Since the beginning of 2021, when Francisco Lindor joined the Mets, he ranks fifth in position player WAR (16.2) behind Aaron Judge (20.4), Freddie Freeman (17.9), Mookie Betts (16.8), and José Ramírez (16.5). While others at his position have seen their production tail off for one reason or another, he has remained excellent thanks to his all-around game.

In recent seasons, though, Lindor has struggled at the plate for prolonged periods. But this year and last, he has made up for slow starts with excellent second halves. From an overall production standpoint, he is an extremely similar hitter from both sides, but since the most advantageous platoon split comes as a left-handed hitter, his bouncebacks have often been driven by adjustments on that side of the plate. That story tracks this season, too, as Lindor is on one of the best stretches of his career as a lefty. Here are the differences between his left-handed production before and after the start of July:

Lindor’s SweetSpot% from this side is top notch; that wasn’t — and never has been — an issue for him. His adjustable bat path and swing decisions propel him to launch the ball consistently at an ideal angle. Oddly enough, despite this consistency in his spread of launch angles, his performance was still down in the first few months of the year, and even despite a couple of percentage points decrease in SweetSpot%, his performance and expected outcomes on balls in play still ticked up from July on because of a rate that is still high relative to his peers. To understand why that resulted in more success recently than at the beginning of the year, we have to do some digging into those sweet spot batted balls. Read the rest of this entry »

Suffice it to say, the 2023 season has not gone the way either the New York Yankees or their fans had hoped. The team’s current nine-game losing streak is their longest in 41 years. And while the team’s 60-65 record isn’t on the same grim level as those of the Athletics or Royals, it’s still awful by the franchise’s typical standards. New York has teetered on the edge of .500 a few times recently, including being outscored in three of four seasons from 2013 to 2016, but you have to go back to 1992 to find the last time they crossed that negative line. Rather than tear everything down to the foundation when things go wrong, the Yankees tend to be a team that reloads and tries again next time. But can they do that this offseason?

The Yankees have had some bad breaks this season, but blaming everything on that would be a mistake. I’m not going to wax poetic about why this season has been so miserable — other writers have already laid out the club’s tale of woe — but we still need to review the basics to get a good view of where things truly stand. The pitching bears quite a lot of the blame. In detailing how the preseason PECOTA projections for the Yankees diverged from what has actually happened, Patrick Dubuque didn’t mince words at Baseball Prospectus:

Two of the Yankees’ seven starters have met expectations so far, and it’s their two worst ones. Injuries have pressed those sixth and seventh (and eighth) starters into service, even more so than our depth chart team anticipated. But when you imagine a collapse like the Yankees have had, you assume that it’s injuries. You envision Aaron Judge’s plate appearances replaced by Billy McKinney’s, like the world’s most unprepared Broadway understudy. While Brito and Randy Vásquez haven’t bailed the team out, they also didn’t make the hole. And at this point, it’s more hole than boat.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins are in first place. I’m not talking about the standings, though it’s true that they’ve got a substantial lead over the Guardians in the AL Central. The Twins are in first place where it counts: on the strikeout leaderboards. Minnesota’s pitchers are striking out 25.7% of the batters they face, and Minnesota’s batters are striking out 27.2% of the time. Both of those numbers are the highest in baseball this season, and the latter is just a tenth of a percentage point off the all-time record set by the 2020 Tigers. In all, the Twins are on pace to be involved in 3,211 strikeouts, the most of all-time.

In a way, the Twins are on the cutting edge. We are living in the strikeout era, the golden age of the golden sombrero. If you sort every team offense in AL/NL history by strikeout rate, 299 of the top 300 played in this century (congratulations and apologies to the 1998 Diamondbacks). Relative to the rest of the league, the Twins aren’t close to making history; they’re just the team in first place. Their offense’s 118 K%+ pales in comparison to the 163 put up by the 1927 Yankees, to pick a notable example.

The game has been trending toward more strikeouts for as long as it’s been around, and if the Twins do end up setting an all-time record, it likely won’t last all that long. Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t honor them for racing out ahead of the pack and playing winning baseball in the crushing maw of the strikeout apocalypse. Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins began this season on an historic pace in one-run games. They won every single one of their first 12 such contests, besting a record that had stood for 51 years. Since then, they’ve played to a more modest 15-11 mark in those bouts, but their .711 winning percentage in such games on the whole would still tie them for the fifth-best in a single season since the Live Ball Era began in 1920 (min. 20 one-run games).

Last Thursday, my colleague Michael Baumann wrote a piece that got me thinking. Specifically, he found that of the three teams outperforming their Pythagorean (run differential-based) record by at least five games at the time, two — the Orioles and Brewers — had outstanding bullpens in one form or another. This idea isn’t new — it’s been hashed, and re-hashed, and re-hashed again. The Tigers, which have since joined that group of five-game overperformers, have also had a remarkably clutch relief corps. But the Marlins, outperforming their expected wins by six games, have a middling ‘pen by any measure. Marlins position players have come through in big moments more than expected, but they also haven’t wowed in those situations to the same extent that the Orioles’ crop of hitters have. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone loves a beginning — the christening of a new battleship, the birth of a new zoo giraffe, the major league debut of a top pitching prospect. On Tuesday night in Philadelphia, San Francisco Giants lefty Kyle Harrison emerged from his pupal stage. It went… pretty well: 3 1/3 innings, two earned runs, five hits, one walk, five strikeouts, one hit batter.

In a short start, Harrison pared his repertoire down to — with very few exceptions — just his fastball and slider. He gave up lots of hard contact, including a home run, but also, said manager Gabe Kapler, Harrison “missed a lot of bats. He missed bats in the zone. His fastball was carrying.”

Harrison entered the night as the no. 17 overall prospect on The Board, and the no. 5 overall pitching prospect. Every team in the playoff hunt could use a fresh, talented starter, the Giants more so than just about anyone. San Francisco is running a rotation out of the mid-20th century: Two very good starting pitchers and then a lot of improvisation. Webb, Cobb, and pray for fog. Or something like that. If you can do better than a slant rhyme, I’m all ears. Read the rest of this entry »

Because I was raised on Saturday morning cartoons of a certain vintage — some of which I’ve recently shared with my going-on-seven-year-old daughter — I have Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner zooming through my brain with alarming frequency. In nearly every episode, there’s a moment when the coyote runs off a cliff and then, improbably, hangs in midair for several seconds before plummeting several hundred feet to the desert ground. Welcome to the 2023 Giants.

At 65-60, the Giants entered Tuesday occupying the NL’s third Wild Card spot, half a game behind the Cubs (65-59) for the second spot, and half a game ahead of the Diamondbacks (65-61), a game ahead of the Reds (64-61), and a game and a half ahead of the Marlins (64-62). Somehow, they’ve hung on this long despite playing sub-.500 ball for nearly the last two months with an offense so comically inept you’d think it came out of an ACME crate.

Dial back to June 10, when the Giants were a middling 32-32, seven games out of first place in the NL West and a game and a half back in the Wild Card race, with an offense that had hit for a 101 wRC+ (.246/.321/.413) while averaging 4.52 runs per game to that point. Two days and two wins later, they moved into a tie for the third Wild Card spot with the Brewers, and save for a brief span from July 6–8, they’ve remained in the playoff picture ever since; as recently as August 8, they were 62-52 and had a claim on the top NL Wild Card spot. Read the rest of this entry »

In the 1991 comedy King Ralph, an American lounge singer becomes the King of England when the entire royal family is electrocuted in a freak photography accident. Despite its Academy Award-winning screenwriter and a cast of well-respected actors, the film fell flat, making it an apt comparison for the 2023 Mets, although that’s not why I bring it up today. After a series of unfortunate and unexpected injuries, Aaron Civale finds himself a key cog with the Rays and, therefore, in the race for the AL East crown. Tampa Bay’s rotation doesn’t have much in common with the British monarchy (there’s far too much turnover and not nearly enough silly hats), but just like Ralph Jones, Civale wouldn’t be in this position if so many others in front of him hadn’t bit the dust.

The Rays entered the season with one of the best rotations in the American League: Shane McClanahan, Tyler Glasnow, Drew Rasmussen, Jeffrey Springs, and Zach Eflin. No other team could boast a projected ERA and FIP under 3.80 for all five of its primary starting pitchers. On top of that, no. 37 overall prospect Taj Bradley was nearing his big league debut, and Josh Fleming, Yonny Chirinos, and Luis Patiño were around to provide depth. Our positional power rankings had the Rays rotation third in the AL and eighth overall.

On the other side of the equation, the Guardians entered the season under no pressure to trade Civale. On Opening Day, their postseason odds sat at 44.7%. Two-thirds of the FanGraphs staff picked them to make the playoffs, myself included. Now, this is the Guardians we’re talking about, so high postseason odds won’t stop them from trading a talented, young player, but Civale was set to make only $2.6 million this season, and he’s arbitration-eligible for two more years. Cleveland had little incentive to trade him unless the offer was too good to refuse. Considering his injury history, his 4.92 ERA last season, and the oblique strain he suffered this April, the chances of such an offer materializing seemed slim. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams befuddles me. There’s no question that he has plus raw power in his bat. Look at this year’s statistics; he’s sitting in the 81st percentile for maximum exit velocity. But despite that fact, he’s in the 10th percentile for average exit velocity, and the 17th for hard-hit rate. He’s a power hitter! He’s a slap hitter! Both are true.

Likewise, I’m not quite sure what to make of the rest of his game. He has blazing straight line speed, and he uses that to his advantage on the basepaths. We have him down as the third-most valuable baserunner in the majors this year, behind only Esteury Ruiz and Corbin Carroll. But almost all of that value comes on stolen bases – he’s 25th in UBR, which measures non-steal advancement. And on defense, he has tremendous range and an average throwing arm, but grades out somewhere between average (DRS) and poor (OAA) anyway. His profile is a series of contradictions.

The thing is, all of these have been true about Abrams since the Padres drafted him in the first round in 2019. He was a divisive prospect from the start; it was never clear whether he’d end up as a slugging second baseman or a rangy, leadoff-hitting shortstop. Then the pandemic canceled the 2020 minor league season, and he missed most of 2021 with injury even as the Padres aggressively promoted him. Suddenly he was debuting in the big leagues at 21 as an injury replacement for, gulp, Fernando Tatis Jr. Life comes at you fast. Read the rest of this entry »

Troy Melton is fast emerging as one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Drafted in the fourth round last year out of San Diego State University, the 22-year-old right-hander has a 2.33 ERA and a 3.21 FIP in 81 innings between Low-A Lakeland and High-A West Michigan. Featuring plus command and a firm fastball that he delivers from a deceptive slot, he’s fanned 84 batters while allowing 21 walks and 66 hits. Over his last three starts, the Anaheim native has allowed just a pair of runs in 17 innings, with 10 strikeouts and nary a free pass.

Assigned a 35+ FV by Eric Longenhagen at the time our Tigers Top Prospects list came out in June, the young right-hander has since moved up to the 40+ FV tier thanks to his “burgeoning upside.” In the opinion of our lead prospect analyst, “his fastball’s impact alone should be enough to make him a good big league reliever even if his secondary stuff doesn’t develop.”

Melton, who has a marketing degree from SDSU’s Fowler College of Business, discussed his development path earlier this month.

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David Laurila: I was told that you have plus stuff. Would you call yourself a power pitcher?

Troy Melton: “I think I’m a mesh of a power guy and a control guy. Coming up in high school, I really didn’t throw very hard, so I kind of had to learn how to pitch. That definitely helped. There are always things to work on with command — you’re never going to be perfect — but that is something I feel I’m good at. I can throw four pitches for strikes, and kind of quadrant up with them too.” Read the rest of this entry »

When I’m not watching or writing about baseball, I like to play games. Board games, card games, video games — I’m not picky, I’m a fan of them all. I like them for many reasons: they help me keep my mind sharp, I love picking apart puzzles and trying to improve my own thought processes, and they’re just fun. One ancillary benefit: I end up hanging out with a lot of people who are younger than me.

At 37, I’m a card-carrying old in the gaming community. I can’t keep up with the youngsters in video games — my hand-eye coordination won’t cooperate — but in other arenas, I give as good as I get. It’s satisfying to butt heads with people much younger than me, and I think it helps to broaden my horizons. Also: I get to learn some wonderful slang. This is a long-winded intro that hasn’t been much about baseball, but there’s a slang payoff: “kids” these days like to call everything “mid,” and I love it.

Mid means more or less what you think it means: average or below-average. It’s broadly applicable, pejorative without being overly harsh, and conveys meaning quickly and efficiently. I’m a mid slang explainer, for example; not my fault, I’m too old to be better. But hearing one of my plays described as mid — a play I thought was perfectly average — got me wondering: who is the most mid hitter in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »