After just two weeks of play, there are several hitters off to scorching hot starts. Some are expected; for example, Giancarlo Stanton, Freddie Freeman, and Mike Trout all have xwOBAs over .460 so far. Given their vast history of offensive prowess, it’s not surprising to see them put together a stretch like this. But if you look near the top of the xwOBA leaderboard, you might do a double take when you see some of the names aside those aforementioned stars. Without larger batted ball samples, we may not be able to draw any concrete conclusions about the unexpected players, but there are some sticky traits that are worth paying attention to as the season develops.

For this exercise, I’m going to highlight four players that have caught my eye this season and who I’ll be watching over the next few months to see if they can keep up their early performance. The criteria for picking these players were relatively loose: It could be an under-the-radar bat that has impressed me, or a veteran who has reached a new height due to an interesting adjustment. With that said, let’s jump into it. Read the rest of this entry »

If you look atop the groundball rate leaderboard, you’ll see some of the usual suspects. Josh Bell and Masataka Yoshida have hit more than two-thirds of their batted balls on the ground this year, while Eric Hosmer and Jean Segura aren’t far behind. Bell, Hosmer, and Segura have been some of the most notable groundball hitters in the majors for years, while Yoshida was a groundball menace in Japan. Even at such an early point in the season, the groundball cream is rising to the top.

At the bottom of the leaderboard, the names are a little more surprising. Noted fly ball hitters Adam Duvall and Brandon Lowe are among the bottom 10, but there are also a handful of players you wouldn’t expect to see. One such player is Daulton Varsho.

Varsho has hit five groundballs this year, good for a 20% groundball rate. Only one qualified batter, Carlos Correa, has hit fewer balls on the ground. However, it was Varsho, and not Correa, who caught my eye, because of his extreme groundball numbers at the very beginning of the season. Over his first eight games, Varsho came to the plate 32 times and put 19 balls in play. Only one was a groundball. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, Taylor Clarke was in quite the pickle. The Royals had tasked him with pitching the eighth inning of a tied ballgame against the Giants and it wasn’t going very well. Clarke allowed three consecutive singles to J.D. Davis, Joc Pederson, and Mike Yastrzemski, with each hit 104 mph or harder. The bases were loaded with no outs. The Giants were reading Clarke’s pitches incredibly well and he needed a solution, fast. Clearly, he found one. Clarke struck out the next three hitters in order, earning seven called or swinging strikes. Kansas City’s offense took the lead in the ninth and went on to complete the comeback victory. So what was special about the way Clarke got out of his jam? Of the 13 pitches he threw, not a single one was a fastball.

While there are many relievers who barely throw any fastballs, like Alex Colomé and Matt Wisler, Clarke isn’t one of them. He came up as a starter with Arizona throwing heaters about half the time. After being converted to the bullpen and experiencing a two-tick velocity spike, he kept up that fastball usage. Had Clarke randomly chosen pitches in line with his career averages (48.8% fastballs) during this three-batter stretch, the odds of him choosing secondaries 13 times in a row would be just .017%, or 1-in-6,000. But on Saturday, he turned to his best stuff and ended up with the best possible results.

The first hitter up with the bases loaded was infielder Thairo Estrada. Estrada likes to put balls in play, and with three ducks on the pond, balls in play often mean runs. In 2022, he combined to strike out and walk just 22.6% of the time, considerably below the league average of 30.6%. Clarke started off the at-bat with one of his two slider variants. This variant, which sits 87-90 mph with a few inches of horizontal break, has a hybrid cutter/slider shape, though he often throws it glove side just like his other, sweepier slider in the low-to-mid-80s. Clarke missed his spot and the pitch drifted over the plate, but Estrada watched it for a called strike. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Brady Singer enjoyed a breakout season on the mound, making him a rare success story for a Royals development team that has squandered a ton of young pitching talent in recent years. They haven’t had trouble graduating pitchers into the majors; the problem has been helping them grow once they get there. So far, only Singer has made a true impact on the big league club, with fellow 2018 first-round picks Jackson Kowar, Daniel Lynch, and Kris Bubic struggling in their limited time at the highest level. But if his first two starts this year are to be believed, Bubic might be joining Singer in that breakout tier.

Bubic’s start to spring training was delayed due to some lingering shoulder soreness, which meant his spot in the rotation was up in the air until just before Opening Day, when Lynch was shut down from throwing with his own shoulder issues. In 10.1 Cactus League innings, Bubic struck out 15 to go along with seven walks, but in his first start of the season on April 4 against the Blue Jays, he allowed just two runs in five innings of work, giving up seven hits and one walk with four strikeouts. That’s a good outing against a tough offense, particularly one loaded with right-handed mashers against the lefty.

Bubic’s second start on Sunday was the real eye-opener, though: six scoreless innings against the Giants with just two hits, no walks, and nine strikeouts on his ledger, matching a career high. He had never earned more than 17 swinging strikes in a single start; he racked up 19 on Sunday and accomplished that feat in just 76 pitches. That 25% swinging-strike rate was easily the highest of any appearance in his career to go with a 43.4% CSW rate, also his best in any start.

Bubic looks like an entirely new pitcher, too. His velocity has increased across the board, his release point is completely different, his changeup has a new shape, and he introduced a new slider to his pitch mix. That’s a lot of things to track. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no disputing that Spencer Torkelson had a disappointing rookie season. Drafted first overall by the Detroit Tigers in 2020 out of Arizona State University, the 23-year-old first baseman went into last year with sky-high expectations only to finish with a 76 wRC+ and just eight home runs in 404 plate appearances. Moreover, he was demoted to Triple-A in mid-July and proceeded to put up a middling .738 OPS with the Toledo Mud Hens before returning to Motown for the final month of the campaign.

Last February, our lead prospect analyst, Eric Longenhagen, had written that “Torkelson’s bat is his ticket to the big leagues, and it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t think he’ll be a terrifying presence in the box for years to come.” Despite his abysmal debut, the potential for Torkelson to become that terrifying presence remains strong. Rejuvenated after an offseason of reflection, the confident slugger logged an impressive hard-hit rate during spring training — my colleague Davy Andrews wrote about it in late March — and he’s continued to scorch a fair number of balls in April, albeit without much to show for it; of the 12 balls he’s hit with an exit velocity of at least 98.2 mph, seven have gone for outs. Belying his slash line — a hard-luck .235/.250/.353 that seems bound to improve once squared-up balls start falling — his average exit velocity ranks in the 74th percentile, his max exit velocity in the 90th. Last Tuesday, Torkelson torched a 424-foot home run off of a 98.9-mph Ryne Stanek heater when the Tigers played in Houston.

Torkelson talked about his history as a hitter, and the keep-it-simple approach that comes with it, during spring training.

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David Laurila: When did you learn to hit?

Spencer Torkelson: “Gosh. I learned at a pretty young age. I kind of just fell in love with hitting the ball over my backyard fence when I was two. I’d walk around asking everybody to throw to me. I’d say that my uncle and my dad had the biggest influence on my hitting. My dad always preached to use the whole field, and my uncle always preached quick hands, quick hips. I had a lot of repetitions with both of them and those things kind of clicked.” Read the rest of this entry »

No hitter in the majors has gotten off to a hotter start this season than Adam Duvall, who joined the Red Sox this past winter via free agency and is currently carrying a slugging percentage above 1.000. Unfortunately, the 34-year-old center fielder won’t be available to star in Small Sample Theater for awhile because on Sunday while diving for a ball, he fractured his left wrist.

Duvall injured himself attempting to catch a bloop off the bat of the Tigers’ Spencer Torkelson in the ninth inning of Sunday’s game. Charging in from center field, he slid and appeared to make the grab, but his glove hand hit the grass awkwardly as he rolled over, and the ball squirted loose. Torkelson was credited with a single, while Duvall came up clutching his wrist, the same one that he sprained last July 23 while playing for the Braves. That time, he jammed his wrist against the wall in pursuit of a Shohei Ohtani fly ball and needed season-ending surgery to repair a torn tendon sheath.

This time, Duvall was diagnosed with a distal radius fracture in his left wrist. Such injuries generally mean a loss of six to eight weeks, but the Red Sox haven’t announced a timeline. Duvall underwent additional testing to determine if he would need surgery to set the fracture or repair tissue damage, but manager Alex Cora told reporters after Monday’s loss to the Rays that he’ll avoid that. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates are off to a surprisingly hot start, winning six of their first 10 games and sitting in second place in the NL Central. But that fair weather cloud has a dark lining, as the team’s young shortstop, Oneil Cruz, landed on the injured list on Monday with a fractured ankle. While Cruz’s injury was (thankfully) well below Jason Kendall’s broken ankle running to first in 1999 on the gruesomeness scale, it was enough to require Sunday night surgery. The early timetable for Cruz indicates that his 2023 season isn’t necessarily finished, but it’ll likely be four months, or sometime in mid-August, until he’s likely to be back in playing form.

Cruz’s injury came on a literal bang-bang play, one which led to some fisticuffs, or at least some minor shoveicuffs. With runners on the corners and no outs in a 1–0 game in the sixth, Ke’Bryan Hayes hit a bouncer off of White Sox starter Michael Kopech. Yoán Moncada at third was shallow enough that trading a run for a double play wasn’t really possible; the play at home was the easier one. What exactly happened is a minor controversy, but the basic facts are that after running on the outside of the foul line, Cruz took an inside line as he approached the plate, appeared to stumble on the dirt, and careened into catcher Seby Zavala knees first.

I don’t get the impression from the play that Cruz intended to take out Zavala; if you were going for the 1970s-style demolition derby smash that looked great on highlight packages and poor in CT scans, you don’t intentionally put on the brakes and then kind of fall into the catcher clumsily. You don’t see a lot of NFL coaches advising their linebackers to tackle with their knees. Zavala was mic’d up and instantly offered a few not-so-minced oaths, but from his point of view, it’s hard to blame him. From his perspective in the heat of the moment, a runner altered his path slightly to make contact, even though he left space for a good slide, and practically groined him with a couple of knees. It wasn’t quite as bad a slide attempt as Adley Rutschman‘s Tekken-style spin kick into Christian Arroyo’s head, but it was up there. Carlos Santana then came out to have words with Zavala, which resulted in the benches emptying. Control of the situation was restored quickly, however, and we had no Royal Rumble-style brawling. I’m not here to judge behavior, though, at least unless you vote Szymborski to be the Grand Inquisitor of Baseball in the 2024 election. Read the rest of this entry »

If the Marlins are going to jump into playoff contention anytime soon, it will be on the back of their young pitchers. Of these, they have assembled many, with varied results. Sandy Alcantara just won the Cy Young. Trevor Rogers looked like a future Cy Young winner for a little bit, though not so much anymore. Max Meyer got hurt but should be back soon enough. Sixto Sánchez got hurt and might not be the back ever. The Marlins even declared a surplus in this area, trading Pablo López (and Zac Gallen, if you want to broaden your time horizons a little) for position players. Braxton Garrett, Edward Cabrera, and a partridge in a pear tree.

But Miami’s most promising young starter at the moment, other than Alcantara, is Jesús Luzardo. He faces the Phillies on Tuesday night having allowed just one earned run in 12 2/3 innings over his first two starts of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

After a decade of hand-wringing and tedious arguments on both sides, MLB restricted defensive shifts this past offseason. Much has already been written about the pros and cons of this decision, and I’m not going to take the time to recapitulate all of those arguments here. One debate in particular really caught my eye, though: Would teams still play an overshift-esque alignment by moving an outfielder to the shallow right field position occupied by shifted second basemen in pre-restriction shifts?

I expected it to be a rare tactic, but still one that came up from time to time. Five-man infields already existed; in fact, I ran the math on when they might make sense in 2019 when the Dodgers tried one. The exact conclusion of that piece isn’t important; the point is that teams sometimes thought a five-man infield was the best defensive alignment when any defense was allowed, so they would surely prefer it with restrictions on other alignments in place. Read the rest of this entry »

It came as a big blow to the Phillies when Rhys Hoskins, a career 125 wRC+ hitter and the de facto team captain, went down with a season-ending injury. But if there were a silver lining to the circumstances, it was that Darick Hall would get the opportunity to prove himself with a more regular role in the starting lineup. Even Hoskins agreed; the day after he tore his ACL, he told Hall he was genuinely happy for him. The 27-year-old non-prospect forced his way to the majors last summer after hitting 20 home runs in 72 games at Triple-A, then crushed another nine at the big league level, finishing with a .522 slugging percentage and 120 wRC+. This year, he had a shot to show he could keep slugging over a full season. If he could, the Phillies would be much better equipped to handle the loss of Hoskins.

Unfortunately, Hall’s big chance was short-lived. On Wednesday afternoon, the winds began to change and the clouds turned dark. The silver lining became harder to see amid the storm. While trying to stretch a single into a double, Hall landed awkwardly at second base, jamming his right thumb into the side of the bag. He stayed in the game for another inning but eventually came out when he realized something was amiss. A righty-throwing first baseman doesn’t use his right thumb in the field all that often, but five out of five doctors recommend hitting the showers when you tear a ligament.

Indeed, a torn ligament was the official diagnosis, and it will require surgery to fix. The Phillies have yet to offer an official timeline for Hall’s return, but it could be several months before he steps back on the field. Mike Trout needed surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb in 2017 and missed about six weeks. Kevin Kiermaier had a similar procedure the following year and missed nine. Travis d’Arnaud lost more than three months after such a surgery in 2021. Clearly, recovery time depends on the individual player and the extent of the injury; we should hear more about Hall in the coming weeks. Read the rest of this entry »