And what a wild table it is. Brooks Raley has secretly been way better than I’d realized. I bring this up to illustrate how dominant Jason Adam has been over the past five years: By most measures, one of the best relievers in baseball. By ERA, the best reliever who’s had a remotely normal career. Adam’s breakout season was 2022, and since then he’s posted an ERA under 2.00 four times in five years, including 2026. His one down year: 2023, when he posted a 2.93 ERA in 54 1/3 innings. Most pitchers would kill to struggle like that. Read the rest of this entry »
Jesús Luzardo has been pitching better than you might think. The 28-year-old Philadelphia Phillies left-hander is an uninspiring 4-4 with a 4.56 ERA over 13 starts covering 73 innings, but his surface stats only tell part of the story. Luzardo has a 3.40 FIP — it was a sparkling 2.77 prior to his most recent outing — while his 26.7% hard-hit percentage ranks second lowest among qualified pitchers. Moreover, he misses his fair share of bats. His 25.6% strikeout rate ranks in the 73rd percentile, while his 30.7% whiff rate is in the 86th. Good fortune simply hasn’t been on his side. At .343, Luzardo has the highest BABIP among qualified pitchers.
The lefty’s lack of luck isn’t what I wanted to talk to him about when the Phillies visited Boston in mid-May. Rather, I was interested in how he has evolved as a pitcher since we first spoke nine years ago. At the time, Luzardo was a 19-year-old Oakland Athletics prospect who was playing for the New York-Penn League’s Vermont Lake Monsters. A lot of water having gone under the bridge, change was inevitable.
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David Laurila: We talked back in 2017 when you were getting your feet wet in short-season ball. Just how much have you changed as a pitcher since that time?
Jesús Luzardo: “I have a little bit different repertoire now. I’ve added some pitches. I’ve fine-tuned my mechanics. Along the way, I’ve just matured as a pitcher. I mean, I feel like I still have a long way to go, that I can get even better. I haven’t reached my full maturity as a pitcher. But I’m definitely a lot more polished. I know more about myself, what makes me me.” Read the rest of this entry »
Shane Baz features a five-pitch mix: a four-seam fastball and a knuckle curve being the most prominent in terms of usage. The Baltimore Orioles right-hander also throws a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. And then there is the offering that reluctantly remains in his back pocket. Baz would love to one day unleash his knuckleball on major-league hitters.
“I threw one when I was a kid, up until I was probably 13 or 14,” explained Baz, who was a big Tim Wakefield fan while growing up in Tomball, Texas. “It was my only off-speed pitch up until then — I was just fastball/knuckleball — so I’ve got a lot of experience with it. I actually try to throw it in every bullpen [session]. I’ll definitely get it into a game, eventually. I just have to convince [pitching coach Drew] French to let me throw it. Maybe next spring training I’ll be able to mix some in and show him what it looks like in a game. I mean, it’s pretty good.”
Baz went on to say that that he threw his pet pitch with a three-finger grip — “fingers on the horseshoe, right by the label” — in his younger days, but once his hands got bigger he went to “the traditional two-finger knuckleball.” And while he basically stopped throwing it in games once he matured and developed more pitches, he’s never lost his affinity for baseball’s butterfly.
At 96.1 mph, Baz’s four-seamer is above average for velocity, but while extra oomph is advantageous for heaters, that isn’t the case for low-spin floaters.
“I can get it up to about 80, but those aren’t as good,” Baz said. “I think it’s best when it’s like 70 to 75. That’s when I have the best control of it and can keep the spin really low. When I’m trying to throw it hard, it starts spinning more and not having as much knuckle effect.”
His overall understanding of the pitch is impressive, and that includes spin properties. Read the rest of this entry »
With a clear mind, a full heart, and an empty stomach, I stepped out of my Crown Heights apartment at 8:40 AM on Sunday. I walked over to the black Toyota RAV4, opened the door, and slid into the backseat next to my friend Anthony and his girlfriend Cristina. Immediately, Anthony gestured to the hot dog costume peeking out of the tote bag between his feet. “Dude, I’m so f—— hyped,” he said with a glizzy-eating grin on his face. “We were born for this.” He then took off his jacket to reveal he was wearing the gray cotton t-shirt that I got him for his birthday. Across the chest in all caps were the words: BAD DAY TO BE A GLIZZY.
The Uber driver pulled away from the curb and started down the street. We were on our way to Coney Island for the first annual Hot Dog Jog, a race hosted by the Brooklyn Cyclones as part of Weenie Weekend. Hot Dog Jog participants run four laps around the ballpark, covering about a mile. Sure, that’s a short distance for a run, but this race isn’t meant to be a feat of endurance. Instead, it’s a test of intestinal fortitude. After every lap, contestants have to stop and eat a hot dog. Anthony and I were running in the race, while Cristina came to see the spectacle, cheer us on, and laugh at us if we puked.
The event was slated to begin at 9 AM, but a few days earlier, we received an email telling us that we would be running in Group 4 and should report to the race no later than 9:40 for registration. The first race, the Cocktail Frank Kids Division, had already begun by the time we were dropped off outside Maimonides Park a little before 9:20. King Henry, the on-field emcee of the Cyclones, was announcing the action through a megaphone and motivating contestants with hot dog puns. We exited the car to a cacophony of crowd chants, color commentary, and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” It was then that we knew we were on the edge of the most glorious day of our lives. Read the rest of this entry »
Aaron Judge has been in a slump lately, and what’s more, his right shoulder has been bothering him when he swings the bat. The 34-year-old slugger sat out the Yankees’ three-game series against the Guardians this week after initially being diagnosed with a bone bruise on a right upper rib. On Thursday, after consulting with multiple doctors, including a specialist in thoracic outlet syndrome, the Yankees announced that Judge has been diagnosed with a stress fracture in his right first rib, an injury that will sideline him for several weeks and leave a sizable hole in the New York offense.
According to the Yankees, Judge will require a period of rest and limited activity, and then will undergo re-imaging in four to six weeks — sometime in early-to-mid-July — after which the next steps will be determined. The team added that it does expect Judge to return this season.
Prior to Tuesday, Judge had started all 59 of the Yankees’ games, either in right field (53 times) or at designated hitter (six times). He had been experiencing pain in his right shoulder for some indeterminate amount of time, with the problem particularly affecting his swing during the team’s series in Sacramento this past weekend. He went 2-for-12 with three strikeouts against the A’s, though he did record five hard-hit balls out of the nine he put into play. Perhaps more tellingly, he had homered just twice over the past four weeks, and from May 11–22, went 11 games without a single RBI, the longest such stretch of his career; he had 10-game droughts in 2016, ’19, and ’23. To be fair, Judge’s latest drought owes something to his teammates. The Yankees hit just .214/.306/.363 during that 11-game span, giving him just six plate appearances with runners in scoring position; he went 0-for-5 with a walk. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
April 25
Sometimes my daughter will be sleeping peacefully in my arms looking for all the world like God’s one perfect creation, and then she’ll crack her eyelids open for a moment, and during that moment, through the tiny crack, I can just barely make out her eyeballs rolling all the way back in her head like she’s possessed by a demon. It’s so disturbing. I swear it’s like I’m watching her soul being ripped from her body. When I mention this to my wife, she tells me that she finds the eye thing adorable.
Kyle Backhus closed out an 8-5, extra-inning win for the Phillies today. He didn’t get the save, though, because the score was 8-4 when he entered the game. Backhus is an extremely fun player and not just because of the name. He’s fun to watch. He’s a classic lefty sidearmer and he accentuates that by setting up angled toward first base, presumably to add some crossfire deception to his delivery. As you’d expect from a sidearmer, he’s a sinker-slider guy with an east-west movement profile and the occasional changeup. That sweeping slider looks great on TV, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t sweep eastward as much as you’d expect it to. It needs to end up in Philly, but it only makes it as far as Pittsburgh, a deficiency that’s likely the reason his ERA starts with a four instead of a three.
More importantly, Baseball Reference doesn’t list a single nickname for Backhus, which seems borderline impossible because, you see, his name is Kyle Backhus. Somebody whose brain is functioning at something approaching full capacity, please get on this. Kyle Backhus deserves a cool nickname.
April 26
Lest yesterday’s entry impart the mistaken impression that I’m unwilling or unable to generate a sobriquet, behold a list of nicknames by which I have addressed my daughter while changing her diaper:
April 27 Transcript of my wife changing Derek Jr.’s diaper:
“I can’t believe I have to do this.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’s not that bad… but it’s not that good.”
“The relief she feels.”
“My God, her legs are so fat.”
“Derek Jr., I’m so proud of you.”
“It wasn’t that big. It was just very… everywhere.”
“She’s thrilled right now. I’ve never seen her happier.”
April 29
It’s 3:30 PM and I just put Derek Jr. down for a nap and turned on the Twins-Mariners game. Royce Lewis is up for the Twins in the bottom of the seventh, and Byron Buxton has edged so far away from the on-deck circle to get a better look at pitcher Eduard Bazardo that he’s very nearly directly behind home plate. No one seems to notice, but he’s apparently been doing this all game long. During the fourth inning, Buxton was practicing his snow shoveling back there.
I guess that’s what happens when you spend your whole career in Minnesota. It doesn’t help Buxton all that much. He grounds into a fielder’s choice and the Mariners pull Bazardo.
We just got back from the one month pediatrician visit. It was smooth sailing, and the percentile charts confirm what we’d been feeling: Derek Jr. is growing like crazy. “The only thing I want to ask,” says the pediatrician, “is whether she’s starting making eye contact with you.” The question catches me off guard. It’s true. Just in the last couple days, she’d started looking me right in the eye while I fed her. I’d registered it, but I’m so focused on just surviving right that I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that this was an entirely new development. Our baby now looks right into our eyes. It’s nuts that I didn’t think about this before the doctor asked. I am literally writing a journal about all of the things I notice about this baby! Turns out she’s right on schedule. She gets a clean bill of health, and we’re informed that she’s now allowed to sleep uninterrupted for up to seven hours if she can manage it. What a world that would be.
April 30
April is almost over and things are getting real. In the baseball world that means consequences for managers. Alex Cora and Rob Thomson just lost their jobs after ugly starts. Carlos Mendoza must be waking up in a cold sweat a couple times a night. Things are getting real in our house, too, and that means a few things. First, it means that we’re getting to understand Derek Jr. better. We’re better at knowing how and how much to feed her, which turns into better sleep and a happier baby. It seems like so much of my job right now is picking up on cues, reading her face and her sounds and her body language. We’re figuring out what bothers her — bright lights, how hard the changing pad is against the back of her head, laying supine too soon after eating, it’s a long list — and what soothes her.
Things are also getting real in the sense that Derek Jr. is growing. Rapidly. All of a sudden, her newborn clothes no longer fit. And when I say all of a sudden, I mean that it literally happened two days ago. Three days ago they fit; yesterday they didn’t. She’s now onto the next size up. The past two mornings, we went through her clothes, holding up onesie after onesie — some of which she wore only a few days ago! — and laughing at how absurd it would be to try to squeeze her into them now. Some clothes she never even had time to wear once. Sadly, we have no unworn baby shoes to give away, because — and if you should run into Ernest Hemingway, please tell him this — babies aren’t supposed to wear shoes, buddy. Shoes can hinder the development of their feet. Your six-word story is structurally flawed, Mr. Nobel Laureate. On the bright side, it does mean that Derek Jr. is now big enough to wear this killer onesie that David Appelman sent.
Derek Jr. is already so different from the baby we met at the hospital, and she will never be that baby again. When she was first born, she was such a monkey. She hooted and clung to my wife with her long, spindly limbs. Now she’s a little bowling ball, and I’m sure she’ll be something else soon enough. In the afternoon, I settle her down for a nap. We’re old pros at this now. It goes like clockwork, except the larger onesie we put on her isn’t very flexible, so it makes her upset when it goes over her head. We probably won’t use this one again. Another lesson learned: Stretchy clothes make everybody’s life easier.
I turn on the Twins-Mariners game, but I struggle to get into it. Two years ago, an absurd series of events led me to fall in love with the Twins. I wrote an article about Edouard Julian and recorded a song to go with it. The song found its way into the locker room, and so did I. I met players and coaches, played the song while sitting next to Julien, got a sincerely moving embrace from Twins fans, and learned about the unbelievably fantastic Minnesota State Fair. (Seriously, everybody out there, you have to go to the Minnesota State Fair. It’s the best.) It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and I knew that it would make me a Twins fan for life. But after last summer’s fire sale, nearly everybody I interacted with, from the GM to the coaches to the players, has moved elsewhere. I still love the Twins, but it’s different. They’re no longer the team I fell in love with, and it happened so fast.
While we’re likening the Twins to my daughter, I should mention that actually I lobbied to name her the opposite of Twins. I was mostly joking, but I wanted to name her Singleton, which is a word I learned from the form we had to fill out before each sonogram. You had to check the box next to either Singleton, Twins, or Triplets. It’s such a delightful word. I love the way it scans. Every time we went to the imaging place, I’d make my pitch for Singleton, and every time, my wife would confirm that her preference for a normal, human name still held sway. Then I’d use the coffee machine in the waiting room to make a decaf coffee, which is the thing I miss most about working in an office by far. I don’t need the coffee, even. I just like to hear the machine kachunk its way through the process. Without fail, the sonogram technician would call my wife’s name the moment I pressed brew, so I’d end up scurrying down the hall trying to catch up with them without moving so fast that I sloshed hot almost coffee down my wrist.
Then we’d get a peek at Derek Jr., tensing every muscle in our bodies at the beginning, then unclenching in stairstep fashion as the technician informed us, one anatomical feature at a time, that everything looked fine. It was worth the apprehension, of course, because we got to see the baby. My wife called the sonograms FaceTiming the baby. They print out pictures for you, too, and not just one like you see in the movies, but lots of pictures at every sonogram. Whole body pictures, pictures of her adorable little feet, and even ghoulish pictures of the beginnings of her face. Our refrigerator is still covered in them. God, we loved that blurry baby-esque phantasm. At some point, we’ll have to move those printouts over to a memory box and start covering the fridge in pictures where she doesn’t look like a poltergeist. But not yet.
On Wednesday night, Gerrit Cole took his first loss since coming back from Tommy John surgery. After two starts of at least six scoreless innings, Cole got tagged for three home runs against the Guardians. Even so, it’s a promising return for the Yankees’ ace, who’s still throwing in the mid-to-upper 90s. His curveball is still curving, and while his fastball mix has evolved over his career in response to some trend or other, I’m confident he’ll find something that works. He always has.
I got to thinking about Cole in the context of a question I posed earlier this week about Adley Rutschman: Who’s the best draft prospect of the 21st century? Who presented the best combination of high floor and elite upside? The answer to that question is probably not Cole; if you were going for a workhorse college starter, you’d pick Mark Prior, Stephen Strasburg, or Paul Skenes. Or maybe even Carlos Rodón. But Cole definitely fits the bill; there’s a reason he was the top pick in the best draft class of the past 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve ever even glanced at a RosterResource team page, you’ve probably noticed there’s an upcoming schedule table at the top that includes probable pitchers for the next 10 days:
That’s all well and good if you only care to look at one team, but if you’re a fantasy player, roster freak, or just chronically ill with baseball fever, the Probables Grid is that little upcoming schedule box blown up to its extreme. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re a casual follower of great relief seasons, this year has probably been all about Mason Miller for you. That’s eminently reasonable. It’s June 4, and his strikeout rate is still above 50%. If there’s a second name in the running, it’s probably Cade Smith, whose 21 saves pace the big leagues. Maybe Cleveland just has a “dominant closer” machine in the clubhouse somewhere. Who needs Emmanuel Clase? But the reliever atop our leaderboards isn’t either of those guys. (They’re second and third, mere hundredths of a win behind, but let me have my bit.) It’s rubber-armed October stalwart Louis Varland, who is most famous for being available a lot.
Varland pitched in nearly every game of the Blue Jays’ playoff run last year, which made him something of a folk hero in Canada. Those appearances weren’t notable for their outrageous quality – he had a middle-of-the-road 3.94 ERA and a 5.01 FIP in 16 innings – but for how impressive it was to take the ball day after day, no matter the situation, and give his team valuable innings. No Toronto reliever entered in more important spots, and while Varland had zero win probability added in the aggregate, that availability was just cool, and particularly noticeable in today’s splintered world of playoff pitching.
This year, Varland is still throwing a ton of innings. He’s 11th in relief innings pitched, but the guys in front of him are pretty much all long relievers. He’s also tied for 11th in relief appearances. Consider this: No reliever who has appeared as often as Varland has thrown as many innings as him, and no reliever who has thrown more innings has appeared more often. You can rack up a lot of innings pitched if you throw multiple frames per appearance. You can rack up a lot of appearances by being a short-stint guy. It’s pretty difficult to be both, but Varland accomplishes it. Read the rest of this entry »
Detmers, if you weren’t aware, is a top 10 starting pitcher to this point in 2026. He has accrued 2.0 WAR, which is slightly more than Chris Sale, Max Fried, and Jesús Luzardo. If it weren’t for Cristopher Sánchez, Detmers might have a case as the best lefty starter in baseball right now. He’s also been the Angels’ best pitcher, even a step ahead of José Soriano, who burst onto the national stage with a red-hot April before cooling in recent weeks. Detmers has kept plugging away, quietly — surprisingly — excelling in the background.
If you’d told me in 2022 that Detmers would be a top 10 starter in baseball by 2026, I would have said, “Sure, that sounds reasonable.” That was his first “full” season in the majors, and he posted a 3.79 FIP with fine peripherals. Yes, he got sent down for about a month in the summer to work on some things, but it was a solid rookie season overall. He even showcased his ceiling with a no hitter that May.
It’s what happened in the seasons that followed that makes this one of the most unexpected early performances of the year. Detmers didn’t improve in 2023. He struck out more batters, which is good, but he developed a pesky command issue that resulted in more walks and home runs. And things got worse in 2024. He again boosted his strikeout rate, and he again gave up more walks and home runs than he had the year before. By June, the Angels had seen enough and sent him down to Triple-A. They recalled him in September for five final starts, and when he returned? Even more strikeouts, even more walks, and even more homers. Read the rest of this entry »
