The Padres continue to sputter along, below .500 (27-32) and outside the playoff picture. While Juan Soto has heated up, Manny Machado has extended the slump that he was in before landing on the injured list with a fractured metacarpal, and Xander Bogaerts has underperformed while playing through a lingering wrist issue for the past month. As for Fernando Tatis Jr., he’s returned from a lost season that included a wrist fracture and an 80-game suspension for using a banned substance, and while he’s been one of the Padres’ most productive hitters, his performance has been uneven, well short of his superstar-level showings from 2019-21.

The circumstances surrounding Tatis’ left wrist fracture have yet to be clarified fully, in part because he could not communicate with the Padres during the lockout, but he’s believed to have suffered the injury during one of the multiple (!) motorcycle accidents he was involved in while in the Dominican Republic during the 2021-22 offseason. He apparently did not start feeling the effects of the injury until he began taking swings in mid-February in preparation for spring training, but only after the lockout ended did the team discover the injury. He underwent surgery to repair his scaphoid bone on March 16, and his recovery took longer than expected. Four games into his rehab stint, Major League Baseball announced that he had incurred an 80-game suspension for testing positive for Clostebol, an anabolic steroid prohibited under the league’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program, a shock and disappointment given both his growing stature within the game and the tantalizing possibility of him joining a revamped Padres lineup.

Tatis’ suspension ran through the Padres’ final 48 regular season games, their 12-game postseason run (during which they reached the National League Championship Series after upsetting both the 101-win Mets and 111-win Dodgers), and their first 20 games of this season. When he took the field on April 20, in the Padres’ 21st game, he was 18 1/2 months removed from his last regular season major league game. That’s a substantial slice of time in a 24-year-old player’s life. Read the rest of this entry »

As a hitting mechanics nerd, there are a few players on my shortlist of guys who I would love to get in the cage with and talk about their process, development, and mindset in the batter’s box. J.D. Martinez is one of them. He’s established a reputation for himself as a cerebral hitter. It was a key reason for his breakout season in 2014, his rebound in 2021 after a rough shortened season in 2020, and now his resurgence in 2023. Despite an IL stint earlier this month for a back issue, Martinez has destroyed baseballs recently and pushed his wRC+ up to a 146 on the season. In May alone, he posted a 172 wRC+ and .392 ISO.

His power stroke is back after working on recovering it with Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc throughout spring training and the opening month of the season. The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya spoke to Martinez and Van Scoyoc in early April about Martinez losing efficiency in one of the most important aspects of his swing: his hand row. Martinez pointed to a line of physical compensations in his swing as a result of an ankle injury from the 2018 World Series that he reaggravated down the stretch in 2021. When you’re as in tune with your mechanics and where your barrel is in space as Martinez is, these little aggravations can significantly impact the way you understand how your body is moving. Before jumping into some video showing how Martinez has changed since last year with Boston, let’s take a look at some batted ball and performance data that detail how much better he has been this season:

Read the rest of this entry »

Taj Bradley has had an up-and-down rookie season with the Rays, but only in terms of promotions and demotions. The 22-year-old right-hander has twice been optioned to Triple-A, and three times he’s been summoned back to the big leagues. He might be in Tampa Bay to stay. Over six starts comprising 30 innings, Bradley has logged a 3.62 ERA and a 2.82 FIP, with wins in three of five decisions. Moreover, he’s fanned 42 batters while issuing just five free passes.

The level of composure he’s displayed belies his age and inexperience. While many players performing on the big stage for the first time have a fast heartbeat, his has been borderline bradycardia. In a word, Bradley is chill.

“I’m not the kind of person to get too caught up in anything,” the 2018 fifth-round pick out of Stone Mountain, Georgia’s Redan High School told me on Friday. “If I were to meet a celebrity, or pitch in a big game, I wouldn’t be making too much of a moment of it. I always downplay things. I mean, you do get your nerves, but I don’t build it up. Someone might say, ‘Oh, you made your debut,’ or ‘Oh, you got a win against the Red Sox,’ but I just go about my day.”

Bradley’s debut, which came at home in a spot start against Boston on April 12, did elicit emotions. Being unflappable may be in his DNA, but it’s not as though he’s an unfeeling cyborg. Nearly two months later, the game remains a blur. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small sample sizes. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones in something like ZiPS or simply personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of homers allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that what StatCast provides gives us the ability to get what is more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in the various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example: when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag, over the same time period, only became hits 10.6% of the time and toward the second base side, 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.

ZiPS doesn’t discard actual stats; the actual models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. For data on how zStats relate to actual stats, I’ve talked more about this here and here.

But you’re here to see the numbers themselves, not the exposition, so let’s star wipe to the main storyline. Read the rest of this entry »

After breaking their long postseason drought last year, the Mariners entered 2023 with some lofty expectations led by Julio Rodríguez, the AL Rookie of the Year, and a cadre of young pitchers. Seattle got off to a slow start in April, limping to a 12–16 record during the first month of the season. Things got a little better in May, but the team really turned on the jets over the last week and half, cruising through a 7–3 homestand that pushed its record to 29–27.

The real story of the week was Rodríguez, who earned American League Player of the Week honors by collecting 14 hits, six extra-base hits, and seven RBIs. He added another four hits and a home run against the Yankees earlier this week, raising his wRC+ from 86 to 111 in the span of these ten games.

Even though the Mariners have one of the best pitching staffs in the majors and a top-tier defense, the ongoing struggles of their offense have held them back to start this season. They’ve scored 4.45 runs per game thus far with a team wRC+ of 97, a little below league average. The slow start from Rodríguez has been a key aspect of that lack of production, though there are other (non) contributors too. Still, it seems like as Julio goes, the Mariners go.

Rodríguez got off to a similar slow start during his rookie campaign last year: through April, he was batting just .205/.284/.260 with a 61 wRC+ and a gaudy 37.0% strikeout rate. He hit his first major league home run on May 1, though, and never looked back from there. This year, his struggles were a little more pronounced and prolonged: through May 21, he was slashing .204/.280/.376, good for an 86 wRC+ with a 28.5% strikeout rate. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — It would be an understatement to say that the Mets have had catching issues in recent years as they’ve cycled through aging free agents, but they finally have a homegrown solution at hand in Francisco Álvarez. The 21-year-old Venezuela native entered the season as the game’s top catching prospect, and while he lacked a clear path to playing time, a double whammy of injuries cleared the way. So far Álvarez has impressed while gaining the trust of the pitching staff’s veterans, including Max Scherzer. On Thursday afternoon, the three-time Cy Young winner and the rookie clicked for the former’s best start of the season. 

Scherzer completed seven innings for the second start in a row, and struck out a season-high nine hitters. The effort helped secure a 4-2 win that completed a three-game sweep of the Phillies and pulled the Mets (30-27) to within 3.5 games of the NL East-leading Braves (33-23), the closest they’ve been since May 1.

Leaning on his four-seam fastball more than usual, particularly with two strikes, Scherzer set season highs for whiffs (22) and CSW% (called strikes plus whiffs as a percentage of total pitches, 36%) as well as strikeouts. Fifteen of those whiffs came via his fastball, which generated a 49% CSW%. Afterwards, Scherzer cited his catcher’s game-calling as the key to his performance:

“I thought today, the most important thing was sequencing, I thought we were mixing up what we want to do, he’s great with it. He’s understanding how I think and pitch. 

“When you catch that rhythm, you kind of know how to keep turning through a lineup and how you’re going to face them the first time, the second time, the third time. I had good stuff, but I thought the sequencing was even better.”

Scherzer credited Álvarez with helping him get more comfortable with the PitchCom system, of which he was critical last year while adopting it with reservations. “I want Alvy to call the game, I don’t want to have to override him, I don’t want to have to call a pitch unless I really know it,” he said. “We’re not using any fingers. And that’s a big change for me, it’s so foreign just being on PitchCom. But working with him, we’re in a good rhythm.”

It took the better part of the first inning to establish that rhythm on Thursday, as one of Álvarez’s weaknesses was spotlighted. After yielding a one-out single to Trea Turner, Scherzer walked Bryce Harper, and when he threw a low-and-away fastball to Nick Castellanos on 1-2, Turner led the way on a double steal attempt. Álvarez’s throw sailed to the left of third baseman Brett Baty and into left field as Turner scored on the error; Harper took third, then came home on Castellanos’ sacrifice fly, putting the Mets in a 2-0 hole.

The steals were Álvarez’s 35th and 36th allowed this season, the NL’s third-highest total; he’s thrown out just five baserunners, for a success rate of 12%. By Statcast’s catcher throwing metrics, which control for the distance of the leadoff, runner speed, pitch location, pitcher and batter handedness, and more, Álvarez’s -2 Catcher Stealing Runs is tied for the major’s third-lowest mark. His average pop time of 1.94 seconds places him in the 67th percentile but is notably higher than the occasional sub-1.80 times noted in his prospect report, neutralizing his plus arm at least somewhat.

(So long as we’re peeking at defensive data, it’s worth noting that Álvarez’s blocking and framing have both scored well in the early going via Statcast; he’s one run above average in the former category, and three runs above in the latter. By FanGraphs’ framing data, he’s 4.9 runs above average, good for fourth in the majors, and by the framing-inclusive version of Defensive Runs Saved — which is not used in the calculation of bWAR — his six runs above average is tied for the major league lead.)

Beyond the throwing mishap, Álvarez didn’t have any further troubles behind the plate. Facing old friend Taijuan Walker, the Mets scratched out a run in the third inning on two walks and a Jeff McNeil single, then took the lead in the fourth on Mark Canha’s two-run homer, and added an insurance run in the sixth via Mark Vientos‘ sacrifice fly. Scherzer scattered four additional hits but didn’t walk another batter or allow another run after the first, and the bullpen — Jeff Brigham, Brooks Raley, and Drew Smith — preserved the lead and wrapped up the win.

Álvarez has caught three of Scherzer’s last four starts, a span during which he’s allowed just four runs (three earned) in 25 innings while looking like a future Hall of Famer who’s still got plenty of good innings remaining. That’s a big change from a few weeks ago, after physical woes and an ejection for using a foreign substance limited Scherzer to 6.1 innings in a 33-day span: 

Álvarez has started 32 of the Mets’ first 57 games due to the injuries of Omar Narváez and Tomás Nido, which wasn’t what the team initially planned for the no. 13 prospect on our preseason Top 100 list. He was initially assigned to Triple-A Syracuse, where he played 45 games last year after a 67-game stint at Double-A Binghamton. Álvarez hit a combined .260/.374/.511 between the two stops last year, earning a five-game cup of coffee with the Mets as well as a spot on the postseason roster.

Given the abysmal .217/.264/.306 performance the Mets got from their catchers (mainly Nido and James McCann), and the lack of offense they received from righty designated hitter Darin Ruf, fans clamored for Álvarez to arrive in Queens even sooner than he did. It’s not hard to imagine that heeding those calls could have made the difference in a division race where the 101-win Mets and Braves were separated only by a head-to-head tiebreaker that forced New York to play a Wild Card Series (which it lost) while Atlanta received a first-round bye.

The Mets signed the 31-year-old Narváez to a two-year, $15 million deal this past winter, hoping he could mentor Álvarez while upgrading a perennial weak spot. Since 2018 — when Travis d’Arnaud tore his ulnar collateral ligament early in April — through the end of last season, the team’s catchers hit for just a 76 wRC+, tied for 23rd in the majors, and produced a meager 2.8 WAR, which ranked 25th. Wilson Ramos, whom the team signed to a two-year, $19 million free agent deal in December 2018, accounted for more than half of that WAR (1.5) in ’19 while hitting for a 106 wRC+, the only average-or-better performance by a Mets catcher with at least 120 PA in that five-season span.

Ramos’ 2020 decline prompted the ill-advised signing of McCann to a four-year, $40.6 million deal in December of that year. He netted just 0.9 WAR in the first two seasons of that contract before being traded to the Orioles for a player to be named later (Luis De La Cruz) in December, with the Mets eating $19 million of the $24 million remaining on his deal. McCann was limited to 53 games last year due to a fractured hamate and an oblique strain. That’s how Nido, whose only previous full season on a major league roster since 2017 was in the pandemic-shortened ’20 season, made a career-high 86 starts. He hit a meager .239/.276/.324 (74 wRC+) but was good for 7.2 framing runs by our metric, and six by that of Statcast, with an additional three runs above average in blocking and one in stolen base prevention via the latter source.

Narváez, who hit for just a 71 wRC+ last year but owns a career 101 mark and was worth 2.8 WAR as recently as 2021, was slated to start ahead of Nido, but he played just five games before suffering a medium-to-high-grade strain of his left calf and landing on the 60-day injured list, which led the Mets to summon Álvarez from Syracuse. While team officials had insisted during the spring that if Álvarez was in the majors, he would catch regularly, manager Buck Showalter didn’t seem to be in a hurry to write him into the lineup, telling reporters that the rookie would receive “some” playing time but making clear he was the understudy by saying, “It’s kind of like a backup quarterback that gets drafted out of college. Everybody knows he’s going to be a really good player, but the time he spends as a backup is very valuable too.” 

Álvarez started just two of the first seven games for which he was on the active roster; the Mets lost both while winning the other five, all started by Nido. But whether or not Showalter needed a nudge from above, Álvarez soon began getting more reps. From April 15 to the end of the month, he started nine games to Nido’s seven, though he hit just .194/.216/.278 in 51 plate appearances for April. Nido was even less productive at the plate, however, and after getting just one more start on May 5, he went on the IL with “dry eye syndrome” and an eye-watering .118/.148/.118 (-25) batting line in 55 PA himself. 

Since the beginning of May, Álvarez has started 22 of the team’s 30 games, with Michael Perez and Gary Sánchez each starting two games apiece to give him a breather; both have since departed, with the former back in Syracuse and the latter in San Diego. Nido, who made a late-inning cameo after being activated on May 25, only made his first start since returning on Wednesday night. The repetitions allowed Álvarez to settle in, and it paid off handsomely, as he hit .292/.363/.667 with seven homers in May, including five in an eight-game span from May 17–26. For the month, he led the team’s regulars in slugging percentage and placed second in homers behind Pete Alonso. Even with an 0-for-3 on Thursday, he’s batting .252/.308/.523 for a 129 wRC+, third on the team behind Alonso (141 wRC+) and Brandon Nimmo (131 wRC+). His total of eight homers is already the most by any 21-or-under catcher since Ivan Rodriguez in 1993.

“I can’t say enough good things about him,” said Justin Verlander of Álvarez recently. “I think we all know the bat is going to be there. But the work he’s done behind the plate, and the work he’s done to get to know the pitchers, and the improvements he’s made already, it’s just a great sign for him as a future major leaguer.” Grizzled veterans such as Carlos Carrasco and David Robertson have sung his praises for his preparation and handling of the staff, while hitting coach Jeremy Barnes has commended his willingness to make adjustments to what had too often been an all-or-nothing approach. Notably, where Álvarez struck out 35.1% of the time in April, he’s trimmed that to 19.3% since, and where he didn’t have a single barrel in April, he’s barreled 13.6% of his batted balls since.

With Nido now back and Narváez in Syracuse on his rehab assignment, the Mets will soon face a catching crunch. Showalter said back in April that he would consider DHing Álvarez when he’s not catching, “if he shows he’s an offensive force up here,” which he has. That could be bad news for Vientos, who has hit just .192/.214/.308 in 28 PA while serving mainly as a platoon partner for lefty DH Daniel Vogelbach.

Showalter didn’t mention DH duty on Thursday when asked about the potential crowd of catchers, sounding as though he expected to carry all three. “I’m gonna make use of all of ’em,” he said. “Tomás had a good game last night behind the plate, got a base hit, I think we won’t forget he’s been a good catcher for us. Omar’s around the corner, but I kind of like where Francisco is. I’m not gonna box anybody out.”

All of which suggests that at the very least, the kid stays in the picture. While Álvarez is far from a finished product, he’s clearly a special one.

“He just has instincts. You can never teach instincts, you either have it or you don’t. He’s kind of got that it factor to him,” said Scherzer. “He just needs to continue to learn and continue to get experience, and he’ll continue to get better… As long as he has that attitude, and wants to get better every single day, he’s gonna be a great player.”

Rowdy Tellez has stopped swinging. Not entirely; he’s tied for ninth in the National League with 12 home runs and 20th with a .494 slugging percentage. But this year, the Brewers slugger has cut at just 35.3% of all pitches, the second-lowest rate in baseball after the famously choosy Juan Soto. It’s uncharacteristic of Tellez, representing an eight-point drop from last year and a 13.2-point drop from his 2021 campaign. The new approach has done wonders for his chase rate: his O-Swing%, which was 35.2% in 2021 and 31.0% in 2022, is now 33rd in the majors at 25.9%. And while he’s never been a terribly impatient hitter, cutting back on swings at bad pitches has meant a rising walk rate, which isn’t quite Soto-esque at 12.0% but is a marked improvement from his 7.1% rate two years ago. That alone will get you on base an extra 30 or so times over a full season.

Tellez started to change his approach last year, swinging at fewer and fewer pitches than he had through the first three-plus seasons of his career. For most of his time in Toronto, he offered at somewhere between 48% and 50% of pitches he saw, but right around the time he was dealt to Milwaukee in 2021, he got a fair bit more aggressive with pitches over the plate, cutting at 73.9% of strikes and just 34.5% of pitches outside the zone. Since then, the aggression at the plate has given way to radical levels of patience:

Now, stop me if you can guess what the problem with never swinging the bat is: he’s taking a lot more strikes. While everyone else in the league is swinging at a majority of the pitches they see in the zone, Tellez is offering at just 47.4%, nearly seven points lower than any of his contemporaries. If he keeps this up, he’ll be the first qualifier to swing at less than half of pitches in the zone since David Fletcher in 2019 and ’20. In the 22 seasons of our Z-Swing% data, his 47.4% rate would be second-lowest over a full season, beating only Brett Gardner’s 44.8% in 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, Diamond Sports Group declared bankruptcy. That dry corporate action, precipitated by a huge debt burden, is starting to have real world consequences. This Tuesday, DSG missed a payment to the San Diego Padres, as Alden Gonzalez first reported for ESPN. That terminated the contract between Bally Sports (a Diamond subsidiary) and the Padres. By Wednesday, the Padres were off of Bally and broadcasting their own games via Major League Baseball.

That’s a pretty big escalation in what until now felt like a slow-moving situation. In fact, in bankruptcy court, Rob Manfred testified that the league received less than one day’s notice of this missed payment. “[They told us] less than 24 hours before they were going to go off the air that they were going to stop broadcasting Padres games,” he said. (Diamond’s lawyers have contested that timeline.) That led to the Padres terminating their contract with Bally Sports, naturally enough, and to MLB stepping in to broadcast games.

It’s no accident that the league was ready to wade into daily game production. They hired Billy Chambers, formerly a Fox Sports and Diamond Sports executive, as executive vice president of Local Media earlier this year. Hiring a regional sports network executive is a pretty good way to start building your own regional sports capabilities, and the league appears to have moved quickly here. Read the rest of this entry »

The calendar just flipped over to June, and somehow we have yet to write even one article about the best position player in all of baseball this season. Not that it’s a surprise; nothing about the best position player in all of baseball is a surprise.

If you Google “Freddie Freeman” and “killer,” in just the first page of results, you’ll find references to Freeman as a Nats killer, a Braves killer, a Mets killer, a Phillies killer, and a Cubs killer. (If you don’t use the quotation marks, you’ll get references to Freeman as a Mets killer and a Nats killer, plus a bunch of headlines about an actual murderer.) But here’s the thing: if you look at Freeman’s performance against every team in baseball and rank them by wOBA, only one of those five teams is even in the top 12. It feels personal no matter who you root for, but Freeman is just an everybody killer. It’s a conundrum straight out of Catch-22.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”

(The Braves are the one team that’s actually in the top 12; they’re number four. Freeman has a .361 average and a 206 wRC+ against them, and for obvious reasons he may actually want to kill them.) Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Steer is emerging as a solid big league hitter. One of three prospects acquired by the Cincinnati Reds from the Minnesota Twins at last August’s trade deadline in exchange for Tyler Mahle — Christian Encarnacion-Strand and Steve Hajjar were the others — Steer is slashing .289/.356/.498 with a 124 wRC+ over 225 plate appearances. One year after homering 23 times between two minor league levels, and twice more after a September call-up, he’s gone deep eight times in 2023.

Eric Longenhagen has been bullish on his bat. Back in January, our lead prospect analyst wrote that the 25-year-old corner infielder has “a well-rounded hit/patience/power toolkit,” adding that he is “a good hitter who will stabilize an infield spot in Cincinnati for the next half decade or so.” Longenhagen ranked the 2019 third round pick out of the University of Oregon no. 2 in Cincinnati’s system; he was no. 47 on the preseason Top 100.

Steer sat down to talk hitting prior to Tuesday’s game at Fenway Park. Read the rest of this entry »