You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” Maybe because your Aunt Debbie shared a post from her favorite social media influencer. Maybe because you passed the time during a layover at the airport perusing the self-help books in the Hudson News near your gate. Like most self-help tropes, whether or not it hits for you depends a little on your life circumstances and a little on how you choose to apply it. When it comes to sports fandom, emotional hedging can be a useful tool to avoid disappointment, or maybe you prefer projecting confidence to manifest a desired outcome. And if you’re a Phillies fan, you’ve perfected the art of oscillating wildly between the two over the course of a single game. You even have a handy meme with a meter that only ever points to one extreme or the other:
(Please excuse the mismatched needle sizes and logo alignment. These images are precious internet relics that have been downloaded, clumsily edited, re-uploaded, compressed, and decompressed hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The pixelation is earned like callouses on the hands of a skilled laborer.)
But the formula seems to assume that expectations are set and controlled by the person in search of a happy existence. The entire notion is upended when mathematical models based on historical outcomes become the source for baseline expectations. In this scenario, if your team is outperforming expectations, then you can enjoy the banked wins, but you do so in fear of the rainier days that surely lie somewhere in the team’s future forecast. Whereas if your team is underperforming expectations, things might feel dire, but there’s reason to believe sunnier days lie ahead. Read the rest of this entry »
Like most people with an MLB.tv account and no serious responsibilities, I spent a large portion of Wednesday afternoon watching the Pirates-Brewers game. This midweek businesspersons’ special featured one of the most hotly anticipated starting pitching matchups of the season so far: Paul Skenes vs. Jacob Misiorowski.
The path Shane Baz took to Tampa Bay’s starting rotation was anything but uneventful. He was drafted 12th overall in 2017 by the Pirates out of Concordia Lutheran High School in Tomball, Texas, where Ke’Bryan Hayes, Glenn Otto, and Adam Oller also played. The following summer, he was dealt to the Rays in a trade Pirates fans are loathe to remember. The Bucs acquired Chris Archer, while the Rays received Baz, Tyler Glasnow, and Austin Meadows.
Baz went on to make his major league debut in September 2021, and six months later he topped our 2022 Tampa Bay Top Prospects list. Then his elbow began barking. The right-hander subsequently underwent Tommy John surgery, and didn’t toe the rubber for the Rays between July 2022 and July of last year. He’s been solid since returning from his two-year recovery. Over 162 innings — including 82 2/3 this season — Baz has an 11-6 record to go with a 3.94 ERA.
What did Baz’s scouting report look like when he ranked third on our 2018 Pittsburgh Pirates Top Prospects list, which was published the previous December? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what Eric Longenhagen wrote and asked Baz to respond to it.
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“Baz had among the most electric stuff in the 2017 draft. He was up to 98 in the spring, sitting in the mid-90s for most of his starts while also producing the best fastball spin rates in the draft class.”
“That was the big thing at the time,” replied Baz, who has made 15 starts and won seven of 10 decisions — albeit with a 4.79 ERA and 4.83 FIP — in the current campaign. “Everybody was talking about spin rate. I didn’t really know much about it, so I definitely wasn’t worried about it. I was mostly worried about trying to get the ball over the plate. But I do feel like I had good stuff when I got drafted. I was up to 97-98 [mph] and trying to live around 94-96. It was mostly about honing it in.”
“Baz can also spin a power breaking ball and throw a nasty cutter.”
“Yeah, I had a cutter at the time,” the righty recalled. “That’s a pitch I’ve kind of put in the back pocket, but it was a go-to back then, more so than my curveball was. My cutter kind of turned into a bigger slider, and now I’m throwing the curveball more.
“That happened more post-surgery,” Baz added. “I started throwing my curveball so hard that the two pitches were kind of running together. You want the one with more movement, so I stuck with the curveball.”
“Some scouts noted his heater was more hittable than they anticipated given its velocity.”
“At the time, probably,” the righty responded. “I mean, I don’t really remember how I pitched my first year of pro ball. It was awhile ago, so I don’t really know.”
“Baz is a tightly wound, but athletic, 6-foot-3 with a good build and room for more weight as he ages.”
“Yeah, I would say that trying to put on weight was a big thing at the time,” Baz said. “That and get stronger. I feel I’ve done a good job of that. I was probably 180 pounds when I came out of high school, and now I’m around 205 or 210. Another thing I was trying to do was working on making my delivery simple.”
“His head-whacking delivery toes the line between explosive and erratic, and he sometimes struggles to throw strikes.”
“That’s not too far off,” the Houston-born hurler said. “It’s gotten a lot better. Obviously, the more consistent you can make your delivery, the more you’re going to command the ball. So yeah, I would say that was accurate at the time. I did have [a head whack]. Back then, I just wanted to throw as hard as I could. I didn’t care about things like longevity, consistency, or the delivery.”
“That will need to improve for Baz to avoid an eventual move to the bullpen… Even if that’s where Baz ends up, his stuff is such that he’s a likely late-inning arm.”
“I think any way I could have gotten to the big leagues, I would have done it,” Baz said. “I was a catcher as a sophomore. I mean, growing up I was always told to try to help the team win in any way I can. That’s how I’ve always looked at it.”
“Baz also played the infield in high school.”
“I was told that as a position player I could go somewhere around rounds three to five,” recalled Baz, who bypassed a commitment to Texas Christian University to sign with the Pirates. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was going to go to college as a two-way player. I don’t know where I would have ended up playing. I mostly played infield in high school, but with the arm and the speed, I probably would have ended up in the outfield.
“I took the two-way thing seriously. It was back before [Shohei] Ohtani and [Michael] Lorenzen — guys like that who could do both — but I definitely thought about it. But not a lot of teams wanted both, even to try doing both, so I decided to just stick to pitching. Would I do it now? I think that ship has sailed at this point.”
On Tuesday night, Ranger Suárez aced his toughest test of the season. Taking on a red-hot Astros team (they’ve posted a 135 wRC+ over the last 14 days) that demolishes lefties (they’re first in wRC+ vs. left-handed pitchers), Suárez hardly broke a sweat. He tossed 7.1 scoreless innings, allowing just three hits, before Cooper Hummel parked his 99th pitch of the game into the right field seats.
The start may have ended on a sour note, but Tuesday’s performance was the cherry on top of an unbelievably sweet run for the 29-year-old southpaw. In his last nine starts, Suárez has allowed eight earned runs. That’s good for a 1.17 ERA over nearly a third of an entire season.
But for some reason, I’m never quite ready to believe. Maybe it’s because his primary fastball sits below 91 mph, or the absence of gaudy strikeout rates, or the lack of a single pitch that grades out as even average by Stuff+ or PitchingBot. Mostly, I think it’s because I perceive Suárez as a fundamentally streaky pitcher. He’s certainly on a run at the moment, and he’s gone on these runs before. During his breakout 2021 campaign, he compiled a 1.24 ERA in his final eight starts of the season. And there were the first three months of 2024: a 1.85 ERA over a 99 inning span. Read the rest of this entry »
Fernando Tatis Jr. was fortunate that the pitch that hit him on the right wrist last week didn’t cause a fracture, but elsewhere in the NL West, Corbin Carroll wasn’t so lucky. On Monday, the Diamondbacks learned that their 24-year-old star has suffered a chip fracture in his left wrist, the result of being hit by a pitch on June 18; he hadn’t played since. Carroll is the second Arizona regular to land on the injured list this week due to a pitch-induced fracture that was only discovered belatedly, after catcher Gabriel Moreno, and he’ll miss significant time. As if the Diamondbacks — who lost ace Corbin Burnes and late-inning relievers Justin Martinez and A.J. Puk to Tommy John surgery earlier this month — needed more bad news, they’ve lost infielder Ildemaro Vargas to a fractured metatarsal, and are crossing their fingers in hopes that both Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez can avoid the IL after making early exits from Monday’s blowout win.
In the eighth inning of last Wednesday’s game in Toronto, Carroll was hit on the left hand by a 91-mph sinker from the Blue Jays’ Justin Bruihl. While he stayed in the game to run the bases, he departed at the end of the inning:
Initial X-rays were negative, and both Carroll and the Diamondbacks hoped that the timing of the right fielder’s return would depend mainly on pain tolerance. After missing the team’s next four games in Toronto and Colorado — during which he remained available to pinch-run and play defense, though the call never came — Carroll was reexamined when the team arrived in Chicago to play the White Sox on Monday. MRI results and additional testing revealed that he had suffered a chip fracture on the back of his hand.
A chip fracture, sometimes referred to as an avulsion fracture, occurs when a small piece of bone is pulled away from the larger bone, generally by a ligament or tendon. “That’s still a little bit confusing to all of us,” said manager Torey Lovullo of the diagnosis. “He’s going to continue to get some opinions just to find out what that official diagnosis means and what the time frame will be.” Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, I was writing about Reds rookie Chase Burns, the hard-throwing former Tennessee and Wake Forest ace who was about to make his first major league start. Burns throws really hard — always has — so I dialed up the fastball velocity leaderboard to see how he stacked up against starters at the major league level. (Quite well, it turns out.)
Anyway, the Angels have a couple guys who are pretty high on that list. José Soriano’s four-seamer averages 97.7 mph, which is one-tenth of a mile short of what Burns managed in two Triple-A starts, but up here in the real-world majors, that makes him the hardest-throwing qualified starter apart from Paul Skenes. Tarik Skubal? Jacob deGrom? Dylan Cease? Those guys can go take a hike. Read the rest of this entry »
Will Warren’s best pitch is a sweeper. That’s the case for a lot of pitchers in baseball today, of course, but his rendition is almost the platonic ideal of the pitch: low-80s velocity, very little vertical movement in either direction, and a huge, comic-book-exaggerated horizontal hook. The ball briefly looks possessed on its flight home:
No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you: That’s a really sweep-y sweeper. No one in baseball gets more horizontal movement on his sweeper than Warren, in fact. From his slingy, low-three-quarters arm slot, he generates the sweep the pitch is so known for, working it across the plate to righties or darting it in to steal a front-door strike against lefties. It’s Warren’s signature pitch, the secondary offering he uses most frequently, and he has it on a string. He throws it more frequently when behind in the count than ahead, believe it or not, and floods the zone with unerring precision.
The natural pairing for that sweeping slider? Warren’s excellent sinker, which dives and tails arm side, falling four more inches and tailing two more inches than your average 93-mph sinker. That movement confuses opposing hitters to no end. He’s induced called strikes on around a third of the two-strike sinkers he’s thrown all year, the best mark in the majors. You can see why:
That, in a nutshell, is the promise of Will Warren. Major league pitchers are increasingly adopting a sinker/sweeper approach when they face same-handed opposition, and Warren is one of the best there is at sinking and sweeping. That was the promise that made him a Top 100 prospect – two elite pitches, the ability to mix in a four-seamer, changeup, and curveball to keep batters off of those two premium offerings, and enough command to sew it all together. It’s working. Though he’s suffered from poor sequencing luck (65.2% left-on-base rate, one of the lowest in the majors among starters), his 2.88 FIP, 3.37 SIERA, and 3.58 xERA all point to his effectiveness so far. Read the rest of this entry »
Max Scherzer was an early adoptee of analytics. When I first interviewed him for Baseball Prospectus back in August 2010, the right-hander called himself “a very mathematical guy,” adding that “the advanced metrics that are coming out throughout the game… have helped me to understand and simplify the game.”
Fifteen years later, Scherzer is an elder statesmen — and a three-time Cy Young Award winner — who approaches his craft differently than he once did. That’s not to say he no longer values analytics — he does — but a decade and a half of facing big league hitters has altered his perspective. (He addressed that evolution in an interview that ran here at FanGraphs two summer ago.) Now with the Toronto Blue Jays and on the back stretch of a career that should land him in Cooperstown, the 40-year-old Scherzer highly values an aspect of pitching that can’t be quantified.
The subject at hand was one he volunteered. Knowing Scherzer possesses both a wealth of pitching knowledge and well-formed opinions, I approached him with an open-ended question: What should we talk about?
Here is the conversation that followed, edited lightly for better clarity.
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David Laurila: You mentioned conviction…
Max Scherzer: “Yes. Guys now are flooded with information, and what they really need to be doing is going out there and competing, and understanding that when you do get beat, it’s not the shape of the pitch. It’s actually the sequence, or the conviction, or it could be 1,000 other things. Talking to lot of young guys, that’s what they care about, their pitch shapes. There’s so much more to pitching than that. Those are the discussions we need to have with the next generation.”
Laurila: Is there are a relationship between shapes and conviction? Do pitches that aren’t thrown with full conviction tend to be less sharp? Read the rest of this entry »
At the end of April, I wrote about whether the Baltimore Orioles could salvage the 2025 season after a dreadful start. Their record stood at 11-17, a decent-sized hole to be sure, but it wasn’t deep enough to be considered a grave. Baltimore still had a chance to turn things around and make a playoff run, so long as the team started winning quickly. Now, nearly two months later, the O’s are 10 wins under .500, and considering we’re one week away from July, the mathematical task to get back into the race is daunting.
The Orioles have actually played better baseball lately, which highlights the fundamental problem with getting to play meaningful games in October. I’d call May 24 their nadir, when the first loss of a doubleheader dropped them to a 16-34 record, just barely ahead of the White Sox, and a 110-loss pace. Charm City has seen some abysmal teams, but only two years of Baltimore baseball featured at least 110 losses; those were 2018 and 2021, during the franchise’s notoriously painful rebuild. Even the 1988 Orioles, who infamously started the season by dropping 21 straight games, recovered enough to manage 54 wins! Beginning with the second game of that May 24 doubleheader, Baltimore has put up a solid 18-10 record. While that sounds promising, it’s actually kind of bad news when we’re talking playoffs. Those 28 games represent just under a fifth of an entire season, and playing really well over this stretch was only enough to increase the team’s playoff probability from 1.5% to 4.4% using the FanGraphs Depth Charts odds, and from 2.6% to 5.0% in the ZiPS projected standings. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark J. Rebilas, John E. Sokolowski and Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images
I wrote yesterday about the Mets optioning Francisco Alvarez back to Triple-A, but plenty more catcher news broke over the weekend. We’ll start in Baltimore, where a left oblique strain sent Adley Rutschman to the injured list just as he was starting to look like he had figured things out. As you’ll surely recall, Rutschman was off to a great start last season, but his performance dropped off after he took a foul ball to his right hand on June 20. Rutschman ran a 138 wRC+ with 15 home runs before June 30 and a 61 wRC+ with four homers through the end of the season. Both he and the team have steadfastly denied that the drop-off in his performance was related to the hand injury, and after his ugly start to the 2025 season, the rest of us were starting to believe them. Rutschman ran a wRC+ of 84 through May 20, but in his last 23 games, he’s been at 129:
Then on Friday, his right side “flared up” during batting practice, to use the words of interim manager Tony Mansolino. “Hopefully it’s not too long,” Mansolino told reporters. “When you play in that type of heat down in Tampa, and you’re playing this long stretch and you’re in the middle of the season, it probably puts you at more risk for things like that.” On Sunday, the team announced that an MRI showed a mild oblique strain and that Rutschman would be out at least until the All-Star break. That means he’ll miss at least one month (21 games).
This is the first IL stint of Rutschman’s career, and it comes when the team has no margin for error at all. The Orioles are 10 games below .500. They’re not only in last place in the AL East, but they’re trailing the fourth-place Red Sox by five games, and we now give them just a 4.4% chance of making the playoffs. Since May 20, Rutschman has put up 0.7 WAR, third-most among the team’s position players. He’s an enormous loss, but at least in the clubhouse, no one is resigned to selling at the deadline. “We’re trying to win, and we’re trying to develop,” Mansolino told reporters. “I think, if we went full-blown development right here in June, when that third Wild Card spot is floating around .500, I don’t know if that’s the right decision for the Baltimore Orioles and the city of Baltimore and the fans.”
Toward that end, the team could really use catching help. The Orioles have put up 0.3 WAR from the catcher position this season, which ranks 26th in baseball. Rutschman has chipped in 1.1 WAR, but his contributions have been almost entirely negated by those of Gary Sánchez and Maverick Handley, both of whom have totals preceded by minus signs. Sánchez returned from a wrist injury 10 days ago, and his splits are extreme: -6 wRC+ before the injury and 196 wRC+ after. That’s about what you’d expect from him. He’s an all-or-nothing slugger who will run big slumps and big hot streaks, and when you average it all together, he looks like a solid backup. When Sánchez was out, the team called up Handley, and to say that he hasn’t worked out would be an understatement. Handley is 27 and last appeared on one of our lists of the Orioles’ top prospects in 2022. He has gotten into 16 games and is currently running a wRC+ of -42. He has three hits. He is striking out over 38% of the time.
In Samuel Basallo, the team also has a blue chip catching prospect at Triple-A Norfolk. Basallo topped our Orioles prospect list in April and is currently ranked fifth on The Board, making him the top catching prospect in baseball. Still, the team clearly doesn’t feel he’s ready to make the jump. Mansolino said the team hasn’t even discussed calling him up. “I don’t think you take a guy like Sammy Basallo and you bring him to the big leagues just because there’s a need,” said Mansolino. “I think you bring a Sammy Basallo to the big leagues when he’s destroyed Triple-A in all facets of the game — his at-bats, his defense, his everything. So when he destroys Triple-A and he knocks the door down, to me, then he becomes part of the conversation. I don’t personally think you bring a guy to the big leagues with that type of profile until that happens.”
Basallo is currently running a 152 wRC+ with 15 home runs in Norfolk, which looks a lot like knocking the door down, but he’s only 20 years old, and he still only has 69 games under his belt at Triple-A. It’s hard to fault the Orioles for following whatever path they believe will give their top prospect the best chance of developing to his full potential. But that means Handley is back up in Baltimore again for at least a month. This sure seems like a time when the Orioles could go looking for an affordable veteran backstop. Maybe even one who knows the team and its pitchers. Surely that would be too much to ask for, right? Right?!
On Sunday, The Baltimore Banner’sAndy Kostka astutely noted that the Braves had released catcher James McCann from his minor league deal. The same McCann who spent the past two seasons with the Orioles, serving as a perfectly cromulent backup catcher. According to reports, McCann was looking for a multi-year deal this offseason, but the Orioles were reluctant to make such a commitment due to the presence of both Rutschman and Basallo. McCann didn’t get his deal, instead signing a minor league pact with the Braves. A few weeks ago, The Athletic’sKen Rosenthal reported that the deal had a rolling opt-out clause, allowing any team to offer a major league deal to McCann, at which point the Braves could either call him up or let him go.
An hour after Kostka noted McCann’s release, Rosenthal reported that McCann had signed with the Diamondbacks. We’ll transition to the Diamondbacks shortly, but we should close out the Orioles section by noting just how big bringing back McCann could have been for the team. McCann is nobody’s idea of a savior. He has a career 82 wRC+, and his catching didn’t grade out well last season. But he’s a veteran who has two years of experience with this Baltimore pitching staff. He ran a 125 wRC+ in the minors for the Braves this season. He’s put up a positive WAR in every season since 2019, and just having a catcher whose wRC+ doesn’t start with a minus sign would be a huge step up for the Orioles.
We have no way of knowing whether the Orioles were also pursuing McCann, but even if they were, money can’t have been the reason he ended up going elsewhere. McCann will be making the major league minimum during his time in Arizona (and a prorated $180,000 during his time in the minors), and his experience in Baltimore makes him more valuable there than anywhere else. It’s a real missed opportunity, but it could be an indication that the Orioles see things the way Dan Szymborski sees them: That it’s time to give up on the 2025 season.
Now we’re on to Arizona, where catching injuries are just the start. On Friday, A.J. Puk underwent internal brace surgery. Last night, manager Torey Lovullo said during the Diamondbacks’ postgame show that Corbin Carroll, who hasn’t played since taking a sinker to his left wrist on Wednesday, was diagnosed with a chip fracture and will be going on the injured list. Jay Jaffe will be covering this miserable news in depth tomorrow. Today, though, we’re going to finish by talking about catcher Gabriel Moreno. Moreno went on the IL with a right hand contusion on Thursday, and his stint was made retroactive to June 15. On Friday, the team announced that the injury was actually a hairline fracture of his right index finger. It dates back to this fluky wild pitch from June 6:
The team had been trying to avoid an IL stint, playing Moreno just three times over the next two weeks. Amazingly, he even hit a home run during that stretch, but he pretty clearly wasn’t himself:
The injury is a major blow to a Diamondbacks team that’s 7 1/2 games back in an extremely tough NL West, and just 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. We currently have them with a 31.9% chance of making the playoffs, but losing a star catcher in Moreno (not to mention one of the best players in the game in Carroll) really, really hurts. Ketel Marte, Geraldo Perdomo, Eugenio Suárez, and Pavin Smith are all legitimately playing like stars, but the Diamondbacks have one of the weaker pitching staffs in the league. This really could be too much to overcome. What’s 31.9% minus Carroll and Moreno? The answer depends on how long they’re out and whether they look like their old selves when they return. Lovullo has said that Moreno’s timetable will be measured in weeks rather than days, which is an ominous sign. It’s also rough because Moreno was on pace for the best season of his excellent young career.
In 2022, Moreno put up 0.8 WAR over just 25 games as a rookie in Toronto, and after being traded to Arizona for Daulton Varsho over the offseason, he followed it up with a 2.3-win 2023 season despite missing 20 days due to shoulder inflammation. Last season, he put up 2.5 WAR despite two different IL trips that limited him to just 98 games. Moreno has never run a wRC+ below 102, and his catching has graded out as excellent in every season of his career. He’ll break the three-win mark as soon as he’s able to get a full, healthy season, but once again, that won’t be happening this year. Although his 105 wRC+ wasn’t a career best, Moreno had showcased a more aggressive approach that boosted his hard-hit rate all the way from 41% in 2024 to 47.2%.
Backup catcher Jose Herrera is running a 68 wRC+ over 33 games, which is actually a bit of an improvement from his career mark. Unfortunately, his glove is grading out worse than it did in previous seasons. This would seem like the perfect time for the Diamondbacks to bring up the 25-year-old Adrian Del Castillo, whom Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice ranked second in the organization in December, but injuries have derailed that possibility too.
Once a highly-touted catching prospect out of Miami, Del Castillo fell in the draft and struggled in his first three minor league seasons before exploding in 2024. His defense isn’t going to impress anybody, but he’s got enough power to make up for it and earn some time at DH or first base as well. Last season, he ran a 136 wRC+ with 26 homers in 105 games in Triple-A Reno while dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his strikeout rate. When Moreno went down with an injury in August, Del Castillo got called up to Arizona and kept right on hitting, running a (very, very BABIP-aided) 146 wRC+ despite striking out nearly a third of the time over 25 games. A shoulder injury cost Del Castillo the first two months of this season. He only got back into action in May 20, spending 12 games in the Arizona Complex League then spending five back in Reno before injury struck again. This one seems to be less serious, a back injury that shouldn’t cost Del Castillo too much time, but he hasn’t played since June 15. It’s hard to imagine calling him up to the majors after he’s played just 17 games this season, 12 of them on the complex.
The Diamondbacks originally called up the 32-year-old Aramis Garcia to fill in when Moreno went down. Garcia had been running a 122 wRC+ with 10 home runs in Triple-A, but he got into just two big league games before the Diamondbacks designated him for assignment and signed McCann. McCann has already reached out to former Oriole teammate Corbin Burnes to get up to speed on the Arizona pitching staff. “I’m the new guy trying to get on their page, and that’s what I’m going to try to do as quickly as possible,” he said. MLB.com’s Casey Drottar reported that Lovullo has yet to determine an official role for McCann. Given Herrera’s performance, it’s not hard to imagine McCann getting significant playing time in the somewhat unlikely event that he continues the hot hitting he showed in Gwinnett.
There’s no guarantee that McCann will perform, but it’s encouraging that the Diamondbacks are doing what they can to make sure the catcher position doesn’t end up as a black hole. Maybe league-average performance is the absolute best the Diamondbacks should expect from the duo of Herrera and McCann, but finding a veteran replacement who represents a clear upgrade over what the team has waiting in Triple-A is exactly the kind of move they should be making as they gear up for the second half.
