Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The parenthetical part of the title is largely just a nod to Zach Lowe, whose ESPN basketball column inspired this one. He occasionally mentions flaws or foibles holding a particular team or player back, in lovingly GIF’ed up detail. I’m more of a rah-rah type, and plenty of weeks I don’t have a single Didn’t Like in the column at all. This week, though, I can’t help it; mental lapses, baserunning errors, and overall sloppiness are all over the column. That’s not to say I don’t love watching it, because part of what’s fun about baseball is when a theoretically staid game gets messy, but let’s be clear: A lot of these plays are not good plays. We’ve got superstars getting confused, on-field collisions, and absolute howlers. Let’s get started.

1. The Profligate Nationals
The Nats are one of the unheralded fun stories of the baseball season. They’re hanging around .500 and playing like better days are ahead. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore look like franchise mainstays. James Wood, another part of the return from the Juan Soto trade, isn’t far off. Mitchell Parker and Jake Irvin might be mid-rotation starters. Jacob Young is an elite defender. They have plenty of interesting role players, and the whole team plays with reckless and joyful abandon.

That’s particularly true on the basepaths, where the Nats rank third in steals but only 11th in total baserunning value. They’re always angling for how to advance another base, whatever the costs. Sometimes that ends in tears. Read the rest of this entry »

By June of 2013, Baltimore’s beat writers had established their favorite in-season stat to track: Manny Machado’s rapidly rising doubles count.

Machado was in the midst of his first full season in the majors and on pace to make a run for the single-season doubles record. He finished the season with 51 (a several-way tie for 51st all-time), but in the moment, he represented a rookie with sky high potential, standing in the shadow of a mountain representing his own potential peak.

As he dumped double after double into the outfield, Orioles broadcasters noted for fans that the 20-year-old Machado was still developing physically, so his power tool was poised to level up as his career progressed, and when it did, some portion of those 51 two-baggers would convert to round-trippers. The Doubles to Dingers developmental arc is a real phenomenon. After hitting a double once every 14 plate appearances and a home run once every 50 in 2013, Machado followed up that performance in ’14 by doubling just once every 25 PA while upping his homer rate to once every 30. More recently, the current Baltimore broadcast booth has applied the Doubles to Dingers arc to Gunnar Henderson, another promising second-year player on the left side of the Orioles’ infield. However, as Henderson has increased his home run rate in his second full season by over 50%, his doubles rate has held steady, suggesting he’s leveled up his hit tool alongside the power surge, which doesn’t quite fit this narrative arc.

So which players have best exemplified the Double to Dingers storyline, and how did their stories play out afterward? We don’t need to rely on broadcasters, who have a tendency to fuel fan optimism, because this is extremely quantifiable. To identify players on this path, I started the search in 1988 and looked only at players who at the time had three or fewer seasons of at least 100 PA in the majors. I compared their ratio of dingers to doubles during the season in question to their career ratio for all seasons prior. Only samples of at least 300 PA were considered when calculating the ratio. Players also needed to be hitting doubles in at least 4% of their PAs prior to unlocking the next level of power, and after leveling up, their new homer rate should settle in above 2% of PAs (thresholds chosen are round numbers at or just below league average because this really only matters for hitters producing at a baseline level of competency in both key categories). To further ensure that the change in their dingers-to-doubles ratio is caused by a somewhat proportional change to the frequency of both doubles and dingers, their homer rate needed to increase by at least half a percent; likewise, their doubles rate must have decreased by at least half a percent. Read the rest of this entry »

This week marks the halfway point of the 2024 regular season. We’re out of silly sample size season now, having moved on to wondering which teams will add at the deadline and which will start building for tomorrow. Season-long leaderboards are populated with the best players in the league, just like you’d expert. The White Sox and Rockies are awful; the Yankees and Dodgers are great. Plenty of this season has gone according to plan.

Not everything has, though. The Blue Jays and Cubs didn’t get off to the starts they hoped for. On the other side of the coin, the Phillies and Guardians have both exceeded expectations by a mile. Perhaps not coincidentally, both teams have gotten superb performances from their relief corps all season. It’s largely the usual suspects: Emmanuel Clase is one of the best closers of the decade, while the Phillies had the best bullpen projection in the sport coming into the season. But it’s not exclusively the usual suspects. Case in point, or perhaps I should say Cade in point: Cade Smith.

If you’re not a Guardians fan, you might not know who Cade Smith is, and I can hardly blame you. He made his major league debut this season after a solid 2023 campaign during which he compiled a 4.02 ERA (3.42 FIP) and struck out 35% of opposing batters. He struggled to control his walks and Triple-A hitters touched him up for six homers (20% HR/FB), but all told, it was a good year. He broke camp with the big league team; those same power rankings that liked the Phillies so much had Smith down for 61 innings of work as a middle reliever. Read the rest of this entry »

The two of us were part of the FanGraphs contingent in Phoenix for the 2024 MLB Draft Combine last week. The first half of the week consisted of showcase events like batting practice, infield and outfield drills, and a game featuring many of the high schoolers in attendance. The back half of the week consisted of athletic and biometric testing, including the 30-yard dash.

Below are scouting notes for some of our favorite hitters from the event. Major League Baseball distributes a list of the top performers in several of the athletic tests to the media, but doesn’t share complete data. Eric recorded the electronic 30-yard times by hand as they unfolded; at the very bottom of the post is a complete list of those times, save for the couple he missed while he was schmoozing, eating, etc. (Update: Arnold Abernathy’s time has been added) We’ll have a post highlighting Combine pitchers, as well as a draft ranking update, to follow. The players aren’t listed in any particular order; our initials appear at the end of the blurbs we wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

As of this writing, Mason Miller leads all relief pitchers in K% and K-BB%. You’ve heard of him. He’s one of this season’s breakout stars. He’s so good, he’s convinced people who should know better that years of team control for a relief pitcher ought to be worth a lot in the trade market. High praise, indeed.

No. 2 is Jeremiah Estrada, a small (6-foot-1) right-hander whom the Padres plucked off the waiver wire last November. In his previous MLB experience — 16 1/3 innings over parts of two seasons with the Cubs — Estrada struck out 21 batters and walked 15 while allowing 10 earned runs, including five home runs. This year, Estrada has 48 strikeouts against 10 walks in 26 1/3 innings. His 43.6 K% is not only second in the league this year, it would be one of the 20 best all-time if he keeps it up for the rest of the season.

It’s like he’s not the same pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

JJ Wetherholt is in an unusual position. A third-year finance student at West Virginia University with an interest in math who once considered going to law school, Wetherholt is leaving college early, and says his parents couldn’t be more proud.

As prestigious and lucrative as a career in law or finance can be, neither holds a candle to professional baseball, and Wetherholt is one of the leading candidates for the top pick in this year’s draft.

In addition to academic All-Big 12 and All-American honors, Wetherholt hit .373/.471/.632 with 29 homers, 56 stolen bases, and more walks than strikeouts in 143 career college games. A compact, sinewy 5-foot-10, 190-pound second baseman with great bat speed from an open, left-handed stance, he’s a lock to become WVU’s highest draft pick ever. (The record is currently 11th overall, shared by Alek Manoah in 2019 and right-hander Chris Enochs in 1997.) Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Schneemann’s claim to fame is having played six positions in his first six MLB games — reportedly no player had done so in over 100 years — but a peculiar versatility record hasn’t been the 27-year-old infielder/outfielder’s only noteworthy accomplishment since he debuted on June 2nd. A surprise contributor to a surprisingly-stellar Cleveland Guardians club, Schneemann has slashed .297/.422/.568 with two home runs and a 182 wRC+ over 45 plate appearances.

To say that the Brigham Young University product has come out of nowhere may not be wholly accurate, but at the same time, he kind of has. A 33rd-round pick in the 2018 draft, Schneemann was an unranked prospect throughout his seven minor league seasons, and his numbers — at least prior to this year’s .294/.428/.556 with 10 home runs in Triple-A — were never anything to write home about.

Intrigued by his transformative emergence, I asked the San Diego native about the adjustments he’s made to get to where he is now.

“They were gradual,” Schneemann told me earlier this week prior to a game at Cleveland’s Progressive Field. “I started making the ones that are important to me in the offseason after 2022. I had some success in 2023 (a 102 wRC+ and 13 home runs at Triple-A Columbus), and built off of those adjustments prior to this season. I’ve seen better results this year, as well.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. I’m not sure if this is by design or simply a scheduling coincidence, but this week was full of compelling matchups between current rivals. The Cubs and Cardinals squared off. So did the Yankees and Orioles. The Guardians and Mariners aren’t exactly rivals, but their series rocked too, and I’m sad I couldn’t find a way to squeeze them in this week. That said, there’s a ton to talk about, so let’s get to it, after our usual nod to Zach Lowe of ESPN, who is surely enjoying a well-deserved vacation after the conclusion of the NBA season. To baseball!
Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »