Dylan Cease came within three outs of making history on Wednesday. Only one Blue Jays pitcher has successfully thrown a no-hitter: Dave Stieb on September 2, 1990. Many others have come close since then, but none of them has finished the job. You can add Cease’s name to that list. He held the Giants hitless for eight innings before allowing a single to the first batter in the ninth. His final line: 8+ innings, one hit, three walks, and 11 strikeouts.

The game started off with a bang — Kazuma Okamoto’s grand slam in the top of the first inning gave the Blue Jays a 5-0 lead before Cease even took the mound. Once he did, it was evident he had his best stuff going. He retired the first 14 batters in order, at one point striking out five in a row. A walk to Willy Adames with two outs in the fifth broke up the perfect game, and then Cease issued another walk in each of the next two innings. This no-hit bid even had its signature defensive play, when Daulton Varsho tracked down a deep fly ball off the bat of Bryce Eldridge in the eighth inning, slamming into the wall in left-center field after making the catch. Ultimately, Cease’s effort fell short. Heliot Ramos saw two pitches from the right-hander in the ninth inning before lining the third up the middle for a single.

That Cease was in a position to complete the feat was a bit of a surprise in the first place. He had thrown a career-high 115 pitches through eight innings, and with teams doing everything they can to protect their pitchers these days, there were real questions about whether Cease would be allowed to pitch the ninth. After the game, Blue Jays manager John Schneider explained his thinking: “I’m a fan of baseball. If a guy has a chance to throw a no-hitter, you let him do it, and I think you make the adjustments after that. Dylan, he’s done it before, and he’s really durable. He’s in the category where you can be pretty aggressive with it. It’s not very often you get to see that, so if I can let a player have that opportunity, I’m going to do it every single time.”

Cease joins a long line of Blue Jays pitchers who have thrown near-no-hitters.

Roy Halladay, Dustin McGowan, Brandon Morrow, and Bowden Francis all had no-hit bids ended in the ninth inning since Stieb’s feat 36 years ago. By game score, Cease’s effort falls in the middle of the pack, less impressive because he didn’t complete nine innings, but better than Francis’ two outings two years ago. Of course, Cease already has a no-hitter to his name, throwing one in 2024 with the Padres. The Blue Jays still have the second-longest no-hitter drought in baseball, ahead of only the Guardians.

As a quick aside, a true no-hitter feels like it could become an increasingly rare feat in the near future. The last no-hitter thrown by a single pitcher was Blake Snell’s back on August 2, 2024, and there were none in 2025. Two combined no-hitters have been completed since Snell’s — one by the Cubs on September 4, 2024 and one most recently by the Astros on May 25, 2026 — but the solo effort now requires both dominance and efficiency. Ballclubs are much more wary of overworking their starting pitchers, so to complete nine innings, they need to keep their pitch counts under control to go the distance. Cease’s durability has been a hallmark throughout his career, and that made Schneider’s decision to let him keep going despite a career-high pitch count justifiable.

Cease’s dominant outing dropped his season ERA to 2.56 and FIP to 2.20, and pushed his WAR up to 3.7, a hair ahead of Cam Schlittler’s mark for the AL lead among qualified pitchers. For most of the first half of the season, the young Yankees starter has been the frontrunner to win the AL Cy Young award. With Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, and Max Fried all dealing with various injuries, the field has been sapped of most of the preseason favorites.

While Schlittler still holds the advantage in the more traditional categories like wins and ERA, Cease leads the AL in strikeouts, FIP (among starters), and WAR — and that’s despite pitching two fewer games than Schlittler. A minor hamstring injury in late May sent Cease to the IL for just the second time in his major league career. Joe Ryan and Parker Messick are also making solid cases, and the traditionalists are bound to love Sonny Gray’s win count and low ERA. Still, it feels like, barring any big surprises, the Cy Young race will come down to Schlittler or Cease.

Getting a Cy Young-caliber season out of Cease immediately after signing him to a massive seven-year, $210 million contract is a triumph for the Blue Jays. One of the preeminent strikeout artists over the last five years, he’s pushed his strikeout rate up to 36.9% this year, a career high. His walk rate is also up slightly — he’s never had great command at any point in his career — but it’s higher than it’s been since 2020. Still, all those additional strikeouts have helped him navigate whatever traffic those free passes put on the basepaths.

While Cease technically has a six-pitch repertoire, he’s mostly known for his riding fastball and hard slider. Those two pitches made up more than 80% of his pitch mix over the previous five seasons. This year, he’s throwing those two pitches about two-thirds of the time. To make up the difference, he’s committed to throwing his changeup a lot more often to keep left-handed batters at bay. He had thrown a form of his changeup back when he debuted with the White Sox in 2019, but it quickly fell out of favor. He had used it almost like a trick pitch over the last few seasons, never throwing it more than 100 times in any given season since 2021.

He found a new changeup grip this offseason and decided to re-incorporate it into his arsenal to give him a reliable third pitch to keep batters off his fastball-slider combo.

The revamped changeup has worked wonderfully so far. He’s thrown it almost exclusively to lefties, but they simply can’t hit it. The pitch has a 60% whiff rate, the highest of any pitch thrown at least 100 times this season. If batters do make contact, it’s usually weakly hit in the air; opposing batters have only managed a .185 batting average and a .215 wOBA against it.

When you think of effective changeups, you might picture Devin Williams’s airbender, dropping and fading away from opposite-handed batters. Or perhaps Edward Cabrera’s power changeup, modeled after Félix Hernández’s cambio. Based on Harry Pavlidis’ research into what makes a changeup effective, we know that a large velocity differential is beneficial for inducing swings and misses. But he also found that changeups that have a wide separation in movement profiles from the pitcher’s fastball can also be effective, particularly at generating groundball contact. Cease’s changeup is unlike any other in baseball.

The velocity differential between his fastball and his changeup is the second highest in the majors, but the pitch’s movement profile is what makes it stand out. It doesn’t fall off the table like you might expect, and it doesn’t fade away from lefty batters either. It’s a straight change. I calculated z-scores for those three characteristics — velocity differential, induced vertical break, and horizontal movement — and summed them as a rough approximation of how unique a pitcher’s changeup is compared to league average. Cease’s has the highest combined score by far.

By this crude method, Cease’s changeup is the most unique offspeed pitch in baseball. It moves a lot like a fastball, except it comes in 14 miles per hour slower. No wonder opposing batters can’t touch it.

This odd movement profile is tied to Cease’s release. He’s a natural supinator — when he releases the ball, his hand is behind it, imparting more backspin on the pitch. Supinators have a very difficult time throwing pitches with the arm-side movement that you would expect a traditional changeup to have. Cease’s change possesses a significant amount of backspin — that’s the reason why it doesn’t tumble as much as you’d think — and its spin profile closely mirrors that of his fastball. Because his offspeed looks a lot like his fastball out of the hand, the effectiveness of his heater has improved, as well. His four-seamer is running a 30.7% whiff rate, a career high for that pitch.

While he may not have made history on Wednesday, Cease is in the middle of what is shaping up to be a career year. He was just named to his first All-Star roster, and he’s pitched his way into the AL Cy Young race. In his first season in Toronto, he’s made the right adjustments to thrive.

Tuesday night’s outing wasn’t anything to write home about — four hits and five runs allowed over 5 2/3 innings in a 6-3 Washington Nationals loss to the Houston Astros — but Andrew Alvarez is having a good season. Across 12 appearances, including six as a starter, the 27-year-old southpaw from Los Alamitos, California has tossed 47 frames with a 3.64 ERA, a 2.97 FIP, and a 25.4% strikeout rate. Pitching in his first full big league season, he has been one of the few bright spots on a staff that is statistically among the worst in the majors.

Velocity isn’t his carrying tool. At 92.3 mph, Alvarez’s fastball ranks in just the 18th percentile for velocity. What the 2021 12th-round pick out of Cal Poly brings to the table is a five-pitch arsenal that leans heavily on a somewhat atypical breaking ball combination. In terms of usage, his mix has been 29.8% four-seamers, 28.7% curveballs, 24.7% gyro sliders, 13.9% sinkers, and 2.9% changeups.

The left-hander’s self-identity as a pitcher pretty much mirrors his profile.

“The Nationals have certainly helped me grow my game and understand who I am,” Alvarez told me prior to a recent game. “I’m not someone who is going to overpower you with stuff, but rather keep you off balance, get some weak contact and a little bit of chase here and there, a little bit of swing-and-miss. For me, it’s more about moving the ball around, changing speeds and locations, and [getting] a lot of groundballs”

Alvarez’s 57.1% groundball rate is tied for sixth highest among hurlers with at least 40 frames on the season. Moreover, his chase rate (57th percentile) and whiff rate (65th percentile) are both comfortably above league average.

And again, Alvarez’s breaking ball combination is atypical, as well as his primary attack plan against most hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

The emergence of Statcast (and similar types of tracking data) over the last decade-plus has revolutionized many parts of baseball analysis. A big category that didn’t really exist prior was the notion of “expected” stats. Up until then, numbers were all tallies of results, and proto-expected metrics, like Bill James’ Component ERA, were derived from the classical array of stats. But tracking data opened up new opportunities in this area, allowing us to more closely look at home runs and strikeouts, and see the underlying processes and skills that made those results. While the past is always the past, expected stats are useful when talking about the future.

As someone who made the odd decision to work with baseball projections for half his life, I have a vested interest in finding the best use of this kind of information when predicting the future. Like the Statcast estimates (preceded with an x, as in xBA, xSLG, etc.), ZiPS has its own version, very creatively using a z instead. zStats do have some correlation with xStats, but not a perfect one, as ZiPS uses things like spray data, sprint speed, and plate discipline metrics in its estimates.

It’s important to remember these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and say, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass and are more stable than the actual stats are for individual players. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. Sometimes that’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than are actual homers allowed. Also, the longer a player “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one. Call this the Rule of Isaac Paredes, in honor of a player who constantly stymies zHR. In some ways, we’re projecting how cruel regression toward the mean will be.

More information on accuracy and construction can be found here.

As with the hitters, the best place to start is checking in on some of last year’s overachievers and underachievers. Read the rest of this entry »

Every July, we release our annual Trade Value Series highlighting the top 50 players in baseball, taking contract status and performance into account. For the past five years, I’ve been in charge of that exercise, with liberal amounts of help from the rest of the FanGraphs staff and some contacts on the team side. Last year, we added a new evaluator: You.

Today, we’re excited to announce the return of our crowdsourced trade value tool, which can be found here. Let’s review how it works, just in case you didn’t spend last year’s All-Star break furiously clicking through it when you should have been working. The tool, created by Keaton Arneson, and developed by Keaton and Sean Dolinar, aggregates simple “Which of these two players do you prefer?” questions to create a composite ranking. Using the tool is simple. When you pull it up, you’ll be presented with two players and asked to choose which one you think has a higher value in trade:

Ah, but what does “higher value” mean? Sometimes the simplest questions are the toughest. Having a higher value in trade isn’t the same as being better, or being younger, or having a more team-friendly contract. It might be some combination of those things, of course, and of other factors as well. In the real world, players have differing levels of value to teams based on a host of considerations, from how well they plug a hole left by a recently injured star to where the team finds itself in the playoff race. A promising prospect might mean more to a rebuilding club, just as a proven difference maker might move the needle for a team with October ambitions. We can’t tell you how to weigh these factors, which is part of the fun of constructing a trade value list in the first place. What we can do is provide some data that we consider useful in making such determinations and let you decide how to apply it. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, my wife’s friend Paula texted me to make sure I’d seen the below play. Paula moved back home to Minneapolis from Brooklyn a few years ago, and we head out to visit her each summer. We do jigsaw puzzles and go to Minnesota State Fair together. It is a lovely tradition. Paula is more of a basketball fan than a baseball fan, but sometimes she’ll reach out to me when the Twins do something surprising. It’s a sweet way of trying to connect with someone who’s important to her dear friend. Last night, however, she just needed to share what she’d seen, because, frankly, it was bit hard to believe. Here are the Royals turning a swinging bunt into a Little League home run via three errors and at least that many terrible decisions:

If you’ve seen this play, you have thoughts. You can’t help but have thoughts. That’s why Paula sent me the video in the first place. When you watch something like this, the thoughts start bubbling up inside you so rapidly that if you don’t find a safe place to vent them, your brain will explode. This play is the baseball equivalent of microwaving a potato. So let’s get to some thoughts.

1. Poor Seth Lugo.
Let us spare a thought today for Seth Lugo, who got dinged with an error and three unearned runs. This would not be Lugo’s finest outing. He would go on to give up six more runs, all of them earned, which means that both his ERA and his RA9 WAR took a beating. After starting his night like this, it’s hard to blame him. But I hold that Seth Lugo was nigh blameless on this play. I avow it with vigor. As such, please find below a list of things that Seth Lugo did right on this pitch:

• He got Carson Benge to chase a two-strike fastball that was a good six inches above the zone.
• He induced contact so weak that Statcast measured the ball as traveling 0 feet in the air with an indeterminate exit velocity.
• He sprang off the mound like a cat who knows how to field groundballs.
• He fielded the ball cleanly. Seriously, form this pure would make your Little League coach break down and cry:

• He made a quick, off-balance throw to first base. That throw was perfectly fine.
• Yeah, you heard me. It was a good throw. It bounced about 12 feet from the bag, giving Jac Caglianone plenty of time to adjust and catch the ball. It would have been easier to field had it been a foot or two farther to Caglianone’s right, but it was by no means offline. I understand that when the ball bounces, the first baseman is absolved from all blame, so the error has to go to Lugo, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be honest with ourselves.
• Yup, we’re still on the throw. I realize this bullet point and the last bullet point should be sub-bullet points, but I don’t want to format them that way, and more importantly, I don’t know how to format them that way. Point is, the throw was good! I watched it zoomed in on super slow-motion, so I can tell you that the throw actually brushed the tip of Caglianone’s glove. You could reasonably argue that Lugo should’ve eaten this ball, but his throw was more or less on target and it got there in plenty of time to beat the runner. Good throw. Do your worst, haters.
• When everything went pear-shaped, Lugo hustled back behind home plate to back up the play. That’s just good fundamental baseball in the midst of one of the least fundamentally-sound plays you’ll ever see.
• He tried to prevent the third error of the play. If you watch the video, you’ll see Lugo shouting and pointing, trying to get Nick Loftin to throw the ball to third base rather than home. I don’t know if that was necessarily the right call, but it certainly couldn’t have gone any worse than the throw to home.
• He kept his composure and ended the inning on the very next pitch. Sure, everything kept falling apart for him the rest of the night, but for at least one more moment, Lugo put his head down and retired the batter in front of him.

2. Poor Jac Caglianone.
I feel bad for Lugo because he did pretty much everything right here. I feel bad for Jac Caglianone for the opposite reason. While I stand by my assessment of Lugo’s throw, I don’t mean to say that it was an easy play for Caglianone. It was a tough throw to field cleanly. But he still made a couple tactical errors. He would have been better served waiting back for the hop rather than trying to stretch and pick this ball. He absolutely should have prioritized knocking the ball down over going for a clean catch. But regardless of who was to blame, everybody who’s ever played baseball knows what it’s like to have to turn around and chase down a ball that you failed to catch. It’s a lonely feeling, even when you’re being observed by 32,734 screeching New Yorkers. It can make you do some things you’ll regret. Speaking of which…

3. Where was Caglianone trying to throw the ball?
I’m not just asking for me. I’m asking for everyone on the internet too:

This ball traveled right between third base and home plate. In fact, it went right toward Lugo, backing up like a champ, except 10 feet over his head. Maybe Caglianone was trying to decide between third base and home plate, and he split the difference? Maybe this is just the major league translation of Caglianone’s 6.4 BB/9 as a collegiate pitcher. The most likely answer, though, is that Cags had no idea where he was throwing this ball either.

4. Or maybe Seth Lugo is a sleeper agent.
Hear me out. Lugo spent seven years with the Mets, and five more years in their minor league system. Maybe he engineered this play on purpose. Maybe Lugo has spent the past four years pitching well for the Padres and the Royals as part of a long-term mole operation, waiting all that time for this moment when he could hand the Mets a game on a silver platter. All it takes is one properly-timed, improperly-placed throw, plus six more earned runs. Will the Mets still lose the game? Of course they will.

5. Advertisements on the pitcher’s mound are a blight on the game.
The beauty of the playing field is one of the best things about baseball. That feeling of walking through the tunnel and emerging into a green cathedral is what makes even non-baseball fans keep coming back to the ballpark (well, that and the soft serve in the little souvenir helmets). Every square inch of the stadium is covered in advertisements. They put advertisements on the players’ jerseys. They put advertisements on the players’ heads. They will soon find a way to put advertisements on the players’ faces. That garish black gash on the back of the mound, the focal point of the entire field, is a slap in the face to anyone who cares about baseball.

6. Create your own luck?
While we’re complaining about the advertisements, let’s also note that the company advertising on the back of the mound has an ad behind home plate as well. I’d never heard of this company before, but everything I can find about them on the internet makes them sound like they treat their customers abysmally. But also, they seem to have repurposed the mantra of the villain in Titanic and made it their slogan. So that’s a choice.

7. Poor Keith Hernandez.
Hernandez was in the booth for SNY last night. It must be a unique form of torture for arguably the greatest defensive first baseman of all time, a guy who is constantly harping on the need for good fundamentals, to watch a play like this. Here are the two things Hernandez said during this debacle. He said, “Ohhhhh.” Then he said, “Oh my God.” He wasn’t wrong.

8. Poor Some Other Guy.
The broadcast booth always houses a couple people whom we never see. Producers, researchers, stat people, I don’t know who they are. But they’re there to help out the people who narrate the game for us, and they normally keep quiet. Keeping quiet is part of the job. On this play, though, right when Loftin’s throw went awry, just before that “Ohhhhh” was forcibly torn from Hernandez’s thorax and/or soul, somebody else in the broadcast booth couldn’t help himself. He shouted, “Oh my—” and then remembered himself and cut the exclamation short. Who could blame him? (I suppose it’s possible that this was Hernandez himself, that he had his mic muted but could still be heard through play-by-play guy Gary Cohen’s microphone. But either way, this exclamation was not meant for public consumption.)

9. Poor Tyler Tolbert.
Statcast makes these cool diagrams where they track the movement of the ball and every player on the field. The moment I saw this play, I thought about the movement tracker. I tried to picture what it would look like in my mind’s eye. How far would the center fielder move on a play like this? Who ended up moving the most? I borrowed this one from Anthony DiComo’s MLB.com article about the play:

It’s a lot to take in. Caglianone ran every which way. Right fielder Tyler Tolbert hilariously ended up with the ball about 40 feet from home plate. Do you know how wrong things have to go for a tapper back to the pitcher to end up with your right fielder in foul territory, right near home plate, and in possession of the ball? Tolbert picked up the ball barehanded on the run like a third baseman charging a bunt. And then he realized it was too late. It was all over. There was nothing left to do but turn the ball over to the proper authorities and make the 200-foot jog back out to his natural habitat.

10. Poor Carter Jensen.
You know who moved the least? Catcher Carter Jensen. The rookie just had to stand there like a Walmart greeter as the Mets whipped by him. He stepped out in front of the plate when Benge tapped the ball back to Lugo. He moved to the left side of the plate when Caglianone’s throw went rogue. He stepped even farther out to give Loftin a clear throwing lane outside the base path. When Loftin decided that clear throwing lanes are for suckers and threw the ball directly at the runner, Jensen trotted 15 feet over toward the right side, then retreated back to home plate. But he never made it more than a step or two onto the grass in any direction. This whole play was an elaborate form of bear-baiting, and Jensen was the bear, staked to home plate, beset on all sides by jubilant Mets, with nothing to do but watch helplessly as wild throws zipped by him in every direction.

For the second time in his four-month-old major league career, Konnor Griffin is headed to the injured list. On June 26, the Pirates shortstop returned from a month-long IL stint due to a low-grade flexor strain in his right forearm. He didn’t miss a beat, running a 115 wRC+ and recording four two-hit games in an eight-game span.

But the triumphant return was short-lived. On Sunday’s game against the Nationals, Griffin hurt his glove hand trying to make a diving stop on a Keibert Ruiz grounder up the middle. He told reporters after the game that he was fine, but imaging revealed a tear in the sagittal band of his left ring finger. The team expects him to miss eight to 10 weeks, which would put him on track for a return around early September. This is a major bummer for Griffin, whose career is off to a brilliant, but sputtering start. It’s a major bummer for the Pirates, who sit just three games out of the final Wild Card spot. And it’s a bummer for baseball, as Griffin is one of the game’s most exciting and promising young players.

Read the rest of this entry »

The emergence of Statcast (and similar types of tracking data) over the last decade-plus has revolutionized many parts of baseball analysis. A big category that didn’t really exist prior was the notion of “expected” stats. Up until then, numbers were all tallies of results, and proto-expected metrics, like Bill James’ Component ERA, were derived from the classical array of stats. But tracking data opened up new opportunities in this area, allowing us to more closely look at home runs and strikeouts, and see the underlying processes and skills that made those results. While the past is always the past, expected stats are useful when talking about the future.

As someone who made the odd decision to work with baseball projections for half his life, I have a vested interest in finding the best use of this kind of information when predicting the future. Like the Statcast estimates (preceded with an x, as in xBA, xSLG, etc.), ZiPS has its own version, very creatively using a z instead. zStats do have some correlation with xStats, but not a perfect one, as ZiPS uses things like spray data, sprint speed, and plate discipline metrics in its estimates.

It’s important to remember these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and say, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass and are more stable than the actual stats are for individual players. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. Sometimes that’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than are actual homers allowed. Also, the longer a hitter “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one. Call this the Rule of Isaac Paredes, in honor of a player who constantly stymies zHR. In some ways, we’re projecting how cruel regression toward the mean will be. Read the rest of this entry »

Each offseason, we fill up these pages with transaction analysis. We dive into trades and free agent signings, qualifying offers, DFAs, non-tenders, Rule 5 selections, and minor league deals, and we even spare some time for manager hirings and firings. Rarely do we devote much space to the comings and goings of coaches. Even the most-prominent, big-name hitting coaches, pitching coaches, and bench coaches do their work almost entirely out of the spotlight. It’s nearly impossible to know what effect they have, if any, and because their heads are the first to roll when things aren’t going right, they come and go with alarming frequency. So when the Mets let Antoan Richardson, their acclaimed first base coach, walk to the division rival Braves in November, I never wrote anything about it. I had thoughts about the development, but not enough analysis to fill a thousand-word article. I settled for a 10-word skeet, and I wrote about Salvador Perez’s contract extension instead. Now that the Mets have been without Richardson, and the Braves have been with him, for half a season, let’s remedy that oversight.

In 2025, the Mets were successful on 89% of their stolen base attempts. That wasn’t just the best mark in baseball. The difference between the Mets in first place and the Cubs in second place was bigger than the difference between the Cubs and the Astros, who finished in 25th. Four teams racked up more than New York’s 147 steals, but because the Mets almost never got caught, Baseball Prospectus still credits them with putting up more base-stealing value than any team in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s generally bad process to evaluate a player based on a hot or cold streak. Everyone has them, and if you only look at a guy’s best or worst stretches, you’re liable to see things that aren’t really there. That’s just how baseball works; no one plays at the same level all the time. Sometimes the ball looks like a grapefruit, sometimes it looks like a grape. Sometimes pitchers dot the corners with aplomb; sometimes their 3-0 offerings fly wide. No one’s ever as good as they look when they’re on top, or as bad as they look when things aren’t landing. But just because hot streaks are resistant to analysis doesn’t mean they aren’t fun. And for my money, there’s no player who’s more enjoyable to watch when he’s firing on all cylinders than Juan Soto.

In the aggregate, Soto is on track for another successful year, with numbers that look roughly in line with his career marks. His .414 OBP is a hair lower than his career number, but he’s hitting for a bit more power than normal, and striking out less, hence a .570 slugging percentage that would be one of the highest of his career. An early-season injury means he won’t hit his normal 700 plate appearances, and of course the Mets are a dumpster fire, but if I put a bunch of years of Soto’s rate statistics up, you’d struggle to separate this season’s numbers from the pack. That’s basically the idealized pitch for Soto: He can roll out of bed and post a 160 wRC+ with a .400 OBP.

That’s just in the aggregate, though. In the last 30 days, he’s batting .325/.472/.578, good for a 190 wRC+, and walking nearly three times as often as he strikes out. Are these arbitrary endpoints? Of course, and Soto’s not even the best hitter in baseball over that stretch. Batters can do almost anything for a month at a time. Pete Crow-Armstrong is slugging nearly .800 over the last 30 days. Heck, Soto is flanked by Luis García Jr. and Kyle Karros on the wRC+ leaderboard over the last month. It’s not about the raw production. But the way he does it? Man, I can’t get enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Skenes turned in his last truly dominant start on May 12 at home against the Rockies. He threw eight shutout innings, allowed just two hits and no walks, and notched 10 strikeouts. Since then, Skenes has posted a 5.36 ERA over 47 innings. He’s gone fewer than six innings in six of his last nine starts, and seven of his 11 home runs allowed on the season have come during that same span.

It’s safe to say Skenes has been missing a certain je ne sais quoi on the mound over the last month and a half. And I say je ne sais quoi, which literally translates to, “I don’t know what,” because there are competing theories about what, if anything, is actually wrong with him. Some blame poor defensive play behind him and point to his expected stats as proof of unfortunate batted-ball luck. Some say it’s a mechanical issue, while others fear he’s pitching through a physical ailment.

It’s true that Skenes has been on the mound for several obvious defensive gaffes. Everyone remembers Opening Day and the bases-loaded fly ball that center fielder Oneil Cruz lost in the sun. The misplay turned a would-be sac fly into a bases-clearing triple. Fast forward to last week, when third baseman Nick Gonzales allowed two runs to score after his throw home on a bases-loaded grounder hit the runner, and it’s pretty easy to assume the defense behind Skenes has been letting him down all season. The numbers support the impression left by those glaring blunders. Overall, Pittsburgh’s defense has been worth -18 fielding runs (fifth worst in the majors). With Skenes on the mound, the Pirates have posted -7 FRV, which is tied for the worst defensive showing behind any pitcher this season. Moreover, most of that negative defensive value (-5 FRV) has come during his skid. Read the rest of this entry »