Will Brennan is a hot hitter on a Cleveland Guardians team that has struggled to produce at the plate. Over his last eight games, the 25-year-old rookie outfielder is 14-for-29 with four doubles and a home run. Rebounding from a slow start, he is now slashing .261/.298/.380 with an 88 wRC+ on the season.

How good of a hitter Brennan will be at the big league level remains to be seen. An eighth-round pick in 2019 out of Kansas State University, he debuted last September and slashed .357/.400/.500 in 45 plate appearances, this after posting a .314/.371/.479 line between Double-A Akron and Triple-A Columbus. Currently no. 7 on our Guardians top prospects list, he was described by our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen as a hitter who generates “doubles power with a compact swing and all-fields approach to contact.”

Brennan sat down to talk hitting when the Guardians visited Fenway Park at the end of April. Read the rest of this entry »

The prospect ranks are as high as an elephant’s eye at Castellini Farms. The Reds may have entered this rebuilding cycle with all the grace of an angry cat trying to get a cereal box off its head (as opposed to the awkward toe-dipping of the last go-around), but through trades and their own scouting, they’ve accumulated an impressive amount of talent in the minors. By our in-progress farm system rankings, only the Baltimore Orioles place higher for the 2023 season. Mean ol’ Grandpa ZiPS agrees; the Reds had seven prospects on the preseason ZiPS Top 100, a total that trailed only the Guardians and the O’s. Baltimore and Cincinnati combined seem to have about 80% of the shortstop prospects in baseball.

Whether you go by human or machine, no Red ranked more highly this winter than Elly De La Cruz, who was no. 6 (60 FV) on the prospect team’s Top 100 and no. 15 on the ZiPS list. After an impressive 2021 full-season debut, De La Cruz cranked things up a notch in 2022, hitting 28 homers and slugging .586 combined across High- and Double-A despite only being 20 years old. Questions still remain about his long-term defensive position, but his bat has proved to be even more potent for Triple-A Louisville, as he hit 12 home runs in a mere 38 games and is already two-thirds of the way to last year’s walk total. He’s responsible for the International League’s ERA going up by nearly half a run a game from 2022! OK, I made that last bit up, but you had to actually think about it for a full second before you smelled burning khaki. Read the rest of this entry »

Across a career in baseball that spanned over 40 years, Roger Craig was at various points a hotshot rookie who helped the Dodgers win their only championship in Brooklyn, the first and best pitcher on an historically awful Mets team, the answer to a trivia question linking the Dodgers and Mets, a well-traveled pitching coach who shaped a championship-winning Tigers staff, and a culture-changing, pennant-winning manager of the Giants. He was particularly beloved within the Giants family for his positive demeanor and the way he shook the franchise out of the doldrums, though it was via his role as a teacher and evangelist of the split-fingered fastball — the pitch of the 1980s, as Sports Illustrated and others often called it — that he left his greatest mark on the game.

Craig didn’t invent the splitter, which owed its lineage to the forkball, a pitch that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s, but he proved exceptionally adept at teaching it to anyone eager to learn, regardless of team. For the pitch, a pitcher splits his index and middle fingers parallel to the seams, as in a forkball grip, but holds the ball further away from the palm, and throws with the arm action of a fastball. The resulting pitch “drops down in front of the batter so fast he don’t know where it’s goin’,” Craig told Playboy in 1988. “To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a fastball that’s also got the extra spin of a curveball.”

Given its sudden drop, the pitch was often mistaken for a spitball, so much so that it was sometimes referred to as “a dry spitter.” It baffled hitters and helped turn journeymen into stars, and stars into superstars. After pioneering reliever Bruce Sutter rode the pitch to the NL Cy Young Award in 1979, pitchers such as Mike Scott, Mark Davis, Orel Hershiser, and Bob Welch either learned the pitch directly from Craig, or from someone Craig taught, and themselves took home Cy Youngs in the 1980s. Jack Morris, Ron Darling, and Dave Stewart won championships with the pitch, as did Hershiser. Years later, the likes of Roger Clemens, David Cone, Curt Schilling, and John Smoltz would find similar success with the pitch, though it eventually fell out of vogue due to a belief that it caused arm problems, an allegation that Craig hotly refuted.

Not that Craig was a hothead. Indeed, he was even-keeled, revered within the game for his positivity. Such traits were reflected in the tributes paid to him after he died on Sunday at the age of 93, after what his family said was a short illness. “We have lost a legendary member of our Giants family.” Giants CEO Larry Baer said in a statement. “Roger was beloved by players, coaches, front-office staff and fans. He was a father figure to many and his optimism and wisdom resulted in some of the most memorable seasons in our history.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, in his update on pitch mix, my colleague Davy Andrews told a tale as old as time (or at least 2008, when the pitch-tracking era began): fastball usage is on the decline, largely to the benefit of sliders (and sweepers). But this year, there’s a new wrinkle: cutter usage is on the rise, too.

Per Statcast, pitchers are turning to cutters more than they have in any season since 2008. That usage is still at just 7.6%, but the year-over-year jump of 0.7% is the second highest on record. Plus, as Davy and the folks over at Prospects Live put it, a lot of the cutter’s value lies purely in its mere existence; it doesn’t have to be used a ton to be a worthwhile offering. That’s because, out of a pitcher’s hand, the cutter bears resemblance to both a fastball and a slider. When pitchers are struggling to tunnel their heater and slide-piece, the problem might be that there’s simply too large a movement and/or velocity gap between the two offerings — one that a cutter can bridge. As long as the hitter has to think not only about the dissimilar fastball and slider, but also a cutter, it can make a big difference, even if the cutter doesn’t show up all that often.

Along those lines, horizontal movement gaps between fastballs and sliders have only grown in the age of the sweeper. The new “riding slider” also tends to have larger platoon splits than other similar breakers, which is where the cutter can come in handy yet again due to its relative platoon neutrality. Read the rest of this entry »

Intending no disrespect to the Minnesota Twins, a lovely team with plenty of commendable players, but the AL Central is a bit of a joke this year. I guess that’s not too surprising — the Central champion has either had or shared the lowest win total among the American League division winners every year since 2017. But as of this writing, the Twins are just one game over .500, a record that would put them in a battle for fourth place (at best) in four of the five other divisions in baseball; nevertheless Minnesota is securely in first place.

Maybe 30 Rock was right, everything is easier in the Midwest. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Mains did some digging into home field advantage and found a very curious effect: home teams did worse in extra inning games than in regular-season games. More specifically, he found that home teams won roughly 54% of games overall but only roughly 52% of extra inning games. There are no two ways about it: that’s strange.

Mains looked into many potential explanations for this discrepancy: team quality, pitcher quality, games that were tied going into the ninth, and various ways of looking at how teams have adapted to the zombie runner era. Today, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with a slightly different way of thinking about why home teams are less successful in extras than they are overall.

My immediate thought when I heard this problem was something Ben Lindbergh mentioned on Effectively Wild: home field advantage accrues slowly, and extra innings have fewer innings than regulation. The minimum scoring increment in baseball is one run, naturally. Home field advantage is clearly less than a run per inning; it’s less than a run per game. I like to think of home field advantage as fractionally more plays going the home team’s way. A called strike here, a ball that lands in the gap instead of being caught there, and eventually one of those plays might put an extra run on the board. Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Votto is nearing the end of a career that should land him in the Hall of Fame. Three months shy of his 40th birthday, the Toronto native has played 16 seasons, all with the Cincinnati Reds, and has a career .297/.412/.513 slash line to go with a 146 wRC+. A six-time All-Star and former NL MVP, he has led the senior circuit in OBP seven times, and in walks six times. Moreover — this amid criticism from the segment of the Cincinnati fanbase who feels he is too passive at the plate — his left-handed stroke has produced 2,093 hits, including 453 doubles and 342 home runs.

Currently on a rehab assignment with Triple-A Louisville, Votto is recovering from rotator cuff and biceps surgery and has yet to play in a big league game this year. He sat down to talk hitting when the Reds visited Fenway Park last week.

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David Laurila: Is hitting easy, or is it hard?

Joey Votto: “Well, it’s the only thing I’ve done, so I don’t have much to compare it to. I failed my math exam. High school math may be more difficult than major league hitting.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers, as you might have heard, are in first place. And that doesn’t even tell the whole story; the Rangers are currently on a 106-win pace, and believe it or not, they’re underperforming their Pythagorean record by four games. And they’ve done a lot of it without the best pitcher in the world.

Jacob deGrom, foremost among the numerous high-profile free agent arms Texas has invested in over recent years, has spent the past month on the IL with elbow inflammation. A slow recovery led the Rangers to move the two-time Cy Young winner to the 60-day IL on Monday. That precludes deGrom from returning to action before the end of June — which may or may not have been in the cards anyway.

But the Rangers have coped just fine without deGrom throughout May thanks in no small part to Dane Dunning, who started the year as a reliever but has matched deGrom’s results. Read the rest of this entry »

As far as ballplayers go, Chris Sale and Cal Quantrill don’t have a whole lot in common. Sale is an established star, with the resume and salary to prove it; Quantrill only recently completed his first full season as a starting pitcher. At his peak, Sale was the preeminent strikeout artist in baseball and arguably the best of all time; Quantrill has the lowest K-rate among qualified pitchers this season. Both have gone under the knife for Tommy John surgery, but while Quantrill has been the picture of health ever since, Sale has yet to return to his former glory.

This past Friday, these two dissimilar pitchers found themselves in the same boat when they landed on the injured list with shoulder inflammation, just days before their respective clubs were due to face off in a three-game set. Shoulder inflammation is a vague descriptor, and the prognosis for it can vary widely. Sometimes a pitcher will only miss a couple of starts to let the pain subside, but in a worst-case scenario, shoulder problems can lead to season-ending surgery. There is no reason to believe, as of yet, that either Sale or Quantrill will need to go the surgical route, but it also seems unlikely that either will return as soon as the minimum 15 days are up. Sale will undergo further testing and might not have a proper diagnosis until this weekend. Quantrill, meanwhile, has stopped throwing altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates are having a relatively successful 2023, as the team has defied expectations and is currently in second place in the NL Central, just a half-game behind the first-place Brewers. The record on the field isn’t the only thing coming up Pirate this year: the team successfully signed Bryan Reynolds to an eight-year, $106.75 million contract extension, ending the eternal and well-founded speculation about which team the Bucs would trade him to and when. With Ke’Bryan Hayes already signed to a $70 million extension — then the largest dollar figure for a contract in franchise history — Pittsburgh has discussed locking up two other foundational talents, Mitch Keller and Oneil Cruz.

Despite the Pirates signing a nine-figure deal with Reynolds, it would be a mistake to assume that it foreshadows a new era in team spending that gets them into the next tier up in the spending ranks. The last time they finished even 20th in baseball in payroll was 20 years ago, in 2003, and they’re usually in the bottom five. There they will stay, but if they spend a good proportion of that self-limited budget on their best young talent, they get their best shots at the NL Central and don’t explicitly look like a stop for young players between Triple-A and the majors. To manage this, Pittsburgh has to sign its young players sooner rather than later, and absorb additional risk.

Of these two players, Keller’s extension is probably the more urgent matter to attend to. The least expensive time to sign him would have been a few years ago, when he was struggling to adjust to the majors and the Pirates could, as noted above, defray some of the cost by taking on that additional risk that he’d never develop. Keller is eligible to hit free agency after the 2025 season, so there’s a real ticking clock here; the longer the Pirates take to come to an agreement, the less financial reason their ace has to take one and the less talent would come to Pittsburgh in the event of a trade. Now that Keller’s breakout appears to be a reality and not a fluke or merely speculation about the future, he has a lot more financial leverage than he did a year ago.

While Keller worked out most of his remaining command issues last season, he still suffered a bit from having strikeout stuff but not being great at actually collecting those Ks. The full version of ZiPS still sees his improved swinging-strike rate not supporting the impressive 50% bump in his overall strikeout rate, but it does agree that his performance in 2023 in this department represents real and significant improvement. As such, Keller has one of the biggest bumps among pitchers from his preseason long-term projection. Even the simpler in-season projection version of ZiPS still has him finishing in the top five in the NL in WAR, behind just Zac Gallen, Zack Wheeler, Spencer Strider, and Logan Webb.

Perhaps the most striking example of Keller’s continued breakout is just how improved his cohort of most similar past pitchers is. Here are the top 50 pitchers in ZiPS similarity (with the specific year at which their baseline is similar) for Keller both before 2023 and now:

You will note that I didn’t label which column was which, because I’m just that confident that you’ll know in about a half-second of glancing which list is the better one!

In sum, ZiPS suggests a fair six-year deal right now would be six years, $116 million:

This reflects the fact that he has two more years of arbitration; a projected offer as a free agent would be six years, $153 million, or seven years, $171 million.

Despite being a shortstop — for now at least — rather than a pitcher, Cruz is the riskier of the pair. He’s less established in the majors than Keller and is currently on the IL with a fractured ankle, making a projection that much trickier. But when agreeing to a mutually beneficial contract, you basically have to pay either in currency or risk, and if the Pirates don’t want to give up a ton of the former, they’ll have to be willing to pay by taking on a bunch of the latter. Even if the current injury makes the atmosphere a little too much like gambling for either side of the negotiations, a healthy Cruz — which is expected to be a thing sometime around August — should be enough to kickstart talks.

Cruz was one of my breakout picks this year, and while the ankle means that’s one that I’m unlikely to get right, he still has a great deal of upside with his game-changing power. And his contact issues, while concerning, are at least a problem that you can pinpoint; it only take a few percentage points of a bump in contact rate for ZiPS to start projecting him with Javier Báez’s prime. Cruz had already shown an uptick in his nine games this year, walking seven times as his contact rate hit 70%. Nine games is a pitifully small sample size, even for less volatile numbers, but it’s certainly better than those numbers going in the opposite direction!

Cruz has more upside than Hayes does, but the latter is healthy and closer to his potential than the former is to his higher potential, and the contract projection comes out similarly to the extension that Hayes signed: a seven-year, $67 million extension that delays Cruz’s free agency by two years.

Will contracts like these single-handedly make the Pirates a perennial contender? No, but signing young players to long-term deals at least gives them the path to long-term relevance in the NL Central and gives a fanbase that’s been beaten up for 30 years some hope that it’ll get to see PNC Park be the long-term home for the team’s core rather than a set of turnstiles.