Which players most often hit the ball to the positions that they themselves play when they’re in the field? It’s a simple question, but it also begs larger, murkier philosophical questions. Is hitting the ball to your own position the height of baseball narcissism? Or is it that hitting the ball to your special spot just feels right? Maybe the batter just stands at the plate, surveys the great green-and-brown expanse before them and gets overwhelmed. “What shall I do?” they ask themselves as the pitch clock ticks down and the hot dog vendors emit their indecipherable warblings. Then they see an oasis of familiarity, the one patch of earth that has welcomed them through a lifetime of baseball-related activities. Hitting the ball there just might feel like coming home. “I know just what I’ll do,” they think, twisting their gloved hands against the handle of the bat. It is their pen, and with it they will write what they know.

So who does that the most? Before I dug into the numbers, I put the question to my colleagues. None of us got it right. I thought I was pretty clever by picking Steven Kwan. He’s a contact maven who specializes in dumping the ball into left field, a position famously played by none other than multiple Gold Glove winner Steven Kwan. I felt all the more clever when Ben Clemens picked Kwan, too. We were wrong. So were Jon Becker, who picked Bo Bichette, Jay Jaffe, who picked Luis Rengifo, and Jake Mailhot, who picked Nico Hoerner. None of the players we picked was even at the top in his respective position, either on a counting basis or a rate basis. Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Fluharty is flying under the radar as one of baseball’s most effective lefty relievers. Since making his major league debut with the Toronto Blue Jays on April Fools Day, the 23-year-old southpaw has a 1.96 ERA and a 2.94 FIP over 18 appearances. Moreover, he’s allowed just seven hits in his 18-and-third innings, and prior to surrendering a solo home run to former Jay Danny Jansen this past Tuesday he’d retired 21 consecutive batters. All three of his decisions are in the win column.

His initial two outings were especially challenging. The first batter Fluharty faced in the bigs was Washington Nationals 2024 All-Star CJ Abrams, who lined a run-scoring double. Three days later, the first batter in his second outing was Juan Soto; the New York Mets superstar also stroked a run-scoring double.

I asked the 2022 fifth-round pick out of Liberty University about those welcome-to-the-big-leagues ABs prior to his third appearance.

“Get put into the fire and see what happens,” said Fluharty, who later that same day faced Rafael Devers [E-6], Alex Bregman [K], and Rob Refsnyder [DP]. “I’m glad they have faith in me. While I obviously would have preferred better outcomes in those first outings, it’s all about adjusting. This game is hard.”

The pitches that were turned around for two-baggers? Read the rest of this entry »

If motor preferences were the final word on pitcher performance, Nathan Eovaldi would be sitting on a beach somewhere.

Eovaldi throws from a low slot, releasing his pitches from an average arm angle of 30 degrees. (Zero degrees is fully sidearm; 90 degrees is straight over the top.) Many low-slot pitchers have a supination bias. There are downsides to being a supinator — their preference for cutting the baseball tends to produce crummy four-seam fastballs — but they usually have no trouble throwing hard breaking balls; they can also more easily harness seam-shifted wake to throw sinkers, sweepers, or kick-changes. Low-slot supinators, like Seth Lugo, can basically throw every pitch in the book. High-slot pronators like Ryan Pepiot or Lucas Giolito don’t have that sort of range, but make up for it with excellent changeups and high-carry fastballs.

Eovaldi is, tragically, a low-slot pronator. Not many low-slot pronators make it to the big leagues. The pronation bias blunts their ability to throw hard glove-side breakers, and the low arm angle obviates the pronator’s nominal advantage, killing the carry on their fastball. As Tyler Zombro of Tread Athletics (now a special assistant of pitching for the Cubs) said in his primer video on motor preferences, “I know in stuff models and just off of Trackman alone, this arsenal with this slot is not that attractive.” Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I watch Oneil Cruz hit, I end up thinking about pull rate. It seems like he’s always using his long arms to yank a ball into right field even though the pitch came in all the way on the outside corner. I’m not quite right, though. According to our leaderboards, Cruz ranks 35th among all qualified players in pull rate. According to Statcast, he’s at 55th, not even in the top third. Maybe it’s just that seeing someone do something as bonkers as this can warp your perspective:

But there is more than one way to think about pull rate. Sometimes you get jammed. Sometimes you have to hit the ball where it’s pitched. Sometimes the situation demands that you shorten up and sell out for contact. Those three examples might tell us a bit less about the intent behind your swing, because you didn’t get to execute your plan. We have ways to throw them out. Today, we’ll look into players whose overall pull rate is notably different from their pull rate when they square up the ball. As a refresher, Statcast plugs the respective speeds of the ball and the bat into a formula to determine the maximum possible exit velocity, and if the actual EV is at least 80% of that number, it’s considered squared up.

I pulled numbers from 2023 through 2025 for each player who has squared up at least 250 balls during that stretch. As you’d expect, the numbers are mostly pretty similar. Of the 219 players in the sample, 165 of them have a difference between their overall pull rate and their squared-up pull rate that’s below three percentage points. No player has a pull rate when squaring the ball up that’s more than 6.5 percentage points off their overall pull rate, but there are a few interesting names here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Kansas City Royals have an excellent starting rotation. Starting pitching (along with Bobby Witt Jr. turning into Honus Wagner with a mullet, I guess) carried the Royals to the ALDS last year. It’s also why the Royals will be well-positioned in the AL Central race if the Tigers ever realize that they’re not actually the 1975 Reds.

But even in such a deep, well-rounded unit, one man must lead the charge. Is it ace Cole Ragans? No. Is it one of Seth Lugo, Michael Lorenzen, or Michael Wacha, Kansas City’s army of rejuvenated Millennials? Again, no.

It’s Kris Bubic! Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the Rocket City Trash Pandas shut out Pensacola, 9-0, in the Southern League. In the Midwest League, the Quad Cities River Bandits eked out a 7-6 win over the Dayton Dragons. And in the big leagues, television cameras captured an enormous raccoon traipsing through the Citi Field seats during the seventh inning of the Mets-Pirates game. It was a good day for raccoons at the ballpark.

The major league raccoon went down one row of seats in center field, then back across the next row up, looking for all the world like it was just searching for its seat. “I’m scared of raccoons,” said SNY broadcaster Ron Darling, stammering slightly. The brief clip makes it look like the Citi Field raccoon was simply out for a late-night stroll, not bothering anybody. It turns out there’s more to the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Though Roki Sasaki’s deal with the Dodgers wasn’t anywhere close to the winter’s biggest, few free agents were so coveted or came with as much hype attached. Known as “The LeBron James of Japanese baseball” for his exploits in high school, he was dominant — even transcendent — during his 2021–24 NPB run with the Chiba Lotte Marines. As he went through the posting process, his combination of youth and a tantalizing repertoire featuring an elite, 80-grade splitter as well as a fastball with triple-digit velocity generated widespread interest by teams, though a dip in that velo last year did rate as a cause for concern. Now, eight starts into his career with the Dodgers, the 23-year-old righty has been underwhelming, and now he’s hurt, too. On Tuesday, the team placed him on the 15-day injured list due to a shoulder impingement, continuing the dizzying level of turnover within the rotation of the NL West leaders.

This is the latest turn in what’s been a rocky rookie season for Roki. Through 34.1 innings — about 4 1/3 per start — he’s carrying a 4.72 ERA, a 6.16 FIP, and a 6.13 xERA. He’s struck out just 15.6% of batters, while walking 14.3% (the highest mark of any pitcher with at least 30 innings), and has served up 1.57 homers per nine. His 21.9% chase rate is the third-lowest at that 30-inning cutoff.

Batters have struggled to do anything with Sasaki’s splitter, which he’s thrown in the zone just 29.6% of the time; they’ve chased it 30.4% of the time, and overall have hit .137 and slugged .237 against it. Even so, his 35% whiff rate on the pitch is well off the 56.5% whiff rate it generated last year in NPB according to Sports Info Solutions. Batters have fared better against his slider (.250 AVG/.417 SLG, 33.3% whiff) and his four-seamer (.253 VG/.494 SLG, 10.1% whiff), rarely chasing either (14% of the time for the former, 15% for the latter). All six of his home runs allowed have been off of four-seamers, as have two would-be homers robbed by Andy Pages; his xSLG on that pitch is a worrisome .663. His 17.8% whiff rate on four-seamers in the upper third of the strike zone or higher is better, but batters have still slugged .692 on pitches there, with a .903 xSLG. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been one week since the Pirates fired manager Derek Shelton and replaced him with former major league utilityman and Pittsburgh native Don Kelly, who served as Shelton’s bench coach for the entirety of his managerial stint. Firing the manager is one of the first moves made by an underperforming or flat-out awful ballclub, so there’s nothing surprising about Shelton getting the axe after a 12-26 start. But a manager’s record is only as good as the players on his roster and the money spent to build that roster, and Pittsburgh was deficient in both for Shelton’s entire tenure, which spanned five-plus seasons. During that time, the team posted a 308-441 record.

Now with Kelly at the helm, the Pirates are still on a ship that’s at best treading water; they are 3-3 in their six games since he took over, with five of them being decided by just one run. Perhaps Pittsburgh will be better with Kelly managing than it was under Shelton. After all, this is a team that at least has Paul Skenes and Oneil Cruz. However, there is only so much that Kelly can do here. The core problems in Pittsburgh can only be solved with a drastic shift in organizational philosophy, and that starts with owner Bob Nutting and the person tasked with executing that strategy, general manager Ben Cherington. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien was a promising prospect heading into the 2013 season, but he was far from a high-profile player. When that year’s Baseball America Prospect Handbook was published, the 2011 sixth-round pick out of the University of California-Berkeley was ranked just 14th in a light Chicago White Sox system. (At the time, in-depth scouting reports were still in their nascent stages here at FanGraphs.)

In the 12 years since then, the 34-year-old Semien has gone on to exceed those modest expectations. He reached the big leagues with the White Sox in September 2013, then established himself as an everyday player after they traded him to the Athletics before the 2015 season. Now in his fourth year with the Rangers after six seasons in Oakland and one in Toronto, the Bay Area native has three All-Star selections, two Silver Sluggers, and a Gold Glove on his résumé. Scuffling in the current campaign — Semien has a 47 wRC+ over 176 plate appearances — he nonetheless has 1,533 hits, including 241 home runs, to go with a 108 wRC+ and 36.1 WAR over his major league career.

What did Semien’s Baseball America scouting report look like in the spring of 2013? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what then-BA contributing writer Phil Rogers wrote, and asked Semien to respond to it.

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“The son of former California wide receiver [Damien] Semien, Marcus was a three-sport standout in high school who followed his father’s footsteps to Berkeley, where he focused on baseball.”

“I actually just played basketball and baseball in high school,” Semien replied. “I was part of a state championship runner-up in my senior year, so I missed probably the first three weeks of my [baseball] season. Once I graduated high school, I knew that baseball was all that I was going to play in college.” Read the rest of this entry »

Rich Hill has a chance. On Tuesday, the Royals announced they had agreed to a minor league deal with the 45-year-old left-handed starter. He began his professional career in 2002 with the Boise Hawks, who are no longer part of affiliated baseball. Hill’s journey from the majors to independent ball, then back to a career renaissance in his late 30s is one of the game’s true feel-good stories, and it’s not over yet. If he makes it to Kansas City, he’ll tie Edwin Jackson as the most useful player on Immaculate Grid, with appearances for 14 different major league teams. However, that’s by no means a sure thing.

Hill started the 2015 season – yes, this historical overview section is skipping over the first 13 years of Hill’s professional career – with the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League. The Red Sox signed him that August, and from 2015 to 2020, he went 43-22 with a 2.92 ERA and 3.48 FIP. Over that stretch, relying (sometimes exclusively) on a four-seamer that averaged under 90 mph and a loopy curveball, Hill put up 10.7 WAR, struck out nearly 29% of the batters he faced, and pitched in two World Series to a 1.80 ERA.

The 2021 season, when Hill was 41, marks a dividing line. Over the past four seasons, he owns a 4.51 ERA with a 4.42 FIP and a 4.52 xFIP. His strikeout rate has fallen to 21.1%. In 2023, Hill posted a 4.76 ERA with the Pirates, then imploded after being traded to the Padres at the deadline, running an 8.23 ERA and 6.77 FIP over 10 appearances. He sat out the beginning of the 2024 season to spend time with his family, then joined the Red Sox in August, putting up a 4.91 ERA with ugly peripherals over four appearances and 3 2/3 innings. For the first time, his fastball didn’t reach 90 mph even once. The team released him in early September. Read the rest of this entry »