We went over this just a couple of weeks ago: between Kyle Schwarber, Nick Castellanos, Rhys Hoskins, and Alec Bohm, the Phillies have no shortage of defensively challenged players who might be better served as the team’s designated hitter, and luckily for them, the DH is now a permanent thing in the National League. The team’s plan at the outset of the season was to use its two new free agent sluggers, Castellanos and Schwarber, to occupy that role while minimizing their exposure in the field, yet for almost two weeks now, the position has been occupied by Bryce Harper. The reigning NL MVP was supposed to be the team’s starting right fielder, but an elbow injury has led to him shelving his glove for the moment — and it’s coincided with him heating up after a slow start.

Harper started eight of the team’s first nine games in right field, but he hasn’t played the position since April 16. Instead, he’s remained in the lineup as the team’s DH for 12 straight games. He apparently injured the elbow while making a throw to home plate on an RBI single by the Mets’ Francisco Lindor on April 11:

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Jeff McNeil has been pretty good so far this year. He’s hitting .328/.388/.492, good for a 163 wRC+. He’s starting all over the field, making the Mets’ complicated lineup decisions easier. That’s great! That’s all good. Today, though, I’m more interested in the fact that he’s displaying strike zone judgment usually reserved for Juan Soto, Joey Votto, and God.

McNeil has always been one of the most aggressive hitters in baseball. That hasn’t changed this year. Here are the hitters who swing the most at pitches in the strike zone:

This is not news. From 2018-21, his career prior to this year, McNeil led baseball in zone swing rate. This year, he leads baseball in zone swing rate. He is continuing to do what he’s always done! More at 11.

But wait, there is more. You know how these swing-happy types work. Take a look at the list again. García has a career 6.3% walk rate and it’s heading lower this year. Anderson has a career 3.5% walk rate. Mountcastle hardly walks for a slugger. Seager – well, okay, Seager is just great. But swinging a lot at pitches in the strike zone also generally means swinging a lot at pitches outside of the strike zone.

Indeed, García and Anderson are the two hitters chasing the most pitches outside the zone. Mountcastle is in the top 15. Seager – yeah, still great. But McNeil is nowhere near that! He’s chasing only 29.1% of pitches outside the zone, a lower rate than the league as a whole and by far a career low. His in-zone swing rate, by the way, is a career high. Did Jeff McNeil crack the code? Read the rest of this entry »

During the past two years, we here at FanGraphs have spent a good bit of time staring into the abyss in contemplation. Specifically, we’ve wondered about a world without Mike Trout, or at least a world where he’s no longer the game’s top player. Who will inherit the mantle of this generation’s Mantle? What would our lowered expectations for Trout look like? What are the chances that in his age-30 season, he’s a bust? What would the playoff races look like without him?

Alas, we got an all-too-real demonstration of that last question just weeks after Dan Szymborski posed it last April, as Trout was limited to 36 games due to a right calf strain that he sustained on May 17. The strain, which occurred as he ran the bases on an inconsequential two-out popup, was supposed to sideline him for six to eight weeks, already the longest absence of his career. It turned out to be worse than expected; he never got comfortable enough in his recovery to begin a rehab assignment, and didn’t return to action before season’s end. Thankfully, he’s back now, and while he may not be better than ever, what his ridiculous stat line — .365/.476/.808 for a 270 wRC+, with all of those numbers major-league bests save for the batting average — presupposes is… maybe he is?

If Trout is on the precipice of age-related decline, it hasn’t come yet. After starting the year just 3-for-15, he’s put together a 10-game hitting streak, during which he’s putting up cheat-code numbers (.432/.523/.946). The streak went on ice for a few days when he was hit on the left hand by an 81 mph slider from the Rangers’ Spencer Patton on April 17; I don’t know about you, but I can’t watch the clip without the urge to yell, “Move, Mike!” when he reflexively pulls his hands down towards his waist and puts them in harm’s way. Thankfully, x-rays were negative, and while he missed three games, he’s kicked things up a notch since returning, with multi-hit efforts in four of his last six games, and seven of the 11 hits within going for extra bases. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in my day — the mid-2000s — baseball was a simpler game. Batters socked dingers, with or without the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Teams batted slap hitters second, fast hitters first, and aging sluggers third. Catchers were valued by their bat and their throwing arm, none of this framing nonsense. And pitchers? Pitchers helped everybody out by throwing fastballs all the time, particularly on the first pitch. Seriously, take a look at this graph:

Year after year, pitchers have examined the mix of pitches they throw to lead off at-bats and decided to lop a few fastballs off the top. It’s not quite monotonically decreasing; there have been tiny upticks in a few years, and 2008 was lower, potentially due to classification issues in the first year of data. But this is as close as a trend can get to slapping you in the face.

The first pitch of an at-bat isn’t always the most important one — in a 3–2 count, one borderline pitch can be the difference between a baserunner and an out — but the difference between a 1–0 count and an 0–1 count is huge. That’s why pitchers have historically leaned on fastballs, which are easier to control; throwing a pitch outside the zone is a sure way to end up behind in the count.
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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second 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.

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

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

This is a story about persistence. I thought I had an interesting way of looking at the marked decline in scoring this year so far; as it turns out, I was wrong. A further investigation, however, revealed that another possible culprit was right around the corner. Does it explain the entire decline in offense? Most certainly not. But I’m interested nonetheless, and I hope you will be too.

If you’ve followed baseball in the past five years, you’re probably used to asking questions about league-wide offense early in the season. Major League Baseball has done itself no favors here; the composition of the baseball keeps changing, and home run rates fluctuate wildly as a result. The same is true this year: despite the adoption of a universal DH, offense is down across the board.

The usual suspects are certainly part of the problem. Pitchers keep throwing harder. Putting a humidor in every stadium affects home run rates in unpredictable ways and might suppress home run rates early in the season. The league used two different baseballs last year, and drag coefficient is up this year. Starters are going fewer and fewer innings, giving batters fewer looks at them a third time through the order.

I think that all of those things have something to do with bad offense. But I thought of another potential cause, one I could investigate without learning fluid dynamics. One of the side bargains between the league and the MLBPA after this offseason’s lockout was for expanded rosters early in the season. Teams are allowed to roster 28 players throughout the month of April. On May 30, that number will revert to the standard 26 — this deadline was recently pushed back from May 1. In addition, teams can carry any number of pitchers on their roster until May 1. After that, they’ll be limited to 14, and 13 after May 29.
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On Sunday afternoon, Byron Buxton demolished a fastball from one of the game’s best pitchers, sending it where balls rarely go at Minneapolis’ Target Field. See for yourself:

That was the longest walk-off homer in the Statcast era, at 469 feet, and the ninth-longest home run in the history of Target Field. Impressive as that swing was, it didn’t come in isolation. It’s worth taking a closer look at the 10th inning to get a better idea of how Buxton ended up turning around a 96-mph fastball, and how this result has been happening more often for the burgeoning superstar. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Cabrera had to wait a couple of extra days to make history, thanks to a hitless afternoon capped by a controversial managerial decision and then a rainout. Nonetheless, on Saturday afternoon he collected his 3,000th career hit with a single off the Rockies’ Antonio Senzatela. In doing so, he joined some elite company as not only the 33rd player to reach 3,000 hits, but also the seventh to do so as a member of the 500-homer club and the third to reach both of those round numbers with a career batting average of .300 or better. The other two? Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. You may have heard of them, and even if you don’t put much stock in batting average, you have to admit that’s about as cool as company gets.

What’s more, Cabrera actually owns the highest batting average and on-base percentage of the seven players who have both milestones, with a wRC+ that trails only Mays and Aaron:

For all of his struggles over the past half-decade, Cabrera would still have to go 0-for-352 to drop his batting average to .299. Even with those struggles and his lack of defensive value (he’s 102 runs below average in terms of Defensive Runs Saved, inlcluding 11 below in just 847.1 innings at first base since 2018), he ranks 11th in JAWS among first basemen (68.8/44.8/56.8), in no danger of slipping below Palmeiro (13th at 71.9/38.9/55.4) or Murray (16th at 68.7/39.2/53.9). And while he may be the last to reach 3,000 hits for some time given the dearth of candidates (Dan Szymborski put Jose Altuve, who has 1,783 hits, at 34% and Freddie Freeman, who has 1,723 hits, at 28% last September), he’s hardly the least. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Gammons didn’t invent the Sunday notes column, but few would dispute that he perfected it. The 77-year-old sportswriter-turned-TV-analyst did so at The Boston Globe, where he began a career that has seen him become the world’s most-influential baseball columnist. To say that Gammons has been an influence on the column you are currently reading would be an understatement.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Gammons for years, yet had never asked him about the genesis of his own Sunday column. Chatting with him at Fenway Park earlier this week, I decided to change that.

“I loved the notion of the notes column, and how Dick Young used it,” Gammons said of the late New York-based sportswriter. “I always thought there should be one for every sport. Bob Ryan and I talked about it when we were both interns, in 1968. I’ve always loved the minor leagues, and in 1970 — 1969 was my first full year with the Globe —I asked, ‘Can I write a notes column on the minor leagues?’ The Globe people said fine. This was for the Sunday paper.”

Gammons recalled writing about Bob Montgomery, who came up through the Boston system before catching for them for 10 big-league seasons. (Later a TV analyst on Red Sox games, Montgomery has the distinction of being the last player for any team to come to the plate without a batting helmet.)

In typical Gammons fashion, the other player he mentioned having covered in his nascent notes days was equal parts obscure and interesting. Calling him “a minor league legend as a hitter,” and citing his .300 big-league batting average, Gammons name-checked Chris Coletta. Read the rest of this entry »

By his own definition, Max Scherzer had a shot at a no-hitter. In the nightcap of Tuesday’s doubleheader against the Giants at Citi Field, in his first home start since signing with the Mets, he held San Francisco hitless for 5.2 innings before Darin Ruf lined a single to left field, ending the 37-year-old righty’s quest for his third career no-no. “My rule of thumb is when you get one time through the order, you got something going. You get two times through the order, you got a shot,” said Scherzer afterwards. He had turned the lineup over for the second time earlier in that inning; Ruf was the 21st batter he faced.

Scherzer wasn’t the only pitcher to make a run at a no-hitter this week. In the span of just over 24 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, five starters made it through at least five innings without yielding a hit. Just hours after Scherzer’s effort, the Braves’ Max Fried retired the first 15 hitters he faced at Dodger Stadium before Hanser Alberto lined a single to right field. The next day, the Brewers’ Brandon Woodruff, the Dodgers’ Tony Gonsolin, and the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani all found the holes in opponents’ bats. While none of them made it as far as the nail-biting time in the eighth or ninth innings, the conditions appear primed for the 2022 season to pick up where last year — a season that featured a record nine no-hitters — left off.

Through the first two weeks of the season, starters have taken no-hitters into the sixth inning 10 times:

Even before the controversy involving Kershaw — who became just the second pitcher pulled from a perfect game in the seventh inning or later — and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, Padres manager Bob Melvin pulled starters with no-hitters in progress in back-to-back games. What’s more, they were his first two regular-season contests with his new team! Like Roberts, Melvin made his moves in light of the fact that his starters hadn’t fully built up their pitch counts after shorter-than-normal spring trainings, and like Kershaw, both Darvish and Manaea publicly supported their manager’s decision. Read the rest of this entry »