Hao-Yu Lee will be one of eight Detroit Tigers prospects participating in the forthcoming Arizona Fall League, and while he doesn’t possess the highest profile of the bunch, he does have the most-traveled backstory. Acquired from the Philadelphia Phillies at the trade deadline in exchange for Michael Lorenzen, the 20-year-old infielder hails from Taiwan and began dreaming of playing professionally in the United States at age 16 after a strong performance in a U-18 tournament, in Korea. Two years earlier he’d excelled in a tournament that took place 15-plus miles southwest of Comerica Park.

The Phillies signed Hao-Yu in June 2021—the Cincinnati Reds and Tampa Bay Rays were among the other MLB teams that had expressed interest — once he’d finished high school. No. 8 on our Phillies Top Prospects list with a 40+ FV coming into this season, he slashed .273/.362/.399 before going on the shelf with a quad strain in mid-August. He ended up playing in just eight games for the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps before missing the duration of the campaign.

The first big-league game Hao-Yu attended was in 2017 when he was competing in the Junior League World Series, which is held annually in Taylor, Michigan. He doesn’t remember if the Tigers won that day, but he does recall his first impression of Comerica Park. “I told my teammates that I was going to play here someday,” the confident youngster said of the experience.

He also remembers the tournament, and for good reason. Not only did Taoyuan, Taiwan capture the international bracket, they went on to beat Kennett Square, Pennsylvania in the finals. Moreover, Hao-Yu “raked that tournament; five games, five homers!” Read the rest of this entry »

After a week off to recharge my batteries — and watch other sports, gasp — it’s time for another installment of five things that caught my eye in baseball this week. Honestly, this list is almost superfluous at this time of year. The standings are so jammed together that half the games in baseball have playoff implications. Teams are getting hot at the right time or collapsing down the stretch in equal measure. Still, you can’t watch everything, so here are some delightful moments you might have missed.

1. Legends, in the Fall
It’s been a rough year for Adam Wainwright. He has put up by far the worst season of his career — a 7.40 ERA says all you really need to know about it — and the Cardinals have collapsed from the perpetual contention he enjoyed for the vast majority of his career. They’ve seemingly played more meaningless games this year than in Wainwright’s entire previous time with the club. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like the Rays have been trying to ditch Tropicana Field since they got there, and apparently it’s finally going to happen. The Royals are likewise pursuing plans to build a replacement for Kauffman Stadium, though the club announced Wednesday that the planned reveal of a new ballpark site was being postponed for the time being.

Both clubs want to replace their aging, arguably obsolete concrete bowls with something more modern — more glitzy. The unspoken promise is that the Royals and Rays — two small-market teams that ranked 25th and 27th in payroll this season, respectively — would turn their new taxpayer-funded playgrounds into an economic engine that would not only boost community welfare but also allow the team to compete economically with the Yankees, Dodgers, and so forth.

We all know this is bunk. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball players who eschew the typical conventions of major league success hold a special place in my heart. As much as we sit in awe of those gifted with the imposing stature of an Aaron Judge or a Giancarlo Stanton, there’s something particularly appealing about the guys who seemingly have to fight to compete in the same league and manage to find a way to do so. One of the wonders of a sport like baseball is that there are myriad ways to contribute – as fans, it’s fun to marvel at those who get creative.

On a Cincinnati Reds roster full of pleasant surprises, TJ Friedl doesn’t stand out so much as he blends in. At 28 years old, he’s one of the oldest regulars in an exceptionally young lineup, this despite being in his first full season in the big leagues. Depending on how you set the plate appearance threshold, he’s not the Reds’ best hitter by any individual metric, nor is he the fastest runner or the flashiest defender – there’s an ultra-athletic 21-year-old phenom with the league’s fastest sprint speed and strongest infield arm that takes those distinctions. But by making his presence felt at the plate, on the bases, and in the field day in and day out, Friedl has managed to be the most productive player by WAR on a team that sits one game out of a playoff spot on September 21. That’s a generous way to frame his 3.4-WAR season, but it’s also an accurate one – Friedl has been a versatile everyday contributor, and there’s a case to be made that he’s been the Reds’ most important player in what has been a pretty important year for the franchise. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles have a tight grip on the AL East race. With time running out on the season, they have a 2.5 game lead on the Rays with the tiebreaker in hand; the division title comes with homefield advantage throughout the AL playoffs. Their +127 run differential is the third-best in the AL. So then why oh why do we at FanGraphs think they only have a 5.5% chance of winning the World Series, worse than the Astros and Rays and just ahead of the Blue Jays and Mariners?

It’s happened two years in a row now. FanGraphs keeps doubting the Orioles, and they keep winning. But don’t you worry, disgruntled O’s fans. As the resident Orioles believer – I picked them to win their division before the season, even if that was mostly a statement that they were underrated rather than a sincere belief that they were the best team in the East – I’m here to dig through the madness and see what’s going on.

First things first, in these “why don’t the odds believe in my team?” articles, it’s always good to walk through how the odds work. They’re quite straightforward, though straightforward isn’t the same thing as simple. We start at the player level, averaging the Steamer and ZiPS projections to come up with projections for every player in baseball. Then we manually build a depth chart for each team. From there, we stitch those pieces together to come up with team-level offensive, defensive, and pitching projections. We plug those into the BaseRuns formula and get projections of how many runs per game each team will score and allow, then convert those to expected winning percentages using Pythagenpat expectation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Hays knows his numbers. More importantly, he understands the process behind his production. He’s also having a career-best year: the 28-year-old outfielder has a 117 wRC+ to go with 36 doubles, 16 home runs, and a .283/.330/.462 slash line as a rock-solid contributor for a postseason-bound Baltimore Orioles team with the most wins in the American League. Overshadowed by young stars like Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman, he is nonetheless an important piece of the puzzle.

The personable Port Orange, Florida product hasn’t revamped his approach this season, but he has tweaked it in search of more thump. Hays explained how when the Orioles visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: When I brought it up yesterday, you told me you were aware that many of your 2023 counting stats are almost identical to what they were at the end of last year. What percentage of guys in this clubhouse would you say keep up with their numbers?

Austin Hays: “I think it’s probably about half and half. There are guys who like to follow where they’re at, follow what they’re doing, and there are others who just like to look at the end of the season. I find numbers interesting, so I like to look at my own, and other people’s numbers as well. It’s something I’ve always been interested in.”

Laurila: You’re in the process of passing some personal milestones. Which of your numbers do you care the most about?

Hays: “Doubles is a big one for me, because that seems to be the thing that helps me out the most with my power numbers. I don’t hit a ton of home runs, so the more doubles I can hit, the higher my slug and my OPS can be. You can get doubles in so many different ways, too. It’s kind of a hustle stat in a way. If you can accumulate five to 10 hustle doubles by going hard out of the box throughout the season, they’ll start to add up, That’s thing I’m probably trying to boost up the most.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, David Laurila asked me an interesting question. He’d been talking baseball with some baseball players – it’s true, we really do have great jobs – and the conversation landed on Josh Hader. That got Laurila thinking about Hader’s similarities to Spencer Strider. The crux of the discussion: Would Hader have ended up as a lefty version of Strider if, after appearing in the major leagues as a reliever, he’d transitioned back to the starting role he held in the minors?

I love questions like this. They’re fun to research, and I also feel no pressure to reach a definitive answer. Would Hader have ended up as a great starter? It’s clearly unknowable. That gives me a lot more latitude to speculate. In addition, this question isn’t just about Hader. It’s about whether future pitchers with Hader-esque profiles make more sense as starters or in the bullpen. No wrong answers and broad implications? Sign me up.

First things first, let’s talk about what it means to look like Strider as a starter. Strider has two standout pitches, but it’s really one standout pitch and a capable understudy. His fastball explodes through the top of the zone and screws hitters into the ground. It’s not so much the velocity – though that doesn’t hurt – but the shape and release point that combine to bamboozle opposing hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, I wrote about the imminent demise of the 3,000 Hit Club after Miguel Cabrera became a member. Simply put, it was a question of math. The worse the environment is for hitting for batting average, the fewer players there will be who will put up lofty career hit totals. While it would be easy to think there are simply more lousy hitters these days, as league batting average has dropped in recent decades, the spread in individual batting averages has not increased; great players see lower batting averages when league batting averages decline. But while 2023’s new rules didn’t herald a reversal of the trend, one late entrant in the race for 3,000 hits has continued to excel: Freddie Freeman.

What makes the nadir of the 3,000 Hit Club so jarring to a baseball fan is the newness of this phenomenon. The explosion of offense in the 1990s wasn’t just homers, but batting average as well. Even going back 10 years, there were always a lot of players with career hit totals somewhere north of 2,000.

In 2023, that number is seven, and that’s only because there were four new members this year: Freeman, Jose Altuve, Elvis Andrus, and Andrew McCutchen. (I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Evan Longoria won’t get 72 hits over the next two weeks.) Contrast that with 2004, which featured 27 active players with 2,000 career hits. Read the rest of this entry »

Gavin Williams came as advertised when I saw him pitch earlier this month. The 24-year-old rookie right-hander’s fastball topped out at 99.3 mph, while his slider sat in the mid-80s and occasionally topped 90. Allowing one hit and a lone run over five rain-delayed innings against the Minnesota Twins, Williams was all about power.

He also came as advertised when I spoke to him on the day preceding his outing. I was told that the 6-foot-6, 255-pound Cleveland Guardians hurler is a man of few words, and that was pretty much the case. While accommodating, Williams was anything but verbose. No matter. I largely got what I was looking for: a self-appraisal of what he brings to the table.

“Most people know me for my fastball, really,” the righty replied when I asked for a self scouting report. “That’s the main thing people know me as, and it’s what I know myself as.”

The Fayetteville, North Carolina native first hit triple digits during his freshman year at East Carolina University, and as meaningful as that milestone was to his identity on the mound, he recognizes that retiring big-league hitters takes more than pure velocity.

“I don’t think 96 to 100 is that big of a difference,” Williams said. “If it’s down the middle it can get hit. Putting it where you want to is a bigger thing. It also matters how it moves.” Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine trading Mookie Betts. Chaim Bloom must have done that, must have considered all of the angles and potential outcomes of such a move, including the possibility that he would be saddled with it as his legacy — then sold principal owner John Henry on a vision of the Red Sox without the superstar right fielder in order to be hired as the team’s chief baseball officer in October 2019. That trade has not worked out well for the Red Sox, who have made the playoffs just once since winning the 2018 World Series, behaving more like a mid-market franchise than the league’s third-most valuable one. And while Bloom had put something of a stamp on the post-Betts roster, the rest of his vision will not be realized. On Thursday, the Red Sox fired him, kicking off a search for new leadership of their baseball operations department for the fourth time since Theo Epstein departed for the Cubs in October 2011.

Unlike predecessors Ben Cherington (2011–15) and Dave Dombrowski (2015–19), Bloom didn’t win a championship during his run to offset the team’s disappointing seasons. On his watch, the Red Sox went just 267–262 from the start of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to the point of his dismissal, becoming more notable for their belt-tightening than for their on-field success. They made the playoffs only in 2021, when they went 92–70, finishing second in the AL East, then beating the Yankees in the Wild Card Game and the Rays in the Division Series before losing to the Astros in the ALCS. They finished last in the division in both 2020 (24–36) and ’22 (78–84) and fired Bloom while tied for fourth with the Yankees at 73–72, with just a 0.3% chance of making the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »