Bryce Harper started out as a catcher. By the time he was old enough to drive, though, everyone knew his catching days were numbered. When the Nationals drafted him in 2010, they stamped that nonsense out, because no one who can mash like Bryce Harper is allowed to waste their energy and their knees behind the dish. Harper moved to the outfield, and those of us who were there in 2012 will recall that for a short while, he was fantastic out there. He played with his hair on fire, he had a rifle arm that slotted in nicely alongside Rick Ankiel’s cannon, and in those first couple years before Statcast appeared, he was downright fast. It didn’t last too long, though. Harper decided to beef up, arriving in Florida each spring with more and more muscle mass and less and less footspeed. Also, he ran into walls a lot. For most of his career, Harper was a poor outfielder, and then in 2023, he returned from Tommy John surgery as a first baseman, initially on a temporary basis. He has not played in the outfield since.

So far this season, according to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value, Harper has been the fourth-worst fielder in baseball. He’s at -7 FRV, ahead of only Willy Adames and Logan O’Hoppe at -10, and Owen Caissie at -8. According to our defensive numbers, which include a positional adjustment, Harper has been worth -12.3 runs, making him the worst defender in baseball by a substantial margin. So that’s bad. Nobody wants to be at the very bottom of the leaderboard. I mean, I suppose once you sort the leaderboard upside down, it shouldn’t be called a leaderboard anymore. It should really be called a trailerboard. Or maybe the shame list. I’m spitballing here. The point is that’s not where Harper wants to be. And it gets worse.

Statcast has FRV values dating back to 2016. Here’s the single-season trailerboard for that entire 11-year period:

So the worst total ever recorded is -9 FRV. Harper is already at -7, and he’s still got half a season left to move beyond 1,250th place. He’s on pace for -13 FRV and -23.2 defensive runs, which would absolutely boat race the worst defensive seasons of the Statcast era. On the bright side, he’s no longer running into walls.

So is Harper one of the worst defensive first basemen in recent history? The other defensive metrics don’t think so. (As a matter of fact, they’re formulas, so they don’t think at all, but you get the point.) Harper is at -1 Defensive Runs Saved this season, an improvement over the -3 he put up in 2025. Deserved Runs Prevented, the flagship defensive metric of Baseball Prospectus, is much more conservative than the others, so Harper’s -0.3 mark makes him the fourth-worst first baseman this season. That’s very bad, but it’s not historic or anything. Last season, he was at a positive 0.3 DRP. In other words, we’re seeing a sudden drop-off according to two metrics, while the other metric thinks Harper has gotten very slightly better.

Harper also graded out fantastically at first base as recently as 2024. That was his first full season at the position, and he nailed it. He was worth 5 DRS, 5 FRV, 0.9 DRP. You can take my word for it (along with the absence of minus signs) that all of those numbers are good. Two years ago, Harper was a good first baseman and all the computers thought so. This season, one of them thinks he’s meh, one thinks he’s terrible, and one thinks he’s bordering on the worst ever to do it.

Now it’s time for the big caveat you’ve been waiting for. Defensive metrics are far from perfect, and they take a long time to stabilize. In fact, when I started writing this article yesterday, Harper was at -8 FRV. Then last night, he made a couple great plays — one of which you can watch below — and knocked it down to -7. That’s the thing about small sample sizes.

Half a season of an ugly FRV does not the worst defender ever make. Still, numbers this extreme definitely mean something, and the nice thing about Statcast is that it gets very specific. Here’s why the fancy cameras dislike Harper:

First basemen don’t really go back on the ball too much, so we can mostly ignore that last column. Charging the ball isn’t Harper’s problem either. Hit the ball right at him, and he’ll probably be just fine. The problem is on the sides. In 2024, Statcast says Harper was great going both to his right (toward second base) and to his left (toward first base). In 2025, he stopped being good to his right side. This year, he stopped being good to his left side, too. He has now officially run out of sides.

With this data in hand, I hit the tape. Here’s another big caveat: Every player is going to look bad if you’re going into your film session looking for the things they’re doing wrong. It’s just human nature. However, I did my best to look at every single ball hit Harper’s way, not just the ones that got by him. Moreover, I’m here to help. I did notice a few clear issues, and I’ve prescribed some simple fixes.

The first problem is that Harper isn’t great at diving for the ball. That’s unfortunate, because although first base isn’t the hot corner, the position is still awfully close to home plate and involves a lot of plays that don’t provide much in the way of reaction time. Harper has had a lot of plays this year where he only has time for a step and a dive. I suspect that a fielder with better instincts and a quicker first step wouldn’t have to dive quite as often, but there’s only so much I can do to quantify that. That’s what Statcast is particularly good at, because it knows every player’s starting point and how much time they have to make each play. For right now, what I noticed is that Harper rarely seems to come up with the ball when he dives for a grounder. On nearly every play in the supercut below, he is within range of the ball, but he doesn’t get his glove down in time, or he dives too late, or the ball deflects off him, or he just doesn’t get extended.

All of these clips are just from the first half of this season, so this is happening pretty regularly. I don’t really know how you fix that. Harper didn’t grow up playing the infield. He spent almost no time on the dirt until he turned 30. It might just be too late for him to develop that particular skill, and it would be lunacy to risk an injury to such a valuable hitter by making him practice hurling himself to the ground over and over again. So that part’s going to be tough. Just to make Phillies fans feel better about this one, here’s a video of Harper making a diving play:

There, that’s nice. Now, I don’t mean to say there’s nothing Harper can do to fix this problem. I don’t know how you get him better specifically at making the play once he’s diving for the ball, but I do think there are a few things he could do to avoid having to dive in the first place. I’m sure that working on his instincts and his first step is already a part of his daily infield routine, but beyond that, there are a couple of ways for him to get in a position to make a few more plays.

I would argue that Harper should play a bit deeper to buy himself more time. This season, when lefties are at the plate with no one on, the league’s first basemen have average depths ranging 120 feet and 130 feet. Harper is right in the middle at 125. When righties are up, he averages 111 feet, a bit shallower than average. If you recall the table at the top of this article, Harper has always been good, maybe even great, at coming in on the ball, so why not push him back just a couple feet? He still wouldn’t be the deepest first baseman out there, but he would get a little bit more of the reaction time that he needs.

The next issue I noticed also has a pretty simple fix. As I watched ball after ball sneak past a diving Harper, I noticed something simple. When he’s holding a runner on first base, he tends not to get back into a good fielding position. When you’re holding the runner on first, you’re all the way on the edge of the field, which drastically reduces your range, since all of the area to your left is foul territory. Once the pitcher commits to home, first basemen usually shuffle toward their right in order to get back into a more useful fielding position. Harper is not great at that. In fact, he sometimes seems to forget to do it altogether.

According to the Statcast data, Harper actually grades out in the middle of the pack in terms of positioning when there’s a runner on first. His average angle is 41 degrees, and some players are as high as 43 (standing directly on the foul line would be a 45 degree angle). However, that data gets measured when the pitcher releases the ball, not when it crosses the plate, and at that point, most first basemen would only be a step or two into their shuffle. Harper often doesn’t seem to shuffle at all, and ball after ball leaks by his right side, even balls that are within the cutout of the infield grass. Believe me when I tell you that the video above could have been longer. At a certain point, I stopped pulling videos, because there were just too many, so here’s a sample of screenshots that show just how close he is to the bag:

He’s flat-footed in all of these shots. No wonder the numbers say that he doesn’t have good range going to his right. He’s starting as far to the left as it’s possible to get, and he doesn’t seem particularly interested in correcting that. Again, the Statcast numbers say that Harper is not the most egregious offender on this particular count, but he is a player whose range could really use some help, and making sure he remembers to take a shuffle or two in order to get into a better position seems like it would be pretty easy.

The last issue I noticed specifically about balls to Harper’s right is that he has a tendency to get greedy. You can’t run into that many walls as a first baseman, but you can go steal grounders away from your second baseman. I love that Harper is aggressive. You want your first baseman to go get the ball. And sometimes, like on these plays, it works out just fine.

Those ended up as outs. That’s great. But we all saw the second baseman behind Harper, ready to field the ball, right? Sometimes it doesn’t work out that great.

The good news is that this should be at least somewhat fixable. I’m sure every infield coach has a drill where they hit tweeners toward their first basemen in order to help them practice making the split-second decision to go after the ball or cover the bag. Let’s make that a regular part of Harper’s pregame warmups.

I have one last complaint. I think Harper is genuinely great at starting the 3-6-1 double play and the 3-6 double play where the first baseman steps on the bag and the shortstop tags the lead runner. His turns are smooth and his throws are strong and accurate. That’s why Statcast thinks he’s great coming in on the ball. Those are often balls where he has to charge and make a good throw, and he’s excellent at it. However, I think Harper doesn’t charge the ball hard enough, specifically on routine plays. He’s often happy to wait back even on softly hit balls, which means that he won’t have time to step on first base himself, which means his pitcher has to cover and catch a flip. Now, Harper’s good at making that flip, but you’d still much rather have your first baseman make that play himself. A lot of things can go wrong on those flips plays: errors, sprained ankles, collisions. Here’s a glaring example:

This ball was an easy grounder hit at 49 mph, but Harper still chose to wait back and field it 15 feet behind the bag. Even then, he still had plenty of time to make the play himself. The runner wasn’t even halfway to first when he flipped the ball to the pitcher. This was a low stakes play, and about as easy a flip play as you’ll see, but it was also a play that did not necessitate a flip at all. Harper just decided early on that he was going to flip it; that’s why he didn’t charge the ball, and that’s why he didn’t keep it even after the runner gave up on the play. Here’s a higher stakes example:

This is a very easy play that Harper turned into a hard one. That’s Cy Young candidate Cristopher Sánchez on the mound. The Phillies should be protecting his ankles at all costs! Not only was Harper the closest player to first base when he fielded this ball, but also, look at where everybody else was when he fielded it.

The batter is barely out of the box. Sánchez is still on the mound, and he has to bust it over to first. Watch that clip again and look how hard he hits the bag. This is egregious. It hasn’t really come back to bite Harper just yet, but turning easy plays into hard ones is not a great habit.

So that’s my critique of Harper’s first base defense. Just a quick 2,400 words. I should once again close by noting that we’re talking about small sample sizes, and that Harper is probably not quite as bad as Statcast makes him out to be, if for no other reason than the fact that no first baseman has ever graded out as badly for a whole season as he has in the first half of this one. However, I need to bring up one more thing.

Just a few days ago, Tom Tango wrote a blog post revealing that Statcast will soon be incorporating data about how first basemen handle throws. It’s an exciting development, and I recommend reading the whole post, but we’re interested in one specific part. Naturally, Tango mentioned a couple players who stand out: “For the 2021-present (thru June 27, 2026), Matt Olson and Freddie Freeman are tied at +25 receiving outs above average. Yuli Gurriel is at +12 at half the playing time. On the flip side is Bryce Harper at -13.” Harper is the worst at this stat even though he’s only been playing first base since late 2023. As Tango was quick to mention, Harper is a converted first baseman. Because we don’t have a year-by-year breakdown, it’s entirely possible that he’s fine at this particular skill now, and that he racked up all that negative value when he was a newbie at the position. I asked a couple smart Phillies fans (though I left Michael Baumann alone because he’s on vacation) what they thought of Harper’s receiving. One said they hadn’t noticed it much one way or another, and one said they thought he’s pretty good at it. So maybe this is merely old news or nothing at all. Or maybe Statcast is about to hate Bryce Harper even more.

When fans woke up on the first morning of May, the Cincinnati Reds led the NL Central with a 20-11 record and were coming off their fifth consecutive series win. Since that point, the Reds have been the second-worst team in baseball with a 19-34 record, and those same fans awoke on the first morning of July with Cincinnati in last place by three games. There’s a bit of good news, however, as the team’s ace, Hunter Greene, will finally make his 2026 MLB debut in Saturday’s holiday game against the Baltimore Orioles. The return of Greene couldn’t come sooner, but is it a case of too little, too late for the reeling Reds?

A lot was expected of Greene coming into the 2026 season. The second overall pick in the 2017 draft out of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California, Greene was a long time coming. At that point, he’d already been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, in a story by Lee Jenkins, touting him as “the star baseball needs.” His career came close to being derailed by two missed seasons in 2019 and 2020 due to Tommy John surgery, with an assist from COVID to keep him from a 2020 return. Greene’s stuff remained intact after the involuntary time off, and he finally reached the majors in 2022. The 2024 season was his true coming-out party. He posted a 2.75 ERA and a 3.47 FIP in 150 1/3 innings, good enough to rank 10th in the NL with 3.7 WAR. Greene slashed off a walk per nine in 2025, and likely would have received some Cy Young votes if not for two stints on the injured list with a groin injury.

While last year was marred by injury, it wasn’t an arm ailment, and the Reds hoped to get a full, healthy year out of Greene this time around. They needed it, too. Cincinnati was near the bottom of the league in team wRC+ in both 2024 and 2025, and the team hasn’t had a wRC+ of 100 or better since 2010. With the offense expected to be lousy, the Reds likely had to get a lot from their pitching staff in order to be playoff relevant this year. Naturally, that outcome would probably require their best pitcher. But after a single appearance in the spring, Greene had surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. Now, after spending three months of the season on the shelf, Greene is back. Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Shulman was featured here in Sunday Notes on June 21, the topic being broadcast traits he shares with his son Ben, who calls Toronto Blue Jays games on radio. Today we’ll hear from the TV play-by-play voice of “Canada’s Team” on non-familial matters, primarily how a club’s fortunes influence tone in the booth. The elder Shulman has been behind the mic in both good times and bad, but does the number of wins and losses — be they over a multi-week stretch or a much longer span — actually matter in terms of a broadcaster’s style?

Shulman addressed that subject, and more, on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: How well a team is doing impacts the mood of a fanbase. To what extent does it — or should it — influence how the games are called?

Dan Shulman: “I think every broadcaster has their own internal balance. Some sway more positive. Some sway more neutral or objective. My job is to keep people interested in watching the team, whether they’re playing well or they’re not playing well, but you certainly can’t have entirely the same tone when the team is having a bad year, as opposed to when they’re having a good year. In 2024, the Blue Jays finished last. In 2025, they made it to the World Series. The tone is very different.

“You do always try to find some positives. In 2024, after the deadline, they traded off a bunch of guys and had some younger players coming up who did pretty well and were interesting. You focus on that a little bit. But again, the overall tone is different. You can’t sugarcoat everything. You have to be pretty honest with the viewers. At the same time, you can’t go on the air and say, ‘This is bad; none of these players belong here.’ That’s not how the job is done.”

Laurila: Basically, it is fair to be critical, but only to a point… Read the rest of this entry »

While he’s never been a true liability on the infield, Max Muncy has generally been a player whose defensive contributions took a back seat to his offense. The Dodgers have long counted on Muncy’s combination of power and plate discipline to outweigh his shortcomings in the field while bouncing him from first base to second to third depending on their roster’s current needs. That handling has paid off handsomely, as he’s been a vital contributor to four pennant winners and three World Series champions since being plucked off the scrap heap in April 2017. This year, however, Muncy has really flashed the leather at third base, showing the best range of his career. He leads all third basemen in Statcast’s Fielding Run Value, while tying for second in Defensive Runs Saved.

According to Statcast, Muncy was 11 runs below average at third base in 3,817 innings from 2018–25, roughly the equivalent of four runs below average per full season of play; he was four below average by that measure in just 801.1 innings last year. This year, he’s already six runs above average in 621 innings. According to Statcast’s Outs Above Average, he’s gone from being the majors’ worst qualifier on plays coming in (-9) to tying for second-best (4). DRS has generally been more charitable in its assessment of his defense; he was 16 runs above average at third from 2018–25, and is eight above average this season.

Muncy is just one of several Dodgers whose defensive play has helped his team top the rankings in my annual midseason defensive breakdown, with shortstop Mookie Betts, center fielder Andy Pages, second baseman Alex Freeland, and catcher Will Smith also making major contributions to that placement. I’ll explain the methodology below, but first, a bit more about the 35-year-old slugger, who on Monday night hit a towering solo homer in the first Dodgers-Athletics matchup to feature both Max Muncys, who share the same birthday (August 25) and drafting team (Oakland). Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals aren’t the biggest story of the 2026 season – not yet, anyway. Their record sits at 43-43, which leaves them 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. That’s a pleasant surprise for a team we projected to finish 26 games below .500, but it has not changed the opinion of the Playoff Odds. Our odds project the Nationals to run the second-worst record in the National League the rest of the way, and give them just a 4% chance of snagging that spot. Until yesterday’s loss to the Red Sox, the computers had begrudgingly had to bump Washington’s probability of winning the World Series from 0.0% on Opening Day all the way up to 0.1%. After the loss, the Nats are back down to double zeroes. Regardless of how much regression comes their way in the second half, the Nationals have been one of the most interesting teams in baseball so far.

You’ve almost certainly heard someone say in the last several weeks that the Nationals have the best offense in baseball and the worst pitching. In fact, our dear friend Leo Morgenstern wrote an article for MLB Trade Rumors titled “A Closer Look At The Best Offense In Baseball.” That was six weeks ago now, and although the Nationals have cooled off some, you can still make the argument that they have the best offense. At the time, Leo pointed out that the Nationals were averaging 5.46 runs per game, the highest mark in baseball this year, and ahead of the franchise record of 5.39 set by the 2019 World Series champions. Since that article came out, the Nationals are tied for the sixth-most runs in baseball, dropping their season mark to 5.26 per game. They still had the best mark in baseball until yesterday, when the Dodgers hung nine runs on the A’s. Both teams have now scored 452 runs, but the Dodgers have played 85 games to the Nationals’ 86, bumping them up to 5.32 runs per game. I wrote this article before yesterday’s games, when the Nationals were still first, so please don’t yell at me too much for the anachronisms in the ensuing paragraphs. Read the rest of this entry »

The team payroll pages at RosterResource have gotten improvements over the last few months, from incentives data to more detailed contract info, that aid in making our payroll numbers simultaneously more accurate and easier to parse where the money’s coming from. Team totals also feed into the Payroll Breakdown page, the subject of today’s Feature Focus.

The page is accessible in two spots: the Payroll tab of RosterResource…

…and also the Breakdowns tab:

The default view of the breakdown table sorts the 30 teams by their 2026 cash payroll, or the amount committed to players for the 2026 season, regardless of when the money is actually paid out. For example, Shohei Ohtani counts as the full $70 million by this calculation, not the $2 million he’s actually earning this year because the rest is deferred, nor the approximately $46 million he counts for against the luxury tax calculation. Clicking on a team’s abbreviation will redirect you to their detailed payroll page for more information.

The table is fully sortable, but upon resorting, the Rank Payroll column doesn’t change; it’s always pegged to that default view. That allows for comparing to the baseline and makes it easy to see that luxury tax (CBT) payroll aligns strongly, but not perfectly, with cash payroll:

The middle three columns illuminate how exactly payrolls are constructed by the stages of a player’s career, again using the cash payroll as the denominator. There are fun quirks to be found there, like the fact that the White Sox have zero arbitration-year salaries on the books:

Or that the ragtag Marlins and Cardinals are spending a third of their payroll on pre-arbitration players, even as those are the lowest salaries possible, at or just a bit above the league-minimum $780,000:

The last set of columns totals the cash payroll commitments for each of the next three seasons. This only includes guaranteed money and does not take into account arbitration-year players, pre-arbitration players, or yet-to-be-earned incentives. So yes, the Dodgers have $422 million in player salaries committed to next year (the proration of Kyle Tucker’s signing bonus means he counts for $87 million!) before accounting for the arbitration-year salaries for Brock Stewart, Alex Call, Alek Thomas, Jake Cousins, Emmet Sheehan, Gavin Stone, and most notably, Andy Pages.

FanGraphs Members can export the entire Payroll Breakdown table to Excel for further analysis.

In the summer of 2024, numerous European soccer teams came to the United States for preseason training and exhibition games, and while they were here, they sampled the local culture, including baseball. You might remember I got a blog post out of it.

Well, the soccer people are back, and in greater numbers than ever, thanks to the World Cup. And they’re trying out our non-foot-based games again. Let’s see how they’re doing.

I know I probably come off as angry and cynical about the state of the world in general, but for all its faults (and they are innumerable), the World Cup is one of my favorite events in all of global popular culture. I’m not just saying that as a big soccer fan; I have an earnest, bordering-on-naïve belief in the power of sports to inspire friendship across national, ethnic, religious, and class lines. Read the rest of this entry »

With July just days away, we’re entering one of the most exciting stretches of the major league season, with the contours of the playoff race coming into full view, All-Star Week festivities looming, and the trade deadline fast approaching. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exempt us from having to contemplate the drier world of player compensation schema, and for what is unlikely to be the last time as MLB and the MLBPA negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. Last week, MLB released a new proposal that would massively overhaul how major league players are paid. By my count, this is the league’s third proposal this month, following its more detailed outline of a potential salary cap and a separate framework that would make the largest changes to amateur talent acquisition since the draft was first instituted in 1965.

Any discussion of baseball’s finances tends to be emotionally charged among fans, so I will freely note my personal biases as a prelude to analyzing the league’s proposal. When I pay money to attend a baseball game (something I admittedly do less than I used to before I covered the sport professionally), I’m paying that money to watch the players play baseball, more so than to watch an owner own a team. Even cynical ol’ me had a Panini sticker book back in the day. Now, teams certainly bear many of the costs to get those players onto the field, but the largest expense — namely, the massive stadiums they play in — is one largely borne by taxpayers. If MLB has a revenue problem, that strikes me as something ownership ought to address. If Bob Castellini and Bob Nutting are suffering because Steve Cohen and Guggenheim Baseball Management have access to more potential revenue than they do (ignoring that the Mets’ and Dodgers’ owners paid a lot more for their respective teams because of those revenue streams) and someone needs to write Castellini and Nutting a check, I’m not sure why it should be Shohei Ohtani and Francisco Lindor (or at least, their comparable future versions) rather than the other owners.

That being said, let’s move on to the meat of the deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Across two decades that have produced just three pennant winners and one champion between New York’s two teams, the city’s sports media industrial complex has spent a fair bit of time calling for one manager’s head or another, or at least stoking that sentiment among fans. Still, it rated as a bit of a surprise on Friday when the Mets announced they had fired manager Carlos Mendoza — er, announced “the departure of” Mendoza, as if he were a flight leaving LaGuardia Airport — and named former Padres manager Andy Green, who’d been the Mets’ senior vice president of player development, to serve as interim manager for the remainder of the season. It was the first time that either the Mets or Yankees had changed skippers during a season since 2008, when the Mets canned Willie Randolph during a California road trip. While the team’s play this season, and indeed for over a year, made the case for a switch, Mendoza didn’t assemble this expensive band of underperformers. But like so many managers before him, he took the fall for someone else’s flawed blueprint.

The Mets were 34-47 when Mendoza was axed, exactly halfway through this season, and halfway through the five-year contract of president of baseball operations David Stearns, who hired Mendoza in November 2023, five weeks after leaving the Brewers to join the organization himself. At the time of the firing, the Mets were last in the NL East and had the league’s third-worst record, with just a two-game margin separating them from the major league-worst Rockies. They had lost six games in a row — their third losing streak of at least five games this season — while being outscored 54-22. In the nightcap of a doubleheader against the Cubs on Wednesday, the Mets’ infield combined to make six errors, with a player at each position making at least one in the same game for the first time since 1962. Amid that debacle, fans chanted the name of bygone slugger Pete Alonso, whose departure via free agency last December has come to symbolize a roster overhaul that went too far.

“Embarrassing,” Mendoza said after the six-error game and the doubleheader sweep. “Overall, the whole day. Two losses, but the way we played overall. That last game was unacceptable. Everybody’s pissed. Everybody’s frustrated.” Read the rest of this entry »

Woo-Suk Go was one of Korea’s top closers from 2019-2023. Over that five-season span, the 27-year-old right-hander logged 137 saves and a 2.39 ERA across 275-and-a-third innings with the LG Twins. Moreover, his 29.3% strikeout rate was the highest among KBO hurlers who threw at least 200 frames.

He hasn’t had nearly as much success since coming stateside. Signed as an international free agent by the San Diego Padres in January 2024, Woo-Suk was subsequently swapped to the Miami Marlins four months later in the Luis Arraez deal, only to be released in June 2025 and picked up by the Detroit Tigers. His inability to gain a foothold is reflected in the numbers. He entered the current campaign having recorded just six saves and a 5.61 ERA over 75 appearances down on the farm.

This season has been an another story. Looking more like the pitcher who dominated KBO hitters, Woo-Suk boasts a 2.06 ERA, a 2.26 FIP, and a 35.1% strikeout rate over 39-and-a-third innings across 25 appearances, eight with Double-A Erie and 17 with Triple-A Toledo. Working most often in a setup role, he is 3-1 with three saves.

Results aside, how does he differ from the young pitcher who excelled in his homeland? Read the rest of this entry »