Sportswriters are a miserable bunch. We slog through box scores and transcripts of quotes from practice and write about games that will be forgotten in hours. Then Hunter Brown falls out of the sky.

The Astros’ new starting pitcher not only has a windup like Justin Verlander’s, he grew up outside of Detroit and idolized Verlander as a kid! Can you believe it? That’s a human interest story fit to make J. Jonah Jameson spit out his stogie and forget all about those pictures of Spider-Man.

Even their repertoires look similar: An upper-90s four-seamer thrown about half the time, accompanied by a slider and a curveball. It’s the meat-and-two-sides combo you’ll find at most barbecue joints. There are differences, of course. Verlander throws his slider more than his curve, while Brown is the opposite. Brown also throws everything harder than Verlander does; his secondaries clock in about 6 mph faster than the three-time Cy Young winner’s.

Regardless, people look at Brown and say the baseball equivalent of “he has his mother’s eyes.” So why does Brown perform more like Framber Valdez? Read the rest of this entry »

Vinnie Pasquantino is fast developing a reputation as a media-friendly player who can be counted on to provide fun quips on a variety subjects, both in print and on podcasts. Entertaining and engaging, the 25-year-old first baseman is already a fan favorite in Kansas City despite having not debuted until midway through the 2022 season. And he can swing the bat, too. The 2019 11th-round pick out of Old Dominion University began his big league career by slashing a robust .295/.383/.450 with a 137 wRC+ and 10 home runs in 298 plate appearances. Our lead prospect analyst is among those who weren’t surprised. Addressing his left-handed stroke last May, Eric Longenhagen wrote that “There are missile defense systems with less precise tracking ability than Pasquantino, who… is on time with remarkable consistency.”

Pasquantino talked hitting a few months into his rookie campaign with the Royals.

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David Laurila: What do you know about hitting now that you didn’t know when you entered pro ball?

Vinnie Pasquantino: “More of the advanced stuff. Looking at data. I was never really familiar with data on pitches before — what vert means, what horizontal spin means, what attack angle means. Things that guys would talk about, like, ‘This guy throws a heavy ball’ or ‘It’s a firm 90.’ Now I have a better understanding of what that all means. That’s probably the biggest thing, just understanding all the data we’re given and how to use it on the field.” Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s play some word association. I’m going to name someone, and I want you to say the first two words that come to mind. Okay, I’m ready: Richard Bleier. Did “middle reliever” jump to the fore? You’re exactly right; Bleier spent 2022 chipping in mid-quality work in the middle innings for the Marlins. One more: Matt Barnes. Did you say “middle reliever” this time? If not, maybe it was “ex-closer.” Barnes was a roller coaster ride of a closer right until he wasn’t, and he spent 2022 pitching anywhere from the sixth to ninth inning depending on need, at least when he wasn’t on the IL.

This year, I can guarantee you that those two won’t be reprising their roles. On Monday, the Red Sox and Marlins swapped their relievers in a one-for-one trade. It’s not even a contract-based swap; both players are under contract for 2023 with a team option for 2024, and the Red Sox sent $5 million to Miami to even out the payroll expenditure on the deal. It’s simpler than that: I want your reliever, and you can take mine. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 7, 1996, Scott Rolen’s journey to the Hall of Fame took a painful, but perhaps ultimately fortuitous twist. That afternoon, the Phillies played the Cubs at Veterans Stadium. Rolen had recorded his 130th at-bat of the year in the bottom of the first: With the bases loaded and one out, he struck out on four pitches against Steve Trachsel. Two innings later, Rolen came up for what was supposed to be at-bat no. 131. Instead, Trachsel hit him in the forearm with a pitch, breaking the ulna in Rolen’s right forearm.

The 21-year-old Rolen took his base, then tried to gut it out in the field in the top of the fourth. He lasted three batters, then could continue no longer. Jim Fregosi pulled Rolen and replaced him with Kevin Sefcik, one of the dozens of interchangeable Kevins who filled out the rosters of the mid-90s Phillies. Rolen took no further part in the 1996 season.

The following year, Rolen played 156 games, hit .283/.377/.469 with 21 home runs and 16 stolen bases, and cakewalked to a unanimous victory in the NL Rookie of the Year race. It was Rolen’s first piece of individual hardware, and one that would not have been possible had Trachsel not plunked him the previous September. Read the rest of this entry »

At this point in the offseason, the micro-level events that will shape the 2023 baseball season have almost all been settled. Aside from the odd trade, teams have largely set their rosters. Injuries, unexpected performances, and trades will start to affect individual fortunes when games begin, but we’re at a local lull.

But there’s big news afoot for the game in a macro sense. Diamond Sports Group, the company that owns Bally Sports Network and thus the rights to 14 teams’ local broadcasts (plus minority stakes in two team-owned broadcasts)*, is careening towards bankruptcy. Per Bloomberg, the actual bankruptcy declaration is merely a formality: the firm will reportedly skip an interest payment due in February, triggering a restructuring that will wipe out the firm’s existing equity and convert all but the most senior debt into equity stakes in the new company, leaving its current creditors in charge.

That’s a shocking turn of events for a media group that sold for more than $10 billion in 2019. Heck, it’s a shocking turn of events for a company that made more than $2 billion in revenues in the first nine months of 2022, and more than $3 billion in 2021. It might also affect long-term cashflows for every team in the league; after all, local broadcast rights are a key piece of the revenue pie, and broadcast rights have exploded along with MLB revenues in the past decade.

How could this have happened? Which teams will be impacted, and what will that impact be? How will the league adapt to the new media landscape brought on by this bankruptcy and any subsequent dominos that fall as a result? I don’t have the answer to all of those questions, but I’ll walk through each in turn before speculating about what might happen next. Read the rest of this entry »

Who was better, Joe Mauer or Chase Utley? I asked that question in a Twitter poll earlier this week and the result was… well, lopsided. The erstwhile Minnesota Twins catcher/first baseman garnered 79.5% of the 1,362 votes cast, while the former Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers second baseman received just 20.5%. With both debuting on next year’s Hall of Fame ballot — one that will include numerous notable holdovers — that breakdown could be telling. While it seems unlikely that Utley will join the likes of Bobby Grich and Lou Whitaker as a one-and-done snub, might he poll just as poorly, or even worse, with BBWAA voters as he did in the head-to-head matchup with Mauer?

Utley finished his career with 61.6 fWAR and 64.5 bWAR.
Mauer finished his career with 53.0 fWAR and 55.2 bWAR.

Adrián Beltré, who will also debut on the ballot, is a shoo-in to be elected in his first year of eligibility. It is much for that reason that the Mauer-Utley comparison is meaningful — at least for the segment of voters that includes yours truly. Eight of the 10 candidates I voted for this year will be returning, and Beltré is a no-brainer. That leaves one open slot. Moreover, I’m not alone in this conundrum. A total of 54 voters put checkmarks next to 10 names, with eight ballots being identical to mine. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Tampa Bay Rays. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third 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 I 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 »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Until the moment Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch beamed at the cameras on Tuesday evening and said, “Tonight we are pleased to announce the addition…” most of us expected to hear that the BBWAA voters had pitched their second shutout in three years. Happily we were wrong, and Scott Rolen beat the odds. While many of us certainly would have preferred him to have company in reaching the 75% threshold instead of becoming the second one-man class in as many years, the election of one candidate is far better than none. Particularly given the shortage of third basemen in the Hall, the institution will be a better place with one of the hot corner’s best enshrined.

As for the other 27 men on this year’s ballot, the voting results have left us plenty to digest, so as promised, here’s my candidate-by-candidate breakdown of the entire slate. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I wrote up a side project I’ve been working on recently: looking through exit velocity distributions to find interesting hitters. You can read that if you’d like (obviously, that’s how the internet works), but as a refresher, I looked through 2022 batted ball data for hitters whose 95th-percentile exit velocity was high but whose average exit velocity was low, as well as hitters who hit the ball hard consistently but didn’t have the results to show for it.

With a little more time to monkey around with the data, I’ve come to a few conclusions about this line of analysis. If you just want to read the article for those conclusions, no sweat: just search for the words “phenomenal cosmic power.” It’s been too long since I’ve used an Aladdin reference in an article, so I promise to shoehorn that one in somehow just before I explain my conclusions.

Okay, great, now that we’ve dispensed with the casuals, let’s talk through a bunch of procedure. You nerds (I say this with affection) love the procedure, I know. First things first: I took Baseball Savant data for all batted balls and grouped them by player and season. I skipped 2020 due to sample size issues and last season because we don’t have subsequent-year data. That left me with approximately 3,000 player-seasons of at least 50 batted balls. Read the rest of this entry »

Insofar as I’ve given thought to who my favorite manager of all time is, my favorite manager of all time is Earl Weaver. He exemplified the ideal shouting, dirt-kicking, umpire-haranguing baseball boss; every image and video of a red-faced Weaver screaming up at an umpire a foot taller than him is a blessing upon our society. But the man was legitimately a tactical mastermind; if baseball could be influenced by coaches the way other sports can, we’d talk about Weaver the way soccer people talk about Rinus Michels.

A lot of “great managers” really just manage a lot. Weaver, despite his hyperactive and combative personality, knew to keep his hands off his offense and let the multiple future Hall of Famers on his roster cook. Weaver’s overall recipe for success usually gets cited as “pitching, defense, and three-run homers” or something similar.

Take it from the man himself, in a (mock) radio interview for a Manager’s Corner segment with Tom Marr in 1982:

Marr: Bill Whitehouse…from Frederick, Maryland, wants to know why you and the Orioles don’t go out and get some more team speed.

Weaver: Team speed! For Christ’s sake, you get [expletive] [expletive] little fleas on the [expletive] bases gettin’ picked off, tryin’ to steal, gettin’ thrown out, takin’ runs away from you. Get them big [expletive] who can hit the [expletive] ball out the ballpark and you can’t make any [expletive] mistakes.

Marr: Well, certainly this show is gonna go down in history, Earl!

Read the rest of this entry »