The loss of Jose Altuve to a broken thumb suffered during the World Baseball Classic has been a blow to the Astros, but while the team is off to an uncharacteristically slow start at 16-14, Mauricio Dubón has risen to the occasion while filling in for the eight-time All-Star. The 28-year-old infielder recently reeled off the season’s longest hitting streak, and on Monday exacted a bit of vengeance by collecting three hits that helped send his former team, the Giants, to defeat.

While playing for Team Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic quarterfinals, Altuve was hit in the right thumb by Team USA’s Daniel Bard, suffering a fracture that required surgery to set. At the time, the Astros estimated that Altuve would need two months before resuming baseball activity, putting him on track for a late May or early June return. The expectation was that unless general manager Dana Brown could add a player from outside the organization in the waning days of spring training, Dubón and rookie utilityman David Hensley would cover the keystone during Altuve’s absence.

It felt like a big opportunity for a nearly-forgotten player. The Astros acquired Dubón from the Giants last May 14, in a straight-up trade for backup catcher Michael Papierski, who played just five games for San Francisco before being lost to the Reds on waivers. It was the third time in five and a half years Dubón had been dealt; after being drafted in the 26th round out of a Sacramento high school by Boston in 2013, the Red Sox included him as part of the Travis Shaw/Tyler Thornburg swap with the Brewers in December ’16. Dubón played in the Futures Game the following summer but his progress to the majors was interrupted by a torn left ACL in May 2018. He topped out as a 45 FV prospect, no. 5 on the Brewers’ 2019 list, but played in just two games for the team before being sent to the Giants in a deadline swap that brought Drew Pomeranz to Milwaukee. Read the rest of this entry »

What makes you happy? Among the things that bring a smile to my face, talking about catching is up there. I will look for any excuse to write, talk, or think about catcher defense. I’m one of those people that has missed catching bullpens since I’ve stopped playing regularly. For those of you who do not know, that is not normal! So whenever Statcast drops new information about catcher defense, I have to write about it.

A few weeks back, I covered some catchers who were throwing at a rate that suggested additional defensive value relative to their peers in the new, more aggressive stolen base environment. Soon thereafter, MLB.com’s Mike Petriello revealed a new stat, Caught Stealing Above Average, to the public, and that Baseball Savant would roll out a leaderboard that would offer a more objective look at throwing out runners relative to the traditional caught stealing stat. You can check out the full leaderboard here.

There are multiple components taken into consideration for Statcast’s model that try to even the playing field when it comes to throwing out runners — variables like pitcher delivery speed, a runner’s lead and jump, and more. Evening all of those out provides more insight on how some catchers are more deserving of outs than others. Typically, I would highlight the catchers who have excelled at throwing out runners, but to emphasize the value of this statistic, I instead want to look at those who have been unlucky this year and last despite consistent strong throws, as well as other catchers where the trends are concerning. The first of this group is expected but notable nonetheless:

J.T. Realmuto (1 Catcher Caught Stealing Above Average in 2023, no. 7)

Base stealers have been running like wild against the Phillies this season, and it’s made for some confusing statistics for J.T. Realmuto. Out of his first 17 stolen base attempts of second base, he’s only caught five runners. If you remember this piece back in November, you know Realmuto has one of the strongest arms and fastest pop times in the game; if anybody should be throwing out most runners, it’d be him. But this year, he is only running a 29% caught-stealing rate, partially due to plays like the one above, where his pitcher was just slightly too slow to home. He has still been better than his expected rate of 22%, but his bar is much higher than any catcher in the league.

Realmuto’s 2022 track record is even more impressive than this year’s. If you combine all of last season’s attempts with this year, his CS% sits at 48%, with an estimated CS% of 23%. His laser-quick pop time makes up for his slower-to-the-plate pitchers. Realmuto is elite at throwing, framing, and blocking; nobody else can make that claim to this extent. We are watching one of the best defensive catchers of his generation.

Shea Langeliers (2 Catcher Caught Stealing Above Average in 2023, no. 5)

Not many things are going right for the A’s, but Shea Langeliers has impressed on both sides of the ball. With a 109 wRC+ fueled by a .244 ISO, he is off to a solid start with the bat, and both his swing and power are promising. On the defensive side of the ball, he has averaged a 1.95 pop time but has been a little unlucky with throwing out runners, with a CS% in his first 19 attempts to second base of 32% but an estimated mark of 24% — a similar discrepancy as Realmuto. On this throw, he was as perfect as you can be, but his pitcher was dragging his feet to get the ball home, and Tony Kemp lost his glove on the tag anyways.

While the pop time isn’t elite on average, Langeliers has proven that he is accurate enough to throw runners out if given the opportunity. It’s one of those situations where he isn’t necessarily a top tier thrower and therefore doesn’t have much room for error if his pitchers don’t cut him some slack or if his throw is just slightly off line. To me, Langeliers is the type of catcher who offers a glimpse into the future. With some automated ball-strike system inevitably coming to MLB, his profile is one that would perfectly transition to that new reality, as he is only average at blocking and framing but is slightly above average at throwing. Combine that with above-league-average offense, and you have yourself a perfect prototype for the potential new catching environment.

Martín Maldonado (2 Catcher Caught Stealing Above Average in 2023, no. 4)

If it weren’t for Realmuto, Martín Maldonado would find himself atop the new throwing leaderboard from 2022 through today, with seven CS Above Average. This year is no different, as he holds a 33% CS% despite a mere 14% estimated rate. The pitchers in Houston aren’t helping him, but he is nabbing runners regardless. Case in point: the play above, where Cristian Javier’s big leg kick and loopy arm took up too much time, undermining Maldonado’s pinpoint throw. But even when he isn’t catching runners, he is making it close.

Over the past few years, I’ve gone back and forth on the Astros’ decision to use Maldonado as their primary catcher. He is an incredible fielder but is consistently one of the worst hitters in the game. As his framing skills have undergone a slight regression compared to earlier in his career, it’s statistically unclear if it’s worth keeping him as the mainstay. But the additional data on Maldonado’s elite throwing and blocking in the last few months reminds us why he’s the lead catcher in Houston. Combine that with his glorified intangibles, and you can easily understand why he has cemented himself as the starter despite the lack of offense.

This new information can work in the other direction, too. Sometimes catchers are unlucky because their pitchers put them in a hole, and other times they can be even worse than expected. Unfortunately, there are some promising young catchers who fall into the latter category. Keibert Ruiz is 2-for-17 (12%) to start the year despite a 23% estimated CS%. His plus-2.00 pop time is the main reason for this. If his framing continues to trend in the wrong direction along with his arm, he will need to be an above-average hitter to live up to his prospect pedigree. Francisco Álvarez faces a similar dilemma, going 0-for-12 to start the year. His estimated CS% was only 12%, but his throws have not been competitive regardless.

For a while, catching was a semi-mystery; we knew who had rocket arms and who didn’t. Now, we have information about framing, blocking, and throwing that helps us figure out the true value of a gifted defensive catcher. It’s an exciting time to be a catching fanatic.

Bryce Harper is back. One hundred and sixty days ago — less than six months! — he had Tommy John surgery, repairing a torn elbow ligament he suffered last April. NBC Sports Philadelphia, who you’d think would have a good read on the situation, published an optimistic headline with an aggressive timetable: Harper could be swinging by mid-May and playing in major league games by the All Star break. It’s May 3 today.

Suffice to say that 160 days isn’t a lot of time. I have perishable goods in my fridge that might have been there when Harper went under the knife. As Jay Cuda noted, the White Sox hadn’t won two straight games all season (until last night) since Harper got a shiny (well, probably not literally) new ligament to replace his old one. That’s not how these timetables work.

Tommy John surgery makes players disappear for a while. They come back to a team that looks similar but not identical to the one they left behind. That’s technically true of the Phillies — Trea Turner is reprising his old role as Harper’s sidekick, Taijuan Walker is new in town, and the bullpen has turned over — but it still feels more or less like the team Harper left. A Philadelphia sports fan who was busy on Opening Day could tune into a Phillies game after the 76ers’ season is over and get confused. “Hey, wasn’t Harper getting TJ? What’s he doing in the lineup?” Read the rest of this entry »

Any time something crazy happens early in the season, such as the week that Adam Duvall was leading the league in WAR, I tend to dismiss it with a single word reply of “April.” But the calendar has now flipped, and the shower-month has become the flower-month, so it’s getting a bit harder to ignore the Pirates, standing at the top of the NL Central with a 20–9 record, a whopping 10 games above last season’s victor, the currently last-place Cardinals. Nearly 20% of the season is now done, and it’s probably time to talk about whether Pittsburgh is for real.

First off, going 20–9 is always an impressive run. Teams that do that aren’t always great teams, but they’re usually at least middling and only rarely actually bad. There have been exactly 1.21 craploads of 20–9 or better runs over the last 20 years, and only two with a run that solid, the 2021 Cubs and 2005 Orioles, finished with 75 wins or fewer. And while the Pirates had more than their share of basement-dwelling opponents (the average opponent has a .430 winning percentage), great performances in baseball tend to be in environments that are most conducive to those performances. The Yankees had the best 29-game run last year, at 24–5, with 21 of those 29 games coming against non-playoff teams.

Suffice it to say that the projection systems were generally not optimistic on the idea of the Pirates being contenders in 2023. Our preseason depth charts gave them a 3% chance to win the division and a 6.5% chance of making the playoffs. ZiPS, which liked the Cardinals better than the combined projections (a prognostication that’s not looking great right now), was even more down on Pittsburgh, with only a 0.7% shot at the NL Central and 1.8% for a postseason. These weren’t hopeless numbers, but they certainly left the Pirates as a longshot. But as of the morning of May 2, our projections now have the Pirates at 18.5% to win the division and 32.3% to make the playoffs. And the updated ZiPS projections for 2023 suggest a chaotic division if everyone’s somewhere around their median projection. When you take into account Pittsburgh’s hot start, the Cubs playing very well, St. Louis’ bleak April, and Milwaukee’s pitching injuries, ZiPS sees the NL Central as wide open:

The good news for Pirates fans is that the assumptions needed to get here are not particularly aggressive. Neither ZiPS nor our Depth Charts combined projections have decided that Pittsburgh is a great team, or even a good one. In fact, both methodologies still see them finishing below .500 — Depth Charts as a .467 team, ZiPS as a .490 team. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Bibee will be coming off a successful big-league debut when he takes the mound for the Cleveland Guardians tonight against the New York Yankees. Last Wednesday, the 24-year-old right-hander allowed six hits and one run with no walks and eight strikeouts over 5.2 innings versus the Colorado Rockies. Since starting his professional career last season, Bibee has a minor-league resume that includes a 10–2 record, a 2.13 ERA, and 186 strikeouts in 148 innings.

His ascent up prospect rankings has been swift. Unranked within the Cleveland system a year ago, the 2021 fifth-round pick out of Cal State Fullerton came into the current campaign No. 70 on our Top 100, with a 50 FV. As our lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen wrote in February, “What a difference a year makes… Bibee now looks like a polished mid-rotation prospect.”

Bibee discussed his debut and the plus repertoire he brings with him to the mound when the Guardians visited Fenway Park this past weekend.

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David Laurila: You just made your big-league debut. How would you describe it?

Tanner Bibee: “It was a whirlwind. It was hectic. It was all of the above. Every single thing that you can think of — the emotions, all of the work I’ve put in to get here… it was all just crazy hectic.”

Laurila: You hit the first batter you faced with a pitch.

Bibee: “I got [Charlie] Blackmon 1–2 and then tried to really hump up on a heater. I probably missed my spot by about 30 inches. I yanked it and drilled him.”

Laurila: Basically, you overthrew the pitch.

Bibee: “100 percent. I mean, I do that sometimes. I’ll hump up and try to throw a fastball up towards the top, but the command wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be on that one. Obviously.” Read the rest of this entry »

The last thing the Yankees needed amid a slump that’s knocked them into last place in the AL East for the first time since April 26, 2021 was in injury to their best player. Yet that’s what they’re facing, because on Monday they placed Aaron Judge on the 10-day injured list due to a strain in his right hip. While the injury isn’t believed to be a severe one — indeed, the reigning AL MVP and the team waited the weekend to see if he felt good enough to return to the lineup — it comes at a time when New York has already been hit hard by injuries, magnifying the roster’s shaky construction.

Judge injured himself last Wednesday, on his 31st birthday. In the second inning, after collecting his second double of the game off the Twins’ Kenta Maeda and helping the Yankees build up a 5–0 lead, he attempted to steal third base. Catcher Christian Vázquez made a perfect peg to third baseman Willi Castro, who tagged Judge on his helmet as he made an awkward headfirst slide into the bag.

The initial concern about Judge was that he’d jammed his right wrist; cameras and tweets from the Target Field press box showed him flexing and shaking his right hand in the dugout afterwards. That he was serving as the team’s designated hitter that day created some suspense as to whether he’d take his next plate appearance. He did, and reached base two more times. But he departed after four innings and two plate appearances on Thursday against the Rangers due to discomfort in his right hip. “It was just a little grab in the hip area — after that headfirst slide… the whole right side has been a little locked up,” he said after that game. “The culmination of having that [slide] and a couple of swings today, I just really couldn’t get it loose.”

An MRI showed what the team described as a small strain near the top of his right hip. Judge didn’t play in any of the remaining three games of the series, forcing an already beaten-up team to play shorthanded. The Yankees lost all three, scoring just four runs and collecting a total of 16 hits. Read the rest of this entry »

Though it feels like Opening Day was just yesterday, we’re officially a month into the 2023 regular season. On the macro level, that means the disappointing and surprising players are already starting to come out of the woodwork. More specifically (and importantly for writers like me), we’re at the point in the season when hitters are routinely cracking the century mark in plate appearances and pitchers are notching 35 innings.

Yet in some ways, this juncture is almost more maddening than Opening Day; we’re still in small-sample-size territory, but enough baseball has been played that we’re tantalizingly close to being able to take a hard look at some of the narratives being spun. For the time being, though, it still makes more sense to look at changes in approach rather than surface-level stats to predict rest-of-season production.

So I returned to a project I started this offseason — analyzing pitcher arm slots — to examine some hurlers who’ve made discernible tweaks to their release in accordance with early shifts in their performance. The equations I used to calculate these numbers can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago, no one would have believed you if you told them that Brandon Nimmo would get $162 million in free agency. That hustling guy on the Mets? How many millions? I don’t know whether it’s the try-hard-ness or the walk-heavy shape of his production, but his rise to prominence and subsequent nine-figure payday elicited more “wow he got what?” responses and raised eyebrows than any marquee free agent in recent history, save possibly Xander Bogaerts’ deal with the Padres. Well, the joke’s on those eyebrow raisers, because Nimmo is one of the best players in baseball this year, and he’s doing it by being as Nimmo as he’s ever been.

What does that mean? I’m glad you asked. For me, the core Nimmo skillset is getting on base without putting the ball in play. He might do it by walking. He might do it by wearing one on the elbow (or, let’s be realistic, elbow pad). However he handles it, though, his most consistent and bankable skill is juicing up the bases for the Mets’ bashers and boppers to drive him home.

In that sense, this season is just business as usual:

All those free bases add up. Nimmo got a cup of coffee in the majors in 2016, but his first real playing time was in 2017. Since then, he’s seventh in baseball in on-base percentage, just behind plate discipline legend Joey Votto. Read the rest of this entry »

“What poor sucker is going to have to pitch in those games?” That’s what Meg Rowley asked last year on an episode of Effectively Wild after MLB announced a two-game series between the Giants and Padres in Mexico City. Those games happened over the weekend, and they lived up to those lofty expectations. Played at an elevation of 7,349 feet — more than 2,000 feet higher than Coors Field, in case you hadn’t been told several times already — they featured 15 home runs, including 11 in Saturday night’s 16–11 offensive explosion. Although Sunday’s game started with yet another home run, this time courtesy of LaMonte Wade Jr., the wind was blowing in, accounting for the paltry total of five homers. So far in the 2023 season, the average game has featured 2.26 home runs. By my calculations, that’s a whole lot less than 7.5 home runs per game. It was so wild that Nelson Cruz hit a triple yesterday. Let me rephrase that: The very nearly 43-year-old Nelson Cruz hit a stand-up triple yesterday. This was not baseball as usual.

All the same, it was extremely fun baseball. Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus put it best, tweeting, “The game is being played on the surface of the moon.” The ball moved differently out of the pitcher’s hand, off the bat, and coming off the turf. In this article, I’ll be relying on Statcast data, so I should note up front that the stadium was working with a temporary TrackMan setup, rather than the permanent Hawkeye systems installed in all 30 MLB parks. It’s reasonable to expect that the numbers are not quite as reliable as they normally would be, but they’re still plenty convincing. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Rangers shocked the baseball world by signing Jacob deGrom to a five-year, $185 million contract in December, it was with the hope that the 34-year-old righty could steer clear of the type of injuries that limited him to a total of 26 starts in the 2021 and ’22 seasons. But since the opening of camps in February, it’s been a bumpy ride, and that’s carried over into the regular season. On Friday night, for the second time in three starts, deGrom took an early exit due to an arm issue; this time, he’s headed to the injured list, with a diagnosis of elbow inflammation. To call upon an oft-used metaphor: this fancy, expensive, high-performance sports car is once again in the shop.

Facing a Yankees lineup weakened by injuries — no Aaron Judge, no Giancarlo Stanton, no Josh Donaldson — on Friday night, deGrom cruised through the first three innings, retiring all nine hitters on a total of 28 pitches, striking out two and never reaching a three-ball count. He began to labor in the fourth, however. After a six-pitch groundout by DJ LeMahieu, he issued a five-pitch walk to Anthony Rizzo, then went to a full count against Gleyber Torres before getting him to fly out, and finally allowed a two-strike single to Willie Calhoun. Notably, deGrom’s last two pitches to Calhoun — a 96.6 mph fastball taken for a ball and then the 89.4 mph slider that he hit, both of which were several inches outside — were down about three miles per hour relative to their previous offerings of that type.

That sudden drop cued pitching coach Mike Maddux and the team trainer to visit the mound; Maddux soon tag-teamed with manager Bruce Bochy, who did little more than pat a dejected-looking deGrom on the shoulder and send him on his way.

After the Rangers finished off their 5–2 win, the team announced that deGrom had departed due to forearm tightness; the pitcher himself described it as “just some discomfort.” According to general manager Chris Young, an MRI taken the next day showed inflammation, but notably, he made no mention of structural damage, suggesting that whatever the team saw with regards to deGrom’s ulnar collateral ligament, flexor, and whatever else was, if not in mint condition, not a concern at this time. The Rangers elected to put him on the 15-day injured list, though Young downplayed the situation, saying, “[H]e came in today and felt OK, which was a positive, but given how important he is to us and our season, we’re going to play this very cautiously and see how he responds over the next several days to treatment. And then after seven to 10 days, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next steps are.” Read the rest of this entry »