In early February, just before camps opened, the Tigers added both Framber Valdez and Justin Verlander to their rotation. After a rather underwhelming winter full of speculation as to whether they would trade two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, a pending free agent, the moves kept them in win-now mode, making them the favorites in the AL Central. Yet injuries to Skubal, Verlander, and several position players have hamstrung Detroit, and after playing .500 ball through the end of April, the team crashed and burned in May, losing eight series in a row while going 6-22 due to an utterly inept offense. At this point, the Tigers have dug themselves a big enough hole that trading Skubal may be a necessity.

This past week was particularly bleak. First, the Tigers dropped two out of three at home to the Angels, the only AL team who had a worse record than them. After Thursday’s 7-1 defeat, the two were both 22-35, and the Tigers followed that by getting swept by the White Sox over the weekend. On Friday night, after Troy Melton and Will Vest held Chicago to one run through eight innings, Kyle Finnegan allowed the tying run in the ninth. And then, once the Tigers retook the lead with a run in the top of the 10th, Drew Anderson served up a walk-off two-run homer to Miguel Vargas. It was Detroit’s seventh walk-off loss this season, the most in the majors. On Saturday, the Tigers were trounced, 7-1, and then on Sunday, when manager A.J. Hinch pulled starter Keider Montero after he’d thrown six scoreless innings on just 65 pitches, Anderson came in and served up a game-tying solo shot to Colson Montgomery, then yielded three more singles and the go-ahead run. The Tigers lost 2-1, for their 21st loss in 25 games. They’re now 5-13 in one-run games — the most losses of any team in that context — and, at 22-38, are tied with the Rockies for the majors’ worst record.

This is just about the last thing anyone expected of the Tigers. Led by Skubal, they claimed back-to-back Wild Card berths in 2024 and ’25, surging over the final two months of the former season to snag a playoff spot, then spending most of last year in first place, though they faded late and lost the division title on the final day. Both times, they won their Wild Card Series before being bounced in a five-game Division Series, including last year’s squeaker against the Mariners, which took until the 15th inning of Game 5 to decide. Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Bell has hit 200 home runs since reaching the majors in 2016, with 198 of them coming in the regular season and the other two coming in October. Which of them is the most memorable? I asked the Minnesota Twins first baseman/DH that question prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

“The first one [on July 9, 2016] is probably my favorite,” replied Bell, who spent his first five seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates. “The grand slam. It was my second day in the big leagues, and I’d gotten a hit the night before, pinch-hitting, so I was batting 1.000. Bases loaded, Adam Warren [on the mound], a Cubs-Pirates rivalry game at PNC on a Saturday night. The place was packed. The ball leaves my bat and I know that it’s gone. My parents were there, too — I gave them the ball — so that one was definitely special. It’s something I’ll never forget.”

A first home run, be it a grand slam or a solo shot, is going to be a favorite for most players. But there will be others that stand out as well, and in Bell’s case, a few of them are Statcast outliers. We’ll get to those in a moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the third installment of that series. You can read all of the entries here.

April 19
So we have this app on our phones where we track baby things. At our first doctor’s visit, the only things the pediatrician specifically told us to do were to feed Derek Jr. every three hours and to keep an eye on how many times a day she was peeing. That’s enough to make sure she’s not hungry or dehydrated. But several people recommended this app, and now we’re neck deep in it.

We track when Derek Jr. pees. We track when she poops. We track when she boths. We track when and what and how much and how long we feed her. A few days ago, we started tracking her sleep too. You wouldn’t believe what other information the app wants; it has a color palette to choose from for each time your baby goes to the bathroom. I am not sure I like all this. (To be clear, I am very sure that I don’t like the part where the app wants to know what color the baby’s poop is. That’s between her and her god, the Diaper Genie.) We’re new parents. All we do is think about the baby and, specifically, worry about the baby. Now we can feed our anxiety with something that presents itself as hard data. The app has totals and averages and graphs and charts. It all looks very certain and official. It could very reasonably be called inFantGraphs. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Stanley was C.J. Nitkowsk’s biggest nemesis. In seven career plate appearances versus the now-Atlanta Braves broadcaster, Stanley homered twice, hammered a double, and walked four times. That added up to a 4.333 OPS. Of the 592 batters Nitkowski faced over 10 big-league seasons, no one was more injurious to his stat sheet.

Somewhat surprisingly, the pair of gophers — one at Tiger Stadium in 1996, the other at Fenway Park in 2000 — aren’t what the southpaw most remembers about his matchups with the slugging catcher/first baseman. What stands out is the two-bagger.

“I have a story about Mike Stanley,” explained Nitkowski, who made 336 MLB appearances, 213 of them with Detroit, while pitching for eight teams from 1995-2005. “As a kid who grew up in New York and was a Yankees fan, I always knew who he was. He was a Yankee when I was in high school. When I got drafted and went down to Orlando for my first spring training [with the Cincinnati Reds in 1995] — I went early to get out of the cold — I was working out with Chad Mottola, who is now the hitting coach for the Rays. He was my first roommate in professional baseball.

“Chad lived down there,” continued Nitkowski. “Mike Stanley happened to live in the same neighborhood, and they worked out together once in awhile, so I met him. I was 21 or 22 years old, so it was a big deal. You meet a big-leaguer and are trying to play it cool — you’re a professional now — but it was Mike Stanley. That’s cool. I thought it was kind of a big deal. I got to know him a little bit.”

Fast forward to August 12, 2000. Stanley was playing for the Oakland Athletics, while Nitkowski was pitching in relief for the Tigers. A request was made in the dugout during the sixth inning. Read the rest of this entry »

A long time ago, Keibert Ruiz was one of the top catching prospects in baseball. He was so highly regarded that he was a significant piece of the Nationals’ return in the Max Scherzer and Trea Turner trade with the Dodgers in 2021. After a solid first full season in Washington the following year, he signed an eight-year extension worth $50 million in March 2023. Unfortunately, that’s when the bottom fell out. Over the last three years, Ruiz has been the worst qualified position player in baseball, “accumulating” -1.9 WAR.

When the Nationals acquired Harry Ford in a trade with the Mariners this offseason, it was fair to wonder if Ruiz’s days as the team’s primary backstop were numbered. He had been a disaster both at the plate and behind it. His 79 wRC+ over the last three years was a hair higher than Patrick Bailey’s 76 mark, but instead of offsetting that offensive futility with elite defense, Ruiz was the worst defensive catcher in baseball. It’s shocking, then, to see that he has so completely turned things around this year; he’s already accrued 0.8 WAR and has been the 11th-most valuable catcher in baseball in just 34 games.

Let’s tackle the most surprising development first: All of a sudden, Ruiz is providing positive value behind the plate. Among the 53 catchers who caught at least 1,000 innings over the last three years, Ruiz was the second-worst framer, the second worst at throwing out base stealers, and the sixth-worst blocker. This year, he’s added two runs via framing and has been a slightly above-average blocker. His throwing hasn’t improved all that much according to Statcast, but he also hasn’t been challenged very often, so that area of defense hasn’t really affected his overall defensive value.

Last year, Ruiz suffered two concussions within a few weeks of each other. The first came on June 23, when an errant foul ball hit him in the head while he was sitting in the dugout. The second came just a week and a half later — and just two days after he had been activated off the 7-day concussion IL — when a foul tip struck him in the mask. He attempted to return to play in September, but he was shut down from his rehab assignment after his concussion symptoms returned. In an effort to reduce his risk behind the plate, the Nationals had Ruiz adjust his stance so that he’s now crouching lower to the ground:

In the picture above, you can see that at the pitcher’s release, Ruiz’s back isn’t as upright and his head is a little lower to the ground. The team thought that a lower stance would allow more foul tips to fly over his head instead of into his mask. That might have been the intended goal of the new position, but the effect on Ruiz’s ability to receive pitches has transformed his defensive metrics. If we look at Statcast’s detailed framing data, over the last three years, Ruiz had really struggled to receive both low pitches and pitches to his right:

It’s reasonable to think that sitting lower in his stance has helped him to frame those low pitches much more effectively. What’s even more surprising is that the right-hand side of the plate is now his strongest framing zone. In addition to benefiting his receiving, a lower crouch has probably helped him block errant pitches that he might not have been able to get to previously.

Going from being one of the worst defensive catchers in baseball to an above-average one is a tremendous improvement on its own, but Ruiz has also taken a step forward as a hitter. Ruiz got off to a familiar slow start at the plate this year; though May 6, he was running a .182/.203/.303 slash line, with a hugely disappointing 37 wRC+. As Spencer Nusbaum of The Athletic reported on Thursday, Ruiz met with the Nationals coaching staff on May 7 to build a plan for improvement. That same day, he smacked a pair of doubles and a home run. Over his last 11 games, he’s collected 16 hits, seven doubles, and three home runs, raising his season line to .262/.277/.486 (109 wRC+). The plan seems to have worked.

Two things keyed this offensive outburst. First, Ruiz is being more selective when it comes to which pitches to swing at, and second, he’s swinging to do damage when he gets a good pitch to hit. Here’s how manager Blake Butera put it in an interview with Jessica Camerato of MLB.com:

“That’s the one thing with Keibert is, he can cover a lot of pitches but he can also hit the ball really hard. And it’s really hard to hit pitches hard when you’re swinging at everything and just making contact. So one thing we put on him was, shrink the zone a little bit, trust your hand-eye coordination, even if that means taking some borderline pitches that are strikes. Wait until you get a good pitch to hit. Then he’s doing the work from there.”

Throughout his career, Ruiz has displayed excellent bat-to-ball skills and a fantastic ability to cover the entire plate; it’s the reason his career strikeout rate is just 11.1%. But his aggressiveness and propensity to put the ball in play is also why his career walk rate is just 4.7%. With a new selective approach in mind, Ruiz has cut his overall swing rate to 47.5%, a five point drop from where it’s been in the recent past. He’s given up nearly all of those swings on pitches located in the zone; his chase rate is essentially unchanged, but his zone swing rate is down nearly 10 points.

Despite that increased selectivity, he’s still making contact just as often, only now that contact has a little more oomph behind it. Ruiz has significantly improved his contact quality, and most of the improvement has come as a right-handed hitter. Throughout his career, he’s run a neutral platoon split as a switch-hitter, but his underlying batted ball metrics were significantly worse from the right side despite the results indicating otherwise:

This year, Ruiz is doing a ton more damage against left-handed pitching. He’s increased his bat speed from the right side by more than two ticks and has seen huge improvements in every meaningful batted ball metric. He’s also seen a jump in batted ball quality from the left side, albeit a smaller one. That growth appears to stem from his intent at the plate. He’s seeking good pitches to hit and is looking to drive them in the air to the pull side. His pull rate is all the way up to 67.4%, the largest increase of any batter this year, and he’s elevating his contact a lot more often as well. The results over the last few weeks speak for themselves.

For now, Ruiz is still splitting time behind the plate with Drew Millas. He has started a little over half of the Nationals’ games this season and just 11 of the 20 games since the fateful meeting that set him on this course. Millas was a well-regarded catching prospect in his own right not too long ago, but he hasn’t exactly impressed during parts of four seasons in the big leagues. He’s currently running a 41 wRC+ with adequate defense behind the plate. And Ford isn’t knocking on the door of the big leagues, either; the young catcher has mustered just a 74 wRC+ in Triple-A this year. If Ruiz continues bashing the ball and is able to keep up the good work defensively, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him reclaim his role as the team’s everyday catcher in short order.

With their plan for improvement in place, the Nationals have to be thrilled to see such positive results so quickly from Ruiz. I’m sure there will be bumps in the future — we’re talking about just 43 plate appearances since he made these changes to his approach — but with the support of the coaching staff, Ruiz appears to have been set on a path to success.

Spencer Strider had a fascinating first inning at Fenway Park on Tuesday. The Atlanta Braves right-hander threw 10 pitches in the frame, and it took him just five to retire the final three batters he faced. The first two batters were another story entirely. Jarren Duran walloped the second of Strider’s offerings over the right field fence, and Ceddanne Rafaela followed by depositing his fifth bullet over the Green Monster. The Red Sox led 2-0 before he had recorded an out.

What was that inning like for Strider? Wanting to find out, I approached him the next day to see if he’d be amenable to a pitch-by-pitch revisiting of what had happened. We’d had such a conversation back in his rookie season, albeit under far different circumstances: He’d fanned the side on 11 pitches in his lone inning of work.

Strider was happy to oblige, so I began by asking him if his game plan differed from 11 days prior, when he’d started against the Red Sox in Atlanta.

“There was some variation,” the righty replied. “I walked Duran to lead off the game in the previous outing, and I felt like some of that was a game-plan thing where we wanted to go with the heater; the walk was a lot of arm-side heaters. For my stuff, and kind of my mechanics, we wanted to target the glove side and get ahead [on Tuesday]. And I did, although I kind of pulled it down a little bit more than we were trying to do. Then we went back to it, as was the plan, and I kind of threw it in the same spot. The down-and-in heater to lefties isn’t a spot where you want to go, especially when they’re sitting heater. Maybe he pops it up or grounds out. Maybe he takes it again. Instead, he hit a homer. Big league hitters do that.”

The three pitches he threw to Rafaela were all elevated. Read the rest of this entry »

When I announced my intention to write about Antonio Senzatela, Jon Becker burst into my Slack DMs like the Kool-Aid Man to demand I use a Penn and Teller-based headline. Credit where due: It was a great idea.

You know what’s not traditionally a good idea? Writing about Antonio Senzatela.

The rigorous study of baseball empirics has made us all smarter and better, but there are a few things I miss about the old days. Foremost among them is Nichols’ Law of Catcher Defense, an old pre-sabermetrics axiom which states the following: A catcher’s defensive reputation is inversely proportional to his offensive abilities. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s May 29, roughly two full months into the regular season, which means, given the year, that it’s time for everyone’s favorite pastime: parsing competing proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement. Wednesday, the MLBPA released its first proposal for a new agreement. Thursday, MLB followed suit with a proposal of its own. Both are best thought of as opening offers, likely to be heavily modified as the negotiations heat up ahead of the existing agreement’s December 1 expiration. But that doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. I think these early offers are revealing of what each side cares about most. The specific numbers quoted are unlikely to survive multiple rounds of bargaining, but the concepts and structures that each side favors at this stage could tell us a lot about what an eventual compromise looks like. So without getting too bogged down in the details, let’s peruse both proposals and try to tease out what each side is trying to accomplish.

The MLBPA’s Proposal
The players’ first salvo focuses on two things: revenue sharing and early-career pay. Revenue sharing is going to be a key point of discussion in this negotiation. The league has raised competitive balance concerns for years, and it’s clear that there’s public interest in leveling the playing field. Collectively bargained labor agreements don’t solely play out in the court of public opinion, but making the sport more interesting and marketable is a benefit for both sides, so a more balanced system of distributing revenue seems like a clear path towards sustaining the game’s recent growth.

The central piece of the MLBPA revenue sharing proposal is a redistribution of TV money. Currently, teams share a flat 48% of all local revenue, TV included. The MLBPA proposal would change that significantly. In their framework, the first $50 million from each team’s local TV contract, and two-thirds of the amount above $50 million, would be pooled centrally, along with all national TV revenue. Read the rest of this entry »

After posting an excellent 125 wRC+ over his first two seasons, James Wood is establishing himself as one of the best hitters in baseball this year. The 23-year-old National is running a 169 wRC+, third best among qualified batters, and he’s on pace for 43 homers, 26 stolen bases, and 7.2 WAR. Everybody knows the parameters of Wood’s game by now. He’s 6-foot-6, extremely choosy at the plate, and so spectacularly powerful that his proclivity for whiffs and groundballs barely holds him back. This year, he’s improved on both fronts, dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his groundball rate and adding nearly four points to his contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. It’s huge news – James Wood-huge even – and if he can hold on to even some of those gains, he’s going to live at the top of the leaderboards for a long, long time. Today, however, we’re going to talk about a leaderboard where Wood ranks dead last.

If you head over to Baseball Savant’s new ABS challenge leaderboard, you’ll find Wood all the way at the bottom. A big caveat before we get going: The challenge system is very new, and because each player challenges so few times, the sample sizes are very small. Moreover, everyone involved is still adjusting to the system, so the trends we’re seeing now are likely to change. In this article, I’m going to be overreacting to these early numbers. It’s way too soon for big proclamations. However, I don’t think it’s too soon to look for patterns and draw some early conclusions about players who stand out as starkly as Wood does. End of caveat.

Now let’s go to the leaderboard and sort by either Net Overturns or Net Runs. There’s Wood, dead last. According to Statcast’s reckoning, an average batter who saw the same pitches Wood has seen would have made 4.8 more successful challenges and netted their team 1.4 more runs. No player has been worse, and even if you ignore the advanced numbers for a moment, Wood’s record tells you all you need to know. He’s made 13 challenges. He’s won three of them and lost 10. For those of you keeping score at home, that stinks. The average batter has won 47% of their challenges, twice as many as Wood. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, after missing the entire 2025 season due to Tommy John surgery, Gerrit Cole fared well in his return to the Yankees rotation, firing six scoreless innings against the Rays even while struggling to miss bats. On Wednesday night in Kansas City, Cole truly looked back, this time throwing 6 2/3 scoreless innings while striking out 10 Royals without issuing a walk. The former Cy Young winner’s reassuring performance is a welcome development for a rotation that has weathered some high-profile absences — and will have to continue doing so.

The Yankees began the season with Cole, Carlos Rodón, and Clarke Schmidt all recovering from elbow surgeries, and while the first two have now returned, Max Fried — their most valuable pitcher last season — has been sidelined for a spell, as has 2024 AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil. Nonetheless, the team’s rotation has been one the game’s best thus far, leading the majors in WAR (7.5), leading the AL in FIP (3.22), and ranking a close second in the league in both ERA (2.98) and strikeout rate (24.5%). Despite backing that unit with the most potent offense in the league, the 34-22 club finds itself trailing the Rays (34-19) by 1 1/2 games in the AL East.

Prior to last Friday, Cole’s last competitive appearance in the majors had been a reminder of a golden opportunity lost: His inexplicable failure to cover first base in the fifth inning of Game 5 of the 2024 World Series fueled the Dodgers’ comeback from a 5-0 deficit on a night they ended up clinching the title. Limited to 17 starts that season due to nerve irritation and edema in his elbow after finally bringing home a Cy Young award in 2023, Cole made just two appearances in spring training last year before being diagnosed with a torn UCL and undergoing surgery. He progressed enough in his recovery to make two brief appearances in Grapefruit League games this spring, then continued his rehab by making six starts spread across three minor league levels before returning to the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »