The normal flow of a baseball season inevitably includes injuries. The dog days of summer usually come with a star or two on the shelf. It’s a long year, and roster depth matters more and more as the months advance. But sometimes, injuries don’t occur at predictable intervals. Sometimes it’s April 14 and half your roster is on the IL. Just ask the Astros.

On Monday, Houston placed Tatsuya Imai and Jeremy Peña on the IL. That followed two moves from last Friday, when Cristian Javier and Jake Meyers both hit the IL. Five days before that, staff ace Hunter Brown landed on the IL himself with a shoulder strain that will keep him from throwing for at least two weeks, and likely prevent him from appearing for far longer than that. And that’s just the in-season injuries. Josh Hader, Zach Dezenzo, Bennett Sousa, and Nate Pearson all started the year on the IL. Brandon Walter, Ronel Blanco, and Hayden Wesneski are still working their way back from elbow injuries sustained in 2025. That’s 12 players on the IL if you’re counting at home, and a number of stars among them.

It’s not like every injury matters the same. Pearson has never appeared for the Astros and has a negative career WAR. Dezenzo is a fifth outfielder. The core missing names for Houston are Brown, Imai, Peña, Hader, Javier, and, to a lesser extent, Meyers. If the Astros can’t replace the production from those five, all of whom are key parts of their roster, 2026 will be a long year. So let’s consider how each affects Houston’s prognosis in isolation, and then consider them all in concert.

Peña’s injury is the one the Astros are best-equipped to deal with. Thanks to last season’s Carlos Correa trade and a quiet offseason, Houston came into this year with an infield logjam. Peña, Correa, Isaac Paredes, and Jose Altuve gave the team four good players for only three spots. None could reliably flex to DH because of the presence of Yordan Alvarez. Altuve spent some time in the outfield last year, even before Correa arrived. Read the rest of this entry »

I made it out to Everett a couple of times last week, drawn by the chance to watch three of our Top 100 prospects and a couple of other notable farmhands. My thoughts on seven of the standouts are below.

Tyler Bremner, RHP, Angels
Bremner was as advertised. He’s a loose athlete with, odd front leg swing as he starts his motion aside, a clean and easy delivery. He ticked every number on the gun from 93-98 mph, flashed an above-average slider, and most importantly, missed a half dozen bats with his 70-FV changeup. On the night, he struck out four, walked three, allowed one hit, and only one or two hard-hit balls. It’s what an early first-round pick should do against a decent High-A lineup.

If we’re going to pick nits, I wouldn’t focus on the walks too much, as Bremner was battling a muddy mound on a cold night. He nibbles a bit and likes to entice hitters off the plate. He does this on the changeup especially, and it’s fair to wonder if big leaguers will bite to the same degree college and low minors hitters have thus far. Despite the velo, he only missed two bats with the fastball and none with the slider, which raises questions about where he’ll turn on days when hitters aren’t chasing the cambio. Ultimately, I don’t have long-term concerns. He still projects as a no. 3 or 4 starter, but the night underscored the importance of continuing to develop his slider and fastball command. Whether that’s a job best done at this level or a rung up is above my pay grade.

Jonny Farmelo, CF, Mariners
Farmelo put together two solid at-bats against Bremner. He didn’t reach base, but managed to turn around an upper-90s fastball up and in and line it to right in his first trip up, and then hit a hard line drive to left in his second plate appearance. He got out in front of fastballs a couple times this week and showed enough barrel manipulation to stay competitive on pitches up, even with his fairly long bat path. Perhaps most encouragingly for a player who has battled a lot of injuries as a pro, he still looks like a 70 runner, and he also made a nice read and leaping catch at the wall in center. Read the rest of this entry »

I live in Mercer County, New Jersey, which has a lot going for it. If there’s a place on Earth with more great hoagie shops per capita, I’ve yet to encounter it. We’re the world capital of passive-aggressive bridge architecture, and it was here that George Washington gave the United States of America its first great Christmas gift: A big pile of dead Hessian mercenaries.

But a college baseball hotbed it is not. Rider and Penn are nearby, and both schools are frequent pesky no. 4 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Which is fun, but it’s not too interesting to a national baseball writer who focuses primarily on the major leagues.

Last weekend was different. Several rounds of Big Ten expansion led to an unusual event: UCLA, the no. 1 team in the country, with presumptive no. 1 overall pick Roch Cholowsky in tow, was obliged to visit Rutgers. I’ve had this series circled on my calendar since last year, and here’s what I learned. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like every team is dealing with serious injuries to start the season. Maybe that’s why there isn’t much daylight in the standings yet. Every team has won at least six games so far, with most clubs huddled right around .500.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula. Read the rest of this entry »

My puny mortal brain is having trouble making sense of the numbers coming out of San Diego right now. It’s an uncanny valley thing. Mason Miller’s statistics just don’t quite seem like they’re numbers that you can put up in the majors. Oh, they’re all in the right columns. They’re not impossible or anything. It’s just that no one else has numbers that look quite like this, and even more so than that, if you think about what they all mean together, it doesn’t seem like the performance they describe can possibly be real.

Let’s start with the most striking statistic: 19 strikeouts in 24 batters faced. That 79.2% strikeout rate is obviously technically feasible, but I keep saying it in my head and it keeps not making sense. I look at strikeout rates a lot, particularly early in the season. But even for very good pitchers, they tend to top out around 40%, maybe 50% if they’re performing especially well. I can fit those numbers into my head. That means that about half the batters they face are going to strike out – easy enough. Face four batters in an inning? Two punchouts.

But 79% doesn’t work so easily. In a four-batter inning, that’s three strikeouts! But you don’t get a lot of four-batter innings if you’re striking out three batters an inning. Another way of thinking about that: Batters reach base safely about 40% of the time when they don’t strike out. But if they’re striking out 80% of the time, they’re already making outs in 80% of their plate appearances right off the top, and then add another 12% from in-play outs (60% times 20%). That’s an out rate of 92%! I can’t wrap my head around 92% outs. That’s the ratio of outs in your average two-hit complete game. But your average two-hit complete game includes a ton of batted-ball luck. Miller’s dominance doesn’t involve a lot of batted-ball luck – or a lot of batted balls.

That leads me to my next point of cognitive dissonance: all the swinging strikes. Right now, Miller is running a 39.6% swinging-strike rate on his slider. That means that batters swing at – and miss – 39.6% of the sliders he throws them. But they only swing half the time! That means they’re coming up empty 79.2% of the time when they offer at that pitch. Likewise, his four-seam fastball carries a 24.4% swinging-strike rate, off of a 43.5% whiff rate. These numbers are all ludicrous if you stop to think about them. Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Pages was the starting center fielder — and the youngest starter, period — on championship-winning Dodgers teams in each of his first two campaigns, showing considerable year-to-year improvement in the regular season but practically disappearing in October due to epic slumps. Now, the 25-year-old has put those postseason indignities behind him and emerged as one of the game’s hottest hitters to start 2026, while also helping the team jump out to the best record in the majors.

Through 15 games, the Dodgers are 11-4, a game and a half better than the second-best team thus far, the Padres (10-6). Pages, who has played all but four innings, has multiple hits in eight of his 15 games; only the Rangers’ Brandon Nimmo (nine) and the Rays’ Chandler Simpson (eight) have as many or more such games. In his latest multi-hit effort, on Friday against Texas, Pages went 3-for-3 with a walk and two key extra-base hits. He smoked a two-run double down the right field line off Robert Garcia in the seventh inning, turning a 4-3 deficit into a 5-4 lead, and followed up with a two-run homer to left-center field off Luis Curvelo in the eighth to extend the lead to 7-4. The Dodgers needed all of those runs as they hung on to win 8-7 on Max Muncy’s walk-off home run, his third dinger of the game.

To date, Pages is hitting an absurd .429/.467/.714 (233 wRC+). He finished the weekend leading the NL in all of those categories except slugging percentage; he’s also first in WAR (1.2, tied with Jordan Walker) and RBI (17). Two and a half weeks into the season isn’t enough to confirm whether he’s unlocked a new level of performance — he’s obviously not going to maintain those slash stats — but he’s shown some promising signs, and his prominence atop the leaderboards at least merits a closer look. Read the rest of this entry »

Randy Vásquez has struck out 19 batters in his first three starts of 2026. He didn’t record his 19th strikeout in 2025 until May 14, in the third inning of his ninth start.

Vásquez has simply dominated in the earliest days of the new season. He opened the year with six shutout innings against the Tigers, striking out eight. He picked up a mere three strikeouts in his second start against the Red Sox, but his stuff was just as good, generating whiffs on 32.6% of swings. And then he picked up eight more strikeouts on Thursday against the Rockies. He now has a 1.02 ERA, a 2.57 FIP, a 27.5% strikeout rate and a 5.8% walk rate, pitching like a top 20 starter in the majors to begin 2026.

Weird, right?

It’s not that Vásquez was terrible before this year. He posted a 3.70 ERA and 4.96 FIP across 26 starts in 2025, and his performance was similar in the two seasons prior. That’s a pitcher who can stick in the backend of most rotations and serve as useful depth. But it wasn’t clear what Vásquez did well, or how he might take the next step to becoming a true mainstay in the majors. He walked more batters than average. He didn’t really limit hard contact. And his 14.8% strikeout rate was the lowest among any starting pitcher with at least 200 innings from 2023 through 2025. He was just kind of there. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers can do all sorts of things to change their lot in life — launch plyo balls, rig up a Trackman, add a kick change — but motor preferences tend to be a fixed fact. Most pitchers fall into one of two buckets: pronator or supinator. Pitchers with high spin efficiency (say, 95% and up) on their four-seam fastball belong to the pronator class, while those below 90% can be considered supinators. (As a reminder, spin efficiency is the measure of how much spin is “useful;” a fastball thrown with perfect backspin would have 100% spin efficiency.) These mechanical biases tend to remain constant throughout a career. I took 185 pitchers who threw at least 25 fastballs in both 2023 and 2026; over that three-year span, the r-squared between their spin efficiency was 0.65.

On that plot above, you’ll see, as there always are, a few outliers. One is Joe Boyle. The tale of Boyle is relatively well known at this point, at least in certain social media pitching circles. Over the last three years, Boyle went from throwing from an over-the-top arm angle (53 degrees) to a distinct side-arm slot (26 degrees.) The arsenal, in turn, transformed alongside it. This dramatic slot change coincided with his fastball spin efficiency declining from 86% in 2023 to 67% in 2026, one of the largest drops in that span.

Boyle belongs to that collection of dots on the left of the plot that went from low spin efficiency to even lower spin efficiency. And then there’s one little dot all alone on the right side of the plot. That’s Emerson Hancock.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Misiorowski has a fastball that consistently reaches triple digits, and he augments it with an effective curveball-slider combination. Usage-wise, the 24-year-old Milwaukee Brewers right-hander is throwing his high-octane heater at a 62.3% clip, while his breaking-ball percentages are 16.6 and 17.3 respectively. Given the lethality of those pitches — his xBA is a paltry .168, and his K-rate an MLB-best 41.8% — he has little need for a changeup…

… but there is one in his arsenal. From time to time, he will even show it to a batter. Of the 289 pitches Misiorowski has delivered so far this season, 11 (3.8%) have been changeups. The story behind his only-sporadically-used weapon?

“I’ve had a changeup my whole career,” Misiorowski told me prior to throwing three of them in a 101-pitch start at Fenway Park on Tuesday. “That was one of the first pitches I truly learned. But then as I started throwing harder, I began going away from it, and it obviously got worse and worse the less I threw it. By the time I got drafted [63rd overall in 2022], I basically didn’t have a changeup any more. I had to relearn it, re-figure it out. So, yeah, it’s always been there, but it hasn’t always been there.”

Misiorowski went on to tell me the grip was originally a more conventional four-seam circle, but that he now has his pointer and middle fingers together, and his thumb underneath. He also said that he likes the amount of horizontal he gets on it, which is generally around 18 inches and has been up to 20. When I told him that the movement profile sounds a little like a two-seam sinker, he agreed that it does.

A few more things Misiorowski told me about the pitch are unfortunately lost, due to glitches I’ve recently encountered on my iPhone’s recording app (I mentioned this teeth-gnashing, hopefully-resolved-soon, issue in Monday’s piece on Padres’ broadcaster Mark Grant.) Fortunately, I was able to grab a few minutes with Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook, who made up for the missing words with his own perspective.

How would he describe Misiorowski’s changeup? Read the rest of this entry »

Braden Nett’s path to prospect prominence was anything but ordinary. Not only was he working at a Home Depot when he signed with the Padres in 2022 as a non-drafted free agent, but he also had barely played in college. What he lacked in conventional experience, he made up for with a promising arm. San Diego saw him pitching in the MLB Draft League, gave him a chance, and what’s transpired since is bordering on storybook. Initially from Troy, Missouri — with a short stop as a St. Charles Community College Cougar — the 23-year-old right-hander has progressed to the point where he is now ranked seventh on our newly released Athletics Top Prospects list, with a 45 FV.

His change of address came at last summer’s trade deadline. Intrigued by his promising-but-unpolished toolbox, the Athletics acquired Nett as part of the six-player deal centered around Mason Miller and Leo De Vries. On the season, Nett notched 116 strikeouts while logging a 3.75 ERA and a 3.77 FIP over 105 2/3 innings between a pair of Double-A outposts.

Currently sidelined with a rotator cuff issue — he’s on roster of the Triple-A Las Vegas Aviators, but has yet to appear in a game — Nett has a mid-to-upper-90s fastball when healthy. As I learned talking to him during spring training, he also has a wide-ranging arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »