In the midst of a season in which he won AL Rookie of the Year honors and helped the Mariners break their 21-year playoff drought, Julio Rodríguez took a star turn at the 2022 Home Run Derby. The 21-year-old phenom thrilled the crowd at Dodger Stadium by crushing 32 homers in the first round, including nine of at least 440 feet, and defeated Corey Seager, 32-24. He followed that by knocking off two-time defending champion Pete Alonso in the semifinals, 31-23, before falling to Juan Soto in the finals, 19-18. With this year’s Derby taking place at Seattle’s T-Mobile Park, Rodríguez will try to become the fourth player to win the event on his home field, after the Cubs’ Ryne Sandberg (1990), the Reds’ Todd Frazier (2015), and the Nationals’ Bryce Harper (2018).

What’s more, Rodríguez, who’s seeded seventh this year on the basis of the eight participants’ home run totals through July 4, will again match up with the second-seeded Alonso in the first round — a pairing that coincidentally features the only two returning participants from last year. The stakes are high for Alonso here, as he’s still seeking to join Seattle icon Ken Griffey Jr. as the only three-time winners in Derby history. To do that, he may have to defeat another familiar opponent: sixth-seeded Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who was the runner-up when Alonso won for the first time in 2019.

I’ll get to the participants shortly, but first, the format, which is along the lines of what has been used for the event since 2015, a set of changes that has done wonders for the watchability of this spectacle. The competition will be an eight-man, single elimination bracket that uses timed rounds of three minutes apiece for the first two rounds and two minutes for the final round, by which point the competitors are generally pretty gassed. Each competitor gets an additional 30-second bonus in each round, and can earn an additional 30-second bonus if he hits at least two home runs with projected distances of at least 440 feet according to Statcast.

Each player is allowed to call one 45-second timeout for use during regulation time; it can’t be used during bonus time, though each player will get a break between the regulation and bonus segments. The lower-seeded player in each round goes first, and the round will end in the equivalent of a walk-off if the higher seed surpasses his total. If two contestants are tied after the bonus time, they each get a 60-second round with no bonus time or timeouts, and if they’re still tied after that, they each get rounds of three swings apiece until a winner is decided. The winner of the Derby will take home $1 million of the $2.5 million total pot.

The Derby arrives amid a season in which home run rates are on the rebound thanks at least in part to a livelier ball — one with a lower coefficient of drag — than last year’s. Where teams averaged 1.07 home runs per game last year, the lowest mark since 2015, they’re up to 1.16 this year, right around where they were in ’16 and ’18 but still below the record-setting ’19 season (1.39 per game) and the elevated rates of ’20 and ’21. Similarly, hard-hit fly balls — those with an exit velocity of 95 mph or higher — are traveling an average of 366 feet, one foot farther than last year but one less than 2021, and nine feet below the peak in 2019. However, they don’t carry as well at T-Mobile Park, which is just 10 feet above sea level, near the water, and one of the toughest parks to hit in overall. This year, those same hard-hit fly balls are averaging 359 feet at T-Mobile, one foot less than last year and nine feet less than 2019:

The impact of T-Mobile’s home run suppression is mainly upon left-handed batters, owing to the longer distance to right-center (385 feet) than left-center (378 feet). Lefty hitters have a 94 park home run factor by our five-year methodology (six percent below league average), where righties have a 102 factor (two percent above league average). By Statcast’s three-year methodology, the split is more extreme, with 90 for lefties and 104 for righties. Thus it shouldn’t be all that surprising that all of the contestants in this year’s Derby are righties, save for switch-hitter Adley Rutschman, who figures to bat righty. On that note, here’s the full bracket:

And here’s a look at the field with some relevant stats:

The method of seeding is unsophisticated, as the players are ranked based upon how many home runs they had hit when the field was finalized on July 4, with home runs since June 15 used as a tiebreaker. By that methodology, one had to go all the way down to the tie for 63rd to include all eight participants. Home run totals are hardly the only measure of a slugger’s capability, particularly in this context, and while it’s fair to question the applicability of any of the above metrics I’ve gathered when it comes to non-game situations, it’s worth appreciating the perspective they provide on this group. I’ve gone beyond the raw totals to show how often each contestant homers per plate appearance, per batted ball [HR/ (AB – SO + SF)], and per fly ball, with their average exit velocities on flies, their average projected home run distance, and their barrel rate, which according to a 2019 study by Devan Fink correlates best with recent Derby success. I’ve also included each player’s Statcast-era total of homers with projected distances of least 440 feet, the threshold that the recent Derbies (save for the 2021 one at Coors Field) have used for the distance bonus.

Honestly, it’s not the most dazzling field. Not that they would have participated if healthy, but it’s a bummer not to have Aaron Judge or Mike Trout; the latter has never participated in the contest. We don’t get Shohei Ohtani, major league home run leader, though it’s tough to begrudge the two-way superstar some rest on the heels of what may have been the greatest month in major league history. No Ronald Acuña Jr., who’s not only in the midst of an incredible season in terms of power and speed but also hits for incredible distance; his 426-foot average on home runs is the highest among any player with more than three homers. There’s no Soto to defend his title, and no Harper, either, though that’s understandable given the latter’s less-than-full-powered recovery from offseason Tommy John surgery. Guerrero is actually the only other participant besides Rodríguez and Alonso with previous experience in this contest, and one of only three participants with 100 career homers, compared to seven of eight last year.

Still, it’s a fun enough format that it should be entertaining nonetheless. Here’s a look at the four matchups

(1) Robert vs. (8) Rutschman

The 25-year-old Robert is in the midst of his best season. He’s second in the AL in homers behind Ohtani, and has already hit more than his 2021 and ’22 seasons combined (25). That has something to do with staying healthy, as he played just 166 games in those two seasons, but he’s also barreling the ball more consistently this year. He has the second-highest barrel rate of the group, as well as the second-highest average home run distance, and until Sunday he was also second in fly ball exit velocity before slipping behind in a crowded field. Given all that, he could be a very fun contestant.

The 25-year-old Rutschman is already an All-Star, a franchise cornerstone, and a face of baseball in the making, but statistically, it’s hard to make a case as to why he’s part of this field. He’s last among the group in every category above — sometimes by a lot — except for average home run distance, where he leapfrogged from sixth to fourth on Sunday by hitting the longest home run of his career, a 461-footer into the upper deck at Target Field; in fact, that’s the longest of any of this year’s Derby participants as well. What he has going for him beyond that demonstration of potential power is the local hook. He’s a native of Portland who starred at Oregon State, and he’s easily the best choice of candidates who are either native to Oregon or Washington or went to college in those states (apologies to Michael Conforto and Jake Lamb). That should make him one of the fan favorites.

(2) Alonso vs. (7) Rodríguez

Before suffering a bone bruise and sprained left wrist when he was hit by a Charlie Morton pitch on June 7, the 28-year-old Alonso was setting a 57-homer pace. In placing him on the IL, the Mets announced, “A typical return to play for this type of injury is approximately 3–4 weeks,” but Alonso spent just the minimum 10 days sidelined. He’s homered four times since returning and is currently tied with Betts for second in the NL in homers, but has hit just .147/.267/.347 since the injury while producing an average exit velocity of 87 mph, with an 7.7% barrel rate. All of which is to say that he may not be 100%, which is a shame, because a healthy Alonso is as perfectly built for this competition as any player in the majors. One thing to note is that where Mets bench coach Dave Jauss was a big part of Alonso’s success as his pitcher in the last two Derbies, this time around Mike Friedlein, Alonso’s travel ball coach from when he was a Tampa teenager, will be throwing to him.

At 22, Rodríguez is the youngest participant for the second year in a row. His season thus far hasn’t been up to the level of his stellar rookie campaign, though the drop-off isn’t as wide as his 51-point drop in wOBA suggests. His exit velocity is 0.8 mph higher and his Best Speed exit velo — the average of his top 50% of batted balls, a better indictor of performance — has improved as well (from 103.7 mph to 104.1). That said, he’s not barreling or pulling the ball as often, he’s hitting it on the ground more, and his maximum exit velocity has fallen from 117.2 mph to 115.5. His average home run distance is the lowest in the field, and he has the highest share of homers projected for less than 400 feet (61.5%), though his ballpark may be to blame, as he’s averaging eight feet fewer on his home homers (390 feet vs. 398). Still, it’s clear from last year that he knows what he’s doing in this format, and not hard to imagine the T-Mobile crowd giving him a lift.

(3) Betts vs. (6) Guerrero

The 30-year-old Betts is the oldest and most accomplished player in this field, the career leader in homers (239), the only former MVP, and already a likely Hall of Famer (he’s 14th in JAWS among right fielders, ahead of Tony Gwynn, Ichiro Suzuki, Dave Winfield, and the elder Vladimir Guerrero). At 5-foot-9, 180 pounds, he doesn’t look like a home run hitter, but after setting a career high with 35 last year, he’s on pace for 47 this year, and just three leadoff homers away from tying the single-season record of 13. He’s not much of a distance guy; just two of his career homers have reached the magic 440-foot mark, and half his homers this year had projected distances under 400 feet, a share higher than all but Rodríguez.

The 24-year-old Guerrero, on the other hand, is a distance guy. Sixteen of his 117 career homers (13.7%) have been 440-footers or longer, edging Alonso (13.3%) for the highest rate of this group. Meanwhile, Guerrero’s 409-foot average for homers is three feet farther than any of the others, and he has the lowest share of sub-400 foot homers of the group this year (30.8%). Like Rodríguez, he isn’t having a big season with the bat, but he is hitting the ball much harder than his slash stats suggest; his .547 xSLG is 104 points higher than his SLG. In other words, he brings the thunder. Of the lower seeds, he’s got the best shot at winding up in the finals.

(4) García vs. (5) Arozarena

Not only does this matchup pit a pair of Cuban players against each other, but both García and Arozarena were teammates in the Cardinals’ minor league chain before being traded away. They remain close friends, and García is godfather to Arozarena’s daughter. If the top-seeded Robert advances out of the first round to face the winner here, that semifinals matchup will also be an all-Cuban affair.

The 30-year-old García leads the group in terms of both barrel rate and average exit velocity on fly balls. His four homers of at least 440 feet puts him in the upper half here, though note that while the 28-year-old Arozarena has none, his average distance is just one foot less than that of his pal. Though not a particularly prolific home run hitter — he’s topped out at 20 in his two full seasons — Arozarena has been hitting the ball much harder this year, with his barrel rate and other Statcast numbers career highs. And as his postseason resumé and star turn for Team Mexico in the World Baseball Classic have shown, he’s a player who absolutely thrives in the spotlight. That could be a big help in this contest.

If you’ve read this far, you probably want some predictions, and while I’m no expert in prognostication, my track record since joining the FanGraphs staff includes the Harper and Alonso wins in 2018-19 — the latter over Guerrero in the finals, even (not that I was going too far out on a limb either time). I haven’t done as well in recent years, however, and while my impulse is to pick Alonso based on his career resumé, instead I’m going with Guerrero over Robert in the finals. More than anything, I’m hopeful that despite the relative lack of star power, this contest will provide thrills on the level of recent Derbies.

It’s been a topsy-turvy year in baseball, at least from a team perspective. Shohei Ohtani is still great, and so are Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto, but the teams leading the charge look nothing like last year’s playoff hopefuls. The Rangers, Diamondbacks, and Reds are in first place in their respective divisions. The Orioles are in second place but sport the third-best record in the game.

In a lot of ways, those teams are doing well because they have great players. That’s just kind of how it works, you know? You don’t get good by having a pile of bad players. That makes it harder to suggest clean upgrades. Sure, occasionally you get a situation like Texas’ outfield mishmash or the back end of Cincinnati’s rotation, but for the most part, “how do we get good players to upstart teams?” is a self-solving problem. The teams are good because they have good players, and there’s just no need to complicate it more than that.

A lot of the good hitters and starters now are the same guys who were good half a decade ago, so teams build their farm systems accordingly. Each of these four surprising teams has core position players and starters who will be there a while. Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman, Corbin Carroll and Zac Gallen, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager, the entire Reds infield: they’re pillars of their respective franchises. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes there’s a difference between returning and being back. After tearing his right ACL in July of 2021, Ronald Acuña Jr. returned on April 28, 2022. He put up a solid 2.1 WAR over 119 games, a 2.9-win pace. Think of him as Paul McCartney in 1970, releasing the solid but uninspiring McCartney on the heels of a regrettable rupture. This year, Acuña is back. He’s Paul McCartney in 1971, authoring an all-time classic in Ram. Please don’t examine this metaphor any further because it can’t stand up to scrutiny (but please give Ram a listen because it can).

Acuña has put up 4.9 WAR and a 166 wRC+ and racked up outfield assists on throws beautiful enough to make an angel cry (or a Cardinal, or a Padre).

Acuña is slashing .335/.412./.589, and for what it’s worth, his 166 wRC+ might be the result of a bit of bad luck. His .459 xwOBA is 34 points higher than his actual wOBA. It’s also the highest in the league, even higher than You Know Who. Read the rest of this entry »

Grant Anderson had an especially-memorable MLB debut earlier this season. Pitching in Detroit on May 30, the 26-year-old Texas Rangers right-hander entered the game in the fifth inning and promptly fanned Zach McKinstry to strand an inherited runner at second base. He then returned to the mound in the sixth and struck out the side. In the seventh, he induced a line-out followed by a pair of punch-outs. In the eighth, yet another strikeout was followed by a Miguel Cabrera single that ended his evening. All told, the sidearming rookie had faced nine batters and fanned seven of them. He was credited with the win in Texas’s 10-6 victory.

He could have been working in a rubber plant instead. On two occasions — one of them as recently as this spring — Anderson seriously considered giving up baseball. More on that in a moment.

Five years ago, Anderson was at home in Beaumont, Texas following the draft with his father and twin brother Aidan [who now pitches in the Rangers system] when the Seattle Mariners took him in the 21st round with the 628th-overall pick. A half dozen or so calls and texts had come earlier. The Brewers, Mets, and a few other teams had reached out to say, “Hey, what do you think about this number and this round?” That none of them actually pulled the trigger wasn’t a matter of high demands. As Anderson put it, “I was coming from a small place and just wanted to play pro ball, so it didn’t really matter to me what the money was. I guess they all just found a better guy for those spots.”

Seattle and Colorado had shown the most interest prior to draft day, and had the former not drafted him, the latter presumably would have. The Rockies called to say they were planning to take him in the 21st round, only to have the Mariners do so a handful of picks in front of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Carroll is having a marvelous season. After a 2022 cup of coffee in which he put up a 130 wRC+, he has improved in nearly every statistical category and leads all rookies in WAR by a wide margin. But while he has a 145 wRC+ (highest among NL rookies) and 41 extra-base hits, he isn’t just a one-dimensional slugger; the completeness of his profile is astonishing for a 22-year-old rookie. He’s amassed 7 RAA since his debut and is the only outfielder with three five-star catches this season, though his arm strength still has room for improvement. Most impressively, Carroll is possibly the most electric baserunner in the league and is producing value with his legs at a historic rate.

Carroll puts a lot of balls in play; his 19.8% strikeout rate and 8.4% swinging-strike rate are both better than league average. But perhaps the only remaining weakness in his game is in his batted ball distribution. He hits the ball on the ground nearly half the time, and while he’s good at turning his fly balls into homers, a considerable fraction of his air balls are popped up. In other words, many of Carroll’s batted balls are either hit straight up or straight down, with a big gap in the middle. His sweet spot rate ranks in the 16th percentile, and his line drive percentile is barely in the double digits. While Luis Arraez can practically walk to first thanks to his barrage of liners into the outfield, Carroll has to sprint for every base he can get.

Luckily for Carroll, his ability to fly out of the box is nearly unmatched. His average home-to-first time of 4.07 seconds is tied for second in baseball. And he can turn on the jets when he needs to; his 62 bolts rank second to only Bobby Witt Jr., who carries the disadvantage of having to start from the right-handed batter’s box. But Carroll doesn’t just use his speed to get on base (he has just six infield hits this year); he uses it to stretch his base hits as far as they can go. With his ability to rocket around the basepaths, any ball he puts in play can easily become a double or triple.

Imagine you’re an MLB outfielder. A batter hits the ball hard on the ground, past a diving shortstop. You run to cut the ball off before it gets past you and fire a strike to second base. How much time do you think you need to make that play? If your answer is anything longer than 7.5 seconds, then congratulations: Carroll has just stretched his single into a double off you. He had the three fastest home-to-second times in the majors in 2022 despite hitting just nine doubles, leveraging his 99th-percentile sprint speed to teleport around the bases. Read the rest of this entry »

There comes a time in many a Red Sox pitching prospect’s life when he is likened to Pedro Martinez, which must be every bit as intimidating as it is flattering. His name was invoked when the Red Sox acquired six-foot-flat Dominican fireballer Rubby de la Rosa — whose grandmother nannied the Martinez boys back in Santo Domingo — in the blockbuster 2012 deal that sent Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, and Nick Punto to the Dodgers. Martinez was again floated as a lofty comp for small-framed Venezuelan right-hander Anderson Espinoza when he emerged as the team’s most promising pitching prospect in 2015 and ’16. Across the league, countless others have drawn the hopeful comparison, sometimes of the Hall of Famer’s own accord.

For 24-year-old Red Sox starter Brayan Bello, the comparisons started at least a couple of years ago. The diminutive Dominican right-hander was also overlooked for his smaller frame in his youth, and while he favors a two-seam fastball over his four-seamer — both register in the mid-90s velocity-wise — it’s the changeup that is perhaps most reminiscent of the pitcher he calls an idol. In May 2021, Peter Gammons quoted a team official noting that Bello was “up to 97 with the best changeup I ever seen, at least since Pedro.” For Bello, the comparison hasn’t exactly been unwelcome; in May of last year, upon his promotion to Triple-A, he said through a translator that he ”would eventually like to be better than him,” reflecting a kind of unabashed confidence that itself is not unlike the former Sox ace. Read the rest of this entry »

When Carlos Rodón returns to the mound tonight — the 30-year-old New York Yankees southpaw has been out all season with forearm and back issues — he’ll be doing so with one of baseball’s best-known sliders. Long his signature pitch, it has contributed heavily to his success, which includes a 2.67 ERA, a 2.42 FIP, and a 12.23 K/9 rate between the 2021 and ’22 campaigns. As far back as 2016, former FanGraphs columnist (and now Tampa Bay Rays analyst) Jeff Sullivan compared Rodón’s slider to the one thrown by future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw.

Harkening back to my Learning and Developing a Pitch series, which has been on hiatus since last July, I recently asked Rodón for the story behind his slider.

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Carlos Rodón: “The slider I throw now is the same one I threw in college. Before I got to [North Carolina State University], it was more of a slurve. My pitching coach in college was Tom Holliday, and he thought that I should throw a harder breaking ball as opposed to one that was more curvish/slurvish. He said, ‘Let’s try to make this closer to a true slider,’ showed me a grip, then said, ‘I want you to throw this as hard as you can.’ I did, and from there it didn’t take very long to develop into the breaking ball I have now. It fell into my arsenal pretty easily.

“The grip isn’t a traditional slider grip. The tracks of the ball, above the horseshoe — both horseshoes — like you’re throwing a two-seamer… you spin it like you’re going straight perpendicular across [the seams]. You’re crossing them, and then my leverage is on that next horseshoe. The leverage is with my middle finger, and while that’s traditional, the grip itself is kind of unorthodox. It’s not like I’m on just one seam. It’s hard to explain, but I’m kind of above it. Read the rest of this entry »

No one can deny that baseball’s new rules are having the intended effects. BAPIP is up, game times are down, and stolen bases are back. Attendance is growing too, and while we can’t give the rule changes all the credit for that one, they’ve certainly done their part. Even better, the new rules aren’t leading to the adverse side effects some of us feared. The pitch clock isn’t causing widespread injury, pitch timer violations have been steadily decreasing as players adapt, and bigger bases haven’t led to any reports of Ty Cobb rolling over in his grave.

As efficacious as all the new rules have been, one stands above the rest. In my humble opinion, the disengagement limit has proven to be the gold standard of rule changes. Let me explain.

I like the pitch clock. Imaginary audience applauds. I like the shift restrictions. Imaginary audience begins to turn on me. I even like the automatic runner on second in extra innings. Imaginary audience starts throwing rotten fruit. But as much as I appreciate those new rules, I understand they all came at the expense of something else, something fans once cherished. The pitch timer offends purists who believe baseball shouldn’t have a clock. The shift restrictions limit smart defensive positioning in service of hitters who can’t adjust. The automatic runner warps each team’s priorities in the 10th inning onward. But the disengagement limit? It’s been a roaring success, and it hasn’t cost us anything at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Late-career resurgences from former stars are fascinating to me. This is a terribly difficult game even when you are at your peak strength and athleticism; as your body declines, it only gets more difficult. Some are just unable to adjust to new circumstances, including former stars. But every now and then, you have a hitter who can make the right tweaks to adapt to their new body and changed environment. There are only a handful who do that every year; this season, Evan Longoria is one of them.

After an injury-laden 2022, the future was murky for Longoria. Last year, he went on the IL for hand surgery, an oblique strain, and a hamstring strain, and ultimately missed the last week of the season after taking a 100-mph line drive off the thumb, leading to a fracture. He had no intentions of retiring before or after the fracture, though; it was only a bump in the road that his potential new team would have to consider, since the Giants did not exercise his club option. He ended up signing a one-year, $4 million dollar deal with the Diamondbacks, where he has enjoyed his best offensive season since 2016 by wRC+ and xwOBA. It comes in a limited sample and strategic playing time from Torey Lovullo, but it’s far from a fluke. Longoria is impacting the ball as well as he ever has in the Statcast era. Here is a table detailing his jump in performance and quality of contact relative to recent seasons:

Every single one of these metrics is a personal high for Longoria since 2015, and some by a wide margin, which is pretty remarkable for a player coming off so many injuries in the back half of their 30s. His HardHit% is fifth in the league among hitters with at least 50 batted balls, putting him in between Juan Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on that list. Pair that with great consistency in hitting the ball between eight and 32 degrees, and you have yourself an xwOBACON over .500 — also good for fifth in all of baseball among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

The Joey Bart Era, such as it was, may already have ended in San Francisco. Struggling to fill the shoes of Buster Posey — admittedly, a ridiculously tall task for anyone — the 26-year-old backstop strained his groin in mid-May; by the time he was healthy enough to return, the Giants had shifted their focus to a younger catcher they were even happier with in Patrick Bailey. After finishing last season in High-A, the 24-year-old Bailey rocketed through the minors this spring, and upon arrival has hit and fielded well enough to help turn the Giants’ season around.

Recall that Posey retired abruptly after the 2021 season, at age 34. The move shocked the entire baseball world, not just the Giants, who had just won 107 games and planned to discuss retaining him upon the expiration of his nine-year, $169 million contract, whether by picking up his $22 million option or by hammering out a longer-term deal. Yet Posey, who had opted out of the 2020 season in order to spend time with his family, which had expanded to include two adopted twin daughters who had been born prematurely, felt the pull of home. Having checked every box for a Hall of Fame resumé except the padded career totals, the sad decline, and the long goodbye, he hung up his mask.

The Giants pivoted to Bart, who had looked like the heir apparent when he was taken with the second pick of the 2018 draft out of Georgia Tech. In Posey’s absence, he had done the bulk of the work behind the plate in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but his inexperience showed, and he spent most of ’21 in the minors. While he began the 2022 campaign with promise by homering off Sandy Alcantara on Opening Day, he was optioned to Triple-A Sacramento in early June. Though he played somewhat better upon returning a month later, he finished with just a .215/.296/.364 (90 wRC+) line and an astronomical 38.5% strikeout rate in 297 PA, with -3.7 framing runs and a meager 0.6 WAR.

After making a two-inning cameo on Opening Day of this season, Bart landed on the injured list due to a mid-back strain. He additionally missed time in late April due to right groin tightness, then was diagnosed with a Grade 1 left groin strain in mid-May. In between all of the injuries, he hit just .231/.286/.295 (63 wRC+) in 84 PA; while he trimmed his strikeout rate to 25%, he walked just twice (2.4%). He started 22 of the team’s 43 games before landing on the IL a second time, with Roberto Pérez making five starts before suffering a season-ending rotator cuff tear and rookie Blake Sabol starting 16 games.

Enter the 6-foot-1, 210-pound Bailey, who was chosen with the 13th pick of the 2020 draft out of North Carolina State. He entered last season at no. 76 on our Top 100 list as a 50 FV prospect but was downgraded due to his early-season struggles at High-A Eugene, where he had finished the 2021 season. While he finished with a respectable .225/.342/.420 (113 wRC+) line with 12 homers, he missed the Top 100 — not just ours, but every major top prospect list of note throughout the industry. Baseball America, for example, ranked him 27th among Giants prospects, calling him a plus defender with “sound footwork and quick release” but also “a switch-hitter with an inconsistent approach [who] gets in trouble when he starts chasing power.” The publication saw his ceiling as that of “a defense-minded backup catcher.”

It wasn’t until last week that Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin published the Giants’ Top 49 Prospects list here. Ranking Bailey third behind Luis Matos and Kyle Harrison, they began the entry with a mea culpa: “Time to eat double crow here, as Bailey was just outside the Top 100 when he was drafted and throughout 2021 before we rounded his FV grade down during an uneven 2022. When we put together the lengthy Giants Imminent Big Leaguers piece, Bailey was not included, as we didn’t anticipate he’d spend just two weeks each at Richmond and Sacramento before the club decided to insert him as their primary big league catcher.”

Indeed, Bailey moved quickly this spring, hitting .333/.400/.481 (143 wRC+) with two homers in 60 PA in Double-A and .216/.317/.353 (61 wRC+) in 60 PA at Triple-A. He got the call when Bart hit the IL, debuted with a late-inning cameo on May 19, and went 1-for-3 in his first start the next day, singling off the Marlins’ Tanner Scott. The day after that, he clubbed a solo homer off Jesús Luzardo and added another RBI later in a 7–5 win. A week after his debut, on May 26, he went 4-for-5 with three RBI in a 15–1 rout of the Brewers; three days later, he went 3-for-5 with a double, a homer, and four RBI in a 14–4 shellacking of the Pirates.

The hits keep coming, and the Giants keep winning. Bailey is batting .302/.336/.512 for a 128 wRC+ — second on the team behind LaMonte Wade Jr.’s 139 — with five homers in 139 PA. The Giants, who were 20–23 before he was called up, are 27–17 since; they won nine straight from June 11 to 21 and soon after pulled to within 1.5 games of the NL West lead. They’ve since fallen back to third place in the division behind the Diamondbacks (50–37) and Dodgers (48–38) and are three games out at this writing, though they’re in a virtual tie with the Phillies (46–39) for the third NL Wild Card spot.

The one win during the team’s recent 1–6 skid was something of a Bailey showcase. Last Friday (June 30), in the eighth inning of the opener of a three-game series against the Mets at Citi Field, he hit a 432-foot three-run homer to center field off David Robertson, turning a 4–2 deficit into a 5–4 lead. With heat-throwing closer Camilo Doval issuing a one-out walk in the ninth, Bailey then made a perfect throw to nab pinch-runner Starling Marte attempting to steal, thus ending the Mets’ franchise-record streak of 35 straight stolen base attempts. On the next pitch, Doval struck out Brandon Nimmo to preserve the win.

“That was as good as it gets,” manager Gabe Kapler said afterwards. “That was superstar-caliber stuff.”

Getting back to our prospect team’s evaluation of Bailey: while putting a 40 present and 50 future grade on his overall defense and a 45 grade on his throwing, they noted, “He is a skilled one-knee’d receiver, great at beating the pitch to the spot in all parts of the zone, often subtly shifting his body to help him receive borderline pitches with strike-stealing stillness.” The numbers back this up; by FanGraphs’ measure, Bailey is 4.8 runs above average in framing in just 302 innings behind the plate, and by Statcast’s measure, he’s four runs above average. He’s done a great job against the running game, with pop times to second base averaging 1.87 seconds. He’s thrown out 12 out of 31 stolen base attempts for a 39% success rate, nearly double the league average of 20%; Statcast rates him as two runs above average in that department, but one run below average in blocking.

On the offensive side, while Bailey hit well from both sides of the plate in college, he struggled mightily against lefthanders in the minors, albeit in a comparatively small sample, an average of less than 50 PA per year. “A natural righty, he viewed the splits as being in part because of a lack of opportunity — he had just 61 at-bats against lefties last year — and made adjustments this spring to his swing and approach,” wrote NBC Sports’ Alex Pavlovic. “The Giants sent Bailey off to Double-A with a plan to spend more time on his right-handed swing during batting practice since he won’t get as many opportunities in games.”

The practice seems to be paying off, because Bailey has not only been effective against lefties within a very small sample, but he’s also put up insane numbers thanks to a BABIP that’s nearly double what it was in the minors — and quite unsustainable. Those have propped up a righty performance that’s slightly above the league average for a catcher (86 wRC+) but hardly exceptional, with strikeout and walk rates that rate as concerns.

Contact-wise, Bailey’s got enough total batted ball events that he’s past the point where the numbers start to stabilize. While the individual platoon splits haven’t entirely reached that point, his actual numbers from both sides are close to his expected numbers — and quite robust:

Bailey really is hitting the ball much harder from the right side of the plate, not that anyone should expect him to maintain Rogers Hornsby’s 1924 numbers.

Getting back to the walk and strikeout stuff: Bailey’s rates are out of balance, but it’s not as though his 44.7% swing rate, 29.1% chase rate, or 9.9% swinging-strike rate stand out as egregious or as marks that can’t be attached to reasonable production. Consider, for example, this list of players who are within 0.2 percentage points of his overall swing rate, two points of his chase rate, and one point of his swinging-strike rate:

Those are largely productive hitters, and the biggest difference seems to be that they’re taking fewer called strikes than Bailey en route to more balanced walk and strikeout rates. But again, it’s not like he is extraordinarily passive or aggressive. Note his -1 run rating in the Statcast shadow zone; he’s taking slightly more pitches in that zone than the league average (52% to 47%) and slightly more than average in the heart of the zone (31% to 28%) as well:

Anyway, for now as he’s making his way around the majors for the first six weeks of his career, Bailey has been exceptionally productive. I would caution that while he appears to have taken a significant leap forward from his minor league stats and pre-2023 scouting profile, the Posey comparisons he’s drawn — comparisons to a franchise pillar and future Hall of Famer (seriously, fight me) who began his career by winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2010 — are over the top. “Hey, let’s pump the brakes a little bit,” said Kapler in response to that line of discussion prior to Bailey’s big game in New York. “It’s a month into his career. Let’s let things unfold.”

As for what this means for Bart, he hasn’t exactly been Pipped out of a job given his struggles, but it’s tough to see him getting it back. For the near future, he may be blocked by Sabol, a Rule 5 pick from the Pirates who’s hitting .251/.313/.438 (104 wRC+) and putting up decent defensive numbers while splitting time between catching (26 starts and a total of 228 innings) and left field (183.2 innings). With his versatility, the Giants could carry three catchers, but doing so only to have Bart sit on the bench instead of working to improve at Sacramento probably isn’t in his best interest. For the longer term, he may be a change-of-scenery candidate — a player whose value is currently at the lower end of its range but one who was previously judged to have the makings of an everyday catcher, who has fewer than 500 PA under his belt, and who still has five years of club control remaining. If he doesn’t get another look in San Francisco, somebody out there will give him a shot.

As the Giants approach the August 1 trade deadline, it will be interesting to see if Bart’s name comes up as they shop to fill their needs. In the meantime, we should probably expect Bailey to cool off and should hope that folks cool it with the Posey comparisons; he casts a long enough shadow over the Giants’ organization as it is. Nonetheless, it’s exciting for any rookie to arrive, put his claim on a starting spot, and help turn his team’s fortunes. Let’s see where Bailey goes with this next.