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 »

The world has changed in a lot of ways over the last dozen years, some good, and some… not. One thing that doesn’t change, however, is the status of Freddie Freeman at or near the top of the first base dogpile.

If at any point over the last decade you made a list of baseball’s top first basemen and didn’t include Freeman, you hopefully crumpled your list and started over again. Freeman will celebrate the 15th anniversary of his 2010 major league debut with the Braves later this year, and more than 2,000 hits and 350 homers later, he’s likely just rounding out the text on his bronze Hall of Fame plaque. Read the rest of this entry »

Roll over Pete Rose, and tell Shoeless Joe Jackson the news. In an historic decision that reversed over eight decades of precedent, on Tuesday commissioner Rob Manfred formally reinstated Rose, Jackson, and 15 other deceased individuals who had previously been placed on the permanently ineligible list for violating Rule 21, which bars players, umpires, and club and league officials and employees from gambling on baseball. The move opens the door for Rose (and Jackson) to be considered for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but that opportunity won’t come until December 2027 at the earliest. Neither their placement on the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot nor their election to the Hall is automatic even if they do become candidates, as the Hall’s heavy hand in committee proceedings — particularly with regards to players linked to performance-enhancing drugs — should remind us.

Given the extent to which Rose spent decades lying about his gambling and showing a lack of contrition even after he was banned — to say nothing of the allegations of statutory rape that surfaced in recent years — Manfred’s decision is a bitter disappointment, perhaps even a shock. While his decade-long tenure as commissioner has produced no shortage of grounds for criticism, he appeared to be hyper-conscious when it came to drawing a distinction between Major League Baseball’s recent embrace of legalized gambling, and the lines crossed by those who flouted Rule 21. Last June, Pirates infielder Tucupita Marcano was placed on the permanently ineligible list for making 387 baseball bets totaling $150,000 through a legal sports book, while in February, an arbiter upheld the firing of umpire Pat Hoberg for sharing legal sports betting accounts with a professional poker player who bet on baseball, and for impeding MLB’s investigation. Rose’s gambling, via bets placed through bookies, was illegal at the time as well as completely out of bounds given his role within baseball.

Manfred’s latest move was driven by the Rose family’s petition to remove Rose — who died last September 30 at the age of 83 — from the permanently ineligible list so that he can be considered for election to the Hall. Rather than just revisit Rose’s eligibility, however, the commissioner chose to issue a broader ruling that erased what had previously been a meaningful distinction between a popularly misunderstood “lifetime ban” (i.e, one ending with the death of the banned individual) and a permanent spot on baseball’s blacklist. Created by commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1920, the permanently ineligible list was reserved for those found to have gambled on baseball (plus a few who committed other transgressions Landis viewed as grave) from future participation within the game. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have one. In that spirit, I’d like to start today’s article with a confession: I have a Trent Grisham evaluation problem. It feels good to say it! I’ve had this problem for years. Ever since he burst onto the scene in San Diego with two straight seasons of good hitting and great fielding, I’ve consistently overestimated his future trajectory. I put him on the first cut of my trade value list every year. I think of him as a starter even when the teams that employ him don’t.

I know all of this. When I’ve looked at Grisham in the past, I’ve seen an excellent player even when others haven’t, and I understand that this bias shades my evaluation. But just when I thought I was kicking the habit, Grisham goes and does something like this and pulls me right back in. Through Monday’s action, the first quarter of the season, he’s hitting a ludicrous .288/.373/.663, and while that’s not any reasonable hitter’s slugging percentage, he’s absolutely tattooing the ball, posting career high marks in barrel rate, hard-hit rate, xwOBACON, xSLG, average exit velocity… You get the idea, he’s just hitting everything very hard at the moment.

Now, as a reformed Grishamite, I have to tell you that hitting the ball hard isn’t one of Grisham’s shortcomings. Not quite like this, of course, because the only person who regularly hits like this is Aaron Judge, but he’s always been a threat to go deep. Grisham might have a low-ish wRC+ over the past three years, but the problem has been the quantity of his hits rather than the quality. Even while he scuffled mightily, he slugged roughly 20 homers per 600 plate appearances. He doesn’t always put the ball in play, but when he does, he makes it count.

Grisham also forces pitchers to come to him. He’s among the league’s best when it comes to chase rate, and he’s walking at a double digit clip. Again, though, I have to tell you that this isn’t new. Grisham’s chase rate is higher than it was last year, and his walk rate is below his career average. Unlike your typical outfielder with a below-average batting line, this isn’t an issue of Grisham never seeing a slider he doesn’t like. He’s quite willing to work a count if pitchers won’t challenge him in the zone. Read the rest of this entry »