Mason Fluharty is flying under the radar as one of baseball’s most effective lefty relievers. Since making his major league debut with the Toronto Blue Jays on April Fools Day, the 23-year-old southpaw has a 1.96 ERA and a 2.94 FIP over 18 appearances. Moreover, he’s allowed just seven hits in his 18-and-third innings, and prior to surrendering a solo home run to former Jay Danny Jansen this past Tuesday he’d retired 21 consecutive batters. All three of his decisions are in the win column.

His initial two outings were especially challenging. The first batter Fluharty faced in the bigs was Washington Nationals 2024 All-Star CJ Abrams, who lined a run-scoring double. Three days later, the first batter in his second outing was Juan Soto; the New York Mets superstar also stroked a run-scoring double.

I asked the 2022 fifth-round pick out of Liberty University about those welcome-to-the-big-leagues ABs prior to his third appearance.

“Get put into the fire and see what happens,” said Fluharty, who later that same day faced Rafael Devers [E-6], Alex Bregman [K], and Rob Refsnyder [DP]. “I’m glad they have faith in me. While I obviously would have preferred better outcomes in those first outings, it’s all about adjusting. This game is hard.”

The pitches that were turned around for two-baggers? Read the rest of this entry »

If motor preferences were the final word on pitcher performance, Nathan Eovaldi would be sitting on a beach somewhere.

Eovaldi throws from a low slot, releasing his pitches from an average arm angle of 30 degrees. (Zero degrees is fully sidearm; 90 degrees is straight over the top.) Many low-slot pitchers have a supination bias. There are downsides to being a supinator — their preference for cutting the baseball tends to produce crummy four-seam fastballs — but they usually have no trouble throwing hard breaking balls; they can also more easily harness seam-shifted wake to throw sinkers, sweepers, or kick-changes. Low-slot supinators, like Seth Lugo, can basically throw every pitch in the book. High-slot pronators like Ryan Pepiot or Lucas Giolito don’t have that sort of range, but make up for it with excellent changeups and high-carry fastballs.

Eovaldi is, tragically, a low-slot pronator. Not many low-slot pronators make it to the big leagues. The pronation bias blunts their ability to throw hard glove-side breakers, and the low arm angle obviates the pronator’s nominal advantage, killing the carry on their fastball. As Tyler Zombro of Tread Athletics (now a special assistant of pitching for the Cubs) said in his primer video on motor preferences, “I know in stuff models and just off of Trackman alone, this arsenal with this slot is not that attractive.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the Rocket City Trash Pandas shut out Pensacola, 9-0, in the Southern League. In the Midwest League, the Quad Cities River Bandits eked out a 7-6 win over the Dayton Dragons. And in the big leagues, television cameras captured an enormous raccoon traipsing through the Citi Field seats during the seventh inning of the Mets-Pirates game. It was a good day for raccoons at the ballpark.

The major league raccoon went down one row of seats in center field, then back across the next row up, looking for all the world like it was just searching for its seat. “I’m scared of raccoons,” said SNY broadcaster Ron Darling, stammering slightly. The brief clip makes it look like the Citi Field raccoon was simply out for a late-night stroll, not bothering anybody. It turns out there’s more to the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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 »

Marcus Semien was a promising prospect heading into the 2013 season, but he was far from a high-profile player. When that year’s Baseball America Prospect Handbook was published, the 2011 sixth-round pick out of the University of California-Berkeley was ranked just 14th in a light Chicago White Sox system. (At the time, in-depth scouting reports were still in their nascent stages here at FanGraphs.)

In the 12 years since then, the 34-year-old Semien has gone on to exceed those modest expectations. He reached the big leagues with the White Sox in September 2013, then established himself as an everyday player after they traded him to the Athletics before the 2015 season. Now in his fourth year with the Rangers after six seasons in Oakland and one in Toronto, the Bay Area native has three All-Star selections, two Silver Sluggers, and a Gold Glove on his résumé. Scuffling in the current campaign — Semien has a 47 wRC+ over 176 plate appearances — he nonetheless has 1,533 hits, including 241 home runs, to go with a 108 wRC+ and 36.1 WAR over his major league career.

What did Semien’s Baseball America scouting report look like in the spring of 2013? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what then-BA contributing writer Phil Rogers wrote, and asked Semien to respond to it.

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“The son of former California wide receiver [Damien] Semien, Marcus was a three-sport standout in high school who followed his father’s footsteps to Berkeley, where he focused on baseball.”

“I actually just played basketball and baseball in high school,” Semien replied. “I was part of a state championship runner-up in my senior year, so I missed probably the first three weeks of my [baseball] season. Once I graduated high school, I knew that baseball was all that I was going to play in college.” Read the rest of this entry »

Roll over Pete Rose, and tell Shoeless Joe Jackson the news. In an historic decision that reversed over eight decades of precedent, on Tuesday commissioner Rob Manfred formally reinstated Rose, Jackson, and 15 other deceased individuals who had previously been placed on the permanently ineligible list for violating Rule 21, which bars players, umpires, and club and league officials and employees from gambling on baseball. The move opens the door for Rose (and Jackson) to be considered for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but that opportunity won’t come until December 2027 at the earliest. Neither their placement on the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot nor their election to the Hall is automatic even if they do become candidates, as the Hall’s heavy hand in committee proceedings — particularly with regards to players linked to performance-enhancing drugs — should remind us.

Given the extent to which Rose spent decades lying about his gambling and showing a lack of contrition even after he was banned — to say nothing of the allegations of statutory rape that surfaced in recent years — Manfred’s decision is a bitter disappointment, perhaps even a shock. While his decade-long tenure as commissioner has produced no shortage of grounds for criticism, he appeared to be hyper-conscious when it came to drawing a distinction between Major League Baseball’s recent embrace of legalized gambling, and the lines crossed by those who flouted Rule 21. Last June, Pirates infielder Tucupita Marcano was placed on the permanently ineligible list for making 387 baseball bets totaling $150,000 through a legal sports book, while in February, an arbiter upheld the firing of umpire Pat Hoberg for sharing legal sports betting accounts with a professional poker player who bet on baseball, and for impeding MLB’s investigation. Rose’s gambling, via bets placed through bookies, was illegal at the time as well as completely out of bounds given his role within baseball.

Manfred’s latest move was driven by the Rose family’s petition to remove Rose — who died last September 30 at the age of 83 — from the permanently ineligible list so that he can be considered for election to the Hall. Rather than just revisit Rose’s eligibility, however, the commissioner chose to issue a broader ruling that erased what had previously been a meaningful distinction between a popularly misunderstood “lifetime ban” (i.e, one ending with the death of the banned individual) and a permanent spot on baseball’s blacklist. Created by commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1920, the permanently ineligible list was reserved for those found to have gambled on baseball (plus a few who committed other transgressions Landis viewed as grave) from future participation within the game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox bandwagon was crowded beyond the capacity limit this offseason, as you’d expect for a team that added Alex Bregman and Garrett Crochet over the winter, and put two near-majors prospects in the top seven of the preseason Top 100. I confess I was a passenger on this bandwagon; it was incredibly sweaty and at least one stranger sat on my lap for a couple stops.

But for all that hype, a quarter of the way through the season the results have been a bit of a let down. Boston is right where it was last year: around .500. Disappointing as that may be, most of the individual performances by Red Sox players have been within the realm of expectation. Surely it’s a bummer that Jarren Duran and Walker Buehler have only been about average this year, for instance, but I don’t know that it’s a monumental shock in either case.

The one player whose numbers are really knocking me out of my chair right now is Tanner Houck. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever struck up a conversation with a stranger at the ballpark, you might have noticed that the FanGraphs readers are easy to spot. Let’s say you find yourself discussing the Yankees. A FanGraphs reader might ponder whether the 30-point gap between Paul Goldschmidt’s wOBA and xwOBA will catch up to him, while a non-reader is more likely to fret over whether Brian Cashman is too reliant on analytics when constructing the team’s roster. But sometimes, the two groups ask the same thing. So today, let’s consider one of those broad questions: Should teams be intentionally walking Aaron Judge more often?

Admit it. You’ve wondered. If you’re a Yankees fan, you’ve wondered just how long Judge is going to be allowed to hit in big spots. If you’re a fan of the team the Yankees are playing, you’ve wondered how your team’s manager ought to solve this impossible puzzle. And if you’re a neutral fan, well, Aaron Judge is the biggest story in baseball right now. He’s having one of the best offensive stretches in the history of the game. Don’t you want to know if there’s anything that can be done about it?

Ever since Barry Bonds broke the sport in the early 2000s, every hot streak in baseball comes with questions about the “Bonds treatment.” Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean 120 intentional walks, Bonds’ tally in 2004 and the single-season record. (It’s the single-season record by 52 walks. Second place? Barry Bonds. Third place? Barry Bonds.) The best non-Bonds total was Willie McCovey’s 45 in 1969. The most Judge has ever racked up in a single season is a measly 20. So the question isn’t whether teams should treat him like Bonds, because no, they shouldn’t. But should they treat him like McCovey? And more importantly, how should opposing managers handle Judge in a playoff game, when all the chips are on the table? Let’s do some math. Read the rest of this entry »

A papal conclave is the ultimate news story. It’s an event shrouded in ceremony and secrecy, which takes place incredibly rarely; only three times in the past 40 years, in fact. Even in this era when seeing everything has made the mysterious mundane, the world is left waiting in total ignorance for news of white smoke. Billions of observers, Catholic or not, look on in rapt fascination. And when the conclave produced the first American-born pope, Leo XIV, things only got more fascinating.

I come from a Catholic extended family, but for the most part, I was a devoted low-church protestant in my youth and am largely irreligious now. Nevertheless, I’ve always held the Vatican in a certain esteem. Its grandeur, its rituals, its dense and ancient jargon — all of that looks mystical and romantic from a distance. Is it the sole conduit to Almighty God? Perhaps not, from where I sit. But it’s a fascinating institution nonetheless.

That cloud of fairy tale wonder evaporated in an instant on Thursday, when the cardinal electors chose Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago to inherit St. Peter’s throne. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Bacsik is best known for having surrendered Barry Bonds’s 756th home run. The August 7, 2007 bomb at San Francisco’s AT&T Park gave Bonds the most in MLB history, one more than Henry Aaron. Unlike the legendary bashers, Bacsik is but a mere mortal. A left-handed pitcher for four teams over parts of five seasons, the now-Texas Rangers broadcast analyst appeared in 51 big-league games and logged a record of 10-13 with a 5.46 ERA in 216 innings.

Despite his relative anonymity, the gopher wasn’t the only noteworthy happening in Bacsik’s career. Moreover, those didn’t all take place with him on the mound.

“In my first 14 at-bats, I didn’t get a hit, didn’t strike out, and didn’t walk,” explained Bacsik, who finished 5-for-50 at the dish. “Apparently that’s a record for not having one of those outcomes to begin a career. I didn’t know this until last year when we were in Detroit and they brought it up on the broadcast.”

In Bacsik’s next three plate appearances, he doubled, singled, and struck out — all in the same game. Two years later, in his 44th time standing in a batter’s box, he drew his only career walk.

The first home run that Bacsik allowed — there were 41 in all — was to Kevin Millar. It isn’t his most-memorable outside of the Bonds blast. Read the rest of this entry »