Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Last week, I explained how players can still change teams even as trades are no longer allowed. Now that we’re a week-plus into August, I’d like to run down the list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers before the month ends, which is the latest that a team can claim them and still have them be eligible for the playoffs. Players placed on waivers are first offered to the worst team in the league, then to the other clubs in ascending order all the way up to the one with the best record at the time of the waiver placement.

I’ll be focusing on teams with playoff odds below 5%, though contending teams teams could see if a rival wants to bite on an onerous contract. (Spoiler alert: they will not.) As a reminder, when a player is claimed off waivers, it’s a straight claim. The team that loses the player gets nothing more than salary relief, as the new team is responsible for the remainder of the contract. Read the rest of this entry »

The A’s have been a bummer of a team to follow for a few years now. They’re moving to Vegas. The fans are protesting, but probably fighting a losing battle. They’re going to play in Sacramento, in withering heat, at a (really nice!) minor league stadium. The owner’s a walking punchline. They lost 112 games last year and then made almost no moves over the winter.

Something’s been brewing in the East Bay, though. Not in terms of a surprise playoff contender – they’re 47-68 on the year, and their playoff odds hit 0.0% on June 10. But nonetheless, this is a much better team than last year’s edition, and it’s mostly happened thanks to internal improvements. This version of the A’s looks downright frisky. Last year, playing them was basically a bye series; this year, they’ve almost matched their win total from ’23 and we’re in early August. How’d they do it? In one word, variance. In many words, well, read on and find out.
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When I first wrote about him in 2017, JP Sears was a recently drafted prospect in the Seattle Mariners system who was racking up prodigious strikeout totals in the low minors. When I wrote about him for a second time four years later, he was pitching for the New York Yankees Double-A affiliate and again punching out more than his fair share of batters. Fast forward to this season, and Sears is firmly established as a member of the Oakland A’s starting rotation. The 28-year-old southpaw came to the A’s in 2022 as part of the six-player trade deadline deal that sent Frankie Montas and Lou Trivino to the Bronx, a swap that worked out better for the woebegone West Coast club than many were expecting at the time.

Sears no longer puts up sexy numbers in the K category — his strikeout rate this season is a humble 18.1% — but the overall output has been solid. His 119 1/3 innings pitched this season are the most on the team — ditto his eight wins — and his 6.5% walk rate is indicative of a strike-thrower. The 4.53 ERA and 4.60 FIP aren’t anything to write home about, but Sears is nonetheless the best starting pitcher on the A’s.

Sears, who threw seven shutout innings on Monday against the San Francisco Giants, sat down to talk about his evolution as a pitcher when the A’s visited Boston in mid-July.

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David Laurila: When we last talked, you were pitching in Double-A. Are you basically the same pitcher now, just three years later?

JP Sears: “Good question. I would say that I’m a lot different pitcher. I still use what kind of helped me get through the minor leagues, that being my fastball and the ability to locate it. But my arsenal has definitely gotten bigger. I’ve started throwing a sweeper a lot more — I really just learned that about two years ago — and I’ve also introduced the changeup as more of a pitch. In the minor leagues, I kind of just used it as a bait type of pitch, a show-me pitch, and now it’s more of an executed pitch that I can throw whenever. My average velo has increased a little bit, but the biggest thing would be adding to my arsenal.” Read the rest of this entry »

You didn’t really think teams were done swapping relievers after Friday and Saturday, did you? If you thought maybe they were tapped out for late relief help on Sunday and Monday, well, you thought wrong! If your bullpen doesn’t look like there are enough dudes to capture Helm’s Deep, you’re woefully short-armed.

The San Diego Padres acquired LHRP Tanner Scott and RHRP Bryan Hoeing from the Miami Marlins for LHSP Robby Snelling, RHSP Adam Mazur, 3B/2B Graham Pauley, and 3B/SS Jay Beshears

As one of baseball’s elite closers on an expiring contract, Tanner Scott was arguably the best short-term option available among relievers. His walk rate has peeked up a little to the numbers of the bad old days, but his first-strike percentage has stayed firmly in positive territory, which is an important indicator of where walk numbers will settle. Scott is likely to help the Padres in a very tight NL Wild Card race, but he’ll probably be even more important for them in the playoffs if they can get there. In San Diego, he teams up with Robert Suarez to asphyxiate opposing lineups late in the games. As far as elite closers who occasionally walk a few too many batters go, Scott is one of the less stressful of the genre, because he’s so hard to hit against with any authority, giving him a good shot at escaping jams following those free passes.

Bryan Hoeing is a sinker/slider reliever who has never quite clicked, as he’s never really been able to induce many swings-and-misses, nor has he mastered the art of inducing weak groundballs. He strikes me mostly as a depth guy who has plenty of years of club control left, and barring a breakout, he seems destined to be shuffled back and forth between San Diego and Triple-A El Paso a lot over the next few years. This trade is about Scott. Read the rest of this entry »

Being Mets-y has been an insult for years, a description of a team combining bad execution and bad luck to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s the kind of thing that describes poor decisions but also poor circumstances. Kodai Senga spraining his calf in his first game all year and missing the remainder of the season? That’s Mets-y. Trading a huge haul to replace him and then getting nothing from the big name replacement? That’d be Mets-y too, but things have changed in Queens. Instead of splashing out prospects for Yusei Kikuchi or going after a toolsy young arm, as the Orioles did for Trevor Rogers, the Mets are doing the MLB equivalent of shopping at Costco. They acquired Paul Blackburn from the A’s in exchange for Kade Morris, their 17th-best prospect, as Will Sammon reported.

Blackburn is definitely not a name you’d put on a marquee. He’s pitched to a 4.83 ERA and 4.36 FIP in his major league career. You know how Yu Darvish is so fun because he throws seven pitches and they’re all above average? Blackburn is like that – only all of his pitches are below average. He has six different options, but our stuff models think that only his slider and cutter are even decent. He makes up for that lack of raw juice with command and with the willingness to throw any pitch in any count.
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The Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees 9-7 on Friday night, and regardless of which team you might have been rooting for, the game was an absolute gem. The lead changed hands fives times, the 28 combined hits included four home runs — one of them a titanic 470-foot blast by Aaron Judge — and the tying runs were on base when Kenley Jansen recorded the final out for his 440th career save. Moreover, the atmosphere at a packed Fenway Park was electric throughout. It was as close to a postseason atmosphere as you will find in July.

The loss was New York’s fifth in sixth games, so I was admittedly a bit apprehensive about asking Aaron Boone a particular question prior to yesterday evening’s affair. I did so anyway. Prefacing it by relating a press box opinion that it had been as entertaining as any played at Fenway all season, I wanted to know if, as a manager, he allows himself to think about the aesthetics of a baseball game in that manner.

His answer didn’t disappoint.

“I always try to have a little appreciation for that,” Boone replied. “Especially with what we’ve been going through as a club. We’ve struggled. There are a handful of games where I’ve felt that way, like, ‘Man, this is a really good baseball game going on.’ When you come out on the bad end it kind of sucks, but you try to have that appreciation for ‘That was a really good one.’ Hopefully we can start to be on the right side of those.” Read the rest of this entry »

I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it.
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Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

With just four (!!!) days to go until the July 30 trade deadline, let’s round up some more news and developments from the last few days and discuss how these nuggets might affect what happens over the next 96-plus hours. Here’s the latest:

Miller Trade Could Be off the Table Following Injury

All-Star closer Mason Miller, the most tantalizing reliever on the market this deadline season, went down with an unfortunate injury this week, making it more likely that he’ll remain with the A’s for the rest of the year.

After pitching a 1-2-3 inning on Monday night, Miller fractured the fifth metacarpal in his left hand. According to A’s manager Mark Kotsay, Miller was getting treatment when “he was reminded that he had a postgame lift to get in. Out of a little bit of frustration, he just kind of pounded his fist down on a padded training table.” Miller was placed on the IL on Thursday, and there is no timeline for his return. While this is certainly better if he hurt his pitching hand, the injury surely depresses his trade value because he won’t be pitching for at least a few weeks. As a result, Oakland would be wise not to move trade this season; he is under club control through the 2029 season, and the A’s were going to move him only if they were blown away by the return package. Now that his trade value is down, the organization would be better off holding onto him and then shopping him around in the offseason, after his suitors have seen him come back healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 27, 2018, a piece titled A Conversation With Oakland Pitching Coach Scott Emerson was published here at FanGraphs. Notable about the piece is that a question I’d asked about a particular pitcher, Daniel Mengden, ended up segueing into a variety of related topics. As I noted at the time, Emerson loves discussing his craft.

Six years later, that hasn’t changed. A few days before the All-Star break, I once again sat down with Emerson at Fenway Park. I wanted to ask him about pitch counts — the night before, A’s starter JP Sears threw 114 pitches across 5 2/3 innings in Oakland’s 5-2 win over the Red Sox — and expected our chit-chat would last roughly five minutes. Not surprisingly, we talked a good bit longer. Moreover — again not a surprise — we ended up discussing not just what I’d intended, but other aspects of the art and science of pitching as well.

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David Laurila: JP Sears threw 114 pitches last night. “What is your philosophy on starters going deep into games in terms of pitch count?

Scott Emerson: “For us last night, he had an extra day of rest, and we’re also going into the break, so he’s going to have some rest there. We wanted him to get through the sixth so we could get to [Austin] Adams, [Lucas] Erceg, and [Mason] Miller. We thought that was our best chance through their lineup.

“As for me, I like starters to go as long as they can and as hard as they can. I don’t think 114 is necessarily that high of a pitch count. I thought he was throwing the ball fine. [Mark Kotsay] and I talked about it, and [Sears] felt good about himself, so we tried to get him through [Rafael] Devers. That was the goal.”

Laurila: Generally speaking, how does a pitcher’s arm action and pitching style factor into it? Read the rest of this entry »

One of my enduring memories of watching the All-Star game as a child — a child who became a baseball fan in a time before high-speed internet, social media, or even interleague play — was learning about all the players I’d been unable to see throughout the regular season. That included the American League and West Coast stars, but also a parade of forgettable pitchers, and yes, it always seemed to be pitchers, from crappy teams.

For some reason, Royals right-hander José Rosado is the guy who sticks out in my mind. Rookie of the Year vote-getter in his age-21 season, All-Star at 22 and 24, done in the majors at 25. If he hadn’t shown up in pregame intros between Justin Thompson and Jeff Cirillo that one time, I might never have been aware of him. Read the rest of this entry »