It’s no longer early. Whether or not one considers the preseason prognostications about the Cardinals being contenders entering the 2023 season to be well or ill-conceived, they’re certainly not contenders now. Reassurances that it was still early in the season no longer work with baseball approaching the halfway point and the All-Star break. Wednesday night’s collapse in the eighth inning against the Astros dropped St. Louis to 33–46, giving the team a four-game cushion in the ignominious contest to be the worst in the NL Central. The only silver lining is a sad one: in a sea of humiliations, nobody notices another bucket being bailed into it. The Cardinals’ playoff chances haven’t actually evaporated completely, but they more reflect the bland mediocrity that covers the division rather than any great merit of the team. For the first time in a long while, “what’s next?” may not be simply “second verse, same as the first.”

To describe the Cardinals in recent decades, I’d personally call them the best of baseball’s conservative franchises. One of the shocking things about the team is just how unbelievably stable and consistent it is. I was in middle school the last time St. Louis lost 90 games in a season (1990); only five living people on the planet were around for the last time the team lost 100. Even just looking at starts rather than entire seasons, this is one of the worst-performing Cardinals squads that anyone alive has watched.

The franchise has had worst starts, but most of those were in the days of very much yonder. Outside of a possible handful of 105-year-old St. Louis residents, we really only have two Cardinals teams in recent memory that got off to worse starts.

If you’re looking beyond 2023, the Cardinals are in a bit of a pickle. It’s been a long time since they either tore the roster down to its foundations or went whole hog in offseason investment, and they might find themselves in that awkward zone where they’re neither good enough to win now or later. Ken Rosenthal over at The Athletic wrote about this dangerous trap in which they’ve been ensnared, and it’s one of the reasons I’m writing this piece. To quote Ken: Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if this happens to my colleagues, but I get attached to the players I write about. I can’t help it. Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “Things separate from their stories have no meaning,” and I’ve found that learning a player’s story, even if it’s just the story of why they need to lay off the slider, is enough to imbue them with an extra layer of meaning. Last year, I wrote about Jose Altuve after both the ALDS and the ALCS. It made me feel more connected to him, and during the World Series, whenever he came to the plate when my fiancée was in the room, I’d say, “That’s my little guy!” I really said that (and she really married me anyway).

Back in spring training, I wrote up our Positional Power Rankings for third base. It was a real crash course. We had projections for 149 different third basemen, and I needed to learn enough about each of them to articulate an opinion on what they’d do this year and why. I learned a lot about what I value when it comes to player performance. The exercise also informed the way I’ve watched the game this year. Diving deep into a league of third basemen, I formed attachments to all these players, especially the young ones, as I read prospect evaluations and beat reports and thought about their potential. Now that we’re nearing the halfway mark, here’s an update on the rookies I’ve been rooting for. Read the rest of this entry »

Want a good example of how tough it is to pitch? Look at Sandy Alcantara. He was the consensus NL Cy Young last year, with a 2.28 ERA accrued across a whopping 228.2 innings. Stamina, command, grounders, and strikeouts: what more could you ask for? I had him 10th on last season’s Trade Value Series and if anything, the consensus feedback I received rated him even more highly.

Of course, the good times didn’t continue, which is why I’m writing this article. Alcantara has been downright ordinary this year – he came into last night’s game with a 5.08 ERA. He’s walking more batters, striking out fewer, and getting fewer grounders. He’s averaging fewer innings per start. Every single bright light in Alcantara’s 2022 performance has been dimmed this year.

The reason why isn’t particularly hidden: as Robert Orr documented back in May, Alcantara’s changeup is the culprit. It was his best pitch last year. By pitch values, it’s been his worst pitch this year. At the time, he was throwing it in the strike zone too frequently, and batters weren’t chasing the pitch when he left the zone. He wasn’t getting the same downward bite as last year, either, which helped explain the other problems. Read the rest of this entry »

The image you just scrolled past is a photograph of professional baseball player Bryce Harper. You might remember him from home runs like this 2019 walk-off grand slam or his rain-soaked, NLCS-clinching blast. Indeed, Harper has hit 288 regular-season home runs and another 11 in the playoffs since making his big league debut. Only nine players have hit more in that time. His career .519 slugging percentage ranks 12th among active qualified batters, and his .239 isolated power ranks 15th. His maximum exit velocity has been in the top 10% of the league for seven years straight. Long story short, this Harper guy is one of the most fearsome power hitters of his generation.

So why am I talking about a two-time MVP as if there’s any chance you aren’t familiar with his accomplishments? Well, as hard as it is to believe for an old-timer like me, millions of people around the world hadn’t even been born the last time Harper hit a home run. Granted, I doubt many of those babies between zero and 34 days old have found their way to FanGraphs just yet, but the point remains: 34 days is a long time. It’s the longest home run drought of Harper’s career. The last time he hit a home run, the Reds had the worst record in the National League and Shohei Ohtani ranked 21st on the combined WAR leaderboards. Five weeks later, the Reds sit on top of the NL Central and Ohtani is lapping the competition in WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Time is flying. It seems like only weeks ago that Shohei Ohtani struck out Mike Trout with a picture-perfect sweeper to finish off the World Baseball Classic, the Rays started the season with a franchise-record 13-game winning streak, and the Pirates shocked the baseball world with a 20-9 April. But no – the calendar turns to July this weekend, those Rays just played their 81st game on Sunday, becoming the first team to reach the halfway point, and Pittsburgh has fallen into fourth place in the NL Central. The days are getting shorter, now, and so is the remaining calendar – by the end of the week, most teams will have more regular season baseball behind them than ahead of them.

If that’s the bad news, here’s the good news: We’re poised for an exciting run over these next three months. With July around the corner, there are 23 teams within six games of a postseason spot, and 19 within four. No division lead is greater than 6.5 games. According to our playoff odds, 21 of the 30 clubs – a full 70% – have between a 10% and 90% chance of ending up in the playoffs. At this point in the baseball calendar last year, just 12 teams fell in that range:

After play on July 3, 2022, when teams had averaged the same number of games – just over 79 – as they have now, the Yankees and Astros had division leads of more than 13 games, making them virtual locks to make the playoffs. The Dodgers, who led the National League with a .628 winning percentage, and the Mets and Braves, who were battling it out in the NL East, all had better than 90% odds, as did the Blue Jays. As of Tuesday, only the Rays and Braves, who lead their respective circuits in wins, have eclipsed 90% – both are north of 98%. The Dodgers and Rangers are over 80%, and Arizona sits at 75.9%, but none of the 25 other teams have a 3-in-4 shot or better:

Things may be even murkier among the bottom tier of the postseason hopefuls. On July 3 last season, 12 teams, or 40% of the league, had less than a 1-in-10 chance of extending their season into the playoffs. On Tuesday, just seven teams fit that bill – the White Sox, Pirates, Tigers, Royals, A’s, Rockies and Nationals. Most everyone else is going to head into the second half of their schedule thinking they have at least a shot to grab a Wild Card. By that measure, we have about as much uncertainty left to sort out in the back half as we did when the season began – our Opening Day playoff odds also had seven teams shy of 10%. Only the Reds have played themselves over that threshold, and only the White Sox have played themselves under it.

There are a good handful of teams in the 10-20% range right now, but I’d say the difference between below 10% and 10-20% is a meaningful one. In that 10-20% bin are the Reds, who lead their division and who the projections may be underrating; the Cubs, Mariners, and Red Sox, who are a hot week or two from a playoff spot (and who seem capable of stringing a couple of hot weeks together if things fall the right way for a stretch); and the Mets and Cardinals, who, for as bleak as the first half has been, are 8.5 and 8.0 games out of a playoff spot, respectively, with enough talent on their rosters to make a significant second-half improvement feasible:

In terms of the ultimate end goal, at this time last year, our playoff odds had just 10 teams with a 2% shot at winning the World Series – with the eventual NL champion Phillies notably not among them – with about two-thirds odds that it would be the Dodgers, Braves, Astros, Yankees, or Mets. This year, though we give about a 47% chance that it’ll be any of the Braves, Rays, or Dodgers, half of the league has a better than 2% chance.

I largely opposed playoff expansion, and I still think it has made the postseason tournament too big, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate what it does offer, which is that it can keep middling teams motivated to win through this point of the season and beyond. But some of the particulars of this competitive landscape are due more to the quirks of division alignment – the same quirks that have brought us an AL East with five teams better than any AL Central team. This season, these quirks mean that the Wild Card races are populated almost exclusively by East and West teams in both leagues, but the Central races are tight enough that second- and third-place teams like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and the Cubs are still very much within reach of the playoffs.

This isn’t a good thing for the general fairness of playoff qualification. We could easily end up in a situation in which the first Wild Card team out in either league has a better record than their league’s Central division champion – right now in the AL, Houston (42-37) and Toronto (43-37) would be left out in favor of Minnesota (40-41). But it’s a great thing if you’re rooting for total chaos in the second half. More teams in the hunt and fewer teams running away with division titles means more meaningful games late into the summer.

To put it another way, with 21 teams left with less-than-surefire playoff odds one way or the other, a 15-game day on the schedule should include on average between 13 and 14 games featuring at least one of these teams. With only 12 teams in that no-man’s land, as was the case last year, a 15-game schedule would include on average nine or 10 games with at least one of these contenders. That’s about four more games with playoff implications every day for fans.

As much as this has to do with extra Wild Cards and quirky division alignments, it seems like some of the credit is owed to the shifting sands of the league, as well. This year, we’ve seen the Orioles, Rangers, Diamondbacks, Marlins, Angels and now Reds emerge as playoff hopefuls – or safe bets, as the case may be – many of whom seem poised to stick around for years to come. It’s an impressive influx of teams trending upwards, and quickly – while the Orioles’ resurgence started early enough last year for the team to finish with 83 wins, the other five clubs averaged just 69.2 wins in 2022 and are projected to improve by an amazing average of 17.1 wins this season:

On the flip side, most of 2022’s top dogs haven’t exactly ceded their spots – the Braves, Rays, Astros, Dodgers, Yankees and Blue Jays aren’t quite ready to give way. In the middle of the pack, the Brewers, Phillies, Red Sox, Mariners, Padres, Twins and Guardians are hanging on while they try to find a hot stretch the way the Giants have. And while there’s little joy in St. Louis and Queens at the moment, given the talent in those clubhouses, our playoff odds aren’t ready to write them off completely, either.

The next few weeks will be crucial for some of these teams on the cusp of contention. With such a competitive field heading into the month, we might soon be closing in on an August 1 trade deadline that could feature far fewer sellers than buyers. Even the teams with comfortable playoff outlooks will be looking to add, so asking prices will likely be high, and it’ll be interesting to see which teams bite at those high prices knowing their own chances of a deep playoff run might be diluted by the field around them, not to mention an extra round of playoff randomness.

Last September, I wrote about the lack of intensity in the chase for playoff spots, much to the chagrin of anxious Mets and Braves fans enduring a nail-biting division race. So far this year, it looks like we’re in better shape to send a number of playoff races into the deep summer and early fall, with some fresh faces to boot. There’s a lot to sort out between now and October, and the sorting out is the best part. Here’s hoping this season stays messy as long as it can.

As we know, baseball is a bit of an oddball relative to other ball-centric sports for several reasons. Prominent among them, the defense controls the ball at the start of each play, whereas in basketball, football, soccer, and hockey, to be on offense is to be the team with the ball. There exists a mindset difference between playing offense and playing defense, or rather between controlling the ball versus not controlling the ball. One is proactive, the other reactive. As players develop they, whether consciously or not, sort themselves into positional groups partially based on their preferred mindset (alongside their natural skills and physical attributes). Some need the comfort of control, while others thrive on guessing their opponents’ next move.

Pitchers and catchers fall in the proactive category, selecting pitch types and locations to best baffle hitters. Position players react both at the plate and in the field. On the basepaths, the roles reverse. Runners make the active decision to advance, leaving pitchers and catchers to react. It’s an abnormal experience for everyone involved.

Season four of Stranger Things hit Netflix on May 27, 2022; around Opening Day of the 2023 major league season, you finally got “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush out of your head. (If you don’t watch Stranger Things, just know that the song features prominently throughout the show’s most recent season.) And as the new season dawned, baserunners went wild on the basepaths and all the chatter about running wormed “Running Up That Hill” right back into your brain. Much in the way the show revived a song from the 1980s, changes to MLB’s rules regulating base sizes and pitcher disengagements revived ‘80s-esque stolen base rates. Read the rest of this entry »

Say this for Jordan Walker: He knows how to put together a hitting streak. The 21-year-old rookie has only played in 39 major league games, and in that brief amount of time has recorded two streaks — a career-opening 12-gamer and now a 15-gamer — that together account for more than two-thirds of that run. His bat has suddenly become a bright spot in an otherwise frustrating season for the Cardinals.

Indeed, the reigning NL Central champions remain a hot mess despite winning five of their last seven games and salvaging a split in the London Series against the Cubs after being spanked 9–1 in the opener. The Cardinals have nonetheless been worse in June (7–13) than May (15–13), producing their lowest monthly rate of scoring runs (4.05 per game) along with their highest rate of runs allowed (4.88 per game), and falling from five games out of first place to 8.5 back. That’s hardly been Walker’s fault, though.

Recall that Walker, who ranked 12th on our 2023 Top 100 Prospects list, hit his way onto the roster in spring training, bypassing Triple-A Memphis, and opened the season as the regular right fielder, a situation that was somewhat surprising given the team’s apparent outfield depth. The move guaranteed that Tyler O’Neill, Dylan Carlson, and Lars Nootbaar would all get less playing time than expected — not the worst thing in the world given the subpar performances of the first two last year. The presence of fellow rookie Alec Burleson only added to the crunch. Yet Walker turned heads by collecting hits in each of his first 12 games, batting .319/.360/.489.

Once the hitting streak ended, however, Walker didn’t get a very long leash as the league adjusted. He went just 5-for-26 over his next eight games, four of which featured multiple strikeouts. Meanwhile, his poor jumps and bad throwing decisions served to remind that he was still a work in progress on defense as well; a converted third baseman, he had just 51 previous professional games in the outfield, including in last year’s Arizona Fall League. Still, it felt odd when, on April 26, the Cardinals optioned him to Memphis, with club president John Mozeliak deciding that the outfield of the 9–15 team was suddenly too crowded. “[G]uys just aren’t getting into rhythm, [with their] expected playing time,” he told reporters, adding that he and manager Oli Marmol envisioned less playing time for the rookie in the near future and figured it made little sense for him to idle on the bench. More understandable was the team’s desire for Walker to work on his approach and hit the ball in the air more often to take advantage of his 70-grade raw power. Read the rest of this entry »

Roch Cholowsky is one of the top high school shortstop prospects in the 2023 draft class, and one of the few potential first-rounders to do the full battery of drills at last week’s MLB Draft Combine. Attending the combine was unusually convenient for Cholowsky, who went to high school in Chandler, Arizona, less than half an hour from Chase Field.

It’s a very, very good place for a young ballplayer to grow up. In the suburbs east of Phoenix you’ll find six teams’ spring training complexes, plus Arizona State. This part of the world has no shortage of high-quality baseball infrastructure, and is crawling with scouts on the lookout for the next Gold Glove shortstop.

“Moving here was the best decision my parents ever made,” Cholowsky says. Read the rest of this entry »

Isaac Coffey is rapidly emerging as a prospect to watch in the Red Sox system. Drafted in the 10th round last summer out of Oral Roberts University, the 23-year-old right-hander logged a 2.83 ERA with 86 strikeouts in 60.1 innings at High-A Greenville before being promoted to Double-A Portland a week ago. His profile is unique. Our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen has described Coffey as having “a funky, drop-and-drive, low-slot delivery (but his arm action is super short, not typical of low-slot guys) that creates big lateral divergence between his fastball and slider.”

Coffey discussed his four-pitch arsenal and his atypical arm slot prior to a recent game at Portland’s Hadlock Field.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with the self scouting report. What is your arsenal?

Isaac Coffey: “I’ve got a four-seam fastball. A lot of people think it’s a sinker or a two-seam, but with the release height and my slot — I spin it between 2:15 and 2:30 on a clock, with 100% spin efficiency — it tends to look like it’s rising, even though it has more run than ride. It plays up in the zone because it’s coming from that lower slot. It averages around 89 [mph], topping out at 91, but my command of it is pretty good. I can place it on both sides of the plate and use it whenever I need to.

“My changeup is a four-seam, basically a circle change. I spin it really good, and it’s got 100% spin efficiency, too. I spin it at like three o’clock to 3:15, and that creates a lot of run. It’s basically straight sideways but sometimes with a little negative drop. It’s always been my best off-speed pitch.

“I also have a slider and a cutter, both of which I developed this offseason. The cutter is just an offset four-seam that I try to throw hard. It gets a little bit of arm-side run, but compared to the fastball… it probably has perceived cut, but not actual cut on the Trackman numbers. I’m getting more comfortable with that and have been using it more and more each outing.

“My slider is also getting better as the season goes on. It’s got that nine o’clock sideways spin. The command is getting a lot better, so I believe I can use it in a lot of counts right now.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, this year’s bumper crop of pitching prospect debuts has overwhelmed you. I write about baseball for a living, and it still gets to be too much for me sometimes. Mason Miller, Bryce Miller, Taj Bradley, Bobby Miller, Grayson Rodriguez, Andrew Abbott, Michael Grove… you could almost make an entire starting rotation just out of Millers. Some of these debuts have been spectacular. Some have been lackluster. Some are works in progress. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s hype.

That leads me to Eury Pérez, our top pitching prospect and perhaps the most anticipated debut of the year. It’s easy to equate all debuts, or at least to think of them as quite similar until a pitcher does something to set himself apart. Don’t fall for that trap, though. I’m here to tell you: Pérez is amazing, and it’s time to start paying attention to him if you’ve been missing out.

One thing is almost universally true about the heralded pitching debuts this year: these guys have stuff coming out their ears. I don’t mean that in an ‘ew gross earwax’ way, either: they’re tooled up like you wouldn’t believe. I think that’s just the way the world works now. Teams are better than ever before at applying objective measurements to individual pitches. In the past, a guy toiling in Hi-A with so-so numbers wasn’t going to the bigs regardless of how much vertical break he imparted. Now, if you’re throwing a fastball that looks at home in the majors, your team knows right away. Read the rest of this entry »