“He has the best stuff on the staff. His pitches move all over the place.”
Those words, which were spoken to me in the Progressive Field press box in late September, came from someone who had not only seen the Cleveland Guardians on a regular basis throughout the season, but a person whose background also includes having played in the big leagues. His assessment of 25-year-old left-hander Joey Cantillo was based both on experience and expertise. (As we were chatting informally, I’m opting not to quote him by name.)
Cantillo’s numbers in is first full major league season suggest that he has a bright future. Initially pitching out of the bullpen, the Honolulu native moved into Cleveland’s starting rotation in early July and proceeded to log a 2.96 ERA, a 3.21 FIP, and a 25.9% strikeout rate over 13 outings comprising 67 innings. Counting his 21 appearances as a reliever, he put up 3.21 ERA, a 3.55 FIP, and a 26.9% strikeout rate over 95 1/3 frames in 2025. All told, Cantillo held opposing batters to a .217 average and a .289 wOBA.
The southpaw was originally drafted by the San Diego Padres in the 16th round of the 2017 draft out of a Kailua, Hawaii high school. (Coincidentally, two picks earlier, the Minnesota Twins took Cleveland reliever Cade Smith out of a British Columbia high school, only to have him eschew signing and attend the University of Hawaii). The Guardians subsequently acquired Cantillo in August 2020 as part of a nine-player trade that included Mike Clevinger, Austin Hedges, and Josh Naylor.
Cantillo sat down to discuss his development path and his four-pitch arsenal in the final week of the regular season.
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David Laurila: How much have you changed since coming here from San Diego?
Joey Cantillo: “A bunch. When I first got here I wasn’t really throwing very hard. I was one of those guys where it was like, ‘Hey, if he can throw harder he could really do some good things.’ Getting here, it was, ‘Hey, let’s start to move the body faster, get the body in better positions and use it better.’
“That’s what we focused on those first couple years, and it was a struggle. When you’re out there on the mound thinking about things like body positions, it takes away from your over-the-plate focus at times. I needed to learn to balance that. Mechanics and competing are two different things.”
Devin Williams, the lights-out reliever with the M. Night Shyamalan changeup, has agreed to a three-year deal with the Mets. A two-time All-Star, Williams earned NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2020 and scored a down-ballot MVP vote as recently as 2023. Even after a disastrous 2025 season kicked his career ERA all the way up from 1.83 to 2.45, he still has a career ERA of – you guessed it – 2.45. Here’s my first piece of analysis: That’s so good, you guys! Assuming he won’t keep running a 55% strand rate from here on out, the Mets just signed up for three years of one of the best relievers in baseball; meanwhile, Williams just signed up for a quick ride from the Bronx to Flushing, but it’s important to note that the ride is always going to be longer than Google Maps predicts, because the odds of actually catching an express 7 train rather than the local are vanishingly small.
Let’s start with the terms of the deal and the credit for who reported which parts of those terms, and then we’ll take a nap and perform some more light analysis. Cool? Cool. Read the rest of this entry »
I never pitched in Little League, but I remember many of the lessons our coach imparted to this day. Most specifically, I remember him harping on “hard in and soft away.” This was silly. Nobody on my team could throw a curveball, and even from my youthful perspective, no one could throw anything hard either. We all mostly struck out or walked; pitchers with command were pretty much untouchable in my small-town East Tennessee league. But we’re losing the plot here – as it turns out, that advice is omnipresent in baseball, from little leagues to the majors.
I’ve always been enamored with this simple and yet fascinating rule of thumb. Why does it work? Does it work, even? What’s so special about “in” and “away” relative to pitch speed? I’ve never quite found a satisfactory way to classify it. But while I was taking a look at contact point data last week, I came up with an idea for how to measure this. When you look at the data, the evidence has been there all along.
I focused on the “hard in” aspect of the adage, because major leaguers throw so many different secondaries that honing in on what “soft” meant seemed impossible. To that end, I devised a quick test to see how conventional wisdom behaves in practice. I defined “inside” and “outside” pitches by removing the middle third of the plate, then extending out nine inches past the edge of the strike zone in both directions. I looked at sinkers and four-seamers thrown in these areas to define “hard in” and “hard away.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Samsung Lions of Daegu, South Korea, have entered the free agent market, scooping up former Detroit Tigers prospect Matt Manning on a one-year, $1 million deal. All Manning needs to do now is find a team called the Bears, and he’ll have the whole set.
Manning, 27, has a career 4.43 ERA in 50 starts in the majors, none since 2024. But he’s more famous than most players with those credentials, on account of being Detroit’s no. 1 pitching prospect for multiple years. Being a team’s no. 1 pitching prospect is not always as impressive as it sounds; at the moment, there are multiple teams without any minor league pitchers with a future value grade over 45 on The Board.
But for the Tigers, in the early 2020s, being no. 1 was a big deal. On the 2020 list, Manning was the no. 12 prospect in all of baseball, followed by Casey Mize, Riley Greene, Tarik Skubal, and Isaac Paredes in Detroit’s system. In 2021, Manning fell behind the previous year’s top draft pick, Spencer Torkelson, but still rated ahead of Skubal and Mize, in that order. Read the rest of this entry »
Rest in peace, starting pitcher Ryan Helsley (November 23, 2025 — November 29, 2025.) Last Sunday, a trio of staffers at The Athleticreported that the Tigers, among other teams, were interested in converting Helsley into a starter. Even by the open-minded modern standards of reliever-to-starter conversions, this seemed like a stretch. As Michael Baumann noted when he pondered the possibility, Helsley’s arsenal, comprised almost exclusively of four-seamers and sliders, is about as limited as it gets, and his extreme over-the-top arm angle leaves little room for projection.
On Saturday afternoon, Helsley’s illustrious starting career came to a close. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that the Orioles and Helsley had agreed on a two-year, $28 million pact, with an opt-out after the first year. According to Passan, Baltimore expects Helsley to handle the closer job.
Given the Orioles’ competitive ambitions and their considerable payroll space, they were all but a lock to spend a little cash on a backend reliever. President of baseball operations Mike Elias said as much earlier in the offseason, telling reporters that they were working to acquire an “experienced ninth-inning guy.” Following a season in which their bullpen delivered a 4.57 ERA, their top internal options to handle the late innings were Keegan Akin and Kade Strowd — fine pitchers, but not the leverage arms of a team with division-winning aspirations. After swinging a trade for setup man Andrew Kittredge in early November, Baltimore landed its “experienced ninth-inning guy” in Helsley.
Whether he’s up for the task is a reasonable question. After three straight dominant seasons with the Cardinals — book-ended by All-Star selections — Helsley had himself a nightmarish 2025, particularly after St. Louis traded him to the Mets at the deadline; he had a 7.20 ERA and a 5.19 FIP with New York after posting a 3.00 ERA and a 3.55 FIP before the trade. His 89-mph bullet slider was as effective as ever, racking up a 41.6% whiff rate and staying off barrels, but the fastball got rocked. In an interview with The Athletic’s Katie Woo a few days prior to his signing, he gave his theory for why his season went off the rails.
“I felt great, and the Mets’ models showed I was actually having the best stuff of my career, so it didn’t make sense for me to struggle as bad as I did,” Helsley told The Athletic. “But I was being really predictable in certain counts. It was almost a double-confirmation for hitters. They see it with their eyes, and they also had a stat behind it saying I’m more likely to throw this pitch in a certain count. It just gave them that much more comfort in the box, and more conviction.”
When hitters put his fastball in play, they slugged .667. And they had no issues putting it in play. His 17.8% four-seam whiff rate ranked in the 26th percentile of all pitchers with at least 300 fastballs thrown, surrounded by names like Jake Irvin, Miles Mikolas and Bailey Ober. That’s not ideal company.
Assuming his slider is fine, the merit of the Helsley deal boils down to whether his triple-digit fastball is still a good pitch. The way I see it, there are three possible explanations for its poor performance in 2025. The first is that Helsley was tipping with some sort of visual cue. Helsley told Woo that he believed his hand position “as he was becoming set” revealed whether the pitch would be a fastball or a slider.
“It was pretty obvious,” Helsley told The Athletic. “I’m not the greatest at (spotting pitch tipping), and even I could see it (on film with) the majority of the pitches.”
For whatever it’s worth, it didn’t look that obvious to me. For those on the public side, pitch-tipping analysis often looks like paranoid pattern-matching, like Charlie Day’s Pepe Silvia red string board. There’s little from the center field cameras, at least, that makes it clear. Here’s Helsley’s setup on a fastball that Harrison Bader launched 109 mph to the pull side:
And here is the previous pitch, a slider. Do you see any difference in the setup? To me, there’s no there there.
Here they are right next to each other:
(Helsley changed his setup after this game for the rest of the season, bringing his hands down and holding the ball closer to his body. The results weren’t much better; as Helsley himself said in that interview, it’s hard to make an in-season adjustment.)
While the physical tipping evidence is ambiguous, the count-level predictability is pretty clear-cut. In a broad sense, Helsley maintained a roughly 50/50 usage of his slider and fastball, occasionally tossing in a curveball as a wrinkle. But looking at the overall usage patterns belies the predictability of his pitch selection.
In 0-0 counts, Helsley opted for the heater 57% of the time. In deep hitter counts (2-0, 3-1, and 3-0), that leapt to 75%. Heavy fastball usage in these contexts is somewhat excusable, but Helsley’s full count approach underlined his reliance on the heater in tight spots. Of the 50 pitches thrown in 3-2 counts, 37 (74%) were four-seamers. (Perhaps another reason Bader smashed that 3-2 heater into the stratosphere.)
A similar story could be told with the slider. Heavy slider use in two-strike counts is to be expected, but even in 1-1 counts, Helsley threw it 72 times in 99 opportunities. For a pitcher with essentially two pitches, this type of predictability is lethal, no matter the nastiness of the stuff.
If Helsley’s ineffectiveness comes down to pitch-tipping and count issues, the Orioles have good reason to be confident in a bounce back. But if his stuff is starting to decline, they may have a problem on their hands.
Is there evidence this is the case? If you squint, maybe. Helsley broke out in 2022 with a superhuman 39.3% strikeout rate while tag-teaming the closer role with Giovanny Gallegos. The breakout was fueled by a massive velocity jump — from 2021 to 2022, Helsley’s fastball gained over two ticks, jumping to an average of 99.6 mph. In 2025, that dropped all the way down to… 99.3 mph.
The case for Helsley’s fastball losing its juice, then, would need to be about something other than velocity decline. Here, there is a bit more to latch onto. In that 2022 season, Helsley’s average arm angle on his four-seamer was around 52 degrees. By 2025, that had climbed all the way to 62 degrees with no concurrent improvement to the pitch’s vertical movement.
A fastball’s effectiveness can be largely explained by its vertical movement relative to its release point; more movement from a lower release or lower arm angle makes it tougher for a hitter to pick up. Because the excellent induced vertical break (18 inches) on Helsley’s fastball now comes from a more “vertical” arm angle, it doesn’t have the same deceptive qualities. Once near the top of the scale in terms of Alex Chamberlain’s dynamic dead zone measurements, his fastball has declined to merely “very good.” If Helsley needs to keep hiking his arm angle up each year to maintain the same level of induced vertical break, that could start to look like a concern.
As it stands, this seems to be more of a minor concern than a red flag. The stuff models on FanGraphs — Stuff+ and PitchingBot — both still consider Helsley’s fastball to be a well above-average pitch, even if they agree that the quality has declined slightly from 2022 or 2023. He’s sitting 99 mph, after all — even with poor shape, a four-seamer with that velocity should still play.
Overall, I’m inclined to say that both sides found a good deal here. The reliever market is the first of any position group to take shape in this early offseason, with both Phil Maton and Raisel Iglesias inking deals prior to Helsley. Iglesias is older, but received $16 million for a single year’s work; Maton, a solid middle reliever, got two years and $14.5 million. If this is the range for the second-tier relievers, and if the three top guys — Edwin Díaz, Devin Williams, and Robert Suarez — are in line for a good chunk more, Helsley’s signing starts to look pretty reasonable for the Orioles, especially because he is only one year removed from being in that elite group. For Helsley, it’s another shot at ninth-inning duty, with a chance to hit the market again next offseason, assuming all goes well.
From 2022-2024, Helsley ranked fourth among all relievers in FIP. His stuff is essentially the same as it was during that run. Assuming he sorts out the tipping issues and gets a little less predictable in certain count contexts, the Orioles just signed a high-end closer at an eminently reasonable price – even if it only proves to be for one year.
So I had this brilliant theory. My brilliant theory was that Elly De La Cruz wasn’t as bad a defender as the numbers would have us think. De La Cruz finished the 2025 season with 11 fielding errors, the second most in baseball, and 15 throwing errors, also the second most in baseball. Put those two together and you get 26 total errors, the most in baseball. I thought those totals might be shortchanging De La Cruz a bit. My brilliant theory was wrong, but before I get to why, let me explain my thinking.
We should start with the fact the advanced numbers do not say that De La Cruz is a bad shortstop. He makes up for most of his errors with length, speed, and the Mega Man cannon where his right arm should be. Statcast’s FRV loved De La Cruz’s defense in 2024, and it pegged him as perfectly average as he battled through a quad strain in 2025. Baseball Prospectus’ DRP, which tends to skew more conservative than the other advanced metrics, had him at 0.8 runs in 2024 and -0.4 runs in 2025. Sports Info Solutions’ DRS has always liked De La Cruz’s defense the least, pegging him at -2 in 2024 and -5 in 2025. So it’s not as if De La Cruz is grading out as a catastrophe. I just thought he deserved even more credit, and with that credit, we might have started seeing him as an above-average shortstop rather than a good-enough shortstop. Read the rest of this entry »
The Boston Red Sox made a pre-Thanksgiving trade on Tuesday, acquiring Sonny Gray from the St. Louis Cardinals in exchange for 25-year-old right-hander Richard Fitts and hard-throwing prospect Brandon Clarke. How well the deal works out for Craig Breslow’s club is anyone’s guess — my colleague Michael Baumann wrote that he couldn’t “declare this trade to be a robbery in either direction” — but the 36-year-old righty does have a track record of reliability. Gray has graced a big-league mound 92 times over the past three seasons, gobbling up 531 innings and posting a 3.63 ERA as well as a 3.11 FIP. If he can continue to fend off Father Time a while longer, the erstwhile Vanderbilt Commodore will add value to the Red Sox starting rotation.
A Vandy product Boston brought on board as a free agent last winter came to mind when the trade was announced. That would be Walker Buehler, who despite high hopes ultimately proved to be a bust. Unable to return to old form, the veteran righty struggled to a 5.45 ERA over 112-and-a-third innings and was cut loose by the Red Sox in late August.
There are clear differences between the two pitchers — their respective health histories particularly stand out — but they nonetheless have things in common. One is a diverse repertoire. Another is a lack of high-octane heaters.
Buehler was in the 43rd percentile for fastball velocity in 2025, while Gray was in just the 16th percentile. As Baumann pointed out, the latter “has started leaking fastball velocity… [but has] compensated by leaning into a cutter and changeup, making him a legit six-pitch pitcher since 2023.” Meanwhile, the 31-year-old Buehler leaned heavily on a six-pitch mix while compensating for the velocity he lost following Tommy John surgery in 2022. Read the rest of this entry »
The stove was already hot the week before Thanksgiving. But on Wednesday evening, the Toronto Blue Jays threw some logs on the fire and aimed a leaf blower at the damn thing, and now the proverbial stove is hot enough to melt soda cans into aluminum ingots.
Dylan Cease has signed with the reigning AL champions, and for what they offered him — $210 million over seven years — you’d be packing your bags for Canada, too. Looks like someone can shell out for the fancy cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving. Read the rest of this entry »
During an introductory press conference for outfielder Brandon Nimmo this week, Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young somehow expressed both confidence and uncertainty about his newest acquisition. Nimmo, he said, would handle right field for the Rangers in 2026, though he didn’t sound too sure about it.
“We’re not 100 percent committed to [Nimmo in right],” Young told reporters on Monday. “I think it’s likely where he’ll play, but [those are] conversations that we’ll have with Brandon, with [manager] Skip [Schumaker] and with Wyatt [Langford], and really making sure that we understand all aspects of this and where they’re most comfortable. I do think we have three very good, talented, very talented outfielders. At the outset, I think it’s likely Brandon plays right, but I think that’s a further conversation.”
There are a number of considerations here. Nimmo, at this phase of his career, is almost certainly best in left field. His knees are jacked up; his arm is noodle-adjacent. Evan Carter nominally profiles as a center fielder, but injuries have kept him off the field for much of the last two seasons; it’s possible a corner could be the best way to ensure his availability. Langford’s known right field experience is limited to a single game for the 2022 Peninsula Pilots of the collegiate summer Coastal Plain League.
In my view, there’s only one way to sort this mess out: Commit to playing Langford in center. Read the rest of this entry »
Connelly Early emerged as one of the top pitching prospects in the Boston Red Sox organization this season. The 23-year-old left-hander logged a 2.60 ERA and a 2.74 FIP over 101 1/3 minor league innings, then allowed just five runs over 19 1/3 innings following a September call-up. His first two major league outings — he made four regular season starts in all — were especially impressive. Facing the Athletics on each occasion, Early worked a combined 10 1/3 frames, surrendering a lone run, issuing one free pass and fanning 18 batters.
Jacob Wilson had some noteworthy at-bats against the young southpaw. The A’s shortstop went 2-for-5 against him, singling twice (one of them an infield hit), and also striking out twice. The strikeouts stand out when you consider Wilson’s profile. The second-place finisher in this year’s American League Rookie of the Year race recorded a 7.5% strikeout rate, the lowest among qualified hitters not named Luis Arraez.
The number of pitches he saw from Early (28) and how they were sequenced is what prompted me to put together the article you are currently reading. Between the two games, Early threw Wilson seven curveballs, seven changeups, five sinkers, four sliders, and four four-seamers. And with the exception of back-to-back curveballs in their first matchup, Early didn’t double up on a pitch. That especially caught my eye the fourth time they faced each other when Wilson went down swinging to end a nine-pitch at-bat.
The day after the Early and Wilson battled for a second time, I approached both to ask what they’d seen from each other. As they wouldn’t be matching up again in 2025, asking them for their scouting reports on one another seemed fair game for discussion.
