”

Lewis has done more than hit grannies. Since making his big league debut last season, the first overall pick in the 2017 draft has slashed a healthy .310/.355/.541 with 14 home runs and a 147 wRC+ over 245 plate appearances. Staying on the field had been an issue. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote in June, “Lewis’ career has been marred by persistent injury.” But as Longenhagen noted, “He is back and ready to make an immediate impact on Minnesota’s playoff push.”

I was in Cleveland for last week’s Guardians-Twins series, and thus was present for Lewis’ 3-for-4, six-RBI, grand slam performance. Prior to the game, I sat down with the red-hot rookie to talk hitting. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cubs signed Seiya Suzuki before the 2022 season, it was part of a bold strategy to accelerate their return to contention. They weren’t quite ready for their close up that year, but the general plan was pretty clear: add a few pieces then, tack on more the following season, and aim for a good team sooner rather than later.

Good news! That plan has worked. The Cubs are in playoff position in mid-September, just like they drew it up. They supplemented 2022’s free agency exploits with a double dip last offseason. Cody Bellinger and Dansby Swanson have been right at the forefront of the charge, though Swanson has slumped recently. But for a bit, it looked like Suzuki might not be a part of Chicago’s plans.

He coasted through 2022, a solid righty bat but hardly one of the best hitters in the league. He started off this season in a funk, dealt with injuries, and finally got benched in early August. It was a long fall for someone so heralded, but honestly, you can see what the Cubs were thinking. Through that point in the year, Suzuki was batting .249/.328/.389, good for a 96 wRC+, and striking out a worrisome 25.3% of the time. He’d slumped as the year wore on, to boot; he had a wRC+ of 59 in the months of June and July. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, I took a look at the Rays pitching staff. Despite having the best offense in the league, the team had fallen back to earth after a red-hot start to the season. Surprisingly, their biggest weakness was relief pitching, an area where the team has long had a reputation for excellence. Even with strong offensive showings and a league-leading wRC+, their revolving door of bulk guys and back-of-the-bullpen options simply wasn’t keeping runs off the board. Headed down the stretch, the Rays boast the fourth-best record in baseball and sit just three games back of the AL-leading Orioles in the East. The bullpen has turned it around in a big way. When I last checked in on them in June, their relievers ranked 29th in FIP. Since then, they’ve been in the top five:

One of the biggest reasons for this improvement has been greater stability in the starting rotation. Despite Shane McClanahan going down with a torn UCL after the early-season losses of Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs, this is the closest thing the Rays have had to a regular rotation all year. After missing two months with an oblique injury, Tyler Glasnow has returned to form, with a sub-three ERA and a 34% strikeout rate. They’ve also made the most of Zach Eflin’s elite command; he currently ranks fourth among AL pitchers in WAR and has almost doubled his previous career high. They moved aggressively at the deadline, trading top slugging prospect Kyle Manzardo for Aaron Civale, who’s improved his K-BB% by nine points since leaving Cleveland. And finally, they’ve converted up/down reliever Zack Littell into an effective starter, because what can’t they do? Since being added to the rotation at the end of July, his 5.8 innings per start ranks in the top quarter of all starters. Read the rest of this entry »

The ability to stay on the field is a critical component of a player’s value, though much of it is out of their hands. Players do their best to stay healthy and game-ready, but the wear and tear of the season on a body is a significant challenge. Injuries of all kinds and severities emerge unwelcome; performance slumps necessitate days of rest or warrant other players’ chances; and illnesses pass through the petri dishes that are clubhouses.

With so many unpreventable interventions, it can hardly be held against a player that he isn’t able to suit up 162 times in 185 or so days. It’s a remarkable thing to ask of anyone, let alone a professional athlete; I’ve never done that in any job I’ve worked, and my career hasn’t involved trying to hit a round ball with a round bat, squarely, as Ted Williams once put it. But those who do are reaching an achievement seemingly unmatched across professional sports and are deserving of a little extra recognition. Read the rest of this entry »

Zac Gallen couldn’t even wait until the sun went down to thumb his nose at my attempt to sort out the NL Cy Young race — or at least at the notion that he was out of it. While I mentioned Gallen in passing in a piece focused on Spencer Strider and a few other pitchers who appeared to have the best statistical cases for the award, I had little to say about Gallen, who spent much of this season as the league’s frontrunner but has faded in the second half, and was coming off back-to-back bad starts that had further puffed up his numbers. On Friday afternoon, the 28-year-old righty threw a three-hit complete-game shutout against the Cubs in a 1-0 win, prompting me to take a second look at situating him within the race as the candidates head into the home stretch.

Building off a 2022 campaign in which he posted a 2.54 ERA, 3.05 FIP, and 4.2 WAR en route to a fifth-place finish in the Cy Young voting, Gallen jumped out to the front of the race early this season. He ran off a streak of 28 consecutive scoreless innings from April 4–26, with an eye-opening 41-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio along the way. He finished June with a 2.72 ERA and 2.06 FIP, led the NL in FIP (2.85) and fWAR (3.8) at the All-Star break, and earned the starting nod for the All-Star Game opposite Gerrit Cole. He’s been the consensus pick for the Cy Young in four monthly polls of MLB.com voters.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles have the best record in the American League, and youthful talent is a big reason why. Gunnar Henderson is the odds-on favorite to capture Rookie-of-the-Year honors, while Adley Rutschman has already reached star status in just his second MLB season. The dynamic duo are the first-place team’s co-leaders in WAR.

They aren’t the only players making an impact. The well-balanced Mike Elias-constructed club has also received meaningful contributions from the likes of Anthony Santander, Ryan Mountcastle, and Austin Hays. On the pitching side, a mix of veterans and less-established arms have more than held their own, in some cases outperforming expectations. From the better-known to the lesser-known, a multitude of players have played important roles in the 90-wins-and-counting success.

With that in mind, who has been the most-underrated player on the 2023 Orioles? I asked that question to four people who see the squad on an everyday basis — two broadcasters and a pair of beat writers — prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

Nathan Ruiz, who covers the team for the Baltimore Sun, chose Danny Coulombe.

“A lot was made of the All-Star combo of Yennier Cano and Felix Bautista, but Coulombe has come in and kind of been that main left-handed reliever all season,” said Ruiz. “He’s been really good with inherited runners, which is something they have generally struggled with. Cionel Pérez was really good for them last year, but they felt they needed another lefty so they acquired him [from the Minnesota Twins] for cash around the cusp of the season and he became a solid piece for them right away. He’s been dependable at the back end of the bullpen.”

Melanie Newman went with Kyle Bradish.

“He’s got an ERA that’s sitting there with Gerrit Cole right now,” the Orioles broadcaster opined. “We all talk about Yennier Cano and Felix Bautista, and our back end — what they’ve been able to do so far — but Kyle has been consistent. For whatever reason, when we’re on the road in a big spot, those are his best moments. That’s what you want out of a guy, and you forget that he’s only in his second year. His breaking pitches are disgusting. I don’t think he gets enough credit.”

Danielle Allentuck opted for Ryan O’Hearn.

“He has kind of been the guy who, whenever they need the big hit — he’s either coming off the bench or already in the lineup — has been providing it,” the Baltimore Banner reporter told me. “He’s been that kind of spark for them. He’s turning his career around here. We’re talking underrated, and I don’t think a lot of people know about him. He’s not the big name. He wasn’t a big superstar, but he’s come here and turned things around for himself, and the team.” Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Strider may be comically overpowering, but his bid to win the NL Cy Young is anything but a cakewalk. Over the course of his past two outings, he’s been hit for 10 runs in 8.2 innings, elevating his ERA from 3.46 to 3.83, higher than any pitcher who has won the award. The truth is that with less than four weeks to go in the season, no NL pitcher — not Strider, Blake Snell, Justin Steele, Zac Gallen or Zack Wheeler, just to run through a partial list of names — has a particularly strong statistical case to win. While each candidate’s remaining few starts may provide some clarity before voters send off their ballots, the race as it stands is worth a closer look.

I’m not a BBWAA voter in this or any of the annual awards this year, but I had been thinking about this race a bit lately thanks to a couple of questions from readers in recent chats and on social media. To that point, my default answer prior to those had been “Strider or Snell,” but I hardly had my mind made up. By a happy coincidence, all of this happened just as we introduced a Cy Young Projections leaderboard based on a simple model created by Tom Tango, using only earned runs, innings pitched, strikeouts, and wins — all counting stats, no rate stats. I know what the leaderboard says, and you can look as well, but I’ll save what it’s telling us about this race until later in this piece. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been fascinated by players whose skill sets don’t match their physical makeup. Look at Mookie Betts, a prolific slugger at a mere 5-foot-9. Conversely, there’s Oneil Cruz, a legit shortstop towering over the infield at 6-foot-7. Spencer Strider is one of the smallest starters in the league, and Zach Eflin is one of the tallest, yet the former is the power pitcher, and the latter thrives on finesse. Don’t get me wrong: It’s fun to watch Aaron Judge sock dingers, too. Still, I’ll always have a soft spot for the players who don’t fit the prototype. I suppose a childhood filled with sports movies has conditioned me to root for the underdog.

In the same vein, I’m a fan of slow runners who nonetheless wreak havoc on the basepaths. These players aren’t nearly as common as their opposite; there are far more fast runners who struggle to contribute on the bases. After all, it’s much easier to fail at something despite possessing a natural advantage than to succeed without one. We’ve all met a tall person who stinks at basketball, but you can count the number of average-height players in the NBA on one thumb. And indeed, the scarcity of such players is a big part of what makes them so easy to root for.

Of the 50 slowest runners by sprint speed in 2023, only six have provided positive value on the bases, and only one has a BsR that wouldn’t round down to zero: Ji Man Choi, who has been worth all of 0.6 BsR. Similarly, of the 50 most valuable runners by BsR, only four have a sprint speed below the MLB average of 27 feet per second: Freddie Freeman, Kyle Tucker, Jose Altuve, and Josh Rojas. Of those four, only Freeman and Rojas have accrued positive baserunning value according to every other major source; Tucker has been below average per Baseball Prospectus, and Altuve has negative scores at both BP and Baseball Savant.

BsR remains my metric of choice, but my point is to highlight just how few players with below-average speed have positive baserunning numbers across the board. Out of 225 qualified runners with a sprint speed below 27 ft/sec, only two are consensus plus baserunners. Freeman and Rojas prove that speed isn’t everything, but the other 223 players show that it’s still pretty darned important. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers have been sputtering, losing 15 of their last 19 since August 15 to turn a 3.5-game AL West lead into a three-game deficit, with the Astros, who just swept a three-game series from them at Globe Life Field, and Mariners both above them. Yet even as the team’s offense has dried up, Corey Seager has been on a tear. Since returning from a sprained right thumb at the beginning of August, the Rangers shortstop has homered 13 times in 30 games; this past week, he finally accumulated enough plate appearances to take over the AL leads in both batting average and wRC+. If not for Shohei Ohtani, Seager would have a pretty decent case for an MVP award, even with his absences.

Seager only missed nine games due to his thumb sprain, which he suffered on July 21 sliding into second base in a game against the Dodgers. That was his second trip to the injured list this year, as he also missed 31 games from April 12–May 17 due to a left hamstring strain. Yet the interruptions haven’t hindered him at all. Read the rest of this entry »