Jazz Chisholm and Jean Segura caught my attention while they were playing catch prior to a recent Miami Marlins road game at Fenway Park. Unlike their teammates, the duo was trading tosses underhand, windmilling their throws like fastpitch softball pitchers. Moreover, they looked good doing it. Their motions were smooth and easy, their deliveries firm and accurate. Having never seen professional baseball players do this, I was very much intrigued.

Standing nearby was Jennifer Brann. Now an analyst with the Marlins, Brann had excelled on the mound at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland prior to being hired by Miami two years ago. I asked her if she had seen them do so previously.

“I’ve seen Segura mess around a little bit, but I’d never seen Jazz pitch underhand like that,” Brann told me. “It was cool to watch. They knew what they were doing, especially Segura; he threw a rise ball and a changeup. But Jazz looked pretty good, too.”

The following day, I made it a point to approach both players in the clubhouse to find out if they had any softball experience. It turns out that they did.

“My grandma was a professional [fastpitch] softball player,” said Chisholm, who grew up in Nassau. “She played for the Bahamas National Team. That’s what really got me into baseball — I learned a lot of my baseball skills from softball — and she played until she was 60, too. She was just superhuman.”

Chisholm played fastpitch growing up, in part because the sport is played in Bahamian high schools, while baseball is not. (He did play Little League baseball.). Having attended a K-12, he began competing against upperclassmen as a sixth grader, both as a shortstop and a pitcher. Chisholm subsequently moved to the United States at age 12, thus ending his competitive softball days, Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tough not to pick on the Cardinals these days. Last season, they won 93 games and took the NL Central title with a team that combined strong offense, exceptional defense — long a St. Louis tradition — and good pitching; it was their 15th straight season above .500 and fourth in a row reaching the postseason. This year, however, they’ve spent time as the NL’s worst team, and while they’re now merely the third-worst, at 33-46 they’re going nowhere and impressing nobody.

A big and perhaps undersold part of the Cardinals’ problem is the collapse of their vaunted defense, which has often featured five players — first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, third baseman Nolan Arenado, outfielder Tyler O’Neill, and multiposition regulars Brendan Donovan and Tommy Edman — who won Gold Gloves in either 2021 or ’22. Manager Oli Marmol has been tasked with shoehorning hot-hitting youngsters Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker into the lineup at comparatively unfamiliar positions, as both are blocked by Arenado at third base, their primary position in the minors, and between injuries and offensive issues, lately Edman has been patrolling center field instead of the middle infield. Backing a pitching staff that doesn’t miss enough bats — their 21.1% strikeout rate is the majors’ fifth-worst — it’s all collapsed into an unhappy mess.

Given that context it’s less than surprising that the Cardinals show up as one of the majors’ worst defensive teams using the methodology I rolled out on Thursday to illustrate the best. For that exercise, I sought to find a consensus from among several major defensive metrics, namely Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, and Statcast’s Runs Prevented (which I’m calling Runs Above Average because their site and ours use the abbreviation RAA) as well as our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as on our stat pages), and Statcast’s catching metrics for framing, blocking, and throwing (which I’ve combine into the abbreviation CRAA). Each of those has different methodologies, and they produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom that owe something to what they don’t measure as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or RAAs, for example, and the catching numbers are set off in their own categories rather than included in UZR and RAA. I’ve accounted for the varying spreads, which range from 86 runs in DRS (from 42 to -44) to 25.6 runs in FRM (from 13.8 to -11.8), by using standard deviation scores (z-scores), which measure how many standard deviations each team is from the league average in each category. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve long been a staunch supporter of Ketel Marte. Switch-hitters with short levers are my personal favorite archetype. When you can produce 90th-percentile max exit velocity from both sides of the plate with only mid-teens strikeout rates, you’ll have my attention each and every night. It’s not always the case that switch-hitters have two contrasting swings, but it is for Marte. He is a natural right-handed hitter, which has played out clearly in his performance over the years, but every now and then, everything clicks on both sides of the plate. In fact, since his breakout 2019 season, he has been an above-average hitter from the left side every other year. But this season, he has taken off unlike ever before.

Throughout Marte’s career, there has been a stark difference in his power from the right side versus his left side. Despite being powerful in terms of exit velocity from both sides, he has always been better at creating pull side lift with his natural right-handed swing. That has resulted in a career ISO of .215 as a righty and .155 as a lefty. But like I said, things are clicking for him as a righty this year.

Before diving into the deep details, let’s look at his splits each year since the 2019 breakout:

There is still fluctuation, but in general, Marte is consistently well above average from the right-handed side. Last year was his worst mark since his breakout, and he was still a 125 wRC+ hitter. But with the more advantageous side of the platoon being the left side, his overall production is highly dependent on how he performs when facing right-handed pitching. So for the rest of this piece, I want to shift my focus to that side. This is the best Marte has been as a lefty since 2019, and that warrants an investigation on what exactly he has done to get here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays have been really good this year, but their bullpen has not. And this has come despite them largely sticking to their strategy of deploying relievers with a wide variety of different release points: two sidearm righties in Kevin Kelly and Ryan Thompson, one sidearm lefty in Jake Diekman, an over-the-top righty in Pete Fairbanks, and an over-the-top lefty in Jalen Beeks. This strategy has succeeded in the past: from 2020 to ’22, Rays relievers have never posted an ERA higher than 3.37; their collective ERA of 3.31 in that span is second only to the Dodgers (whose bullpen also happens to be struggling this year); and their FIP of 3.71 ranks third.

This year, things are different. Even with some modest improvements of late, Tampa Bay’s 12th-ranked 3.83 ERA belies ugly peripherals, including a 4.43 FIP that ranks sixth-worst. The rotation has been ravaged by injuries, forcing the team to turn to the bullpen earlier in games; Rays relievers have tossed 1.26 innings per appearance on average this season, the fourth-highest in the league. But some of this is due to the usage of followers, which is nothing new; perhaps what’s behind the drop-off is simply too much of an emphasis on forcing opposing hitters to deal with different looks.

The Blue Jays, perhaps unintentionally, have taken this lesson to heart. Having signed one of the best splitter-throwers in Kevin Gausman prior to 2022, they traded for another this past offseason in Erik Swanson. Despite the league-wide increase in splitter usage due to its potential as a platoon-neutral offering for pronating and sweeper-throwing hurlers, only 2.2% of all pitches thrown so far this year have been splitters. Given the uniqueness of the pitch, the Jays should have Gausman and Swanson throw on different days to maximize the surprise factor, right? Just as the Rays might save two similar sidearmers for different days? Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers haven’t played in the postseason since 2016 (and haven’t even finished above .500 since then), but they’ve been atop the AL West for almost the entire season and are now 49–31, with a six-game lead over both the Angels and Astros. They own the majors’ largest run differential (+160) as well as its most potent offense (5.98 runs per game), and thanks to a revamped pitching staff, they’re third in run prevention as well (3.98 per game).

An underrated part of that run prevention is the team’s defense. By my evaluation of a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages), and Statcast’s Runs Prevented (which I’ll call Runs Above Average because their site and ours use the abbreviation RAA) and catching metrics for framing, blocking, and throwing (which I’ll combine into the abbreviation CRAA) — the Rangers rate as the majors’ second-best defensive team thus far this season. The Brewers, who are in the midst of a dogfight for first place in the NL Central, are the only team ahead of them.

I’ll explain the methodology behind this conclusion below, but first a bit more about the Rangers. With Jacob deGrom sidelined after just six starts due to a UCL tear that resulted in Tommy John surgery, the team’s pitching staff has the 13th-lowest strikeout rate in the majors (22.2%), but it also has the third-lowest BABIP (.274), in large part thanks to the team’s fielders (the pitchers haven’t been especially good at preventing hard contact). Second baseman Marcus Semien is the only past Gold Glove winner of the bunch, but he’s one of five Rangers defenders with at least 5 DRS thus far, along with first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, outfielder Travis Jankowski, right fielder Adolis García, and catcher Jonah Heim. Lowe, Semien, and center fielder Leody Taveras all have at least 4 RAA, and Heim is 3.7 runs above average in FRAM and +6 in CRAA.

Not all of the metrics are as favorable for the aforementioned players, but it’s worth noting that of the 10 Rangers with the most defensive innings played at a single position, the only negative run ratings are those of shortstop Corey Seager and left fielder Robbie Grossman (both -2 RAA) and Lowe (-2.6 UZR); every other Ranger with at least 161.1 innings at a position rates as average or better. To be fair, 161.1 innings is still a small sample, and for that matter, even the 697.1 innings of Semien at second is less than ideal for a full evaluation, though we can feel better that his DRS, UZR and RAA don’t wildly contradict each other. Particularly at this stage of the season, with teams having played 78–83 games, it’s better to bear in mind the range of values reflected in an individual’s fielding metrics rather than focusing on a single one. To return to Semien: his 6 DRS and 5 RAA are contrasted by his 0.8 UZR; it’s not a matter of which one is “right” so much as it is understanding that he shows up somewhere along the spectrum from slightly above average to solidly above average.

Given all of this alphabet soup dished out in small servings, I set out to look at team defense by aggregating the aforementioned metrics, which reflect differing methodologies and produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom that owe something to what they don’t measure as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or RAAs, for example, and the catching numbers are set off in their own categories rather than included in UZR and RAA. I’ve accounted for the varying spreads, which range from 86 runs in DRS (from 42 to -44) to 25.6 runs in FRM (from 13.8 to -11.8), by using standard deviation scores (z-scores), which measure how many standard deviations each team is from the league average in each category. I don’t proclaim this to be a bulletproof methodology so much as a good point of entry into a broad topic. The Rangers, who entered Wednesday (the cutoff for all of the data below) tied with the Blue Jays for the major league lead with 42 DRS, score 1.86 in that category but “only” 1.37 in UZR and 1.13 in RAA (13.4 runs in the former, 10 in the latter, both fourth in the majors), and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox got a diamond in the rough when they chose Chase Meidroth in the fourth round of last year’s draft. Splitting time at third and second base, the 21-year-old University of San Diego product is slashing .309/.453/.445 with six home runs and a 155 wRC+ between High-A Greenville and Double-A Portland. A patient hitter who had more walks than strikeouts as a collegian, he’s logged 44 of each in 243 plate appearances.

Currently No. 15 on our Red Sox Top Prospects list as a 40+ FV prospect, the Manhattan Beach, California product isn’t built for power, but he is bigger than the 5-foot-9, 170 pounds that most publications are listing him at. As he explained prior to a recent game, he is now a solid 195 pounds. Long gone are the days when he was a lightly-recruited 5-foot-8, 150-pound prep performer. What hasn’t changed is the dirt-dog attitude that has prompted at least one Red Sox staffer to offer a Dustin Pedroia comp.

Chaim Bloom didn’t volunteer any comparisons when I asked about the club’s decision to draft the under-the-radar infielder, but he did touch on the process behind the pick.

“There are some people in this world who can just flat hit, and he’s one of them,” Boston’s Chief Baseball Officer told me. “The combo of ability and makeup really caught our scouts’ eyes. This is somebody who, coming into our meetings before we really knew how our board would fall… we felt like there was a good chance we might end up with this guy. There were a lot of good indicators there. Our scouting opinions and the work we do to understand players analytically all converged.” Read the rest of this entry »

In 2021, the Mariners called up Logan Gilbert, their no. 3 prospect at the time; he has compiled a tidy 7.0 WAR across nearly 400 innings over the last three years. Last year, the Mariners called up George Kirby, their no. 3 prospect at the time; he was a key member of the rotation that helped break Seattle’s two-decade-long postseason drought. With Luis Castillo joining the rotation at the trade deadline last season and then signing a five-year extension in September, Robbie Ray heading into the second year of his five-year deal he signed prior to the 2022 season, and Marco Gonzales eating innings at the back of the rotation, Seattle entered this season with a starting five that appeared to be the biggest strength on the roster.

Things haven’t gone exactly according to plan. Ray injured his elbow in his first start of the season and underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery in early May; Gonzales has been out since late May with his own elbow issues. But despite losing two members of the Opening Day rotation, the Mariners have barely skipped a beat, thanks to the efforts of two more top prospects who have graduated to the majors this year: Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo. Seattle’s starters have the fourth best park- and league-adjusted FIP in the majors, and a park- and league-adjusted strikeout-to-walk ratio that ranks inside the top 20 among all 300 team seasons over the last decade. Only the Twins are outpacing them in those two categories in the American League.

After trying to fill Ray’s spot with a combination of Chris Flexen, Tommy Milone, and Easton McGee, the Mariners called up Miller on May 2 to make his debut against the light-hitting Athletics. He dazzled across six innings, allowing just two baserunners and one run and striking out ten. Across his first five starts in the majors, he allowed just 17 baserunners total, giving him the lowest WHIP (0.51) through a pitcher’s first five career starts in MLB history. A rough pair of outings against the Yankees and Rangers have been the lone blemish on Miller’s ledger; he’s bounced back with three excellent starts since then. Overall, he’s compiled a 3.88 ERA and a 3.36 FIP with a fantastic 4.45 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

As soon as Gonzales hit the IL with his injury, the Mariners quickly turned to another one of their youngsters. Woo made his debut on June 3, though his introduction to the big leagues did not go as well as Miller’s; given the assignment of slowing down the Rangers’ high-powered offense, he lasted just two innings, allowing six runs on seven hits and striking out four. He’s been much better over his last four starts, allowing just six runs total and posting a 5.60 strikeout-to-walk ratio. If you lower the bar far enough, Woo has the fourth-highest strikeout rate among all starters with at least 20 innings pitched this year. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »