Tanner Scott is 15 appearances into the season, and by extension 15 appearances into his four-year, $72 million Dodgers contract, and a lot of things are working as normal. He has a 2.40 ERA, almost exactly the same as the 2.31 he posted in a breakout campaign with Miami two years ago. He has a 2.93 FIP, just one hundredth of a run up from his mark last season. He has eight saves, which is commensurate with his role: Closer on a really good team.

But he hasn’t walked anyone. In 15 innings, having faced 54 batters, he hasn’t walked anyone. This falls into the most annoying April blog category of: “Please don’t mess with my premise before this article runs,” but as of this writing, Scott has thrown more innings than any pitcher in the league with zero walks. Only three pitchers with two or fewer walks on the year have thrown more innings than Scott.

That’s because he’s pounding the zone. Scott’s first-pitch strike rate is an astounding 85.2%, the highest number in baseball. That’s helped by a 45.1% chase rate, which is the highest mark in the league among pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. But Scott is also throwing in the zone a career-high 57.1% of the time, which is in the 87th percentile for pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 16, Jackson Holliday ended an 0-for-17 slump with a second-inning grand slam that put the Orioles up 4-0 in an eventual 9-1 win over the Guardians. But a commanding win wasn’t the only momentous occasion taking place at Camden Yards that evening — it was also Bark in the Park night. When asked in his post-game interview if there were any furry friends he’d like to shout out, he replied, “Oh yeah, Coconut’s here,” referring to the one year old Bernedoodle that Holliday and his wife added to their family during spring training last year. Coconut attended the game wearing Holliday’s jersey and acted as his good luck charm, though Holliday believes dogs beyond his own have the power to bring him positive vibes at the plate. “I have a good track record in the minor leagues of performing on Bark in the Park, so maybe we’ll have to have these more often,” Holliday continued. That is a claim simply begging to be fact-checked.

Over Holliday’s tenure in pro ball, he’s played in eight games where fans were encouraged to bring their pups to the park, five in the minors and three in the majors. In the minors, Holliday’s teams went 1-4, as he amassed 19 plate appearances with four walks, five strikeouts, two singles, two home runs, and four RBI. That’s good for a .266/.421/.666 slash line, which isn’t bad, but when you consider Holliday posted a .303/.443/.485 line in the minors, it’s really only impressive from a power perspective (Holliday’s slash line in big league Bark in the Park games is .222/.300/.500 with four RBI over 10 PA). Still, the home runs are clearly what stand out in Holliday’s mind, and given that he went deep just 23 times over 218 games in the minor leagues and is driving the ball over the fence even less frequently in the majors, it makes sense that those four-baggers would feature prominently in his memory. Especially since all three put his team in the lead.

Now, I will confess that I only checked Holliday’s home games for Bark in the Park events. As you’ll soon see, I did an absurd amount of manual data collection for this piece, but I drew the line at checking the theme nights for every minor league affiliate Holliday faced. Maybe he disappointed dog owners up and down the Mid-Atlantic as he posted monster numbers in opponent ballparks. We’ll never know. But Holliday’s assertion that he gets a leg up from the presence of his four-legged friends led to a broader research question. Are there other players who consistently outperform their typical production with all those good boys and girls in the building? Read the rest of this entry »

A certain joke has been making the rounds for a while now. It’s really simple. It goes, “Tommy Edman, power hitter? [Pause for laughter].” I made this joke myself during the Tokyo Series. If and when the joke is actually funny, it’s because Edman doesn’t have the traditional look or profile of a power hitter. That kind of incongruity makes a great premise both for jokes and for a startlingly high proportion of children’s movies. A switch-hitting, 5-foot-9 utility player who wants to be a power hitter is roughly as quirky as a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, a robot who wants to find love, or a snail who wants to be a race car driver.

Edman never reached double-digit home runs until he got to the majors, and he has still never hit more than 13 in a season. However, I think it’s time we changed our inflection. Tommy Edman is a power hitter, or at the very least, he’s half a power hitter. That might come as a surprise, even to those of us who have been rooting for him (and thinking of him as Cousin Tommy) ever since his debut in 2019.

All three of those home runs are from this year, and all three were hit harder than 108 mph. Edman’s eight homers this season are tied for sixth in baseball. He also ranks 27th among qualified players in slugging percentage (.514) and 16th in isolated slugging percentage (.271). However, it goes without saying that a hot start like this won’t last forever. Edman is hitting the ball hard, but his bat speed is still well below average. He’s succeeding by pulling tons of balls in the air, and while I would love to see him hold onto those gains like high-contact guys Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner before him, we’ll have to wait and see where things settle. For that reason, I don’t necessarily want to focus on this power surge. I want to think bigger. Read the rest of this entry »

It was June 2024, and Matt Bowman was in a tough spot. He was 33 years old and fresh off his third DFA in six weeks. In his one appearance as a Mariner, he recorded just two outs, gave up one run on one hit — a home run — and one walk. As a righty reliever on the wrong side of 30 with a 92-mph sinker, he was about as fringey as they come.

That day in Seattle could have been his last time on a big league mound. Instead, he tried something crazy. Once the owner of an unremarkable delivery, Bowman now throws from the most extreme horizontal release point in the sport. And it looks like it has saved his career. Read the rest of this entry »

Brooks Baldwin doesn’t profile as a future star, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a long and productive major league career. Versatility is a big reason why.
A poor man’s Ben Zobrist, the 24-year-old switch-hitter has played every defensive position besides first base, catcher, and pitcher since debuting with the Chicago White Sox last summer. It may be only a matter of time before those three are added to his résumé. Counting his days as a North Carolina prep and a UNC-Wilmington Seahawk, there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t played.

The versatility dates back to his formative years.

“I’ve been playing all over the field since I was 10 years old,” explained Baldwin, who was announced as a third baseman when the White Sox selected him in the 12th round of the 2022 draft. “It’s something my dad instilled in me, not restricting myself to one position. He played pro ball a little bit [in the Cleveland Guardians system], and before that in college at Clemson. He did the same thing.”

Chuck Baldwin’s son has seen time at first base in the minors, and the other two missing positions at the major league level are ones he’s well acquainted with. The chip off the old block caught “pretty often” in his freshman and sophomore years of high school, and pitched all four years. Primarily a starter, he had a fastball in the upper-80s as a senior.

Baldwin has been switch-hitting since he was eight or nine years old. His father’s high school coach, Linwood Hedgepeth, made the suggestion. After watching the naturally-left-handed hitter in the batting cage, the member of the North Carolina Baseball Hall of Fame told the elder Baldwin,’This kid can switch it.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

“I’m so sick of this friggin’ guy,” is one of the greatest compliments one can pay an opposing athlete. And the Dodgers must be sick to death of Pete Crow-Armstrong. The Cubs and Dodgers, who opened the season together in Japan, just played five games in the span of 13 days to complete their season series. In those five games, Crow-Armstrong did his normal speed-and-defense act, but he also went 10-for-22 with four home runs.

In the two-game series that just ended, PCA went 3-for-5 with a home run and a double in the first game, and 3-for-4 with a home run and two stolen bases in the second. The Cubs won each game by one run; I don’t think it’s at all unfair to say that in a series that featured the Dodgers’ vaunted three-MVP lineup, plus Kyle Tucker, Dansby Swanson, Teoscar Hernández, and a partridge in a pear tree, it was the young PCA who singlehandedly turned the tide. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re welcome, Yankees fans. Exactly one year ago today, I checked in on Aaron Judge while the slugger was in the throes of a season-opening slump. Though the Yankees were 16-8 when I wrote that piece, it was a dark time for Judge, who a few days earlier had heard a smattering of Bronx cheers while striking out four times on Aaron Judge Bobblehead Day and conceded with typical Jeterian diplomacy and humor, “I’d probably be doing the same thing in their situation.” He’d shown faint signs of turning things around since, combining a couple of days worth of hard-hit balls — including a double on April 23, his first extra-base hit in 10 days — with the apparent end of a strikeout spree, but he wasn’t out of the woods.

In the year since, Judge has put together what might be the best offensive performance any of us has seen. He not only recovered from his slump, he went on to hit 58 homers, win his third home run title and American League MVP award, help the Yankees to their first World Series since 2009, and secure his place in the pantheon of the game’s greatest hitters. What do you even do with these numbers besides gawk?

For sheer offensive impact as measured by wRC+, that performance would outrank any AL/NL season — even Barry Bonds’ best:

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The worst part of a long rebuild is about a third of the way through, when the teardown is nearly finished and the daunting enormousness of the task starts to sink in. At that point, the old guard is gone but the core of the next good team is still in the minors at best — sometimes, the next superstar is still in ninth grade.

But someone has to go out there and log some minutes for the tanking ballclub. And in every rebuild — sometimes because of keen scouting or inspired development, but often as not just through sheer volume — one or two of those random unfortunates breaks out and survives into the next competitive window.

I’ve long been fascinated by players in this situation, because they fall into one of two categories. First, there’s the Rhys Hoskins class. Hoskins was an uninspiring college first base prospect who exploded into the one bright spot on some late-2010s Phillies teams that I cannot describe accurately on a family website. Read the rest of this entry »

This season is the third since the implementation of a spate of significant rule changes across the majors. Along with a pitch clock and limits on defensive positioning, a limit on disengagements (read: pickoff throws plus idle standing around) combined with slightly larger bases gave runners a collective green light. With fewer throws to first, bigger targets to slide into, and more predictable pitcher deliveries thanks to the clock, stealing a base got much easier overnight. In 2022, the last year of the old rules, the majors saw 2,486 steals across the entire season. In 2024, that number surged to 3,617 steals. Even better from an offensive perspective, the stolen base success rate jumped from 75.4% to 79% over that span.

The first year of the new rules was all about experimentation. Some players ran wild – Ronald Acuña Jr. more or less took off every time he could. Meanwhile, the Giants stole just 57 bases as a team, fewer thefts than the previous year, when those steal-boosting rules weren’t yet in effect. None of that seems particularly surprising to me; when new rules of this import are added to the game, every team will scramble to figure out how to change their own behavior to benefit. There were a ton of moving parts, and many teams took a simple approach: keep stealing more and more until it starts to fail.

The 2024 season was the year of the defensive reaction. Teams attempted 209 more steals in 2024 than they did in 2023, but only succeeded on 114 of those extra steals. The aggregate effect was a lower success rate on marginally more attempts. Catcher pop times improved, pitchers threw over more often, and defenses were more attentive to baserunners in general. That brings us to 2025, and in the early going, it looks like the baserunners are continuing to push the envelope:

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