At risk of stating the obvious, Luis Arraez doesn’t strike out often. Since 2022, his first full season and the year he won his first batting title, Arraez has struck out 5.5% of the time. Let me put that into context. As of this morning, the Padres have a 6.0% chance to win the NL West. That means they are more likely to upset the baseball-ruining Dodgers than Arraez is to strike out in any given plate appearance. And that might be underselling his skills. In the second half of 2024, he reduced his strikeout rate even further, going down on strikes just five times over his final 57 games. That included baseball’s first 30-game strikeout-less streak in 20 years. Since the 2024 All-Star break, Arraez has struck out in 1.9% of his trips to the plate. Meanwhile, San Diego’s odds of winning the World Series currently sit at 2.2%. A pessimist might use that comparison to demonstrate that the Padres are long shots; 17 teams have a better chance to win it all. An optimist would counter that every time Arraez strikes out, it’s a reminder that the Padres are still World Series contenders. If that’s the way you see it, well, boy did the Padres get one heck of a reminder on Wednesday afternoon. For the first time all season, Arraez struck out.

It was the top of the ninth. The Padres were up 2-1. The inning began with a base hit by Martín Maldonado. That itself is a rare enough event. No other batter in recorded major league history has taken as many plate appearances as Maldonado (3,888) and has such a low batting average (.204) to show for it. Adding to the unlikelihood of Maldonado’s single, the batted ball had a mere .100 expected batting average, a 1-in-10 chance to be a hit. Yet, third baseman Max Schuemann, who entered the game that inning as a defensive replacement, flubbed the play. The ball slipped right out of his glove. As I watched his ill-fated attempt to retrieve the ball, I couldn’t help but think of my 6-year-old self trying to crossover dribble like Allen Iverson. Neither of us had any control of the ball:

With Maldonado on first, Arraez stepped up to the dish. He was already 0-for-4 with three fly outs, a strange enough day for a player who rarely hits fly balls. Since the day of his debut in 2019, Arraez has taken 2,916 plate appearances. Thirty-nine others have taken as many or more plate appearances in that time. None of them has a lower fly ball rate. But I’m getting off track. We aren’t here to talk about fly balls.

The pitcher on the mound was Justin Sterner, who somehow isn’t the A’s player with the closest-sounding name to a current or former Dodgers third baseman. Sterner, an offseason waiver claim from the Rays, has looked sharp so far in seven games for his new team. He entered this contest with nine strikeouts through his first six appearances. His 10th would be his most impressive yet. Arraez took Sterner’s first pitch, an 88-mph cutter on the upper-inside corner, for a strike. The count was 0-1:

Pitch number two was a 94-mph fastball that Arraez sent straight back into the crotch of catcher Shea Langeliers:

Is it funny when a man gets hit in the family jewels? I’ll let you decide for yourself. What I like so much about this moment isn’t the slapstick, but rather the subtle humor of how awkwardly Arraez behaves in the aftermath. One of my favorite bits from the little-known television comedy Friends is the scene where Ross picks up a lamp. That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw Arraez pick up that baseball. Why was his first instinct to pick up the ball as quickly as possible? I’m truly not sure. Was he worried someone would trip on it? Was he trying to hide the weapon? Or did he simply feel a need to do something, and picking up the ball was the first idea that popped into his head? He’s like a well-meaning but clueless husband trying to offer support while his wife is in labor. But instead of running for ice chips, he decided to pick up a baseball.

Arraez’s next move made more sense, as he went to pat Langeliers on the back. However, the consequences of his earlier actions soon returned to haunt him. He was still holding that damn baseball:

It became something of a dance for Arraez, who went back and forth between comforting Langeliers and dealing with the ball. It’s funny to watch because we’ve all been in that position before, facing a situation where we feel like we should help but there really isn’t much we can do. It’s even funnier in juxtaposition to the physical comedy of a man getting bopped in the beans. It’s certainly funnier than the A’s TV broadcaster suggesting they call the catcher “Shea Pain-geliers,” though perhaps not quite as funny as the Padres announcer blurting out, “They call him Langy!” in response to absolutely nothing (unless he was listening to the A’s broadcast). He just seemed to be reading the name plate on Langeliers’ chest protector because, much like Arraez, he wasn’t sure what else to do.

The third pitch of the at-bat was an 81-mph sweeper in the dirt. It never came close to Arraez, and indeed, he watched it bounce. Yet, seemingly still spooked by what happened on the previous pitch, he made a delayed effort to avoid getting hit. Maybe Arraez thought the ball was going to bounce off Langeliers and hit him in an act of swift poetic justice. That would explain why he shielded his face with his hand as he spun almost 360 degrees to avoid a projectile that did not come anywhere close to his body:

At long last, you’re all caught up on the series of incidents that set the stage for the strikeout. With a 1-2 count, Sterner threw another inside cutter, much like the first pitch of the at-bat. This time, however, he missed his spot badly:

The pitch hit Arraez squarely on his left thigh. Home plate umpire James Hoye called it strike three. The call was correct:

Indeed, there wasn’t anything controversial about it. Even as Arraez stood up and started walking to first base, and even when Mike Shildt came out to discuss the call, I don’t believe either was strong in his convictions. Simply put, it wasn’t close. This wasn’t a case of a batter accidentally bringing his bat around as he tried to avoid a missile hurtling toward him. Arraez began his swing with intention and didn’t even start to pull it back until the ball had already made contact with his body. Some umpires might be holding a grudge against Arraez for disparaging comments he made in spring training, but that’s not what this was. This was a strike:

Throughout his career, Arraez has only swung and missed at 16 of the 930 (1.7%) pitches he’s seen in the waste zone (per Statcast). That’s one-third of the league-average rate. Of the 257 batters who have seen at least 500 waste zone pitches since 2019, only five have a lower swing-and-miss rate than Arraez. It’s not often you’ll see him fail to make contact so miserably. In fact, having watched all 16 of his waste-zone whiffs, I could argue this was the single worst swing decision (category: context neutral) of his career.

Perhaps there was something in the air in Sacramento that day. After all, Maldonado got a hit, and Arraez did not. If that’s not a sign of the apocalypse, I don’t know what is. Supernatural or not, this strange, funny, and painful sequence of events that finally led to Arraez’s first strikeout is exactly why I love writing about baseball.

Oh, and did I mention it was his birthday?

In 2023, the Braves didn’t just lead the league in basically every offensive category, they posted historic numbers. They followed up that performance with a more middle-of-the-pack showing in 2024. Some of that downturn can be classified as regression to the mean, while some of it was definitely injury-related, with key contributors such as Ronald Acuña Jr., Ozzie Albies, Sean Murphy, and Austin Riley missing large chunks of the season. Moving forward, those theories imply that a healthy Braves lineup should perform somewhere in between their historically great 2023 and their exceptionally mediocre 2024. So far, however, the 2025 Braves have posted a gaunt 82 wRC+ as a team, creating anxiety that 2024 wasn’t just an unlucky draw from the low end of the range of possible outcomes, but rather something representative of a new normal, an indication that the range of possible outcomes in Atlanta has shifted downward. Of course, it’s too early to say for sure, especially since Acuña hasn’t made his 2025 debut, but batted ball and swing data, as well as changes in opponent pitching strategy, may offer insight into how pitchers have regained the upper hand when facing the Braves’ lineup.

If the extreme discrepancy in outcomes between 2023 and 2024 really was just variation within the error bars around Atlanta’s true talent level, then we’d expect to observe some amount of luck (good or bad) in their batted ball outcomes, which would lead their expected stats to diverge from their actual numbers, but the table below indicates their expected stats align pretty closely with reality:

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The SEC’s all-time hit king made his major league debut this week, to almost no fanfare. In some respects, the Tampa Bay Rays are a step down for Jake Mangum. The Rays currently play at Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field, capacity just over 11,000, while they await disposition after Hurricane Milton took the roof off the Trop last offseason.

Mangum played his college ball at Mississippi State, whose ballpark, Dudy Noble Field, holds 15,000, with a record attendance of 16,423 cowbell-whacking, barbecue-devouring maniacs. It’s one of the most electrifying (in good times) and demanding (in bad) environments in all of college sports. To someone who’s played at The Dude, as Mangum has, even the most raucous major league crowd probably feels like a Presbyterian church. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. I was at a wedding this past weekend, a generally fun event for a baseball writer. That’s because strangers ask me what I do, and then I get to say, “I’m a baseball writer.” That plays a lot better than, “I work in accounting/finance/tech,” no offense to any of you in those fine fields. But this weekend, someone inquired deeper. “Oh, like sabermetric stuff?” “Yeah! Kind of. Also I make GIFs of dumb and/or weird plays. And bunts, lots of bunts.” Yes, it’s a strange job being a baseball writer, but also a delightful one, and this week delivered whimsy and awe in equal amounts. So unlike guests milling around at a wedding, let’s get straight to the point – after the customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the inspiration for this article format.

1. Not Reaching Home
The third time a runner was tagged out at the plate in Wednesday’s Cardinals-Pirates clash came at a pivotal moment. Locked in a scoreless tie in the bottom of the 11th, Pittsburgh finally looked like it would break through when Joey Bart singled to right. But, well:

That was a good throw by Lars Nootbaar and a clean catch by Pedro Pagés, and that combination turned a close play into a gimme. I mean, how often are you going to be safe when the catcher already has the ball in his glove and you’re here:

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Their $200 million shortstop has grounded into more double plays than he’s hit singles. Their star center fielder is striking out 37% of the time. Their oft-injured third baseman is (sigh) injured again and won’t return until sometime next month, and their top starter left Tuesday night’s game with a hamstring injury. After squandering a playoff berth over the final quarter of last season, then mostly remaining on the sidelines this winter, the Twins opened this year by losing eight of their first 11 games, their worst start since 2016 — a season in which they went 59-103.

These Twins — who did win on Wednesday night to improve to 4-8 — aren’t likely to be that bad. In fact, our preseason Playoff Odds favored the Twins to win the AL Central, albeit with a modest 36.2% chance of winning the division and a forecast for just 84.1 wins, with the Tigers, Royals, and Guardians all packed within five wins of their total. The system estimated Minnesota had a 55.2% chance of making the playoffs, but so far this does not look like a team that belongs in the postseason.

The Twins stumbled out of the gate, dropping three straight to the Cardinals in St. Louis before getting stomped by the White Sox in Chicago, 9-0; through their first four games, they were outscored 28-6. They recovered to win their next two games against the White Sox, but then returned home and lost two out of three to the Astros. Now in Kansas City, the Twins have lost two out of their first three games of their four-game set against the Royals. The dispiriting start feels like a carry-over from last season’s collapse. To refresh your memory:

As of last August 17 — the last time they had a streak of more than two wins in a row, ahem — the Twins were 70-53, second in both the AL Central (two games behind the Guardians) and the AL Wild Card standings (a game and a half behind the Orioles), with a 92.4% chance of making the playoffs. Though their odds rose as high as 95.8% circa September 2, they proceeded to go just 12-27 after August 17, half a game better than the historically futile White Sox. At 82-80, they placed fourth in the division, 10 1/2 games out of first, and fifth in the Wild Card race, four games out. Adding insult to injury, both the Royals and Tigers (whose fortunes mirrored the Twins) earned Wild Card berths. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Boyd has exceeded most outside expectations. Selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft out of Oregon State University, the 34-year-old southpaw was ranked 29th when our 2015 Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list was published that March. He’d pitched well the previous year — a 3.17 ERA between High-A and Double-A — but as our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel wrote, “Some scouts still think there isn’t enough here to stick as a starter.” Given Boyd’s relatively short track record of success, the skepticism was understandable.

The left-hander’s own expectations were loftier, and he wasted little time in proving his doubters wrong. Boyd made his major league debut three months later, and not only did he do so as a starter, he’s gone on to make 170 of his 184 career appearances in that role. Now in his 11th big league season, and his first with the Chicago Cubs, Boyd has never been front-of-the-rotation good — his career ERA and FIP are 4.79 and 4.56 respectively — but he’s been effective when healthy. The problem is that Boyd often hasn’t been healthy; over the past four years alone, he’s missed 390 days of the season due to injury. It’s early, of course, but so far in 2025, Boyd has been both healthy and effective. Across his two starts, he’s thrown 11 scoreless innings.

What did Boyd’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 McDaniel wrote and asked Boyd to respond to it.

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“Boyd was a senior sign out of Oregon State in 2013 that got $75,000 in the 6th round after making real progress in his last amateur year.” Read the rest of this entry »

Some days, we analyze all of baseball here at FanGraphs, and maybe come up with some tools that will help predict all of future baseball. Injury-aware depth charts, payroll matrices, top prospect lists: You get the idea. Today, however, is not one of those days, at least not for me. That’s because after watching some videos of Tyler Soderstrom being very strong, I tried to figure out whether his early-season success will continue.

Being very strong is a valuable skill, at least when it comes to hitting a baseball. People don’t ooh and aah over Aaron Judge because his name makes for a fun fan section; they do it because he hits the ball so far. There are countless different ways to be good at hitting, but let’s be honest with each other: Being really strong is one of the best ways. Chicks don’t dig the well-placed opposite field sinking liner, you know? Or, if they do, no one made t-shirts about it.

How strong is Tyler Soderstrom? Well, watch this swing:

I’m sure you’ve heard of taking what the pitcher gives you, going to the opposite field when the ball is away rather than trying to pull it. I’m fairly certain that the people giving that advice don’t mean that you should flick your wrists and smash the ball over the fence at 100 miles an hour, though.
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This seems like an apt moment to reexamine the concept of value. What is a relief pitcher worth? What is anything worth? The context matters quite a bit. In boom times, when you can barely remember a past in which the arrow pointed any direction but up, the upside feels so real that it’s hard to resist. Sure, a premier setup man with a short track record is a luxury, but what’s the harm in splurging? In the darker times, when the eggs sitting in your refrigerator have suddenly gone from basic staples to commodities so precious that you can’t afford to waste them on something as trivial as breakfast, you need to hunt for value wherever you can find it.

For an Astros team determined to reset its luxury tax penalty, that means trading away reliever Rafael Montero and eating 72% of the money remaining on his contract in order to be free of the other 28%. For the Braves, reeling from a series of early-season setbacks, that means taking a chance on the discounted Montero and his untested splitter in exchange for a player to be named later. Read the rest of this entry »

Early enough in the season, you’ll find some weird stats. This is a well-established fact of baseball in April. There’s even a song about it. As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Kyle Tucker leads the league in position player WAR, with Aaron Judge third and Corbin Carroll fifth; if the leaderboard looked like that at the end of September, it’d probably be a mild surprise — a highly, highly lucrative one for Tucker — but nobody would write a book about how weird the 2025 season was or anything.

But Wilyer Abreu is second in WAR and Tyler Soderstrom is fourth. Both of them are promising young players, but nobody worth listening to had either one in the preseason MVP discussion.

In short, these things will shake out soon enough. There was an old saying to that effect: Baseball season hasn’t really started until Mike Trout leads the league in WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Liberatore was ranked eighth in one of the game’s top-rated farm systems when our 2019 Tampa Bay Rays Top Prospects list was released that January. Drafted 16th overall the previous summer out of Glendale, Arizona’s Mountain Ridge High School, the now 25-year-old southpaw was assigned a 50 FV by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel. Twelve months later, Liberatore was no. 3 — still with a 50 FV — on our 2020 St. Louis Cardinals Top Prospects list, which was published a week after Liberatore was traded to the NL Central club in a multi-player deal that included Randy Arozarena.

What did Liberatore’s 2019 and 2020 scouting reports look like? Moreover, what does he think of them all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what Eric and Kiley wrote and asked Liberatore to respond to it.

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January 2019:

“He was arguably the best high school pitcher in the class, evaluated heavily early on by the Giants (who picked second), before settling into the 7-13 range by June.”

“That’s pretty cool,” Liberatore replied. “I was highly scouted in my senior year — I think I had over 100 scouts at my first start — so I wouldn’t say it was one team in particular. I knew that I was going to be scouted through the first round, but there wasn’t necessarily any indication, right up until the draft, as to who was going to take me.”

“When [Kyler] Murray was selected, teams picking behind Oakland suddenly had access to one more player than they had anticipated… Other teams hadn’t considered the possibility that Libby would fall to them and either hadn’t done a lot of background work, or weren’t comfortable with how he might alter their bonus pool math.”

“I definitely thought the A’s were a possibility, and I was also told the Pirates were a possibility,” Liberatore recalled. “A couple minutes before the pick, we got a phone call saying [the A’s] chose to go another direction. I found out it was Kyler Murray. I figured he was probably going to go in the first round of the NFL draft in a couple of months, so I was definitely surprised by that. But I grew up going to Tampa every summer to visit family, and had been to plenty of Tampa Bay Rays games throughout my life, so to end up going to them at 16 ended up working out pretty well for me.”

“When Liberatore was at his best, he’d throw strikes with 93-97 for the first several innings of his starts, show you a 70 curveball, a good change, and alter the timing of his delivery to toy with hitters.”

“Pretty similar to now,” Liberatore opined. “I don’t necessarily quick pitch or do the hesitation to alter the hitter’s timing as much anymore, but that’s definitely not something that I’m crossing off the list. So, pretty similar scouting report to how I pitch now.”

“At other times, he’d sit 88-92 with scattershot command and get too cute with Johnny Cueto shenanigans.”

“Hmm. I mean, I’m not going to agree with that, necessarily,” Liberatore said. “You have days where you feel really good and go out there with your best stuff, and then you have days where you don’t feel so good and have to find other ways to get hitters out. If you look at my numbers in high school, I did a pretty good job of doing that. So, I wouldn’t say I got too cute with anything.”

Asked if he could directly address the Cueto comp — the way the veteran hurler will sometimes shimmy and turn before delivering a pitch — Liberatore said it was all about disrupting timing.

“Why do guys throw a breaking ball or a changeup?” he replied. “It’s all about altering timing, and that’s another way to do that. Some scouts didn’t like it. I had a guy come into my house and tell me to quit doing that. But if it gets outs it gets outs, and Johnny Cueto was doing it at the highest level of the game. And there are other guys that do the same thing. I don’t think that it ever hurt me at all.

“I actually used it as a reset a lot of times. If my regular delivery wasn’t working, I could go to one of those and find the right feel to lock me back in, sync me back up. I never viewed it as trying to trick the hitter outside of it being no different than throwing a changeup or a breaking ball to throw off the hitter’s timing. I mean, I’ve definitely toned it down since then. I do it rarely, but like I said before, it’s certainly not something I’m going to get away from forever.”

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January 2020:

“Because Liberatore’s fastball has sinker movement, the growth of this changeup is going to be the most important aspect of his development, since those two pitches have similar movement and will theoretically tunnel better.”

“I throw two different fastballs,” Liberatore said. “One of them has sinker movement, and one of them is a little more hoppy. I think the development of the cutter has been bigger than the development of the changeup for me. Being able to own the inner half of the plate is something that has helped me quite a bit.

“I’ve thrown both my whole life. The two-seam, if you look at it in a vacuum, is a pretty average analytical pitch. But it plays off the rest of my arsenal. It doesn’t sink, but it runs into left-handers so I’m able to show them a slight difference in shape without having to change the velocity.”

“His knockout curveball has all-world depth… it’s the type of pitch that’s hard to hit even if you know it’s coming, but it might be easy to lay off of in the dirt, because its Loch Ness hump is easy to identify out of the hand.”

“Yeah. I think it all depends on how you use your other stuff around it,” Liberatore said. “If you throw any pitch every single time, it’s going to be easier to pick up. That’s why I’ve always kept that four-seam fastball, to be able to show guys something up in the zone, to tunnel off of that curveball. Yeah, it can be easy to lay off at times, but if I start landing it for a strike you have to honor it. I think it can definitely be a knockout pitch for me.”

“The total package should result in an above-average big league starter.”

“I’ll take that.”

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Previous “Old Scouting Reports Revisited” interviews can be found through these links: Cody Bellinger, Dylan Cease, Matt Chapman, Ian Happ, Jeff Hoffman.