On Sunday, the Angels made 22-year-old James Wood the first player to receive four intentional walks in a single game since Barry Bonds in 2004. You could argue the plan worked, too, as Wood came up with at least one runner in scoring position all four times, and the only one of those runners to score did so on a bizarre, inning-ending double play. If the Angels’ goal was to avoid the big inning, then they nailed it. If their goal was to win the game, well, hope springs eternal; the Nationals won, 7-4, in 11 innings. The obvious takeaway is the 6’7” Wood is a terrifying talent, but just as obvious is how out of step with current baseball thinking – or really any baseball thinking – this move was.

Wood is having an incredible season, launching 22 home runs, walking 14.5% of the time, and batting .283. His 156 wRC+ makes him the eighth-best hitter in the game this season and a genuine contender for the National League MVP. However, it’s impossible to argue that he’s in Bonds territory. Bonds earned four IBBs four different times that year. He was in the midst of his fifth straight 45-homer season and 13th straight 30-homer campaign. He held the single-season home run record and was closing in on the all-time one. He put up a 233 wRC+ en route to an absurd 11.9 WAR in 2004. He was in his own league. Moreover, the game has progressed in its thinking since 2004, and it’s now widely understood that an intentional walk is rarely the smart move.

Stathead, which uses Retrosheet data from back before intentional walks were an official stat, lists 12 instances in which a player received at least four intentional walks in a game. This John Schwartz article from the 1980 Baseball Research Journal can teach you even more about the earlier history of the IBB, including the contention that Mel Ott received five intentional passes during the second game of a doubleheader on October 5, 1929 (though Retrosheet only lists three of Ott’s five walks that day as intentional). So this is an extraordinarily rare feat, and fully a third of the times it has happened in baseball history, it was specifically happening to Bonds in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »

Last December, 33 years after he last played, Dave Parker was finally elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The lefty-swinging, righty-throwing “Cobra” had once been regarded as the game’s best all-around player, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound slugger who could hit for power and average, had plenty of speed as well as a strong and accurate throwing arm, and exuded as much charisma and swagger as any player of his era. But injuries, cocaine use, and poor conditioning curtailed his prime, and while he rebounded to complete a lengthy and successful career, in 15 years on the writers’ ballots, he’d never drawn even one-third of the support needed for election. He hadn’t come close in three tries on Era Committee ballots, either, but buoyed by the positive attention he had generated while waging a very public battle with Parkinson’s Disease, and backed by a favorable mix of familiar faces on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, he finally gained entry to the Hall, alongside the late Dick Allen.

Unfortunately, Parker did not live to deliver the speech he said he’d been holding for 15 years. Just shy of one month from the day he was to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, he passed away at age 74 due to complications from Parkinson’s Disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2012.

Parker is the third Hall of Famer to die between election and induction. Eppa Rixey, a lefty who pitched in the National League from 1912 to ’33, was elected by the Veterans Committee on January 27, 1963. He died one month and one day later, at the age of 71. Leon Day, a righty who starred in the Negro Leagues from 1934 to ’46, and later played in Mexico and in the affiliated minor leagues, was elected by the Veterans Committee on March 7, 1995. He died six days later, at the age of 78. Read the rest of this entry »

Cam Schlittler has emerged as the top pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization. His ability to overpower hitters is a big reason why. In four starts since being promoted to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on June 3, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound right-hander has logged a 1.69 ERA and a 40.2% strikeout rate over 21-and-a-third innings. Counting his 53 frames at Double-A Somerset, Schlittler has a 2.18 ERA and a 33.0% strikeout rate on the season.

The 2022 seventh-rounder out of Northeastern University is averaging 96.5 mph with his heater, but more than velocity plays into the offering’s effectiveness. As Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, Schlittler’s “size and arm angle create downhill plane on his mid-90s fastball akin to a runaway truck ramp, while the backspinning nature of the pitch also creates riding life.”

I asked the 24-year-old Walpole, Massachusetts native about the characteristics our lead prospect analyst described in his report.

“Arm slot-wise it’s nothing crazy,” Schlittler said in our spring training conversation. “I’m more of a high-three-quarters kind of guy, but what I didn’t realize until looking at video a couple months ago is that I have really quick arm speed. My mechanics are kind of slow, and then my arm path is really fast, so the ball kind of shoots out a little bit. With my height, release point— I get good extension — and how fast my arm is moving, the ball gets on guys quicker than they might expect.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.

1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.

Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:

What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I was writing about Reds rookie Chase Burns, the hard-throwing former Tennessee and Wake Forest ace who was about to make his first major league start. Burns throws really hard — always has — so I dialed up the fastball velocity leaderboard to see how he stacked up against starters at the major league level. (Quite well, it turns out.)

Anyway, the Angels have a couple guys who are pretty high on that list. José Soriano’s four-seamer averages 97.7 mph, which is one-tenth of a mile short of what Burns managed in two Triple-A starts, but up here in the real-world majors, that makes him the hardest-throwing qualified starter apart from Paul Skenes. Tarik Skubal? Jacob deGrom? Dylan Cease? Those guys can go take a hike. Read the rest of this entry »

Most former players remember details about personal milestones. A hitter can typically tell you where, and against whom, he recorded his first hit and home run. Ditto for details about an especially meaningful moment, perhaps a pennant-clinching double, or even a game-deciding grand slam against a bona fide ace. The same goes for pitchers. Ask them about their first win, their first strikeout — even their first home run allowed — and they can rattle off an answer without much effort. How many Ws were they credited with over the course of their career? Piece of cake.

Other questions aren’t so easy. With that in mind, I challenged former Kansas City Royals (and briefly Anaheim Angels) right-hander Mark Gubicza to a quiz. The now-Angels broadcaster wasn’t deterred when I warned him my questions weren’t going to be layups. Gubicza, who pitched in 384 games from 1984-1997, agreed to give it a shot.

——

The first question I asked the former All-Star was which batter he faced the most times. Gubicza guessed Kirby Puckett. Nope. His second guess, Jose Canseco, was likewise incorrect. I informed him the correct answer: Wade Boggs.

“I should have remembered that,” replied Gubicza, who squared off against the five-time batting champion 97 times. (Puckett was close behind at 92, while Canseco was further down the list at 60.) “He hit about .387 against me, or something like that.”

The hurler-turned-analyst got two of those three digits right. Boggs batted .367 against him, going 29-for-79 while also drawing 17 walks and lofting a sacrifice fly.

How about the batter who got the most hits off of him? Read the rest of this entry »

If you were only going by raw stat lines, the end of April would have been an understandable time to give up on Jo Adell. After struggling mightily in parts of four seasons with the Angels as well as the first half of 2024, he showed some positive gains in the second half before being shut down due to an oblique strain in early September. He finished in replacement-level territory, with a 90 wRC+ and 0.1 WAR, then was dreadful at the start of this season, sticking out even among one of the majors’ worst offenses. Lately, though, Adell has come around in promising fashion, offering hope that he can be a productive big leaguer after all, if not the star so many once believed he could be.

Originally, I intended to use the 26-year-old Adell to lead off the 2025 version of an article I wrote last year, covering players who had improved the most after dismal starts — even if their overall numbers were camouflaged by their early struggles and still came off as rather ordinary. Using May 1 as a cutoff, with a minimum of 80 plate appearances on either side, I found that Adell had improved the most from the first leg of the season to the second. Here’s the table, with the stats updated through Sunday:

Adell hit just .190/.236/.310 with two home runs in March and April while striking out 27% of the time, but from the start of May through Sunday, he hit .255/.344/.582 with 11 homers while trimming that strikeout rate to 23.2%. He was about half a win below replacement level before May 1, and has been about a full win above since.

I’ll dig into the numbers below, but first, a recap. A 2017 first-round pick out of a Louisville high school, Adell cracked our Top 100 Prospects list in each of the next three seasons, ranking as high as no. 4 in 2020, as a 65-FV prospect, and he was similarly regarded by other outlets thanks to his combination of plus-plus raw power and plus speed. But since debuting early in the 2020 season, he has generally struggled to make good contact, or any contact at all for that matter, with his lack of refinement limiting his opportunity to show off the tools that so tantalized talent evaluators. In a total of 178 major league games from 2020–23, he hit just .214/.259/.366 with 18 homers in 619 plate appearances en route to a grim 70 wRC+. After appearing in 88 games with the Angels but managing just a 77 wRC+ and -0.2 WAR in 2022, he played only 17 games in the majors in ’23 while returning to Triple-A Salt Lake for the fourth year out of five. As I joked early last year, when it looked like he might be breaking out — which proved not to be the case, alas — if he’d spent just a bit more time in my hometown, my parents would have been obligated to invite him over for dinner. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a beautiful night here in Brooklyn on Wednesday, and although I couldn’t make it to Citi Field in time for Mets-Nationals, I decided to go for a long walk and then stop at a local sports bar to read and watch some baseball. Naturally, the Mets were on one of the TVs behind the bar, while the other was reserved for the Yankees, who were set to play the Royals a little while later. That was a bummer for the two Red Sox fans sitting next to me, Mike and Kathleen, but they were resourceful. The bar has free wifi, so Mike pulled up Boston’s game against the Rays on his phone. He and Kathleen didn’t know one another, but they recognized each other as fellow Sox fans from the weekend prior, when they were both at the same bar to watch Yankees-Red Sox. He moved over to the stool between Kathleen and I, so that she and her partner Harry could also watch the game. The four of us started talking, and it turns out Harry and I went to the same high school, though he graduated four years ahead of me. Small world!

Anyway, sometime between Marcelo Mayer’s first and second home run of the game, Kathleen said to me, “The best thing about Red Sox fans is we simultaneously love and hate the Sox, and we love to hate them, too.” I bring this up because I thought about her description of Boston fans as I sat down to answer the first question in this week’s mailbag.

We’ll get to that in a moment, but before we do, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Four years ago, LaMonte Wade Jr. seemingly came out of nowhere — he was acquired in a minor trade following a couple cups of coffee in Minnesota — to help the Giants win 107 games and their first division title since 2012. His stream of clutch hits in a close NL West race earned him the nickname “Late Night LaMonte,” and while he couldn’t quite replicate that timeliness in subsequent seasons, he continued to do solid work in a platoon capacity for the Giants, at least until this year. Last week, with the team in the midst of a 2-6 slide during which they scored just 13 runs, president of baseball operations Buster Posey designated Wade for assignment as part of a shakeup aimed at upgrading the offense.

The 31-year-old Wade, who played with Posey on that 2021 squad, was dealt to the Angels for a player to be named later or cash on Sunday, with the Giants sending some unspecified amount of money towards the remainder of his $5 million salary. He was replaced on the roster by Dominic Smith, who had opted out of a minor league contract with the Yankees earlier in the week. Backup catcher Sam Huff was also DFA’d, while infielder Christian Koss was optioned to Triple-A Sacramento. Catcher Andrew Knizner and outfielder Daniel Johnson were both called up from Sacramento to replace them; each had signed minor league contracts with the Giants in May.

[Update: Shortly after this article was published on Tuesday, the Giants placed Matt Chapman on the 10-day injured list with a right hand injury — suffered while diving back to first base on a pickoff — and recalled Koss. Chapman was later diagnosed with sprained ligaments in the middle three fingers of his hand; he hopes to return before the All-Star break.]

With the three new players in the lineup, the Giants proceeded to reel off five straight victories against the Padres (salvaging a split of their four-game series) and Braves (sweeping the weekend series) to lift their record to 38-28, good enough to slide into second place in the NL West, 1 1/2 games behind the Dodgers. Not that the offense really awoke from its slumber. While the team did score 21 runs in those five games, breaking its streak of consecutive games scoring four or fewer runs at 16, its longest since 1965 (h/t Andrew Baggarly), the Giants hit just .200/.256/.327 (64 wRC+) over that stretch, worse than their .223/.304/.306 (77 wRC+) during the eight-game skid. The new guys, in case you were wondering, went 7-for-36 with two doubles and a walk. For the moment, correlation is good enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Ron Washington has formed strong opinions over his long time in the game. One of them is built on old-school common sense. The 73-year-old Los Angeles Angels manager doesn’t believe in hefty hacks from batters who don’t possess plus pop, and that’s especially the case when simply putting the ball in play can produce a positive result. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t like home runs — “Wash” is no fool — it’s just that he wants his hitters to play to the situation. Moreover, he wants them to play to their own strengths.

The subject came up when the veteran manager met with the media prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. Zach Neto had gone deep the previous day — it was his 10th dinger on the season — and Washington stated that he doesn’t want the young shortstop thinking home run. I proceeded to ask him if he likes any hitter thinking home run.

“That’s a tough question,” he replied. “You’ve got guys that are home run hitters — that’s what they do — and you’ve also got guys that are home run hitters who are ‘hitters.’ There are guys that can walk up to the plate, look for a pitch, and take you deep if you throw it. Neto is not one of them.

“The game of baseball has transitioned itself to the point where everybody is worried about exit velocity and launch angle,” added Washington. “Even little guys have got a launch angle. They’re supposed to be putting the ball in play, getting on the base paths, causing havoc on the base paths, and letting the guys that take care of driving in runs drive in the runs. But for some reason, the industry right now… everybody wants to be a long-ball hitter. And I see a lot of 290-foot fly balls. I see a lot of 290-foot fly balls where they caught it on a barrel. If you caught the ball on a barrel and it only went 290 feet, you’re not a home run hitter. I see a lot of that.”

What about hitters that do have plus power? Does Washington like them thinking home run? That follow-up elicited any even lengthier response. Read the rest of this entry »