Jose Altuve is having a Cooperstown-worthy career. Since debuting with the Houston Astros in 2011, the 35-year-old second baseman has logged 2,329 hits, including 246 home runs, while putting up a 129 wRC+ and 59.2 WAR. A nine-time All-Star who has won seven Silver Sluggers and one Gold Glove, Altuve captured MVP honors in 2017.

Turn the clock back to 2008, and the 5-foot-6 Puerto Cabello, Venezuela native was 18 years old and playing stateside for the first time. His manager with the rookie-level Greeneville Astros was Rodney Linares.

I recently asked the now-Tampa Bay Rays bench coach for his memories of the then-teenaged prospect.

“One guy that doesn’t get a lot of credit for Altuve is [current St. Louis Cardinals first base coach] Stubby Clapp, who’d been my hitting coach the year before,” Linares told me. “He always talked about Altuve, because he’d had him in extended spring. He was like, ‘You’ve got to watch this kid; this kid is going to be really good.’ I used to tell Stubby, ‘You think that because you’re small and played in the big leagues, anybody who is small can play.’”

Linares recalls the Astros organization’s wanting him to play 20-year-old Albert Cartwright at second, prompting him to tell Altuve ‘Go to short, go to third, go to left field. I’m going to make sure that you get your at-bats.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Today that title is a bit of a misnomer; I got back from vacation Monday night, so I saw very little baseball before Tuesday. That said, I didn’t need to see very much to have a great time. This week has been awesome. Home runs both mammoth and inside-the-park, great baserunning by slow guys, bad baserunning by slow guys, reflex plays and dekes; the list goes on and on. We might need the All-Star break just to catch our collective breath before a bustling trade deadline and sprint to the finish. For now, though, let’s just marvel at the week – after my customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, of course.

1. Unconventional Double Plays
Cody Bellinger has been great addition to the Yankees after they acquired him for peanuts over the winter. He is flashing the offensive prowess that has come and gone over the years, and with Trent Grisham manning center, he is playing the corner outfield more than he has in the past. His glove isn’t as good as it was at his peak, but putting a center fielder in left is still a plus for your team defense, as the Mets learned on Sunday. This Juan Soto line drive would have been a hit against almost anyone else:

Statcast gave it a 25% catch probability, and I think it was probably even harder than that. Catch probability measures how far Bellinger had to run and how much time he had to do it, but that ball was absolutely scalded and had so much topspin that it was hooking down hard in the brief time it was in the air. He caught it by the very end of the webbing; “baseball is a game of inches” is usually about the bat hitting the ball or a bang-bang play, but in this case, one inch separated a catch from extra bases:

Oh yeah, then this happened:

That throw is as good of a play as the catch! At full extension, stretched out awkwardly to secure the ball, Bellinger still managed to find first base on the run and unleash an absolute seed that hit Paul Goldschmidt right in the glove on the fly. Making that catch was hard enough. Making it without falling was even harder. Making it without falling and then throwing a frozen rope on target? Almost unthinkable.

Even after that catch, even with that throw, you might wonder why Francisco Lindor got doubled off. Partially, he couldn’t believe anyone could catch that line drive. Partially, too, he got deked. Goldschmidt no-sold the play, barely moving his glove until he absolutely had to. This isn’t the body language of a guy desperate to turn a double play:

That’s not the perfect angle, but you get the idea. The rhythm of this play, to Lindor, didn’t feel like the kind where he’d need to sprint and dive back to first. When someone makes a play that good, you turn around and go back, but what are they going to do, unleash an off-balance missile while the first baseman you’re staring at barely moves? Apparently, yes!

2. Irrational Exuberance
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is not a good baserunner. That’s not an opinion. He’s been below average in each year of his major league career. He has 24 career steals and has been caught stealing 12 times. He’s slow, and he hits into a lot of double plays. But despite all that, Vlad likes to run. Give him the chance, and he’ll take off. Take Wednesday, for example. Guerrero took advantage of an errant pickoff throw to scamper to second:

You’ve seen that play a million times. Everyone was pretty relaxed about it; in the game audio, you can actually hear Jays first base coach Mark Budzinski calmly telling Vlad “go ahead, go ahead.” But the play wasn’t over:

Yeah, don’t do that. I’ve already mentioned that Guerrero isn’t fleet of foot, but it also took him forever to get moving; acceleration isn’t a strength either. Watch his feet – his first step was actually backwards, out into right field. Adrian Houser was on the wrong side of the mound, but Vlad just didn’t have enough straight line speed to make it matter. To make matters even worse, that was the third out of the inning, at third base, with Addison Barger — one of the teams’ hottest hitters — at the plate. Against the White Sox! Don’t do this.

Don’t do this either:

Now, to be fair, this is a tougher play than before. The underlying cause, though, is similar: a belief that baserunning is easier than it actually is. Elite runners might be safe there. That said, elite runners are a lot faster, and better at sliding, and they’d probably take two steps to their left to better block the throwing lane. That should be an extremely difficult throw for a right-handed first baseman, instead of the easy pitch-and-catch that it was. And once you’re dead to rights, well, hitting the brakes and retreating is a better option than starting your slide so early. You probably won’t survive the rundown, but you might stay in it long enough to give the runner on third time to score before you’re tagged for the final out of the inning.

To Guerrero’s credit, he did try a nifty maneuver at second that nearly rescued the whole thing:

Again, though, leave the high-difficulty baserunning stunts for the high-talent baserunners. Both of these decisions would be excellent if, say, Trea Turner had made them. Knowing what you can accomplish is a key part of accruing value on the bases. Watching what happens when that crucial step doesn’t occur sure is fun for a neutral observer, though.

3. One-up-manship
Kyle Schwarber had himself a game on Tuesday night. He went 2-for-4 with a double and a home run, and that homer was outrageous. Not only did he hit it into McCovey Cove, but he did so more or less flat-footed:

He even showed off another facet of his game an inning earlier, swiping second base off a distracted Robbie Ray:

That brought Schwarber to nine steals on the year, with only one caught stealing. He’s one of the slowest runners in baseball, but he understands the proper application of that speed, generally stealing bases off pitchers who forget about him. He’s not a particularly good baserunner overall, but he’s been picking smart spots to go this year.

One batter later, though, Schwarber tried to double up on his baserunning feat by swiping third. Enter Patrick Bailey:

Schwarber had a great read on Ray; he got an excellent jump in a great spot to steal, with the batter screening the catcher at the plate. Bailey just did everything he had to do that much better:

Watch his footwork there. He cleared batter Alec Bohm and got his lead foot planted at the back of the batter’s box while he was catching the ball. The catch and transfer were both perfect, letting him throw in rhythm. The throw? A laser beam to Matt Chapman’s glove for a tag that got Schwarber by an inch or two. I don’t think Schwarber could have done anything better; he just got beat by perhaps the best defensive catcher in the game.

Bailey is having a miserable season at the plate, but he even outdid Schwarber there, too. The Schwarbomb in the seventh put the Phillies up 3-1, and the score stayed there until Bailey batted with one out in the ninth. Then, well:

It’s hard to imagine a more exciting walk-off than that, and it made for the perfect kicker to this game. Sure, Schwarber had a stolen base and two-run homer, but Bailey had a caught stealing and a walk-off, three-run, inside-the-park homer. Real “anything you can do I can do better” vibes.

4. Two-Way Excellence
Oh, you like inside-the-park home runs? Northern California has your back:

That’s Lawrence Butler leading off the home half of the first for the A’s with an only-in-Sacramento play. It involved the ball kicking off of a chain link fence section of the wall and eluding the entire Braves outfield. That let Butler score even with one of the most nonchalant starts to an inside-the-parker you’ll ever see:

That’s the stride of someone who thought he hit the ball out of the park, but the crazy carom and Butler’s speed made it all work in the end. That’s been a hallmark of his game this year, in fact. He’s not the best defender in the world, but he’s got enough range and instincts to make up for a scattershot arm. He has plenty of swing-and-miss in his game, but he has enough plate discipline to keep his strikeouts from capsizing his offensive contributions. He’s a savvy baserunner capable of hitting top speed faster than you’d think. And he has enough power to make up for any small flaws elsewhere:

Inside the park? Outside the park? Butler has the speed/power combination to accomplish both. He looks like a nice building block of the next good A’s team – not this year’s team, of course, but maybe next year’s. After 1,000 major league plate appearances, it seems pretty clear that he’s a solid all-around player but not quite a star. That’s just fine for both the contract and the prospect pedigree, though – and as a huge bonus, he’s tremendously fun to watch. More home runs like these, please.

5. Raw Power
More home runs like these, too. Jac Caglianone was playing college baseball last year. The sixth pick in the 2024 draft, he looked more like a developmental stash than a plug-and-play star. He played both ways in college, though he was clearly a lot better offensively, and the Royals drafted him with that in mind. But he was raw, with iffy command of the strike zone and a swing-first mentality that led to ugly swings over sliders.

A whirlwind tour of the minors – 158 wRC+ in Double-A, 164 in Triple-A – convinced Kansas City to call him up at the beginning of June. Through just over a month of play, the results have been disappointing; Caglianone is hitting .151/.205/.286, for a 31 wRC+. But the results are lying. He’s been much better than I thought he’d be, to be quite honest. He’s running a 22% strikeout rate, far lower than I would have expected given that he’s chasing 41% of the pitches he sees outside the strike zone, one of the worst marks in the big leagues. The stats might be rough, but the process isn’t; by xwOBA, he’s been about an average hitter, rather than 70% below average, thanks to his prodigious exit velocities.

In other words, over the long run. Caglianone is going to hit for a lot of power. He’s already hitting the ball very hard, in fact, he just hasn’t quite harnessed that into doubles and dingers. But oh my god, have you seen what it looks like when he gets hot? Tuesday night, he did this:

If you want to know how scalded that ball was, watch the outfielders. Those are courtesy jogs, not “maybe I can get this one” sprints. That was 114 mph off the bat, the kind of home run that only the Judges and Stantons of the world can consistently pull off. When you hit the ball that low (19 degrees), it’s hard to leave the stadium. Caglianone is part of that group of elite power hitters already.

One hard-hit ball often begets another. His results so far have been poor, but he’s clearly close to unlocking something. If you leave a pitch over the middle of the plate against Caglianone, it’s going to travel a long way. Look at this nonsense from the next day:

That’s not a reasonable place to hit a home run. It went 466 feet, some real Bo Jackson stuff. I had the volume cranked up on this game, and the crack of the bat was so thunderous that the entire crowd went “ooooh” in unison. He might not have hit that ball quite as hard as the previous one, but he got it at the perfect angle and still tattooed it. His power binges are park-proof; Kaufmann Stadium is the stingiest stadium in baseball for left-handed power hitters, but if you hit the ball as hard as Caglianone does, it doesn’t matter where the fence is.

I didn’t think Caglianone was going to hit the majors this quickly. I’m still kind of surprised at how well he’s adapted to big league pitching; he’s getting attacked relentlessly on the inside part of the plate and chasing 40% of the time, and yet still running reasonable strikeout rates. But I’m not at all surprised at how fun he is to watch – and I can’t wait for more rainmaking home runs, and more mob movie celebrations in the dugout:

I owe George Springer an apology. Back in March, I wrote an article with a very simple premise: If Springer got off to a terrible start, the Blue Jays needed to be ready to sit him down. He was godawful at the beginning of spring training, he’d been a below-average player for two seasons in a row, and ZiPS saw him as the seventh-best outfielder on the team. Not the seventh-best defensive outfielder; ZiPS projected that Springer would put up 2.2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, a bounce-back campaign, but still worse than the projections of six other Blue Jays outfielders. I wasn’t saying he was washed or anything, but I was concerned that Springer might deliver more of the same, and that the Blue Jays would keep running him out there even though they had better options available. I needn’t have worried.

“I feel great, actually,” Springer told MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson while he was putting up those abysmal spring training numbers. “For me, it’s about the process. It’s not about the results. I want to make sure that I’m swinging at the right pitches and getting my swing off. Yeah, obviously everyone would like to see the ball hit the grass, but for me specifically, I’m working on the mechanical side of it.” Then the season started, and Springer went out and backed those words up. He’s having a renaissance. A couple months shy of his 36th birthday, he already has 1.8 WAR, and his 143 wRC+ is the best mark he’s put up since he was a fresh-faced 30-year-old Astro in 2020. He’s on pace for his highest home run total since 2019, and he’s running a career-best 12.4% walk rate. So Springer is walking more and hitting for more power, and because of a .303 BABIP, his best since 2016, he’s also running his best batting average in years. How is he doing all this? Read the rest of this entry »

Starting pitchers prepare for games in three-stage fashion. A few days after taking the mound, they throw a bullpen session under the watchful eye of the pitching coach, typically with a Trackman recording each throw. At the start of every series, there is a pitchers’ meeting with all arms present, as well as the catchers and pitching coaches. On the day of a start, the pitcher will go over that day’s game plan with the catchers and coaches.

And then there are the talks pitchers have among themselves. While informal, they can likewise play a meaningful role in preparedness. Every time a hurler takes the hill, he brings with him knowledge gleaned from his peers. That was a big part of what I was interested in when I approached three starters — Lucas Giolito, Kevin Gausman, and Ryan Pepiot — to learn how they get ready for an outing from an information perspective.

Here are excerpts from my conversations with the pitchers:

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PRE-SERIES AND PRE-START MEETINGS

Giolito: “You go over a lot of things in the pre-series meeting. You go over guys who like to run — stealing bases and things like that — and you obviously go over the hitters. Considering that you have a bunch of dudes in the room that have wildly different stuff and attack plans, that’s more surface level. You’re not going down the line and saying, ‘This is how we’re going to attack this guy,’ because we’re all different. That’s for when you have your pre-start meeting.

“In the pre-start meeting — that’s with the coaching staff and the catchers — we go over each hitter, talking about strengths, weaknesses, and attack plans. The attack plans are based on the individual pitcher’s stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »

A piece that ran here at FanGraphs just over a week ago elicited a good suggestion. Commenting on A Conversation With Max Scherzer on the Importance of Conviction, reader muenstertruck wrote the following:

“If you’re taking follow up questions, I’d like to hear how he differentiates intention and conviction from physical effort. How difficult is it to mentally commit to the pitch but only give it 90% so you keep some gas in the tank? Is it even possible to do so?”

Fortuitously, an opportunity to circle back with the future Hall of Famer came just a few days later when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park for a weekend series. As expected — Scherzer likes talking ball — he was amenable to addressing said followup.

“Effort level and conviction are different,” Scherzer answered. “You can throw a pitch at 100% effort and still be mentally indecisive about it. You can also put out less than 100% effort and be mentally convicted in what you’re doing. Can things go hand-in-hand? Yes, but it’s not ‘more effort means more conviction.’ You can just be more mentally convicted.”

Scherzer had opined in our earlier conversation that you’re more likely to miss your spot when not fully convicted. What about throwing with full conviction at a 90% effort level? Does that make it easier to pinpoint your command? Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into 2025, you might not have expected Alejandro Kirk and Ernie Clement to play central roles on a playoff contender. Neither player was an above-average hitter last season; in fact, each hit for a 93 wRC+ while playing regularly for a team that won just 74 games. Yet the pair rank first and second in position player WAR on the Blue Jays, thanks not only to improved offense but exceptional glovework, with Kirk battling the Giants’ Patrick Bailey for the top spot in two catching metrics, and Clement ranking among the best third basemen while also posting strong metrics in limited duty at the three other infield positions. The pair have not only helped the Blue Jays to a 47-38 record and the top AL Wild Card position, but also the top ranking in my annual midseason defensive breakdown.

Kirk and Clement aren’t Toronto’s only defensive stalwarts. Second baseman Andrés Giménez and center fielder Myles Straw, a pair of light-hitting glove whizzes acquired from the Guardians in separate trades this past winter, have been strong at their respective positions, with the latter helping to cover for the absences of Daulton Varsho. A Gold Glove winner last year, Varsho missed the first month of this season recovering from right rotator cuff surgery, and returned to the injured list on June 1 due to a strained left hamstring. Even in limited duty, Straw, Varsho, and Giménez — who missed about four weeks due to a quad strain, with Clement filling in at second for most of that time — have all rated as three to five runs above average according to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value (FRV), and five to eight above average according to Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). Clement has totaled 12 DRS and 10 FRV at the four infield spots; in 359.2 innings at third, he’s second in the majors in both DRS (7) and FRV (5).

This is the third year in a row I’ve taken a midseason dip into the alphabet soup of defensive metrics, including Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our own catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages). One longtime standby, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), has been retired, which required me to adjust my methodology. 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 »

You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” Maybe because your Aunt Debbie shared a post from her favorite social media influencer. Maybe because you passed the time during a layover at the airport perusing the self-help books in the Hudson News near your gate. Like most self-help tropes, whether or not it hits for you depends a little on your life circumstances and a little on how you choose to apply it. When it comes to sports fandom, emotional hedging can be a useful tool to avoid disappointment, or maybe you prefer projecting confidence to manifest a desired outcome. And if you’re a Phillies fan, you’ve perfected the art of oscillating wildly between the two over the course of a single game. You even have a handy meme with a meter that only ever points to one extreme or the other:

(Please excuse the mismatched needle sizes and logo alignment. These images are precious internet relics that have been downloaded, clumsily edited, re-uploaded, compressed, and decompressed hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The pixelation is earned like callouses on the hands of a skilled laborer.)

But the formula seems to assume that expectations are set and controlled by the person in search of a happy existence. The entire notion is upended when mathematical models based on historical outcomes become the source for baseline expectations. In this scenario, if your team is outperforming expectations, then you can enjoy the banked wins, but you do so in fear of the rainier days that surely lie somewhere in the team’s future forecast. Whereas if your team is underperforming expectations, things might feel dire, but there’s reason to believe sunnier days lie ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Scherzer was an early adoptee of analytics. When I first interviewed him for Baseball Prospectus back in August 2010, the right-hander called himself “a very mathematical guy,” adding that “the advanced metrics that are coming out throughout the game… have helped me to understand and simplify the game.”

Fifteen years later, Scherzer is an elder statesmen — and a three-time Cy Young Award winner — who approaches his craft differently than he once did. That’s not to say he no longer values analytics — he does — but a decade and a half of facing big league hitters has altered his perspective. (He addressed that evolution in an interview that ran here at FanGraphs two summer ago.) Now with the Toronto Blue Jays and on the back stretch of a career that should land him in Cooperstown, the 40-year-old Scherzer highly values an aspect of pitching that can’t be quantified.

The subject at hand was one he volunteered. Knowing Scherzer possesses both a wealth of pitching knowledge and well-formed opinions, I approached him with an open-ended question: What should we talk about?

Here is the conversation that followed, edited lightly for better clarity.

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David Laurila: You mentioned conviction…

Max Scherzer: “Yes. Guys now are flooded with information, and what they really need to be doing is going out there and competing, and understanding that when you do get beat, it’s not the shape of the pitch. It’s actually the sequence, or the conviction, or it could be 1,000 other things. Talking to lot of young guys, that’s what they care about, their pitch shapes. There’s so much more to pitching than that. Those are the discussions we need to have with the next generation.”

Laurila: Is there are a relationship between shapes and conviction? Do pitches that aren’t thrown with full conviction tend to be less sharp? Read the rest of this entry »

Something weird is happening with Alejandro Kirk. It’s not that he’s having a great season. That’s not weird at all. Kirk ranks third among catchers with 2.4 WAR and 21st among all players. He’s also hitting much better than he has in the past two seasons, but that’s not necessarily weird either. After combining for a wRC+ of 95 in 2023 and 2024, Kirk has a 129 wRC+ this season, the same as he ran in 2022, when he was an All-Star and won the Silver Slugger. He’s always been great with the glove, and it now looks like his bat is back. His .370 xwOBA and 119 DRC+ are also his best since 2022.

What’s weird is that he’s hitting the ball harder – much, much harder – but he’s not necessarily hitting for more power. Let me show you what I mean with a table. Below are a bunch of contact-quality metrics for the five full seasons of Kirk’s career. On the far right is his isolated power. Usually, contact quality and power are pretty much synonymous. If you hit the ball hard, you’re going to end up with doubles, triples, and homers. Usually.

This season, Kirk is running the highest average exit velocity, 90th percentile exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and slugging percentage of his entire career, and not by a little bit. These are huge jumps. Everyone’s favorite 5’8” catcher is in the 97th percentile in hard-hit rate! Yet his ISO is merely the third best of his career, a mere nine points above last season’s mark. I’m curious about why Kirk is hitting the ball so much harder all of a sudden, and I’m curious about why it’s not resulting in a massive power spike. Read the rest of this entry »