Dansby Swanson brought home back-to-back Gold Gloves in 2022 with the Braves and ’23 with the Cubs while leading the majors in Statcast’s Fielding Run Value in both seasons. Although he hasn’t added any hardware to his collection since then, and while his defensive metrics have slipped, he still grades out as comfortably above average in both FRV and Defensive Runs Saved. His defensive acumen was on display in Tuesday’s Wild Card Series opener between the Cubs and Padres, as he made a couple of pivotal, run-saving plays in Chicago’s 3-1 victory.

The Padres had taken the lead in the second inning, when Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts opened the frame with back-to-back doubles off Matthew Boyd; Bogaerts took third when center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong’s relay spurted away from Nico Hoerner at second base. Ryan O’Hearn then hit a sizzling 101-mph groundball, and Swanson, who was shaded up the middle, dove to his right to stop it. He looked Bogaerts back to third base, then threw to first for the out. The play loomed large as Bogaerts ended up stranded.

The Padres threatened again in the fourth, when Manny Machado drew a leadoff walk and took second on Merrill’s sacrifice bunt. Bogaerts legged out a chopper into the no-man’s land to the right of the mound for an infield single, and San Diego appeared poised to capitalize when O’Hearn hit a flare into shallow center field. Swanson had other ideas, making a great over-the-shoulder snag of the ball, then in one motion turning to fire home to keep Machado honest.

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The first game of the 2025 postseason played out exactly as scripted, plus or minus a few crazy bounces. In the Wild Card series between the Tigers and the Guardians, the aces looked like aces and the offenses looked, well, inoffensive.

Tarik Skubal, who will be picking up his second straight Cy Young in a month or so, carved up the Guardians to the tune of one (barely) earned run over 7 2/3 innings. Gavin Williams, who put up a 3.06 ERA and allowed just six runs over his final five regular season starts, returned the favor, allowing two unearned runs over six innings and change. The two starters combined for 22 strikeouts, with 14 of them coming from Skubal, who earned the win and gave Detroit a 1-0 series lead. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cleveland Guardians are playing postseason baseball for the seventh time in the past 10 seasons, and it’s not because of a prolific offense. The low-budget AL Central club doesn’t score a high number of runs, but neither do its opponents. The Guardians allowed the third fewest runs in the junior circuit this year, and only the Houston Astros have been stingier over the past decade. Cleveland’s reputation as a pitching factory is well-earned.

How do Guardians hurlers view the organization’s pitching group, which is fronted at the big league level by pitching coach Carl Willis and includes assistants Brad Goldberg and Joe Torres, as well as bullpen coach Caleb Longshore? I recently asked that question to a quartet of Cleveland pitchers, three of whom are on the current staff, and another who was on the team prior to this summer’s trade deadline.

Before we hear their thoughts, though, it makes sense to touch on the 26-year-old right-hander who is slated to take the mound in this afternoon’s Wild Card Series opener against the Detroit Tigers. I didn’t talk to Gavin Williams about the Guardians pitching group, but I did ask him how his game has grown since we first spoke two years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, you asked for more of the American League Central. Or at least, I assume you asked for more of the American League Central. Major League Baseball definitely thinks you want more of the American League Central; why else would the league schedule all three Wild Card games between the Tigers and the Guardians for 1:08 PM Eastern? That’s prime time (assuming you’re a middle schooler who’s home with strep throat). The only division without a 90-game winner is sending two teams to the playoffs, and the Guardians and Tigers will spend three days in Cleveland fighting over the honor of facing the Mariners in the ALDS. That may not be enough to dethrone the Red Sox and the Yankees in terms of scheduling, but it’s a repeat of last year’s thrilling ALDS matchup, which went the full five games and ended with the unlikeliest outcome of all: Tarik Skubal losing a game.

The two teams couldn’t be coming into the Wild Card round on more different trajectories. The Tigers ended their series quietly with a loss to the Red Sox on Sunday. That loss handed the division title to the Guardians, who went on to beat the Rangers with a walk-off homer in the 10th inning just for funsies:

At the All-Star break, the Tigers had the best record in baseball, while the Guardians ranked 22nd. Since the All-Star break, the Guardians have the best record in baseball; the Tigers rank 21st. I can keep going. Read the rest of this entry »

“Nobody believes in us!” is usually the cheapest heat in sports. I hate it. It fosters a base, provincial mindset among fans and players alike. It turns the joy of competition and success into hostility at a perceived (frequently imagined) slight. I’m just gonna come out and say it: If you need “the haters” to motivate you, you’re a small-minded person! If I never heard “nobody believes in us” again, I’d be a happy man.

Fortunately, I don’t have to hear it as much these days, because the 2019 Patriots — a year removed from their sixth Super Bowl win and ninth appearance in the Brady-Belichick era — rolled out the line and got laughed at. There’s a difference between “nobody believes in us” and “nobody likes us,” and the Patriots found out the hard way. They haven’t won a playoff game since.

Even though “nobody believes in us” is unimaginative, and usually untrue, and hackneyed into utter meaninglessness, I want to extend a waiver to the 2025 Cleveland Guardians. I’ll put my hands up; I didn’t believe in you. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t tell you why the structure of the big leagues seems to bend towards close races. On August 31, the teams on the right side of the playoff cut line were all at least 2 1/2 games ahead of their nearest competitors. All baseball has done since then is collapse into chaos. The Mets have gone 8-13 to fall into peril, though that’s nothing compared to the Tigers, who have gone 5-15 over the same stretch. The Guardians are an absurd 18-5. Playoff fortunes have ebbed and flowed mightily.

Which players have featured most prominently in those games? There are any number of ways of answering that question. You could look for the highest WAR among contenders, the worst ERA or the most blown saves. You could use fancier statistics like Championship Win Probability Added, which accounts for how much each game mattered to each team. You could use the eye test, honestly – I can tell you from how frustrated Framber Valdez has looked this month that he’s not helping the Astros.

But the closest thing to matching the way I experience baseball, as a fan, is regular ol’ win probability added. My brain doesn’t distinguish between the importance of games when a team is in the pennant race. They’re all important. You can’t lose a random game on September 7 when you’re three back in the standings; you never know when the team you’re chasing will lose five in a row. Championship Win Probability Added distinguishes between whether your team is a long shot or playing from ahead, but when I’m rooting for one of the teams jockeying for a playoff spot, I don’t do that. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either. If every game in the race is equally important to you, Win Probability Added will measure the players who have mattered most in that framework. So I’ve compiled a list of notable players from the past month in each playoff race – and as a little bonus, I threw in a few players who have either stymied contenders or gotten trounced by them. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 8, the Tigers had 59 wins, while the Guardians had just 42. With one week remaining in the regular season, the Tigers have 85 wins and the Guardians have 84. A single game separates the two teams in the race for the AL Central title, a division that seemed all but sewn up for the Tigers as recently as September 13, when Detroit’s odds to win the Central sat at 98.2%, putting Cleveland’s odds at 1.8%. As of this writing, the Tigers are still favorites to win it, at 62.7%, but given that three of Detroit’s last six games are against Cleveland, the error bars on those odds are huge.

That wild swing in divisional odds happened over the course of the last week, but such a dramatic swing could only occur because in the two months leading up to it, two teams that had been heading in opposite directions both gradually rerouted and wound up on a collision course. Through April 25, both teams were winning games at roughly a .600 clip, but their fates diverged from there. By July 8, the gap in winning percentage had widened to 167 points, which translated to an additional 17 wins for the Tigers compared to the Guardians. Ever since July 8, that divide has slowly evaporated, and now the two teams own nearly identical records. Read the rest of this entry »

Cade Horton hasn’t simply been one of the best rookie pitchers in MLB this year, he has been one of the better starters in the senior circuit. The 24-year-old Chicago Cubs right-hander has a record of 11-4 to go with a 2.66 ERA and a 3.53 FIP over 115 frames. Moreover, he boasts a 0.93 ERA over his last 11 starts. In Triple-A to begin the season — his Cubs’ debut came on May 10th — Horton is now poised to start for Craig Counsell’s club in October,

My colleague Michael Baumann wrote about the 2022 first-rounder just over a month ago, but given his continued success, and with the postseason looming, another article seemed in order. Already well-informed on his background and arsenal, I asked Horton about the approach he takes with him to the mound.

“I’m a guy that is going to go out there and fill up the zone,” the erstwhile Oklahoma Sooner told me prior to a recent game at Wrigley Field. “I really just try to get outs and put my team in a good position to win. I’m a competitor, so I’m attacking the strike zone.”

Attacking the strike zone is, in many ways, akin to pitching to contact — more of an old-school approach to pitching — whereas in today’s game, chasing swing-and-miss is most often the goal. Given his high-octane heater and overall plus stuff, is he not looking to miss bats? Read the rest of this entry »

BOSTON — The Cleveland Guardians drafted Parker Messick 54th overall in 2022, and the decision to do so is looking increasingly shrewd. Since making his major league debut on August 20, the 24-year-old southpaw out of Florida State University has taken the mound five times and fashioned a 1.84 ERA and a 2.50 FIP over 29 1/3 innings. And while his 18.3% strikeout rate in the majors isn’t impressive, Messick fanned 29.1% of batters prior to his call-up, suggesting the strikeout stuff is still to come. When Eric Longenhagen wrote about Messick in late May, he pointed out that the lefty “leads the minors in strikeouts since 2023.”

What makes Messick effective is a combination of factors that belie his pedestrian velocity and lack of an elite breaking ball. As our lead prospect analyst explained when ranking the 50-FV prospect fourth in the Guardians system, “Messick’s 92-mph fastball doesn’t have a ton of carry to it, but it does run uphill and can garner whiffs via its angle.” Eric went on to write that his “changeup is at least plus.”

Messick considers his changeup to be his best pitch.

“I would say that it is,” Messick told me when Cleveland played in Boston earlier this month. “As far as swing-and-miss goes, yeah. When it’s paired right with my other stuff — when I’m tunneling it off of my other pitches — is when it is at its best. It does have some sharp movement down at the end, I guess. It also has just enough speed differential to get that swing-and-miss at the bottom when they’re out in front of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Cam Schlittler was on the doorstep of the big leagues when he led Sunday Notes on the penultimate day of June. Just 10 days later, the 24-year-old right-hander took the mound at Yankee Stadium against the Seattle Mariners and earned a win in his MLB debut. He’s been a presence in New York’s rotation ever since. In 11 starts for the pinstripers, Schlittler has a 3-3 record to go with a 3.05 ERA and a 3.73 FIP over 56 solid innings.

The 98-mph cut-ride fastball that Schlittler addressed in the article has been his most prominent pitch. Thrown at a 56.2% clip, it has elicited a .202 BAA and just a .298 slug. Augmenting the high-octane heater are a quartet of secondaries — none of which is the offering he planned to add to his arsenal this season.

“When I talked to you in the spring, I was working on a splitter,” Schlittler told me at Fenway Park on Friday. “But I just couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t want to go into the season competing with something I wasn’t really comfortable throwing, so I stopped throwing it.”

The 2022 seventh-round pick Northeastern University product began this season in Double-A, where he attacked hitters with the aforementioned fastball, a sweeper, and a curveball. He introduced a cutter — “metrically, it’s kind of in-between a slider and a cutter” — in his final start before being promoted to Triple-A in early June. He’s since added a two-seamer, giving him a pitch he can use to bore in on righties.

Which brings us back to the shelved splitter. Why does the young hurler feel that he wasn’t able to master the pitch? Read the rest of this entry »