Archive for Daily Graphings

Ah, the end of September. For most teams in baseball, it’s a time for planning. Out of the race? It’s time to plan for the future. Playoff spot locked up? Time to plan for October. The Brewers are no exception. They’ve cruised to a postseason bye and look very likely to end the year as the top overall seed. But while the games the rest of the regular season aren’t of huge import to them, one decision is: What to do about Kyle Harrison.

If Jacob Misiorowski hadn’t been the Brewers’ biggest story this year, Harrison would’ve been. After a few tough years in San Francisco and a rocky half-season in Boston, he arrived in Milwaukee in the Caleb Durbin trade and impressed right away. He struck out eight in his first start. He kicked it into overdrive by the end of April. An early summer slowdown notwithstanding, he had spectacular numbers at the All-Star break, and I was surprised he missed earning his first appearance at the Midsummer Classic.

In the end, he wouldn’t have played in the game anyway. The Brewers put him on the IL on July 11 with forearm tightness. When he returned in August, he was down a few ticks of velocity and looked like he was searching for the form that had so befuddled hitters earlier in the year. After a few near-misses and inefficient outings, the wheels fell off in Chicago on August 31; the Cubs tagged him for nine runs in 3.2 innings, courtesy of a gruesome five home runs. In his next start, at Cincinnati on September 6, he gave up six more runs and walked as many as he struck out. Read the rest of this entry »

Ron Coomer was a solid hitter while playing for four teams, mostly the Minnesota Twins, across the 1995-2003 seasons. A corner infielder who took his hacks from the right side, the Chicago-area native counted 92 round-trippers among his 827 base knocks. An All-Star with the Twins in 1999, he later suited up for the Cubs, Yankees, and Dodgers.

He is currently in his 13th season as a color analyst in the Chicago Cubs radio booth. Working along the legendary Pat Hughes, Coomer not only provides insight gleaned from his playing days, he consistently contributes entertaining anecdotes. Given those attributes, he was an ideal candidate for an installment of our Challenging Career Quiz series.

As with most of the dozen players-turned-broadcasters who preceded him, I began by asking who he faced the most times.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Would it be Scott Karl?”

Coomer wasn’t particularly close with his guess. He matched up against the erstwhile Milwaukee Brewer a total of 25 times, whereas he faced Chuck Finley 45 times.

“Really?” Coomer said upon learning it was the longtime California/Anaheim Angels southpaw, against whom he went 11-for-42 with a pair of home runs. “I remember Chuck very well. I remember getting some hits off him, and I really remember that I got a lesson taught to me when I was a young big league player. He threw me a pitch inside and I blasted it, but hit it way foul at the Metrodome. I thought, ‘Well, he’s not throwing that again.’ I was wrong. He doubled up and struck me out on the same fastball inside. I went, ‘Hmmm, OK. Don’t forget that.’ I think this was my first year in the big leagues.” Read the rest of this entry »

Did you see Chase Meidroth’s 2026 season coming? If you expected Meidroth to launch 15 home runs, to put up a four-win season, to be a top-30 position player, then by all means, stand up and take a bow, invest in some Powerball tickets, try your hand at writing horoscopes.

When he debuted last year, patience was his calling card. No qualified batter swung less often at pitches in the zone, and because he had the fifth-lowest bat speed, pitchers threw the ball over the plate and invited him do his worst. I mean that almost literally. When Meidroth swung at a pitch in the zone, he ran a .278 wOBA, which ranked 293rd out of 308 batters (minimum 1,000 total pitches seen). When those swings resulted in balls in play, his .295 wOBA ranked 229th out of the 237 (minimum 250 BIP). But let me share with you some wisdom courtesy of C.S. Lewis: “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

What a sad world it would be if everybody just repeated their rookie season until they retired, if nominative determinism (or, in the case of most ballplayers named Chase, the opposite) were real. Meidroth came into spring training with a new dream. “Just shortening up my swing a little bit,” he told James Fegan for Sox Machine back in February. “Just shortening up the leg kick a little bit. It got a little high last year.” He also opened up his stance and moved up in the box. The goal, Chicago’s hitting coaches explained, was not necessarily to make Meidroth’s already extremely short stroke even shorter, but to help him put the ball in the air a bit more often. The dream came true. Meidroth is hitting more fly balls and line drives and fewer groundballs and popups. This year, he has exactly tripled his 2025 total of five home runs, he’s exactly doubled his .067 ISO to .134, and he’s, well, OK, he’s improved his 87 wRC+ all the way to 112, which is a huge deal, but only an increase of 28.736%. I never promised you all the numbers would be round.

The weird thing is that Meidroth is both swinging the bat and hitting the ball softer than ever. His bat speed dropped from 67.4 mph to 66.9 mph, which moved him from the fifth- to fourth-lowest qualifier. His fast-swing rate dropped from 1.6% to 1.1%. His average and 90th-percentile exit velocities dropped, as did his hard-hit rate. And yet he’s literally doubled his ISO. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless the Los Angeles Angels win their final six games and somehow figure out how to get Major League Baseball to overturn the results of 15 others, the club will finish below the .500 mark for the 11th consecutive season. This postseason will mark the 12th in a row to not feature any Halos, and it has been 17 years since the last time they won a game in the playoffs. The Arte Moreno era is ending, with Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke taking over the helm. And while Kroenke has a mixed record as an owner, a mixed record would qualify as progress after Moreno. New ownership tends to represent a new beginning for a team, setting up an important question: Can the Angels return to playing October baseball in the near future? After all, while the team doesn’t have the same revenue as the Dodgers, it’s still located in the second-most-populous metropolitan area in the United States; theoretically, they have the resources to speed up the process.

I like to joke about baseball’s Anna Karenina issue, because I think the novel’s first line — “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — is an even more appropriate observation for baseball teams than it is for families. All great baseball teams look kind of the same, but every lousy team looks different. As bad teams go, the Angels have never been spectacularly lousy; if they fail to at least split their last six games, 2026 will be the first time ever that the franchise has lost 100 games. Still, this is a franchise that hasn’t figured out how to play .500 ball while employing the best player of the 2010s and the likely best player of the 2020s. They even had both of those guys on the team for a while! That the Angels have tended to hover just below mediocre rather than being hilariously awful is probably one of the reasons they’ve never truly blown things up and tried something radically different. The Angels never reached a point where they just threw stuff against the wall to see what sticks, something the White Sox finally accepted a few years ago, and that the Rockies appear to be starting to accept now.

If the Angels were to compete again soon, where would the talent come from? At first blush, there’s no amount of squinting that can make the Angels look like they have the foundation of a solid team. Mike Trout is still pretty good, but he’s a galaxy away from the player he once was, and as hard as it is to believe, he turned 35 last month. Zach Neto is solid, but if you listed the rest of the starting lineup and told me that I was looking at the starting lineup for the Durham Bulls or the Round Rock Express, I might believe you.

To get a more comprehensive look at the team’s offensive future, I ran updated WAR and OPS+ projections for the Angels over the next five seasons. I’ve included pretty much everyone on the roster or in the high minors, as well as those top prospects who are at a minor league level where projections are practical. That leaves out intriguing players like Johnny Slawinski, Joswa Lugo, and Yilver De Paula, but we’re also talking about non-elite prospects at the very low levels, so the median outlook for their projections is going to be fairly low. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are at least a few additional lottery tickets out there for the Angels.

To make a quick read of the table easier, I’ve highlighted all of the 3-WAR projected seasons in red and all of the 2-WAR projected seasons in yellow. I’ve also blacked out the seasons where a player isn’t under team control, or where ZiPS is highly confident that they won’t be in baseball based on their performance. Oh, and I threw in Anthony Rendon for the sake of curiosity:

There… isn’t a lot of color in that chart. ZiPS doesn’t see anyone beyond Neto as a key part of a contending team. Trout is almost certainly going to become less and less of a contributor in coming seasons, and Denzer Guzman and Christian Moore look more like complementary options than guys threatening to attend a string of All-Star games (though Guzman does have some decent projected upside). Even given the very real possibility that ZiPS is underrating Arjun Nimmala, that’s still a stunning lack of offensive talent in the organization.

Let’s move on to the pitching, where things do look a bit better. There are no borderline star seasons projected, so I’ve highlighted all the 100 ERA+ seasons in yellow:

Reid Detmers and Walbert Ureña both project as very good mid-rotation starters, and the latter is a long way from free agency. There may be No Such Thing as a Pitching Prospect©, but ZiPS does think Tyler Bremner is likely to be at least solid. None of the rest of the arms look amazing, but the Angels do have an interesting bunch of plausible bullpen candidates, though nobody who would blow your mind. If the Angels get lucky with either Grayson Rodriguez or George Klassen, and Najer Victor figures out the significance of that white house-shaped pentagon next to the batter, it’s a pitching staff they could make quite decent with a few splashy upgrades.

Sum it all up, and ZiPS sees the Angels as a 70-win team in 2027, with only minor growth from there based on their in-organization options. To that end, the team’s player development absolutely has to improve; the Angels only barely moved out of the bottom third of our farm rankings on the last update, the first time they’ve done so since 2020. That’s particularly concerning for a team that hasn’t contended in more than a decade. Hopefully the team will move on from a draft philosophy that emphasizes high-floor/low-ceiling prospects who can be promoted to the majors very quickly.

As for their options beyond the organization, could the Angels contend with a spending spree next year? I get asked that question fairly regularly in my weekly chats, so at least someone is interested in the answer, or at least wants to trick me into writing about the Angels. Let’s give it a spin.

A contending Angels team needs a high-end starting pitcher, a veteran bulk arm, and probably three additional good relievers. Here’s one set of potential additions:

Most of the names here are interchangeable with other options, but you can’t really fake signing Tarik Skubal and have to go with the real thing. ZiPS estimates that doing so would make the Angels a 77-85 team, but also one that just added more than $80 million in salary to get there.

As for the offense, it needs a lot of work and there is only so much they can practically do, even in an ultra-aggressive buying frenzy. Assuming that Trout stays at DH, they certainly need a couple of outfielders, and there’s no Aaron Judge to sign. The corner infield spots aren’t the weakest on the roster, but Teruaki Sato is one of the best players (possibly) available, and I’d like a bit more certainty at second base if we’re doing full-on win-now mode:

You may have noted the problem I’m running into for the quick-fix route: There’s a hard limit on just how many difference-makers there are available in free agency. These four signings probably add another $80 million to the payroll, and once you throw in the player benefits, the Angels would have a luxury tax payroll creeping into the $300 million range. Their projection would only improve to 83-79, and while that would be the team’s best year in a decade, it’s a pretty brutal projection to intentionally pay $300 million for.

In the end, the Angels don’t appear to have enough in-house options to make buying their way into contention a real possibility. That means that the road ahead will be a lot harder, with them eating some awful seasons without any pretense of contending, trying some new things, and taking some chances, all of which the franchise has struggled with for the last decade. As it turns out, needing to replace about 20 players on your roster isn’t something you can do quickly. By the time the Angels are good again, we might be talking about the next lockout!

Despite a middling second half, the Nationals have been one of this season’s pleasant surprises. After years of feeling both directionless and punchless, they’ve put together a spectacular offensive group and have won more games than in any year since their 2019 World Series championship. They’ve scored more than five runs a game on the season, the third-best mark in the majors, and it has been a team effort. Unfortunately, the pitching staff hasn’t followed suit; they’ve allowed the third-most runs in baseball themselves. But there has been one shining light in that group: Cade Cavalli, the team’s oft-injured first round draft pick from 2020. And they weren’t about to let a good thing go. Last Friday, Cavalli and the Nationals agreed to a four-year, $47 million contract extension with a club option for a fifth year, as Spencer Nusbaum first reported.

Cavalli is a fascinating pitcher – so fascinating that I wrote about him in late July. I think that piece is worth a read – hey, I wrote it – but if you’re looking for the TL;DR, the gist is that two months ago, Cavalli’s career was at an inflection point. His lengthy struggles with injury had limited him to roughly 50 innings before the 2026 season, and he’d scuffled in the minors in 2025 as he worked to build up his workload again. But he was spectacular in the first half of this season, the best arm on the Nats by a fair margin, particularly when taking his underlying numbers into account. What was to come was uncertain, but there were tons of bright outcomes in the distribution of possible futures.

A few months hence, I think we might be living in the best of those outcomes. Cavalli has made nine starts since I wrote about him, and he’s been spectacular, with 70 strikeouts and just 12 walks across 53 innings en route to a 1.87 ERA. He’s been a rare bright spot as the team has sputtered to an 18-23 record since the trade deadline. Thanks in part to the offensive contributors the Nats traded away, they’ve scored only 4.5 runs per game over that span. But they’re looking to the future, not to the past or even the present, and Cavalli’s phenomenal year has made him an indispensable part of that future. Read the rest of this entry »

With one week to go in the regular season, the playoff field is nearly set in the National League, though it’s anything but settled in the American League, with two of the three division leaders — two different ones since I last checked in — ahead by just one game and those races spilling over into the battle for the third and final Wild Card spot. We’re not going to get any tiebreaker games due to the fun police and the playoff format change put into effect by the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, but it’s entirely possible a playoff spot — and perhaps even a division title — will be decided on the basis of MLB’s tiebreaker procedures.

Since the situation is simpler in the NL, I’ll start there. The Brewers (98-58) lead the Dodgers (96-60) in the race for the top seed, and own the tiebreaker there on the basis of a 4-3 season series advantage. According to our Playoff Odds, as of Monday at 9 AM, the Braves (92-64) have just a 0.9% chance of bypassing either Milwaukee or Los Angeles. The Brewers — who have a magic number of one to clinch a first-round bye — finish out with a visit to the Phillies (86-70) before coming home to face the Cardinals (76-80), while the Dodgers host the Padres (87-69) for three and then travel to the Giants (62-90), with the Braves hosting the Reds (72-84) and then visiting the Marlins (76-80).

The Padres have taken advantage of a soft spot in their schedule — series against the sub-.500 Nationals, Giants, Rockies, and Marlins, after taking two out of three from the Yankees — to win 13 out of their last 14 games. Not only did that push them past the Diamondbacks (now 82-74), whom they trailed by half a game before the start of the surge, but they’ve tied the Cubs (87-69) for the top NL Wild Card spot, with the Phillies a game behind them. The Phils have been phlailing lately, going 8-10 in September and failing to win a series since beating the Diamondbacks at the start of the month. Their slide gave the Braves enough room to clinch the NL East title on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Bobby Witt Jr. is having a down year. He’s running his worst batting line in three seasons. He’s in danger of missing the 20-homer threshold for the first time in his career. A lower back injury in July will also limit him to a career low in games played. Put it together, and Witt is on pace to put up his the lowest WAR total since his 5.9-win 2023 campaign. Oh, and he also grabbed hold of the American League lead in WAR back in July and still hasn’t relinquished it. A down year by Bobby Witt Jr.’s standards is still good enough to make him a deserving MVP.

I don’t know if Witt is going to win his first MVP this year. Ours is the only flavor of WAR in which he leads the AL, and he leads by just a quarter of a win. He ranks third by Baseball Reference’s rWAR and is eighth by Baseball Prospectus’ WARP. Yordan Alvarez leads all of baseball in WARP because he’s hitting like, well, Yordan Alvarez and staying healthy like, well, someone other than Yordan Alvarez. Cam Schlittler leads the AL in Baseball Reference WAR, and he’s been so dominant that he deserves consideration for the Cy Young-MVP combo — if only he’d pitched just 23 fewer innings last year, he could’ve gone for the trifecta with Rookie of the Year. Kevin McGonigle has played like an MVP from the moment he arrived in Detroit, and Junior Caminero has surpassed 40 home runs for the second season in a row as a 23-year-old. All of these guys have a case, and they aren’t the only ones who merit inclusion in the discussion:

Read the rest of this entry »

Max Muncy is still a work in progress. Four-plus years after he was featured here at FanGraphs in a piece titled, Oakland Prospect Max Muncy is Trying to Find Himself in High-A, the 2021 first-rounder is doing much the same in the majors. Currently slashing a wholly uninspiring 230/.296/.387 with nine home runs and an 83 wRC+ over 284 plate appearances, Muncy remains — as he readily admitted when I spoke to him earlier this summer — in search of his groove.

“It’s one of those things that might be ever-evolving,” said the 24-year-old infielder, who put up not-dissimilar numbers after debuting with the A’s last season. “You have to just keep working at it. Every level presents a new challenge — the pitchers are better, so you have to make adjustments — and luckily there is no level higher than this one. Once I get enough at-bats, get to play consistently, I’m going to do what I know I can do. I’m going to be a good player.”

Muncy said in our 2022 conversation that he had been doing a lot of experimenting, and to a large extent that has continued throughout what is now more than 2,200 professional PAs. Read the rest of this entry »

The Reds dropped six out of seven games to the Dodgers this season, all within the last two weeks, but Elly De La Cruz no doubt left an impression both on them and the rest of baseball. The 24-year-old shortstop homered in five of those seven games while lighting up Statcast and assembling some eye-opening highlight clips. Although the Reds have regressed after making the playoffs last year, De La Cruz is putting the finishing touches on his best offensive campaign — and he still has a reasonable chance at his first 30-homer, 30-steal season.

Coming as they have while the Reds play out the string of a disappointing season, De La Cruz’s recent feats at the plate and in the field admittedly have a bit of a Tungsten Arm O’Doyle feel. After claiming the third NL Wild Card spot last year with an 83-79 record — the Reds’ first postseason berth in a full season since 2013 — they’ve slipped to 71-82, including 12-20 since August 15, the second-worst record in the NL during that span. But it’s hardly De La Cruz’s fault that Hunter Greene made just five starts before undergoing Tommy John surgery, that starters Nick Lodolo, Rhett Lowder, and Brady Singer are all sporting ERAs well over 5.00, or that TJ Friedl, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Noelvi Marte, and Matt McLain have combined for nearly 1,200 plate appearances and a 49 wRC+.

Against that dismal backdrop, De La Cruz has still kept the Reds worth watching, if only to see what the switch-hitting 6-foot-6 marvel might do next. From September 5–9, he homered in five straight games, the first two coming against the Brewers at Great American Ballpark and the last three at Dodger Stadium. The Brewers broke De La Cruz’s streak, holding him homerless during last weekend’s three-game series in Milwaukee, but he was back at it with homers against the Dodgers in Cincinnati on Monday and Wednesday. Unfortunately, twice during that stretch (September 9 and 14, both against the Dodgers), his homer provided the Reds with their only run of the game. Here are the dingers from the five-game streak:

That streak placed De La Cruz in the company of White Sox rookies Munetaka Murakami (April 17–22) and Tristan Peters (August 22–26), Tigers first baseman Spencer Torkelson (April 22–26), and Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber (May 7-12), all of whom homered in five straight games this season as well, with the Rays’ Junior Caminero going yard in six straight games (June 25–July 1). De La Cruz’s streak tied one by Eugenio Suárez from 2018 (July 23–27) as the second longest by a Red in the last 10 seasons, with the longest a seven-gamer belonging to Joey Votto in 2021 (July 24–31), one short of the major league record shared by Dale Long, Don Mattingly, and Ken Griffey Jr.

Beyond the volume of De La Cruz’s homers was their emphatic nature. Six of them had exit velocities of 106 mph or higher, with his solo shot off Evan Phillips of the Dodgers on Monday leading the pack at 114.1 mph, followed by a 112.1-mph solo home run off the Brewers’ Dustin May on September 5. His two-run homer off Tarik Skubal on September 8 had an estimated distance of 444 feet, making it both this season’s longest at Dodger Stadium and also the longest surrendered by the two-time reigning Cy Young winner. The clout off Phillips was estimated at 457 feet, making it the longest hit at Great American this year — it actually left the ballpark after bouncing on the concourse — as well as De La Cruz’s longest since September 26, 2023 (a career-best 467-footer).

De La Cruz’s recent hot streak has been about more than just home runs. Before going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts against the Dodgers on Thursday afternoon, he had reached base in 23 consecutive games dating back to August 22, matching the longest streak of his career, from April 9 to May 4 of last season. Over the course of this year’s streak, he hit .424/.480/.793 with eight home runs, four stolen bases, a 242 wRC+ (tops in the majors over that span, two points higher than that of Rafael Devers), and 2.4 WAR (also tops, 0.3 WAR ahead of an MVP-bound Pete Crow-Armstrong). During that stretch, De La Cruz’s batted balls averaged a sizzling 99.6 mph in exit velocity, with a 29.7% barrel rate and a 67.2% hard-hit rate.

On the other side of the ball, De La Cruz also uncorked the hardest throw for an assist by an infielder in the Statcast era, a 102-mph relay that nabbed the Dodgers’ Teoscar Hernández at the plate as he tried for an inside-the-park home run on September 9. That was the same night De La Cruz homered off Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

Though the velocity on that throw was revised downward upon review, from an initial report of 105.3 mph, it was still 2.2 mph faster than the previous high — which was set by De La Cruz on July 20, 2023 (a relay throw to catch the Giants’ Wilmer Flores at the plate), and matched on August 8 of this season (yet another relay, this one to nail the Nationals’ Nasim Nuñez trying to score). In fact, according to MLB.com’s David Adler, De La Cruz owns the five fastest infielder assists in the Statcast era. The others are also on relays to the plate, with this 99.7-mph one from August 27, 2023 (cutting down the Diamondbacks’ Corbin Carroll trying to complete an inside-the-park homer) and this 99.2-mph one from August 19 this season (extinguishing a none-too-swift Blaze Jordan trying to score) rounding out the top five.

Overall, including Thursday’s 0-fer, De La Cruz is hitting .284/.362/.517 for a 138 wRC+. All of those numbers represent career highs, with his slugging percentage ranking sixth in the league and his wRC+ seventh. Thanks in large part to his on-base streak, his 6.0 WAR ranks second among NL position players behind PCA; he’s still 0.7 behind the combined pitching and offense total for Shohei Ohtani, but could close the gap during the two-way superstar’s stint on the injured list. De La Cruz also remains 0.8 WAR shy of his own career high, set in 2024, but he played 160 games that year, whereas he’s totaled 134 this year, having missed three weeks in June due to a right hamstring strain. He would max out at 143 games if he plays all nine remaining on the Reds’ schedule.

De La Cruz has reason to do just that. While his 28 homers already represents a career high, he’s just two away from reaching 30, and needs four stolen bases to get to 30 in that category as well. He’s not running as often — or as fast — as he used to. In 2024, De La Cruz led the NL with 67 steals (in 83 attempts) with 100th-percentile sprint speed, but this year he’s stolen just 26 in 34 attempts, including only four in August and two in September, with 80th-percentile sprint speed; it’s understandable if he’s not as willing to test his hamstring. If he does reach 30 in both categories, he would join PCA (44 homers, 37 steals) and likely CJ Abrams, who currently has 30 homers and 29 steals, in this year’s club.

The switch-hitting De La Cruz’s big step forward has been driven by significant improvement in his production against left-handed pitching. He’s made adjustments to his right-handed swing that have brought it more in line with his left-handed one, and gained substantial bat speed from both sides of the plate that have resulted in much better contact. Some of this was documented earlier this season, here by Ryan Blake, at MLB.com by Jared Greenspan, and elsewhere, though not everything that was true when they checked in still holds.

Though he’s a natural right-hander based upon both his throws and his self-description, De La Cruz’s production against lefties lagged before this season, as both Blake and Greenspan pointed out. Updating the numbers:

From 2023–25, De La Cruz hit .271/.351/.497 for a 128 wRC+ against righties, placing him the 83rd percentile among lefties with at least 300 plate appearances in that context. Meanwhile, he hit just .220/.278/.329 for a 66 wRC+ against lefties, landing him in the third percentile among righties with at least 300 plate appearances in that context. With more than twice as many plate appearances against righties, he was still above average overall, with a 109 wRC+ during that span, but the split was jarring; that’s the kind of production that gets lefties benched against same-side pitching.

This year is a different story, as De La Cruz has has improved his wRC+ by 112 points against lefties. If that sounds like a lot, it is. Our Splits Leaderboard data only goes back to 2002, but of the 2,615 player-seasons in which a right-handed batter took at least 100 plate appearances against lefties in back-to-back seasons, it’s the 16th-largest gain, placing him well inside the 99th percentile. The largest gain was made by switch-hitting Orioles catcher Matt Wieters, who jumped from a 44 wRC+ in 127 plate appearances against lefties in 2010 to a 201 wRC+ in 142 plate appearances against them in ’11. The median wRC+ within the top 20 was 58 in year one and 172 in year two; qualitatively, that looks like a turn from total incompetence to total mastery, but a lot of fluky things can happen from year to year over the course of 100 or 150 plate appearances, and figuring out the whys of all those big gains, and the extent to which they were maintained, is outside the scope of this piece. For De La Cruz, at least, the improvement is founded in much better contact:

De La Cruz’s average exit velocity against lefties has jumped 7.4 mph from 2025, with his barrel rate nearly tripling, his hard-hit rate increasing by almost 20 percentage points, and his expected slugging percentage surging by almost 130 points. What’s more, his actual production from that side has exceeded his expected numbers by a fair bit. He’s not only producing his highest pulled-air rate of his career from that side (though a comparatively low one in the grand scheme), he’s also poked five homers to right (opposite field) from among 24 batted balls, for a 1.435 slugging and an .806 xSLG; in three previous seasons, he had just one such home run.

Meanwhile, De Le Cruz’s average exit velo against righties has improved by 2.3 mph, with his barrel and hard-hit rates and xSLG jumping as well, but not by as much as from the other side. He’s underperforming those numbers, in part because of that very low pulled-air rate, but it’s still very good production from that side.

Underlying those higher exit velocities are better swing decisions and improved bat speed from both sides. On the former front, he’s cut his chase rate from 28.5% to a career-low 25.8%, with his swing rate falling from a career-high 45.6% to a career-low 40.9%. As for the latter front:

I ditched the small-sample 2023 data, when he was swinging even faster, but here you can see that relative to the last season, De La Cruz’s bat speed against lefties has improved by 2.3 mph, with his fast-swing rate against them increasing by 21 points and his squared-up and blast rates really jumping. Earlier in the season, he had shortened his right-handed swing relative to last year, but that no longer holds. From both sides of the plate, the position of his feet has varied so widely from month to month over that three-season stretch that I didn’t even try to get more granular, but he has closed up his stance on both sides relative to last season, and increased the distance between his feet. During this current tear, in September he’s averaged a 13-degree open stance with his feet 34.9 inches apart from the right side of the plate (versus lefties) and a 19-degree open stance with his feet 35.7 inches apart from the left side (versus righties).

The increased distance between his feet, or the season-to-season variation, owes to De La Cruz’s moving from a leg kick (2024) to a toe tap (2025), and back to an even bigger leg kick this year, with refined mechanics helping him to be more explosive and produce greater power. On MLB Network on Thursday, Yonder Alonso and Mark DeRosa broke down the slugger’s progression and the changes with video examples better than I can muster. This is four minutes from a segment that’s over nine minutes long.

The two former major leaguers disagree on some points, but as Alonso explains it, with the toe tap, De La Cruz’s swing was “two-step” and he was “a hair late” to the ball. The leg kick creates “a much better angle to the baseball and better bat speed,” and as shown near the end of this excerpt, his swings from both sides of the plate are much more similar than they were before.

As you can see from the table presented near the end of that excerpt, De La Cruz’s overall year-to-year increases in barrel rate and hard-hit rate are the largest in the majors, with his increased exit velocity the second largest. Including updated stats from Thursday, here are the top 10s for each of those:

In that context, De La Cruz’s improvements in those two rate stats particularly stand out. The distance between him and the second-ranked hitter is about the same as those between the second- and 10th-ranked hitters. The same is more or less true in terms of exit velocity, in that the distance between him and the third-ranked hitter is even greater than that between no. 3 and no. 10.

With his huge frame and exceptional speed, power, and arm, De La Cruz has always been one of the majors’ most compelling players to watch. As he’s refined his game, that’s become even more true — and to think, he’s just 24 years old. I can’t wait to see where these improvements take him.

As I was scrolling The Website Formerly Known As Twitter on Sunday, perusing for articles to read and news to get caught up on, I stopped dead in my tracks at this post from Giants reporter Alex Pavlovic:

The Giants now have 16 players on the 60-day IL, which will make for an insane series of roster moves at the start of the offseason. When Scott Bandura takes his first at-bat tonight, they'll set a franchise record by using 67 different players.

— Alex Pavlovic (@PavlovicNBCS) September 13, 2026

If you’re a normal baseball fan, that’s not the most interesting piece of news Pavlovic reported around that same time; that would, of course, be the bombshell that Rafael Devers was undergoing core muscle surgery, ending his season and making him that 16th player on the 60-day. The lefty slugger finished his season scorching hot before it came to its abrupt end. He ultimately finished with 3.4 WAR and 37 home runs, just one off his career high set back in 2021. Had he remained healthy and clubbed three more, he would’ve become the first Giants player since Barry Bonds in 2004 to reach the 40-homer threshold.

But from my purview as a roster freak, my wheels immediately started turning and thinking about how the Giants were going to clean up their 40-man roster at the start of the offseason. Our RosterResource data goes back to 2021, and for only one other stretch has a team had 16 players on the 60-day IL: The 2021 Rangers from August 27-30. But that late-August timing afforded the Rangers some in-season wiggle room to work through the 40-man shuffle, a luxury the Giants won’t have. Nobody on San Francisco’s 60-day is expected back this season, the 60-day IL can’t be used again until the onset of spring training, and the Giants have just one pending free agent in JT Brubaker. Needless to say, Buster Posey, Zack Minasian, and the rest of the team’s decision makers have their work ahead of them, with 55 names to sort through all at once and no intermediate moves in the offing.

I began where I tend to start my rabbit hole of research: tabbing back and forth from RosterResource and a spreadsheet of categorizing players into various buckets. I settled on 24 players for the initial 40-man who should be in no danger of getting cut. This includes all the usual suspects and big contracts, plus some nice mini-breakouts representing silver linings of a lost season.

A special shoutout is in order for Trent Harris, who may singlehandedly be keeping the rainbow curveball alive. The bullpen hasn’t had a set closer all season (Caleb Kilian, currently on the Phillies’ IL, leads San Francisco with eight saves), but Harris and 2025 All-Star Rodríguez (on the IL all year after undergoing Tommy John surgery) could make for an interesting one-two punch next year. Hey, there has to be something positive about the future of the club.

That leaves 31 players for 16 spots, which for many teams would be a gargantuan task. Imagine if the Rays or Dodgers had to sort through that many names with how deep their rosters always are. But not for the Giants, because there is, shall we say… a lot of slop here.

The most puzzling situation here is Bader, whom the Giants signed to a two-year, $20.5 million contract this past offseason. While it’s smaller scale than the contracts of Adames and Chapman, which have been a mixed bag so far, the Bader deal is probably the single biggest disaster of Posey’s tenure. He’s gotten into just 30 games this year, been placed on the IL twice, and the Giants are currently suspending payment to the 32-year-old following a scooter accident, which he suffered while already on the injured list, that ruled out a 2026 return. When able to play, he’s been 51% worse than league average by wRC+ and merely scratch in center field by FRV. Whether the Giants have to pay Bader or not, it’s hard to envision a significant role for him on the roster in 2027, the final year of his contract, especially with the emergences of Schmitt, Gilbert, Cox, and Hill.

Where the Giants go with the rest is anyone’s guess, though some of these players’ jobs are certainly safer than others. For example, they traded Patrick Bailey in part to accommodate Susac, meaning his spot is likely secured. However, I’ll be the first to admit there are plenty of easy cuts here, even if there isn’t consensus on who those easy cuts are. When I teased I was writing this article, a few Giants fans came into my mentions with their ostensible obvious cuts, but their cut lists didn’t even match each other’s, and the Giants’ own list is impossible to nail perfectly without being inside the room with them. (Buster, if you’re reading this, call me.)

The above lists, which feature a combined 55 names, don’t even account for the players who need to be added to the 40-man roster to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. At a minimum, the Giants will add Henry Lalane and Bo Davidson, but the club has other Rule-5 eligible 40-man candidates, including Marty Gair, Luis De La Torre, Joe Whitman, Reggie Crawford, and Sabin Ceballos. The deadline to protect players is a bit later, though (it was November 18 this past offseason), affording the front office more time to shuffle the furniture and make further cuts.

Most of these roster cuts won’t garner major headlines when they happen, but they are decisions that teams don’t make lightly because they could end up biting them later on. This initial roster culling won’t determine the overall trajectory of the 2027 Giants, whether they are a good or bad team, but these moves could make the difference of a few wins — which could be crucial if they are to have any hope of claiming a wild card berth next season.