Daulton Varsho is a tinkerer. In each of his seasons with the Blue Jays, either SportsNet’s Arden Zwelling, SportsNet’s Shi Davidi, or both have written an article detailing a swing change – except in 2024, when Zwelling noted that for once, Varsho was going to finally try (gasp!) not tinkering with his swing.
Despite all the adjustments, Varsho remained the same kind of hitter. He had a super steep swing that was seemingly tailor made for today’s lift-and-pull focused game. He whiffed a lot and didn’t hit the ball particularly hard, but when he did square it up, he ripped it into the right field bleachers. That’s a recipe for a lot of variance – the lows involve scads of strikeouts and the highs involve heaps of homers – so it wasn’t surprising that his first three seasons with the Blue Jays saw one average season at the plate, one below-average season, and one above-average season. Although injuries limited him to just 71 games in 2025, Varsho put up a career-best 123 wRC+ and slugged 20 homers. Over a full season, that’s a 46-homer pace! If ever there was a time to stand pat, this was it, right? Right!? Read the rest of this entry »
Dylan Dodd throws a sinker that doesn’t sink. Nor does it have much horizontal movement. For all intents and purposes, it isn’t a sinker at all. Despite it being classified as such, the pitch is functionally a four-seamer delivered with a two-seam grip.
Labels aside, it works just fine. The 27-year-old southpaw has thrown his signature offering 87 times (59.6% usage) this season to the tune of a .158 batting average allowed and a 26.3% strikeout rate while making seven appearances out of the Atlanta Braves bullpen. Limited to 10 2/3 big league innings due to an earlier stint on the IL for thoracic spine inflammation, Dodd has fanned a dozen batters, allowed seven hits, and issued just one free pass.
I learned about his atypical “sinker” when the Braves visited Fenway Park late last month. All I knew prior to our conversation was that Dodd’s player page showed him having transitioned away from a four-seamer, and that doing so was yielding good results. Interested in the reason behind the switch — ditto the process behind it — I began by asking him if what I’d seen was accurate. Read the rest of this entry »
Reasonable people can disagree on who the best draft prospect of the 21st century is. I think there’s a pretty good case for Adley Rutschman: A switch-hitter with patience and power, a plus defender at a premium position, a College World Series champion who’d been tested repeatedly against the toughest amateur competition in the world and come out on top routinely.
If you were only looking at the top-line numbers that Roki Sasaki has posted through 10 starts — a 4.59 ERA and a 5.04 FIP in 51 innings — you could be forgiven for thinking that the 24-year-old righty had made little progress since last year’s abbreviated rookie season. At times, it has seemed as though he might be better off ironing out his mechanics and approach in Triple-A or in the bullpen, where he found some success last fall after missing four and a half months with a shoulder impingement. While Sasaki’s early-season starts brought to mind last year’s struggles, a little over a month ago he made a change to his repertoire, adding a second offspeed pitch to his mix. Since then, he’s pitched more effectively thanks not only to the new offering, but also to better command and velocity.
Sasaki’s improvement has come at a particularly opportune time for the Dodgers, as they’re once again carrying on without either Tyler Glasnow or Blake Snell. Glasnow left his May 6 start after just one inning due to back spasms and still hasn’t been cleared to throw off a mound yet, while Snell didn’t make his season debut until May 9 due to shoulder soreness, then lasted just three innings before discomfort in his elbow forced him from his start. He was diagnosed with loose bodies in the elbow and underwent surgery using the same NanoNeedle Scope 2.0 procedure that Dr. Neal ElAttrache had just used on Tarik Skubal. The new version of the surgery is aimed at accelerating recovery time, but Snell has been moved to the 60-day injured list nonetheless, and can’t return until early July. Increasingly, it appears Glasnow won’t be back before July either.
Sasaki’s new pitch is a splitter, but it’s not the same splitter he threw last season, and it’s not entirely new; it bears more resemblance to the one he threw in NPB with the Chiba Lotte Marines and in the 2023 World Baseball Classic for Team Japan than it does to its immediate predecessor. Statcast has redefined the offspeed pitch he threw last year as a forkball and is tracking the two pitches separately. Sasaki throws his splitter about five miles an hour faster than his forkball, and relatively speaking, it gets a bit more rise and a lot more arm-side run. Since introducing the new pitch — which I’ll get into more below — he’s lasted at least five innings in all six of his starts, something he’d done in just four out of eight starts last year and one out of his first four this year. Read the rest of this entry »
Not sure if PokéBallpark is the game for you? Follow me! I’m about to play the demo, and I hereby grant you permission to roam the land with me!
Our character has just woken up as an amorphous blob. It’s unclear who or where we are. First, we’re given a device for storing all of our PokéBallKnowledge, it’s called a FanGraph. Our FanGraph reveals that we are a versatile creature who inhabits the world of baseball.
Our character (whom I’ve named RedAsh, I hope you’re cool with that) has a transformation ability that enables it to quickly pick up moves from other PokéBallers and take on the role of GM, player, or coach as needed. And it will be needed because the baseball world is looking dire. PokéBallers are nowhere to be found. Once lively stadiums are now deserted ruins. The only sign of life is the flickering screen of a videoboard in the distance. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been a Max Meyer fan since long before he became a Marlin. I love undersized hard-throwing college right-handers. I love plus athletes from unfashionable Midwestern schools. I love guys with a breaking ball and an edge. Meyer was a freshman on the 2018 Minnesota team that gave the eventual national champion, a totally loaded Oregon State club, everything it could handle. (I’ve mentioned the 2018 Corvallis Super Regional previously, as the center fielder on that Minnesota team grew up to be Sketchy Ben from Love Is Blind.)
By 2020, Meyer was the no. 3 overall pick and top college pitcher in his draft class. Not that I expect any of you to remember my thoughts on draft prospects from six years ago, but here’s what I wrote on draft night: “Meyer isn’t the best player in this draft, but he’s my favorite.” Read the rest of this entry »
William Liang, Denis Poroy, Sam Navarro-Imagn Images
I’m not sure whether it’s called the Effectively Wild rule or not, but I learned a fun rule of thumb from that podcast: Statistical samples are only stable after Mike Trout leads the league in WAR. Until then, it’s still too early. This rule made more sense a decade ago, when Trout was the clear best player in the sport, but the sentiment applies today. When Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Bobby Witt Jr. are near the top of the leaderboard, it’s probably been long enough to believe the statistics. If they aren’t, it’s too early.
Ohtani and Witt are indeed atop the combined WAR leaderboards, but Judge isn’t even in the top 30. And the rest of the names are kind of strange, too, particularly if you limit yourself to the hitter’s leaderboard and leave Ohtani’s singular two-way nature behind. Oh, there’s a Dodger in the top five, but it’s Andy Pages. There’s a Yankee, but it’s Ben Rice. Two rookies are in the top 10, and they’re both behind Xavier Edwards. It’s an odd leaderboard, no matter how you look at it, and it got me wondering two things. First, is that Mike Trout rule generally true? And second, what does it say about 2026 if so?
I settled on one thing first: no two-way players. That might annoy the Ohtani fans out there, but I had two good reasons. One, he’s been around for a while now, so it’s not like this is some special consideration that only applies to 2026. Second, pulling all these numbers is hard work. I didn’t want to handle corner cases in every year, so I stuck with the pure hitting leaderboard. Given that I wanted to look at the whole 21st century and see how often hitters stay atop the heap from one year to (early in) the next, I opted for a simple definition and only looked at hitters. Read the rest of this entry »
Corbin Carroll is the best left-on-left hitter in baseball right now.
It’s been a tremendous year for Carroll, however you want to split up the data. He has a 152 wRC+. He has 2.6 WAR. It’s looking like his best-ever season — a perfect follow-up to his best-ever season last year.
That Carroll appears to be taking another step forward in 2026 isn’t quite newsworthy. But the way he’s doing it certainly is:
Carroll is all of a sudden crushing lefties. He was just average against them the first few years of his career. Last year, he was fairly good in left-on-left matchups, though that improvement seems to stem more from his overall growth at the plate rather than a specific step forward against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »
The Cincinnati Reds went 10-17 during the month of May, dropping from first in the NL Central to last, making this a terrible time for them to lose their most important player. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened on Monday, when shortstop Elly De La Cruz landed on the injured list for the first time in his career after straining his hamstring on Sunday. Now in his fourth big league season, De La Cruz was hitting .280/.346/.509 with 12 homers and a 134 wRC+ in 58 games, and looked to be on his way to making his third consecutive All-Star team. His 2.7 WAR was enough to lead all National League shortstops and rank second in the majors at the position, behind Bobby Witt Jr.. Minor league infielder Edwin Arroyo was called up from Triple-A Louisville to take De La Cruz’s place on the roster.
While it’s never good news to see your superstar miss time, the silver lining is this is not a season-risking injury. After limping while running the bases on a fifth-inning single on Sunday against the Braves, De La Cruz immediately came out of the game and underwent an MRI the next day. Manager Terry Francona described the results as “kind of between a Grade 1 and a Grade 2” strain. For those without the weirdly specific knowledge of muscle strain terminology, Grade 1 typically refers to a mild strain and Grade 2, a partial tear. So this is more than just a “Rub some dirt on it and get back in the game” thing, but less than a “Crap, do we have to look up Jose Iglesias’ phone number?” diagnosis. The initial prognosis is that De La Cruz will be out for two-to-four weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, Jake Mailhot wrote about the complete overhaul that has turned Keibert Ruiz from one of the worst players in baseball to, as of now, the 12th-best catcher in the game according to WAR. I’m particularly jazzed about this success story because I wrote about Ruiz’s chance to do something like this last year. It’s not often you come across a six-year veteran with a wRC+ of 65 and see real potential for improvement, but Ruiz was demonstrating some gifts that sure seemed like they could start bringing some value.
In an article about players who pull the ball significantly more often specifically when they square it up, I noted that Ruiz ran some of the highest pull and contact rates in the game, up with José Ramírez, Alex Bregman, and Isaac Paredes. He didn’t fit in with that group, though, because he mainly used those great contact skills to pull weak grounders. I figured that he was caught in between. He might be able to find success following the path of Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan, using his contact skills to wait back and shoot line drives the other way, or he could follow the lifter-pullers and start trying to do some actual damage with all that pull-side contact. The Nationals chose the latter path, increasing his bat speed and encouraging him to do damage, and it sure seems like it’s working so far.
Jake’s article went hand in glove with a deep dive from The Athletic’s Spencer Nusbaum that described the all-hands-on-deck nature of the turnaround: “This season, the Nationals have started to implement ‘player plan’ meetings, an individual gathering with every member of the roster every six weeks. First, they tell players how they’re being evaluated by the organization. Then, they talk through a plan to tweak their routines accordingly.”
Between executives, coaches, and trainers, Nusbaum reported, these individual player meetings have nearly 20 people in them. His article also mentioned the specific areas of improvement the Nationals identified for Jacob Young, Curtis Mead, José Tena, and Luis García Jr. Today, we’re going to talk about Nasim Nuñez, who went unmentioned in the article and is one of the few Nationals hitters who isn’t having a career year.
Nuñez is a 25-year-old switch-hitting middle infielder. This is his third major league season, and it will be his first full one. To some degree, things are going as expected for him. In 2024, Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice wrote that Nuñez possessed “virtually no power,” but predicted a “John McDonald-esque career” based on “his incredible hands, range, athleticism, and infield versatility.” Last year, Ben Clemens echoed that sentiment, calling Nuñez “the platonic ideal of the light-hitting utility infielder.” This season, Nuñez is getting everyday reps at second base with occasional days at shortstop. He possesses blistering speed, and that part of his game is going great. He leads the majors with 22 stolen bases and his 3.4 baserunning runs rank fifth. He’s also running a tidy 11% walk rate thanks to good plate discipline and a league-average contact rate. Lastly, his defense isn’t lighting up the advanced metrics just yet, but it is grading out as solidly above average.
That’s it. Those are the things that are going right for Nuñez, and if he were posting something approaching the 93 wRC+ he put up across the 90 games of his career entering this year, they would be enough to make him an above-average second baseman. Great baserunning and middle infield defense along with a good walk rate really should really be enough. Unfortunately, the rest of Nuñez’s offensive profile is dragging him way, way down. He is batting .193 with a 50 wRC+, second worst among all qualified hitters. I made a list of 12 categories where Nuñez ranks in the bottom octile of all qualified players, and another list of 10 categories where he ranks dead last, but I think just telling you about the two lists is enough to get the point across. He has looked like the worst hitter in baseball, and as a result, he’s been sub-replacement level so far this season.
As you’d expect for anybody hitting this badly over a relatively short sample, Nuñez has been the victim of some bad luck. His .270 xwOBA, execrable though it is, is still 30 points above his actual wOBA. Likewise, his DRC+ of 84, while dreadful, at least pushes him up out of the bottom 30 among qualified hitters. Still, a lack of power is the main thing dragging Nuñez down, and it’s hard to argue that he’s getting jobbed in that department. He is at or near the bottom of the league in every exit velocity metric. He has not yet homered. He has not yet notched a barrel. He’s last among all qualified hitters in both doubles and triples. In fact, I put all of his extra-base hits in the GIF below. Anytime you can put a player’s entire highlight reel for two months of a season into a single GIF, that’s definitely a bad sign.
That’s right. Nuñez has two doubles and both of them were hustle doubles. The one and only time this season he has hit the ball past the defense, it was on a fly ball with a 60% catch probability. Luckily Nuñez hit it toward Matt Wallner, whose -9 defensive runs saved rank last among right fielders. A decent right fielder catches that ball, and most non-Wallner right fielders avoid misplaying it into a triple.
Nuñez’s slugging percentage is 50 points below his expected slugging level, but that’s almost entirely because of singles not falling in. He’s hit just four balls this season with an expected slugging percentage above 1.000. One was the first double in the GIF above, where he lined the ball toward (but not all the way into) the right field corner against the Brewers. Three were little bloopers that always go for singles and occasionally get stretched into doubles. This is the ball with the highest expected slugging percentage he’s hit all year.
It’s also the hardest-hit ball he has hit all year, but it is the most routine single in the world. You’d expect a speedster like Nuñez to be getting lots of hustle doubles, so is it possible that he’s just been unlucky on that front, getting thrown out trying to stretch singles into doubles? That ain’t it either. He’s only been cut down once trying to advance to second on a single, and amazingly, it was on a freak bunt play where the Brewers tried their best to throw the ball away but were foiled by the wayward torso of the umpire:
So why am I spending so much time showing you that a player we all expected to be light on power is, in fact, light on power? First, because things are so extreme that Nuñez is in danger of making some dubious history. He has an isolated slugging percentage of .023. You won’t be shocked to learn that it’s the lowest mark among all qualified players, but you might be surprised to learn that the next-lowest ISO is more than double Nuñez’s mark. (You might also be surprised to learn that it belongs to Fernando Tatis Jr. What a world.)
Nuñez isn’t just failing to slug, but he’s also been historically bad at it. Among qualified AL/NL position players since 1901, Nasim this year is currently tied for the ninth-lowest single-season ISO, and he has the third-lowest single-season slugging percentage. Of course, the game is very different now, and the names around Nuñez at the bottom of these leaderboards are nearly all from the turn of the last century. (You can tell because the first names include Spike, Spook, Patsy, Rollie, and, of course, Goat.) If we look at plus stats in order to compare Nuñez to the league average for historical context he drops even lower. His 15 ISO+ and 55 SLG+ are the very lowest. In AL/NL history. Since 1901.
Now, it’s not quite fair to compare Nuñez to full-season marks. We’re catching him over a shorter, noisier sample. It’s a long season, and he’s sure to pick up the pace some. He’ll hit better and he’ll get luckier, if for no other reason than that he couldn’t get much worse. But even if we just look at partial seasons from this century, Stathead tells us that only 14 players have ever run a slugging percentage this low over a span of 50 games and at least 190 plate appearances.
My goal in writing this article was not to drag a player who’s having a rough season and who only has 244 career plate appearances under his belt. I really like Nuñez’s game. His true talent level isn’t this low, and even if it were, he could still be a useful player. He’s always been better-suited for a utility role, and on a better team, that’s what he’d be. He’d get to rack up value as a pinch-runner, show off his glove, minimize the percentage of his overall value that came at the plate, and specifically minimize his time facing right-handed pitching. The Nationals are, very understandably, playing Nuñez in front of Jorbit Vivas and José Tena, whose bats aren’t much better and who don’t possess Nuñez’s glove or speed. But I still think Nuñez could be better.
As I hinted at in the previous paragraph, he has some serious splits. Over his short career, he’s got a 42 wRC+ hitting left-handed and a 120 mark batting righty. This season, those marks are 23 and 110. Even in this dreadful, dreadful season, Nuñez has been a legitimately good hitter from the right side. His bat speed is two ticks higher from the right side, his exit velocity is more than three ticks higher, and his strikeout rate is a full seven points lower. It’s very tempting to look at his profile and wonder whether he’s just miscast as a switch-hitter, but I don’t want to go that far. For one, I don’t know him nearly as well as the Nationals do, and they’ve had three years to consider that option. For another, according to Statcast, he actually put up a higher wOBA as a lefty in the minors (at least when the fancy cameras were watching). What I will say is that Nuñez needs to figure out how to unlock his left-handed swing.
I have no idea what the Nationals told Nuñez to work on during his player plan meeting. It’s hard for me to imagine they gave him the same Do Damage advice they gave to Ruiz, Young, and García. Nuñez is 5-foot-8 and he’s never given the faintest sign that he possesses the ability to hit for power. Then again, his average bat speed even in this powerless year is higher than Ruiz’s was last year, and he outhomered Ruiz last year despite playing in 19 fewer games. Maybe swinging hard is good advice for everybody.
