The Oakland Athletics entered the season with low expectations. After completing their two-year fire sale by trading Sean Murphy to Atlanta for a package that was generally agreed to be quite light and adding minimal talent in free agency, the Opening Day ZiPS projections forecasted them to win just 69 games; their playoff odds were just 2.9%. Still, that total would have tied them with Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, while Colorado and Washington saved them from the honor of being projected for the league’s worst record. Two weeks later, the A’s sit at a miserable 3-13, below any of the other bottom feeders. While the team’s collective 94 wRC+ isn’t good by any means, it’s not the reason their run differential is 29 runs worse than anyone else’s. Instead, their pitching staff has been one of the worst in recent memory.

With 125 runs surrendered in 16 games, Oakland has pitched far worse than any other team in the league. The 29th-place White Sox are closer in runs allowed to the 12th-place Astros than they are to the last place A’s. The A’s 188 ERA- and 156 FIP- paint a similar picture. In fact, with a 7.60 ERA thus far, this Oakland squad has the third-worst staff ERA through 16 games of any team in the integration era, only outdone by the 1951 St. Louis Browns and the 1955 Kansas City A’s; those teams each went on to allow at least 5.7 runs per game across the entire season. A simple glance at each team’s 2023 strikeout and walk rates shows a clear gulf between Oakland and the field:

Many of these struggles have occurred in a handful of huge blowups, as the A’s have surrendered double digit runs in six games. On the second day of the season, fans excitedly watched the major league debut of Shintaro Fujinami, who showed flashes of both elite stuff and extreme wildness in NPB. After sitting down his first six batters and notching four strikeouts, Fujinami allowed eight baserunners, three via walk, while recording just one out before being lifted from the game. His second start also featured a blowup inning after cruising the first time through the order; he exited after 4.1 innings, with four walks and a hit batsman. On Saturday, in the A’s 15th game of the season, Fujinami recorded the team’s first quality start with six innings of one-run ball, but he still took the loss after coming out for a seventh inning and adding two more runs to his line. Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers announced on Sunday that pitcher Brandon Woodruff’s shoulder pain has been diagnosed as a mild subscapular strain, meaning a trip to the injured list was in order. But while the word “mild” appears, the result is anything but, as it’s almost certain that he will spend significantly more time on the IL than the minimum 15 days, and a trip to the 60-day IL may be in order.

Craig Counsell on Brandon Woodruff: pic.twitter.com/yg2ipI88pL

— Todd Rosiak (@Todd_Rosiak) April 15, 2023

The good news is that the team doesn’t believe, at this time, that surgery will be required. But in talking about the injury, Woodruff didn’t sound like a player who was particularly optimistic about a quick return.

“If this was something that happened midseason, All-Star break, right before or after that time, I would probably end up being done, to be honest, for the season.”

[…]

“I’m not going to rush this, I’m not going to come back too early just for the sake of coming back early,” Woodruff said. “That’s just not going to do anybody any good. I’m going to take my time, I’m going to listen to my body and trust the rehab process and just go through that, and hopefully come back at whatever point that is throughout the season and then try to finish up strong.”

The subscapularis is one of four muscles that make up the rotator cuff and is a stability muscle that is key to keeping the shoulder from being dislocated. It’s one of the muscles less likely to be injured, but the recovery time for pitchers has been significant. Corey Kluber missed three months in 2021, and Justin Dunn has been shut down since the start of spring training, though his case is complicated by the fact that his shoulder problems are more longstanding. In a small study of eight professional players in Japan with similar injuries, the five pitchers had a mean time of 81.5 days until return to play, with a significance variance among the players that wasn’t based on severity of the injury. Looking back at the players 21 months after their injury, none of the eight suffered a recurrent injury to the muscle. Read the rest of this entry »

The best article I’ve ever read about Adam Ottavino was written on this site. Travis Sawchik wrote it, years ago, and ever since then I’ve found myself following Ottavino’s career and thinking about that article. The season after he revamped his pitching arsenal by throwing by himself in a Manhattan storefront, he had a career year for the Rockies. The season after that, he returned to New York to pitch for the Yankees, and after a brief detour to Boston in 2021, he’s back in his hometown pitching for the Mets. Now, though, he’s doing it with some new tools.

That fateful offseason, Ottavino learned to command his slider. But that wasn’t the pitch he was trying to learn at the start. Take a look at his pitch mix by year, and you can see the cutter he planned on integrating:

Big sweeping sliders like the one Ottavino throws pair well with sinkers, and he changed his primary fastball accordingly. But sweeping sliders and sinkers both display large platoon splits, so he also picked up a cutter to pair with his two primary pitches. That was the idea, at least. In practice, he didn’t throw his cutter much against lefties, and by 2020 he didn’t throw it much at all. From 2020 through ’22, he threw that cutter only 3.7% of the time overall.

In a perhaps related development, Ottavino has gotten shelled by lefties since 2018: from that year through ’22, he allowed a sterling .256 wOBA against righties and a middle-of-the-road .313 mark against lefties. That’s hardly surprising; he basically only threw two pitches, and neither of them are at their best against opposite-handed batters. The Yankees used him more or less as a righty specialist and then traded him to the Red Sox in a salary dump to make their bullpen work more efficiently. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers have spent virtually all of the young season atop the AL West, and they solidified their position this weekend by taking two out of three games from the Astros in Houston. Though they’re off to their best start in seven years, they lost Corey Seager to a left hamstring strain last week and may not get him back for a month, threatening the momentum they’ve built.

The 28-year-old Seager came up limping while running out a fifth-inning double against the Royals last Tuesday; he grabbed at his left hamstring shortly after rounding first base, hopped his way to second in awkward fashion, and then started back to the Rangers’ dugout before the trainer could reach him. On Wednesday, general manager Chris Young told the media that an MRI revealed Seager suffered a Grade 2 strain.

This is unfortunately an all-too-familiar position for Seager — on the injured list — and an all-too-familiar injury for him as well. While a member of the Dodgers in 2019, he missed a month with a similar left hamstring strain, not to be confused with the myriad other injuries the shortstop suffered with the Dodgers, including a torn ulnar collateral ligament requiring Tommy John surgery in 2018 and a right hand fracture in ’21. After playing 157 games and winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2016 and then 145 games the next year, Seager played in a total of 307 games out of a possible 546 from ’18 to ’21, the equivalent of 91 games over a full season.

After signing a 10-year, $325 million deal in December 2021, Seager was healthy enough to play in 151 games last year, his highest total since 2016, but despite clubbing a career-high 33 homers, he slumped to a .245/.317/.455 line, setting full-season lows in all three slash stats. That was still good for a respectable 117 wRC+, five points higher than his injury-marred 2019, but it wasn’t exactly what the Rangers had in mind when they signed him. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season is underway and we’ve already seen some history made. With a little over two weeks worth of regular season data, it’s time to start assessing how teams have played to begin this year. It’s way too early to draw any definitive conclusions, but there are some surprises among the best teams, some teams that have shown real improvements so far, and a few others that have fallen flat despite lofty expectations.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

The Rays won their first 13 games of the season, tying the modern era major league record. You can talk all you want about the quality of their opening schedule — they steamrolled over the Tigers, Nationals, A’s, and Red Sox, with three of those four series at home — but it’s still really hard to string together that many wins in a row. Of course, their win streak came to an end as soon as they ran into a tougher opponent, losing two of three to the Blue Jays over the weekend. Still, those 13 wins are in the bank and they give Tampa Bay a huge advantage in the extremely competitive AL East. Unfortunately, they’ve already started to suffer some injury attrition — Jeffrey Springs and Zach Eflin have hit the IL, with the former expected to miss multiple months with an elbow injury.

The Brewers entered the season with a roster in flux. Christian Yelich and Willy Adames remained as anchors in the lineup, but they added three new regulars and were planning on running out two rookies to start the season in Garrett Mitchell and Brice Turang. So far, their bet on the newcomers and youth has worked out. Mitchell has mashed the ball despite still struggling with strikeout issues and Turang has been solid at the plate while providing elite defense at second base. A shoulder injury has sidelined Brandon Woodruff for an extended period but Freddy Peralta looks healthy and is pitching extremely well, helping to cover for that hole in the rotation.

The Braves won all six of their games last week, sweeping the Reds and the Royals. That streak has helped them get back on the right track after losing three of four to the Padres last weekend. Ronald Acuña Jr. is crushing the ball again, and Matt Olson and Sean Murphy are keeping the offense rolling. Atlanta is getting Max Fried back from his early season injury today and recently recalled Vaughn Grissom to cover for injured starting shortstop Orlando Arcia; Grissom has already collected hits in all three games he’s played in the big leagues this year.

The Cubs’ veteran reclamation project seems to be paying off so far. Cody Bellinger, Trey Mancini, and Eric Hosmer are all contributing on offense, though they’re not necessarily playing up to their previous standards. The team just extended Ian Happ and activated Seiya Suzuki from the IL over the weekend. But the real reason they’ve looked so good early this season is a better-than-expected pitching staff. Their rotation has been solid despite some early season hiccups from Hayden Wesneski, and their bullpen is a lot deeper than it looked on paper.

The Blue Jays managed to take down the undefeated Rays over the weekend, winning two of three. Matt Chapman has been leading the offense, with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette playing important supporting roles. The Blue Jays’ problem has been a pitching staff that has looked pretty shaky during the first few turns through the rotation. Thankfully, four-fifths of their starters turned in excellent starts last week, though Alek Manoah was torched for seven runs by the Rays on Sunday. He’s carrying a 6.98 ERA and a 7.04 FIP through four starts, and those struggles are beginning to become a real concern.

The Mariners clawed their way back to .500 after struggling through the first few weeks of the season. The man currently steering the ship? None other than Jarred Kelenic, who looks to be finally delivering on all that promise he had as a top prospect. He’s currently in the midst of a 10-game hit streak, blasted four home runs in consecutive games last week, and is now running a 220 wRC+ in 52 plate appearances. And while he’s unlikely to sustain that level of production, it’s a very encouraging sign for the M’s, who were counting on a breakout season from their young outfielder.

The Orioles have gotten off to a strong start behind their young and athletic lineup. They’re running all over the opposition behind strong showings from Adley Rutschman and Ryan Mountcastle. Uber-prospect Gunnar Henderson has been slow to get his rookie campaign off the ground, but he is walking in nearly a quarter of his at-bats. With that kind of plate discipline, the hits will eventually follow. Baltimore finally called up Grayson Rodriguez, too. He’s gotten off to a decent start to his big league career, with his eight strikeouts against the White Sox yesterday a highlight.

The first base position in Philadelphia must be cursed. After losing Rhys Hoskins for the season during spring training, his replacement Darick Hall tore a ligament in his right thumb, sidelining him for months. Now, the Phillies are preparing Bryce Harper to play first to expedite his return from Tommy John surgery. If they value his health, they might be better off sticking with their original plan to keep him at designated hitter for the entire season. Beyond the thinning of their lineup, the Phillies are also working to overcome a disastrous start to the season from their bullpen. The exception is José Alvarado, who has already collected 16 strikeouts in just 6.1 innings pitched.

Except for maybe the Cubs, no team has outperformed their preseason expectations more than the Pirates. They just completed an extremely hard fought split with the Cardinals over the weekend, Bryan Reynolds is leading the offense, and Andrew McCutchen looks revitalized in Pittsburgh yellow and black. Unfortunately, their exciting young shortstop Oneil Cruz broke his ankle on a play at the plate last week and will be out of action until late in the summer at the earliest. That definitely puts a damper on their early success.

It’s certainly surprising to see the Padres this low in the rankings after coming into the season as one of the favorites in the National League. After winning three of four in Atlanta last weekend, they struggled against the Mets and Brewers, losing five of seven. They’ll get both Fernando Tatis Jr. and Joe Musgrove back this week, which should give their offense and rotation a much needed boost.

No team has outperformed their expected win-loss record more than the Marlins so far. They aren’t doing it with clutch hitting or a lockdown bullpen. They’re simply winning all of the close games they’re playing and getting blown out when they lose. That skews their run differential, but the wins they’ve secured are in the bank. Yesterday was just the second time this season Luis Arraez has been held hitless, finally dropping his batting average below .500. Their starting rotation has been as good as advertised, with Jesús Luzardo looking like he’s finally putting everything together.

Speaking of pitchers putting things together, there’s something happening in Kansas City. With a new development group brought on board by new general manager J.J. Picollo, the Royals pitching staff has rarely looked better. Before going down with a strained flexor in his throwing elbow over the weekend, Kris Bubic put together a handful of promising starts. Brad Keller has a revamped repertoire as well; he’s also gotten off to a strong start. Aroldis Chapman is throwing harder than he has in years. Unfortunately, their offense has been dismal to start the season, and they were just swept by the Braves at home over the weekend to drop them to 4-12.

The A’s have already allowed a whopping 125 runs this year. The major league record for runs allowed in a 162-game season is 1,103 by the 1996 Tigers; at this rate, Oakland is going to shatter that record. They made history on Friday, allowing 17 walks to the Mets, which led to two separate innings with six or more runs allowed on just a single hit. That’s the wrong kind of history they want to be making in Oakland.

…

Billy Wagner was the club’s closer when Craig Kimbrel joined the Atlanta Braves in 2010. Thirty-nine years old by season’s end, Wagner logged the last 37 of his 422 career saves, and he was as dominant as ever while doing so. Over 69-and-a-third innings, the left-hander fanned 104 batters while allowing just 38 hits.

Kimbrel, who was just 21 years old when he debuted that May, was every bit as overpowering. In 21 appearances comprising 20-and-two-thirds innings, the rookie right-hander fanned 40 batters while allowing just nine hits. Along the way, he recorded the first of what is now 395 saves.

I’ve had a Hall of Fame vote for three years, and in each of them I’ve put a checkmark next to Wagner’s name. This coming winter, I plan to do so again in what will be his penultimate year on the ballot (assuming he doesn’t get voted in; Wagner received 68% of support in his last go-round).

Kimbrel will soon celebrate his 35th birthday, and while the end of his career is fast approaching, he’s still pitching. Will he likewise be getting my vote once his name appears on the ballot? And what about Kenley Jansen? Still going strong at age 35, he’s also got 395 saves, tying him with Kimbrel for seventh on the all-time list, directly behind Wagner.

Let’s compare some of their numbers:

Wagner: 422 saves, WPA 28.40, 187 ERA+, 2.73 FIP, 6.0 H/9, 11.9 K/9.
Kimbrel: 395 saves, WPA 22.99, 174 ERA+, 2.38 FIP, 5.2 H/9, 14.3 K/9.
Jansen: 395 saves, WPA 24.72, 161 ERA+, 2.44 FIP, 5.8 H/9. 13.0 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

Orlando Arcia getting the nod for the starting shortstop job in Atlanta raised some eyebrows this spring. After all, he had looked more like a utility infielder in recent years than a viable starting shortstop, and it felt a bit like that ship had long since sailed. The present and future was Vaughn Grissom, our top Braves prospect last year after the graduations of Spencer Strider and Michael Harris II. Grissom didn’t exactly struggle in his debut last fall, whomping pitchers to the tune of a .293/.353/.440 line, a triple-slash that would be viable for a first baseman, let alone a guy who can handle short. Yet it was Arcia who ended up with the job in the spring. It didn’t even seem like the typical service time shenanigans, such as the Cubs swearing that Kris Bryant needed a couple weeks to learn to be a better player than Mike Olt; Grissom already had nearly a third of a year of service time, which would have made it a bit arduous to maintain that façade.

Arcia didn’t disappoint in early play: In 13 games, he hit .330/.400/.511 and looked fairly comfortable playing short regularly for the first time in a few years. Unfortunately, a Hunter Greene fastball had other plans for the position; his upper-90s heat hit Arcia’s wrist during an at-bat, knocking him out of Wednesday’s game against Cincinnati, replaced by Ehire Adrianza. Initial x-rays didn’t reveal a fracture, but an MRI and CT scan on Thursday showed a microfracture, sending him to the injured list. This appears to be a minor injury, and it appears as if Arcia will only miss a couple weeks of play. Cookies don’t crumble in identical ways, but Nick Castellanos suffered this injury in 2021 and only missed a couple of weeks.

If there were service time issues involved, the Braves could have very easily plugged in Adrianza or Braden Shewmake for a couple of weeks and continued to let Grissom work on his defense in the minors (he was so-so at best in the majors last year with the glove). But finding time at short for Grissom, who by all reports took his demotion with humility, was still the upside play. Just as Arcia didn’t disappoint early on, he performed very well for Triple-A Gwinnett, with a 1.044 OPS in 10 games. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Braves won the World Series in 2021, Ronald Acuña Jr. was a bystander, as a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee knocked him out for the second half of the season and the entire postseason. He returned to action near the end of April last year, but while he was the Braves’ second-most valuable outfielder — which wasn’t saying much due to the slumps and calamities that befell the team’s other fly chasers — his performance was far short of the high standard he’d set since debuting in 2018. With a strong start to his 2023 season, Acuña is showing signs of recovering his pre-injury form, though his performance in a couple of areas does raise concerns.

After hitting a sizzling .283/.394/.596 (157 wRC+) in 82 games before tearing his ACL in 2021, Acuna dipped to .266/.351/.413 (114 wRC+) in 119 games last year. It wasn’t a bad performance; his wRC+ ranked among the top 30 of all outfielders, and his 2.1 WAR prorates to about 2.6 per 650 PA. On a team where all of the other outfielders besides rookie Michael Harris II — namely Travis Demeritte, Adam Duvall, Robbie Grossman, Guillermo Heredia, and Eddie Rosario — netted -1.1 WAR, Acuña’s contribution wasn’t an unwelcome one, helping the team win 101 games. Yet his season was well shy of the elite level that he set for himself pre-injury, with a 140 career wRC+ and 6.0 WAR per 650 PA. After all, this is a player whom Dan Szymborski had once projected as the most likely to supplant Mike Trout as the game’s best in terms of WAR.

Acuña missed his chance for that, but he’s still just 25 years old, and through the first two weeks of the season, he’s hitting .370/.452/.537 through 62 plate appearances. Already he has three three-hit games and four two-hit games under his belt, and he’s helped the Braves jump out to a 9-4 record even while dealing with numerous injuries to their rotation and lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

After I wrote about Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran last month, consider this the next installment of my highly unrelated, only-for-the-joke “Duran Duran” series; today we take an entirely separate look at 25-year-old Twins closer and velocity king Jhoan Duran. This Duran was one of baseball’s best relievers as a rookie in 2022; this year, he returned to the Twins’ bullpen with a lot less to prove after his impressive rookie campaign. Nevertheless, he has made some significant tweaks to his already devastating arsenal, and he’s bringing more heat in his sophomore season than ever before.

Duran arrived on the scene in Minnesota last year at a rather uncertain time in his prospect journey. After registering on our Top 100 prospect lists as a high-velocity starter in 2020 and 2021, a forearm strain (and a global pandemic) limited the right-hander to all of five appearances across the river with Triple-A St. Paul in the last two years. The uncertainty around his health obscured his future outlook and called his potential as a starter into question. But he did enough in just seven Spring Training innings last season to show he was healthy and earn one of the final spots in the Twins’ bullpen, then made the absolute most of his first big league opportunity. In 57 relief outings, he allowed just 14 runs and limited hitters to a .251 wOBA, .187 xBA, .269 xSLG, and .232 xWOBA, all of which were in the top 10% of the league. His 34.7% whiff percentage was in the 94th percentile, and his 33.5% strikeout rate was in the 96th. Thanks in part to the trust he quickly earned from Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, he finished second among big league relievers with a 4.56 WPA. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another installment of the five things that most caught my eye in baseball over the past week. As I mentioned last time and will no doubt continue to mention long into the future, this column was inspired by Zach Lowe’s excellent weekly NBA column. To quickly recap, the idea here is that there are constantly tons of little, delightful things going on in baseball. They can’t all have a column of their own, but that doesn’t make them any less pleasing – or irksome. The following isn’t an exhaustive list; it’s merely a few things that I think you’ll enjoy.

1. One Pitch Knockouts
I discovered a new category of walk-off this week, and I can’t believe I’ve never recognized it before. Let’s set the stage: the Twins and White Sox took a 3-3 game into the bottom of the 10th inning. The White Sox had failed to score in the top of the inning, which put them in a dire situation. Willi Castro started the bottom of the 10th on second base, 180 feet away from ending the game. Jesse Scholtens, hardly Chicago’s best reliever, took the mound. Merely living to fight another inning felt like a long shot.

As it turns out, the Twins didn’t need a whole inning. They needed exactly one pitch:

The official game log had this to say: “Michael A. Taylor singles on a bunt groundball to third baseman Hanser Alberto. Willi Castro scores. Throwing error by third baseman Hanser Alberto.” A more succinct description: “Michael A. Taylor bunts, chaos ensues.”

That was a great spot to bunt, the best possible result, and also a downright hilarious way to end a 10-inning game. Baseball is all about the slow build. Sure, home runs are a quick jolt of offense, but most rallies feature hits, walks, and errors building on each other to a triumphant conclusion. Instead, this time the slow build was all about what happened between innings. Players jogged to their positions. Scholtens threw warmup pitches. Castro ran out to second base. Both broadcasts explained the finer points of extra-innings strategy. It was all supposed to be a buildup to an exciting duel, with high-stakes batter/pitcher confrontations stretched out over multiple at-bats and plenty of pitches. Instead, it ended right away, and with a bunt, and a baseball that hit Taylor in the head (he was fine):

Would I want every game to end on a bunt? Of course not. I wouldn’t want every extra innings game to end on the first pitch, either. But there’s something delightful about the inversion of form here that I want more of. Not with a bang, but not with a whimper either. The zombie runner might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it makes for some delightfully whimsical endings. The Twins didn’t care, though; they mobbed Taylor past first base. He looked appropriately sheepish, but hey, a win is a win:

2. How the Mets Roll
Baseball is a fair sport in the long run, but the long run can take a while to show up. There’s no rule that says your hard contact has to get rewarded; you can hit five screaming line drives in a row and have each one find a fielder’s glove. I’m not a major league hitter, but I imagine that one of the hardest parts of their job is keeping an even demeanor even when the game feels like it’s stacked against you.

Of course, that’s not the only way things can go. Sometimes you feel jinxed, and sometimes you’re the New York Mets this past Monday. In the bottom of the seventh inning, the Mets were nursing a two-run lead against the dangerous Padres when Mark Canha led off with a double. This is a bunt-friendly column, so you know what happened next: Luis Guillorme tried to bunt Canha over to third for a good shot at an insurance run. What you might not have guessed is that Guillorme bunted the ball perfectly:

“You couldn’t roll it out there any better” is an overused announcer trope. That implies that it would be easy to roll it out there. I’ve played bocce ball enough times to know that rolling the ball that far and with that slim of a margin for error is tremendously difficult. This ball had to walk a fine line to stay fair, and it juuuuuust got there:

Two batters later, things got sillier. Tomás Nido cued one off the end of his bat, and, well, you’ll just have to see this one:

I’m just gonna say it: you couldn’t roll it out there any better. It sat on the chalk! Poor Yu Darvish just shook his head ruefully; what other option did he have? Seriously, you need to see that one again:

Every base hit is a line drive in the next day’s box score, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to get a gift every once in a while. If you’re not convinced of how good that feels, just take a look at Nido and Tommy Pham in the aftermath:

Bonus Mets content: the broadcast remains as delightful as ever. Tune in for a random afternoon game, and you’re liable to hear sentences that have never previously been conceived of. “That was a snappy Tom – put that in your Bloody Mary,” said Keith Hernandez this Wednesday. He was talking about a David Robertson curveball, for the record.

3. Alek Manoah’s Non-Competitive Pitch Problem
If more pitchers were like Alek Manoah, baseball would be a lot more fun to watch. He works deep into starts, wears his emotions on his sleeve, and challenges hitters rather than nibbling. He went at least six innings in 25 of his 31 starts last year, a welcome throwback in a world increasingly populated by five-and-dive starters and one-inning reliever parades.

This year, Manoah hasn’t found his form. His strikeout and walk rates are both 15.9% — that’s far too many walks against not nearly enough strikeouts. He’s already had starts of 3.1 and 4.1 innings, each shorter than any start he made last year. He’s lost a little velocity, but that’s not the biggest problem here. No, the thing that’s most vexing Manoah is a troubling increase in non-competitive pitches.

Manoah’s game is built on efficiency, and part of that is not wasting pitches. Baseball Savant has a handy “waste” zone – it refers to pitches thrown so far away from the strike zone that they hardly ever draw swings (roughly 6% in each of the past five years). Every year, only about 9% of pitches fall into that non-competitive bucket. Last year, only 8.3% of Manoah’s pitches ended up in the “waste” zone. Pitchers almost never intend to throw it there; those are just the pitches where their mechanics betray them, and they either yank the ball or have it fall off their hands weirdly.

This year, Manoah’s mechanics have been betraying him a lot. In his second start of the season, he threw 16 waste pitches out of 98 total, a 16.3% mark. On Tuesday, he threw another 15 (16% of his 94 pitches). His fastball velocity was down in both starts, too: he bottomed out below 88 mph, and he’s averaging roughly 1 mph less this year than last.

In graphical form, it’s just as ugly. Here’s a good Manoah start from last year:

Here’s this Tuesday’s start:

It doesn’t take a data scientist to spot the problem. Manoah couldn’t land his slider, and he left a bundle of sinkers above the zone too. The AL East is going to be a grindhouse this year. The Rays have already pulled out to a sizable lead. If Toronto is going to chase them down, their ace needs to start repeating his delivery and stop giving batters free pitches.

4. Blind Tags and Ghost Tags
2023 is not a good year for fielders who like tagging out runners. The bases are bigger, which means it’s harder to find runners. Pickoff throws are limited, which means runners are getting better leads, and the pitch clock only exacerbates that problem. The end result is that a chance to tag a runner out, whether on a stolen base attempt or not, presents itself far less often than a year ago.

What’s a fielder to do? If you’re Brandon Crawford, you just get better at tagging. The Royals are aggressive on the basepaths, which is a mixed blessing: it means more chances to tag someone out but a lower likelihood of succeeding. A lower likelihood isn’t the same as no likelihood, however. When MJ Melendez tried to advance on a fly ball to center, Crawford wasn’t having it:

That’s just perfect. He had no time to execute a standard spin-and-find. He knew where Melendez was likely to be, and he could hear him; that would have to be enough. You need a firm grasp of your position to execute a tag like this:

And just for fun, one more angle of it:

Of course, not everyone has eyes in the back of their head. That doesn’t stop infielders from getting their tags in, though. Take this beauty, pointed out by a reader last week. Francisco Lindor did some tagging (and acting) without even having the ball to prevent Christian Yelich from getting a free base:

Tagging a guy after he’s safe in the hopes that he’ll come off the bag for an instant is no fun. Doing it without the ball so that he gets paranoid about getting tagged out and don’t advance, while the ball kicks around the outfield? Sheer genius.

You don’t have to be a Gold Glove shortstop to get in on the tagging party, either. Brendan Donovan is more notable for his positional versatility than his defensive value; he’s slightly below average at a wide array of defensive positions. That measures his range, sure hands, and arm, though. His imaginary tagging? It’s off the charts:

You can’t see it from that angle, but Nolan Gorman’s errant throw got all the way to the wall in left field. Yonathan Daza was sure he knew where the ball was, though: in Donovan’s glove. He jammed his finger slightly on the play, which might have helped distract him, but that canny fake tag saved a base either way.

Maybe I’m grading on too much of a curve, but I’m more impressed by Donovan’s wherewithal than by Lindor’s. I expect Lindor to make genius plays I hadn’t thought of and to look smooth while doing so. I picture Lindor mulling over his grocery list while he’s in the field; he seems to have everything under control to the point where he has time to think about other things. Donovan is more of a max-effort type. But in the world of effective fake tags, they’re both number one in my book.

5. Ezequiel Tovar’s Balletic Defense
Ezequiel Tovar’s transition to the major leagues is still a work in progress. He’s batting .209/.227/.302 so far, and didn’t take his first walk of the season until Wednesday. The power he intermittently showed in the minors has mostly disappeared. He swings too much. The road to positive offensive value looks tenuous.

The Rockies will likely give him time to develop that offense, though, because Tovar is a breathtaking defender. Here, watch him not turn a double play and still make it look like art:

You could hang that toe drag in the Louvre. The snap throw afterwards is audacious. You need to see this in slow motion to truly appreciate it:

Want him to range deep into the hole and come up with one? I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the throw, but I can say for certain that it’ll look pretty:

When he’s charging the ball, he sets his feet instinctively and fires with a stable platform from positions where most players couldn’t:

Tovar is hardly a finished product. In a thus-far minuscule sample, both DRS and OAA think he’s below-average defensively. As I already mentioned, his offense has a long way to go. But if you’re looking for some of the prettiest infield defense in baseball, don’t overlook Colorado. Tovar has the skills to be a highlight reel defender for years to come.

That brings us to the end of another installment of the five things that most caught my eye this week. Our sport is full of tiny, delightful, maddening moments like these, which is a big part of why I love it so much. Until next time, I hope you have as much fun watching baseball as the Rays do playing it: