Bad injury news for a member of your rotation is always unwelcome, so the Braves had a very unhappy Wednesday, with two starting pitchers hitting the IL to go along with a loss in their series closer with the Red Sox.

In Atlanta’s current era of success since its last rebuild, there’s no pitcher that has been more crucial to the team’s fortunes than Max Fried. Since his debut in 2017, he has amassed 14.4 WAR, more than double that of any other pitcher on the roster (next up is Charlie Morton at 6.5). He’s already missed time this season due to an injury, a hamstring strain that cost him two weeks in April. The current injury, however, is far more serious, one that will measure in months rather than days or weeks.

Expectation has been Fried and Wright will both be sidelined for at least two months. With this being his second shoulder ailment of the year, Wright thinks he could be out longer than Fried.

— Mark Bowman (@mlbbowman) May 10, 2023

A forearm strain is usually enough to cause serious and forlorn eyebrow-raising, but the silver lining here is that the MRI on Fried’s elbow didn’t reveal an injury severe enough to require surgery. This is especially important given that he already had Tommy John surgery back when he was a prospect with the Padres. That previous procedure cost him part of 2014 and all of ’15, and the basic truth is that though medicine has made progress and that Tommy John surgeries aren’t career-enders to the degree they used to be, repeat procedures have considerably less success. In this 2016 study of so-called revision Tommy John surgery, less than half of the pitchers looked at even pitched in 10 major league games afterward, and they saw their average career length drop in half compared to first-time patients. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re closing in on the quarter-season mark on the 2023 MLB schedule, and the Twins are off to a first-place start. Sure, that’s thanks in part to a sluggish performance of the rest of the sorry AL Central – the second-place Tigers are the fifth team out of a Wild Card spot at the moment – but Minnesota looks just about poised to run away with the division, and the team has its arms to thank. By ERA, FIP, xFIP and WAR, the Twins have one of the top three pitching staffs in baseball to this point, and despite an offense that has yet to really find its rhythm, the Twins’ run prevention efforts – led by a slew of impressive right-handed starters – have been something of a revelation.

Sonny Gray has had perhaps the sunniest start of all, allowing no more than one earned run in each of his first six starts and showing flashes of his vintage All-Star form. Newcomer Pablo López had a pair of starts he wishes he could take back at the end of April, but for the most part looks as advertised. With early injuries to Kenta Maeda and Tyler Mahle – who the Twins just announced will undergo Tommy John surgery – the depth is already being put to the test, but Bailey Ober has looked fantastic in his three outings and Louie Varland has handled his call capably, most recently allowing a single run in six frames against the Padres on Tuesday.

Then there’s 26-year-old Joe Ryan, who seems to have taken a step forward after a respectable 2.1-WAR rookie season last year. Through seven starts, the right-hander has a 2.45 ERA, 2.87 FIP, and 3.31 xFIP with 47 strikeouts and just six walks in 44 innings, leading Minnesota to a 5-2 record in those games. He’s one of just nine pitchers in the majors with as many as six quality starts; he’s allowed 1 or 0 earned runs four times and three or fewer hits four times. In just his second full season in the majors, Ryan looks as though he’s been there for years. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something we all know about Joey Gallo: He’s got power to spare. Even before he was a big leaguer, tales of his top-of-the-charts power made the rounds among talent evaluators and fans alike. The question was never whether his power would play in the majors, it was whether the strikeouts that came with that power would drag his production down. Those discussions didn’t stop when he made the majors for good in 2017. In fact, it’s 2023 now, and most of the same positives and negatives are still up for debate.

To wit: Through Tuesday’s games, Gallo has hit .189/.326/.541, which works out to a 137 wRC+. He’s also striking out 32.6% of the time – and that would be the lowest strikeout rate of his career. In just 89 plate appearances, he already has seven home runs. By most accounts, it would appear that Gallo is Galloing as hard as ever.

Plot twist: Gallo has made a big adjustment this year, one that seems to have steered him out of the rut he fell into in recent seasons. See, Gallo had a second carrying tool offensively, beyond the power. His thump made opposing pitchers so afraid of him that he ran up massive walk totals merely by being passably selective. In 2019, the season that saw him post his best batting line, he walked 17.5% of the time. In 2021, his second-best, he walked 18% of the time. It’s not so much that he had a perfect batting eye; rather, he just started swinging less in 2019, and pitchers avoided the zone against him to such an extreme degree that he drew piles of walks. He kept it up for a few years before starting to swing more again in 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

Like a riddling Batman villain, the Red Sox entered the 2023 season draped in question marks. Much of the uncertainty surrounded their rotation, which was set to include injury-prone veterans Chris Sale, Corey Kluber, and James Paxton; perennial “breakout” candidate Nick Pivetta; and converted reliever/inexperienced starter Garrett Whitlock. Moreover, the Red Sox were heading into battle without their three most valuable defensive players from the year before. Christian Vázquez, Xander Bogaerts, and Trevor Story combined for 20 DRS and 28.8 DEF in Boston last season; the rest of the team produced -51 DRS and -40.8 DEF. Reese McGuire, Enrique Hernández, and Christian Arroyo had big shoes to fill. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I wrote a piece about the benefits of hitters simplifying the mechanical process in their load or gather. For many hitters, moving too much in the lead-up to their barrel entering the hitting zone can create inconsistent timing and suboptimal reciprocal movements. Taking noise out of the swing can better prepare a hitter to have a consistent bat path; if you always know where your barrel is in space, you’re better equipped to hit the sweet spot more frequently. The thing is, not all hitters are the same. What works for one may not work for another, and that is the beauty of baseball.

I’m afraid I may have left some readers with the impression that simplification is the only path to improvement, when in reality, some hitters need to add more movement to their process to put their body in a position to be athletic. More movement does not always equal more complication if that movement is in the right direction. If a hitter stagnates their mechanics too much, they could be taking away from their potential. The kinetic chain needs flowing energy to function at full capacity. To some people, cueing simplicity and less movement can be harmful. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox signed Orix Buffaloes star Masataka Yoshida over the winter, suffice it to say I was intrigued. In his walk year, in the second-best league in the world, he hit .336/.449/.559 with 21 home runs and 82 walks against just 42 strikeouts. In the 20 months leading up to his competitive debut in MLB, he had made two NPB All-Star teams and won a batting title, a Japan Series, an Olympic gold medal, and a WBC title. In the latter event, he went 9-for-22 with two home runs and struck out just once.

I don’t pretend to know much about what goes on in NPB, but everything I’d heard about Yoshida was exciting: Here was this ultra-high contact hitter who idolized Bryce Harper and posted basically peak Juan Soto numbers against the toughest pitching you’ll find outside MLB. Moreover, no baseball player’s name is more fun to say in an Australian accent, if you care about that sort of thing.

Whenever a star player comes over from Japan, there’s a natural excitement. North American baseball is so saturated with information that it’s a refreshing change when a fully formed top-level pro appears from another league — all the more so because every newcomer presents the opportunity to learn. American baseball pedagogy is as open-minded now as it’s ever been, but it still imposes an orthodoxy. Athletes are molded to fit an ideal; if not intentionally, then they mold themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Swanson has quietly emerged as a top-shelf reliever. Since the beginning of last season, the 29-year-old right-hander has made 75 appearances — 57 last year with Seattle and 18 this year with Toronto, who acquired him along with Adam Macko in exchange for Teoscar Hernández — and boasts a 1.64 ERA and a 2.18 FIP. Moreover, he’s allowed just 46 hits and fanned 93 batters in 71.1 innings. Thanks in part to one of baseball’s best splitters, his K-rate over that span is a robust 34.7%; with the Blue Jays this season, it’s an even higher 35.4%.

His path to Canada’s largest city was circuitous. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, Swanson proceeded to “bounce around a little bit growing up,” eventually landing in suburban Cincinnati where he graduated from Mariemont High School. From there it was on to Mount Carmel, Illinois, where he attended Wabash Valley Community College — “one of my only options for baseball” — and then to Council Bluffs, where he spent his sophomore year at Iowa Western Community College. It was at the last of those stops where he began to blossom as a pitcher. The Texas Rangers selected the raw but promising youngster in the eighth round of the 2014 draft.

More moves were afoot. Texas subsequently swapped Swanson to the Yankees in August 2016 as part of the Carlos Beltrán deal, and in November 2018, he was shipped from New York to Seattle in a trade involving James Paxton. The latter move went a long way toward shaping his future. A handful of months into his 2019 rookie season — his MLB debut came that April — Swanson was switched from a starter to a full-time reliever. Even more impactful was a suggestion he received from Seattle’s then-bullpen coach Jim Brower.

“He told me to think about throwing the splitter and pairing that up with my fastball,” Swanson said. “My changeup hadn’t been very good. A lot of guys were shutting it down right out of the hand, and I was also having a tough time throwing it in the zone. So I started messing around with grips after the 2019 season. The splitter changed the course of my career.”

It took time for Swanson to develop what is now his signature pitch. The COVID-19 pandemic shutting down spring training in 2020 just as he was getting a feel for it was one hurdle to overcome. His anatomy was another.

“I’ve got really small hands,” he admitted. ”Initially, I was having a lot of pain [below the crook of the pointer and middle fingers] because I couldn’t get around the baseball very well. It definitely wasn’t a good pitch from the get-go.”

North Dakota backroads provided a panacea. Swanson had moved back to Fargo in 2015 — his family had previously relocated when he was six years old — and spent many hours of his offseason driving around in his pickup truck with a baseball tucked between his fingers, stretching them out. The increased flexibility improved the comfortability of his new splitter grip, the genesis of which was a video clip of a now-Blue Jays teammate.

“One of the guys I watched when I was trying to figure it out was Kevin Gausman, who was with the Giants at the time,” Swanson said. “I watched a video where he explained his grip, I started holding it similar to the way he does, and from there it kind of just clicked.

“Initially, I’d tried to use a traditional splitter grip, but my hands just couldn’t do it. I ended up bringing [the pinky and ring fingers] up on the side. They’re together with [the middle finger]. Then I’m just kind of running the two seams and getting around it a little bit. Gausman’s is similar to that. but he’s got bigger hands than I do, so he’s actually able to curl [his index finger] a little bit. I don’t do that. He’s also got the one seam that comes down the middle, and I’ve got the two seams that comes down the middle.”

Asked how Swanson’s and his pitches compare, Gausman, who arguably possesses the game’s best splitter, pointed both to movement and mechanics.

“It’s a different shape of a split,” Swanson said. “I would say he probably has more horizontal, while I have more vert. He’s also got a little funk in his delivery and hides the ball really well. I think hitters see his later than they do mine. So while the grips are very similar, the way we throw is pretty different. Arm angle, approach angle… but what matters is that we both have success with the pitch.”

That’s an understatement. Opponents are batting .203 with a .234 slug against Gausman’s split this season, and they’ve fared even worse against Swanson’s. The well-traveled reliever has delivered 124 splitters this season — 48.6% of his total pitches thrown — and allowed a .105 batting average and a .158 slugging percentage. Not bad for a kid from Fargo, which is how Swanson identifies himself, despite plans to change his home address yet one more time.

“I’m Fargo through and through,” he said. “Even though I haven’t spent my entire life there, it will always be home for me. I’m actually moving north, though, to Roseau, Minnesota, where my wife is from. Roseau is 12 miles from the Canadian border, around 3,000 people live there, and I love that area of the country. I love the outdoors, so it’s the perfect place for me.”

Given the success he’s having on mound, Toronto is a perfect place for him as well. Fargo’s own has been a stalwart out of the Blue Jays’ bullpen.

The book on Yandy Díaz has already been written. An excellent eye at the plate paired with great bat-to-ball skills has allowed him to post fantastic strikeout and walk rates throughout his career; he was one of six qualified batters who walked more than they struck out last year. When he puts the ball in play, he hits it harder than nearly anyone else in baseball, though his extremely high groundball rate has been a problem. In 2022, all those skills coalesced into a career-high 146 wRC+ and 3.8 WAR.

The book on Díaz has yet to be written. His elite plate discipline is still present, but he’s already matched his home run total from last year in just 32 games; he’s on pace to launch more than 40 this year, which would blow away his previous career high of 14 in 2019. On April 18, he hit the longest home run of his career, a 440-foot blast. His outstanding hard-hit rate has increased up to 56.4%, and his barrel rate has increased by nine points, fueling a .281 ISO and a 192 wRC+, all career-bests. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Arenado could have won the National League Most Valuable Player award last year, though he lost out to teammate Paul Goldschmidt, who gave chase to the Triple Crown and finished with the more eye-catching traditional stats (but slightly lower fWAR and bWAR). But while Goldschmidt has been similarly productive this year amid the Cardinals’ dreadful start — indeed, his three homers on Sunday helped end the team’s eight-game losing streak — the same can’t be said for Arenado, who’s off to an uncharacteristically bad start.

Between compiling their worst record through 35 games in half a century and making the puzzling decision to move marquee free agent Willson Contreras off of catcher, the Cardinals are such a mess that I mentioned Arenado only in passing on Monday. He’s nowhere near the team’s biggest problem, yet at the same time, the 32-year-old third baseman is hitting just .232/.282/.326 for a 69 wRC+ thus far. His 82-point drop from last year’s 151 wRC+ is the majors’ second-largest among players with at least 400 plate appearances last year and 100 this year:

Arenado, whose 207-point drop in slugging is also the majors’ largest at these cutoffs, isn’t the only MVP-caliber player struggling. Judge, the reigning AL MVP, hasn’t come close to replicating last year’s astronomical numbers, though he’s still an above-average hitter. Machado, who finished between Goldschmidt and Arenado in the NL MVP voting (and edged both in WAR), is scuffling nearly as badly as his fellow third baseman. Several recent All-Stars besides those players (Benintendi, Giménez, Marte, Rodríguez, and Springer) are represented above as well. That’s baseball, Suzyn. Read the rest of this entry »

If you look at teams with long-term stability, you’ll tend to find teams who have managed to get a lot of their best talent inked to contract extensions. When it comes to team construction, that certainty makes resolving other questions about the team a simpler matter and reduces the risk of a nasty surprise when your rival decides to spend the GDP of a small country on one of your best players in baseball. Making sure your core is locked up has been trickier since the mid-1970s, as it shockingly turned out that when you allow players to choose their employer, they may choose to find new employment! Teams as widely varying as John Hart’s 1990s Cleveland teams to today’s Braves employed these strategies as foundation of their continued success.

This year has already seen a number of key players signing long-term contracts that guarantee them healthy amounts of guaranteed cash: Corbin Carroll, Andrés Giménez, Keibert Ruiz, Miles Mikolas, Jake Cronenworth, Logan Webb, Ian Happ, Pablo López, Bryan Reynolds, and Hunter Greene have all signed deals within the last two months. Signing players now is usually better than waiting to later, so here are my eight players who teams should most urgently attempt to sign to long-term deals. For each player, I’ve included the current ZiPS-projected contract.

First off, let me address two players who you might expect to see here but who are not: Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto. Ohtani looks like such a mega-blockbuster free agent that I’m not sure the Angels can realistically keep him from hitting the open market, and in any case, the projection would just be “all the currency that exists or ever will exist.” As for Soto, as much as it suprises me that I’m saying this, there’s enough of a question around where his ability level is right now that I think a meeting of the minds may be very difficult. The fact is that he’s a .234/.398/.437 hitter over the last calendar year, and with extremely limited defensive value, I’d actually be a little squeamish about offering him the 14-year, $440 million extension he turned down from the Nats. Read the rest of this entry »