Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. There must have been something in the water across the league over the past seven days, because while this column always highlights delightful oddities that I caught, they aren’t often so delightful or so odd. This week, rarities abounded. There were runners getting hit by throws, wild acrobatics, no-look passes, and even a pitchout. Hot teams and cold teams clashed, errors got compounded, and situations that felt in hand rapidly got away. So keep an eye on the runner at first base, and let’s get started – after my customary thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, who popularized this column format for basketball.
1. Not-Quite-Free Bases Jarren Duran is off to a slow start to the 2025 season. And while the problems have mostly come at the plate, everything seems a little off. Take this misadventure on the basepaths last Thursday. Duran led off the bottom of the 10th inning with a game-tying single. That made him the winning run, and he immediately started plotting a theft of second base to get into scoring position. Nick Sandlin checked on him:
Then he checked on him again:
That’s two disengagements; Sandlin wasn’t likely to try again. Duran stole 34 bases last year. He’s blazing fast. He was 5-for-5 on the season and had already swiped one in this game. Second base was as good as his. And so the Blue Jays took extreme measures, calling for one of the least-used plays in modern baseball, a pitchout:
Nick Sandlin didn’t get his second save in as many games on Thursday. One day after breezing through three Boston batters on nine pitches, the Toronto right-hander was tagged with a loss after surrendering a pair of bottom-of-the-tenth-inning runs. The ending was anomalous. With the score tied, one out, the bases juiced, and the infield playing in, Sandlin induced a squibbed grounder that was mishandled, allowing a speedy Red Sox runner to score easily from third.
Making the walk-off unique was that Blue Jays second baseman Andrés Giménez, who had no chance to get the runner at home after bobbling the ball, threw to first for a meaningless out. The play went into the books as a 4-3. In other words, the game ended with the winning run crossing the plate on what looks like a routine groundout on the scorecard.
Which brings us to Sandlin, whom I’d decided to write about after his shutdown effort on Wednesday. Protecting a 2-1 lead in the 11th inning, the 28-year-old reliever fanned David Hamilton on three pitches, retired Rob Refsnyder on a pop foul to the catcher, then got Jarren Duran to slap a worm-killer to Giménez. Sandlin’s pitch breakdown comprised two splitters and seven sliders.
A sweeping slider is Sandlin’s bread and butter, and it’s what Refsnyder referenced when I asked him what makes the low-slot hurler so hard to hit. Read the rest of this entry »
Matthew Boyd has exceeded most outside expectations. Selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft out of Oregon State University, the 34-year-old southpaw was ranked 29th when our 2015 Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list was published that March. He’d pitched well the previous year — a 3.17 ERA between High-A and Double-A — but as our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel wrote, “Some scouts still think there isn’t enough here to stick as a starter.” Given Boyd’s relatively short track record of success, the skepticism was understandable.
The left-hander’s own expectations were loftier, and he wasted little time in proving his doubters wrong. Boyd made his major league debut three months later, and not only did he do so as a starter, he’s gone on to make 170 of his 184 career appearances in that role. Now in his 11th big league season, and his first with the Chicago Cubs, Boyd has never been front-of-the-rotation good — his career ERA and FIP are 4.79 and 4.56 respectively — but he’s been effective when healthy. The problem is that Boyd often hasn’t been healthy; over the past four years alone, he’s missed 390 days of the season due to injury. It’s early, of course, but so far in 2025, Boyd has been both healthy and effective. Across his two starts, he’s thrown 11 scoreless innings.
What did Boyd’s 2015 scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think of it a full decade later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Boyd to respond to it.
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“Boyd was a senior sign out of Oregon State in 2013 that got $75,000 in the 6th round after making real progress in his last amateur year.”Read the rest of this entry »
Then he changed his mind. I try to avoid the impulse to tell baseball players what to do with their careers, but I’ll say this: $500 million is a really, really good reason to abandon one’s previous position.
Guerrero’s $500 million contract extension with the Blue Jays starts next year, runs for 14 years, and contains a full no-trade clause but no opt-outs. The intention, then, is to keep Guerrero in Toronto for the rest of his career. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to this season’s first edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’m never more excited to watch baseball than I am at the end of March. The winter feels endlessly long, even for me in pleasant San Francisco. Spring training doesn’t quite scratch the itch. A series in Tokyo? Eh, everyone was asleep. But then comes Opening Day, and suddenly there’s baseball everywhere. Hats at the grocery store. Announcers on television and on the radio. Crowds filling bars and stadiums, TVs broadcasting the soothing sounds of my favorite sport. I’m all fired up. You only get one opening week a year, and this one’s been excellent. So after the customary nod to Zach Lowe (now of The Ringer, congrats Zach) for the format, let’s get right to the things that made me jump out of my seat this week.
1. Mookie!
I’ll admit to being a little skeptical about how the start of Mookie Betts’s season would go. It’s not because of any doubt about his skill – at this point in his career, I think he’s earned the benefit of the doubt there. But we’re not talking about how Betts would look at full strength. In fact, the reason I was skeptical was because he’s specifically not at full strength after losing nearly 20 pounds during a bout with norovirus.
Betts doesn’t weigh a lot to begin with – he’s officially listed at 180 pounds, but he checked into spring training this year at 175, according to Dodgers announcer Joe Davis. Losing 20 pounds from there is a big deal. Betts hits for a ton of power given his stature, but reducing his body weight by more than 10% makes that an even greater challenge. When he missed the Dodgers’ two games in Tokyo and then came back to play on Opening Day while still clearly affected, I mentally marked down my expectations for him early on.
Betts still isn’t back to full strength. Per a Dodgers broadcast last week, he’s back up to 165 pounds, and still hoping to gain more weight sooner rather than later to deal with the rigors of the season. That lack of oomph shows in the batted ball data; it is, of course, very early in the season, but Betts has barreled up only a single ball, and the hardest he’s hit one all year was a mere 100.8 mph. (For context, his max exit velo last season was 109.4 mph.) His bat speed is down. It shows on Betts’s body, too; he’s always been slight, but he looks smaller this year, because he is.
One place it hasn’t showed up? His batting line. He’s hitting .300/.364/.750 to start the year, and that’s with a .188 BABIP. He has more home runs (three) than strikeouts (one). Every single one of those homers gave the Dodgers the lead. And every single one of them had juuuuuust enough power to clear the wall:
How much distance did those balls have to spare? Maybe 10 feet combined? I think we need to look into the possibility that Betts is a magical being unconstrained by the rules of reality. I don’t know how else to explain his incredible performance even as he’s so focused on recovery that he eats meals during games to try to regain muscle mass.
If you’ve followed his career, you know that Betts is prone to white-hot streaks where he hits everything out of the park. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. But doing it when he’s visibly weakened by illness? Doing it while playing shortstop full time? Doubt Betts at your own risk. The Dodgers are impressive in a million ways – but right now, I can’t stop watching Mookie and giggling with delight.
2. Follow the Bouncing Wall
Ever heard of a strike ‘em out, throw ‘em out single play? Jeremiah Estrada managed that trick over the weekend, and in a way I’ve never seen before:
It’s not unheard of for a pitcher to retrieve the ball after a dropped third strike. Here’s another from the first week of the season:
But that’s how they happen, with balls that bounce back toward the field of play, and bounce far enough that the catcher can’t reach them. After the ball gets behind the plate, it’s the catcher’s ball for better or worse. Unless you’re playing with the wall bumper settings turned up to maximum, that is:
The ball hit a solid railing perfectly, flush and angled back into the field of play. A fraction of an inch in any direction would have made it completely unplayable. But throw enough fastballs off the wall behind the plate, and apparently one will kick back perfectly for some pitcher fielding practice. I’ve never seen anything like it – and that feeling, that I’ve never seen anything like what just occurred, is exactly why I’m so happy to have regular-season baseball back in my life.
3. Genius Defenders and Oblivious Baserunners
If you played baseball or softball growing up, you probably have the same instincts as me: When you see a rundown, you get giddy. Maybe, like me, you even say “Ooh! Pickle!” before you even notice that you’re talking. At the youth level, turning a pickled runner into an out is anything but a sure thing, and both the defenders and the runner have a lot to say about how things go. In the big leagues, the defenders are just too good for that. Escaping a rundown is getting tougher every year, because with perfect execution by both the runner and the defense, the runner is always out.
Here’s a classic one for you, a grounder to third base that hung Dairon Blanco out to dry on the basepaths:
You can quibble with having Blanco run on contact there, with no outs and Bobby Witt Jr. on deck. After the ball was in play, though, he didn’t have a lot of options. Catcher Bo Naylor came up the line aggressively and gave Blanco nowhere to hide. So Blanco went for the classic “break toward the thrower after he releases” plan; he didn’t execute it perfectly, but even if he did, it probably wouldn’t have worked. José Ramírez is fast, Hunter Gaddis and Carlos Santana were both covering home plate for reinforcements if the rundown continued, and like I said, it’s nearly impossible to escape a rundown conducted by major league fielders.
Why am I showing you this standard play? Because it wasn’t a standard play, and didn’t end there. Ramírez wasn’t just bluffing to third with that post-tag pivot:
It’s fun to watch a baseball genius at work. Ramírez made a string of great decisions on this play that equaled Kansas City’s string of bad ones. First, he took off down the third base line even before Naylor’s throw was in his glove. Blanco might be faster than him in a footrace, but he was already accelerating homeward when Blanco planted and changed direction. Rundowns are about quickness, not speed, and Ramírez is preternaturally agile.
He had the runner at second on his mind the entire time, too. You can see him waving Naylor toward him to hurry the play up. By the time he received the throw, he was already thinking about second base. Then, as he turned that way, he gave Kyle Isbel enough of a deke to freeze him on the basepaths. He even managed to re-insert himself into the rundown, though he wisely stepped aside when he saw his teammates had it under control.
Isbel, on the other hand, didn’t cover himself with glory. On this snapshot, the play should essentially be over:
Look at how far down the line Ramírez had already gotten, with Blanco still trying to change direction. That out was as good as made, Isbel had a perfect view of it, and he was close enough to second base to get back easily. But with the ball still right near third base and a fast and accelerating player holding it, Isbel inexplicably decided to take off:
Here’s how bad that decision was: Between Isbel deciding to run and Ramírez tagging Blanco out, Isbel took exactly two steps. He was maybe 20% of the way to third when Ramírez made the tag, and Ramírez was maybe 20% of the way from third to home.
Poor Jonathan India. He seems to know his way around a rundown. While the rest of the Royals were finding ways to create outs, he played everything perfectly. He tore down the line to first. When the defense abandoned him to cover the rundown, he went partway to second. And when Isbel got caught too, India did the right thing and went all the way to the second base bag. Just to put the cherry on top, rewatch the clip of Isbel getting tagged out. India didn’t step on the bag until the tag was applied. That’s because he was trying to start a rundown of his own; if Isbel had just sprinted back to second instead of stopping, India would have retreated to first, hopefully allowing Isbel to reach third or maybe even getting out of the rundown without being tagged given how many fielders were down near home plate. It’s amazing how good baseball players are at these little things. Well, how good they usually are, at least.
4. Lunging Practice
Double plays are a frequent feature of this column, because a well-turned double play, particularly if the degree of difficulty is high, is one of the most exciting plays in baseball. It features so many people operating in unison, there are usually close plays for at least one of the outs, and acrobatic pivots at second are just visually pleasing, period. And then you’ve got the double plays that aren’t perfect but are satisfying nonetheless:
What happened here? First, Mark Vientos made a difficult pick on a short hop. Then he judged that he had enough time and threw to second:
You can tell that something is wrong with the throw even in that abbreviated clip. The angle looks wrong, and so does his arm action. Good hands, yes, but bad throw:
Luisangel Acuña made that look easier than it was, but that could have been a disaster. His glove actually clipped second base as he went down for that one. How could it not, given the short hop? The ball rattled around in his glove, and he nearly lost his footing on the base while securing it, but he made the tough catch and even kept himself in position to throw to first.
At this point in the play, doubling up Isaac Paredes was far from automatic. Acuña didn’t have the time to baby the throw; he had to rip it and hope for reasonable accuracy. And “reasonable” is about what he got:
Pete Alonso isn’t a heralded defender, but he played this ball perfectly. When he saw the flight path, he went out and attacked the catch point. Stay back, and you have an in-between hop. Paredes might even beat out the throw; it was a really close play. But Alonso cut down the distance with his stretch, and he even got a bit of momentum by pushing on the base with his right foot, making sure to keep in contact until after he’d caught the ball. I love the brace with his right hand, too; that’s a good way to make sure that a collision with the ground doesn’t jar the ball out of the glove.
Honestly, that ball should be a double play every time without the need for anything spectacular. But hey, it was the first day of the season. Everyone was still getting up to game speed. And what better way to do that than by practicing some tough catches?
5. George Springer Still Has It
In the prime of his career, George Springer was a do-it-all outfielder in addition to being a slugger. He played 500 or so innings a year in center, spent the balance in right field, and showed off a cannon arm and fantastic instincts to go with plus speed. At 35, he’s not that kind of defender anymore. His last two seasons have been his worst defensive efforts as a major leaguer. But there’s a big difference between a diminished Springer and your regular kind of bad defender.
You can be a bad defender in many different ways. You can have bad instincts, or no speed, or a scattershot arm. But while Springer’s sprint speed is down, his heady play isn’t. How many below-average defenders can do this?
That’s not a great angle from the live broadcast, but I wanted to show it to you first so you can get an idea of how routine everything looked until the slide. Springer was playing far off the line in right when Ryan O’Hearn ripped the ball down the line, so it was a clean double off the bat. With Colton Cowser running from first, the math was pretty easy: If the ball hits the wall, Cowser scores. That’s why the broadcast cut to Cowser rounding second; he was the focus of attention at that point.
In his younger years, Springer might have gotten to that one standing up. But even missing a step or two, he has outstanding defensive instincts. He realized there was little downside and plenty of upside in trying to make a tough play, then pulled it off perfectly:
Every little thing about that is gorgeous. He was into the slide with legs extended by the time the ball hit his glove. He set his feet and lifted his body off the turf without using either hand, which let him complete the transfer from glove to throwing hand more quickly. Check out his left foot as he pivoted into the throw; his toe was pointed in the wrong direction at first, so he gave a quick jab to establish the correct position. Then he ripped the throw, off balance and falling away, hitting the cutoff man on the fly. Cowser had rounded second before Springer even started his slide, and yet the ball was back in an infielder’s hands by the time he stepped on third.
Small potatoes? Sure. He didn’t record an out or even prevent the hitter from getting to second. But keeping a runner from scoring, even with one out, has value. The O’s didn’t score in this inning, and that definitely wouldn’t have been true if Springer hadn’t made the play so seamlessly. And seriously, he was way off the line for that one. Here’s where he started the play:
The Jays like to shade Springer that way against lefties, but it’s nowhere near a straight-up right field position. Look at where he was standing against righties:
Now, did I pick that particular clip to show you that Andrés Giménez can juggle a baseball with his feet? I sure did. But you can see where Springer came into the picture, and he was maybe 20 feet closer to the line than he was against O’Hearn. My point is that it would have been easy for him to play that ball off the wall, or trap it with his momentum going the wrong way, or any number of ways that bad defenders play the ball when it’s not right at them. But Springer still has the elite defensive instincts he showed earlier in his career, and he made the kind of play that he always has. I love it. Even as he ages, you can still see what makes Springer so electric. Oh, and he’s slugging so far this year too. You love to see it.
Programming note: My chat next week will take place Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern, as I’ll be out on Monday. Talk to you then, I hope.
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Toronto Blue Jays. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
Bowden Francis was one of baseball’s best pitchers over the final two months of the 2024 season. From August onward, the 28-year-old Toronto Blue Jays righty made nine starts and posted a 1.53 ERA with 56 strikeouts while allowing just 24 hits and seven walks across 59 innings.
All told, Francis recorded a 3.30 ERA, a 22.5% strikeout rate, and a 5.4% walk rate last season across his 27 appearances (13 starts) spanning 103 2/3 innings. It stands to reason that the minuscule .211 BABIP he allowed isn’t repeatable, though it may not be due for as much of a regression as you might expect. Inducing weak contact is Francis’ modus operandi on the mound, and a low BABIP is a feature of his game, not a fluke.
Considering the priority for pitchers to generate as many swings and misses as possible, when I spoke with Francis during spring training, I wanted to understand his approach to pitching. Specifically, I asked him, “How do you get guys out?”
“Pounding the strike zone,” said Francis, who was selected out of Chipola Junior College in the sixth round of the 2017 draft. “Strike percentage, getting guys on their heels more. Mixing it up and moving it around, trying to keep them off balance. Pitchability is my thing. I’ve never been super-overpowering. I’ve always been more on the crafty side.” Read the rest of this entry »
Alan Roden roped baseballs with regularity this spring, helping himself to land not only a roster spot, but also an Opening Day start in right field for the Toronto Blue Jays. Showing signs that he’s ready to take off at the MLB level, the 25-year-old left-handed hitter punished Grapefruit League hurlers to the tune of a 1.245 OPS and a 220 wRC+. He also coaxed six free passes and fanned just four times over his 37 plate appearances.
More than spring training results factored into his first big-league opportunity. Building on a strong 2024 season, split between Double-A New Hampshire and Triple-A Buffalo, Roden has been adding pop to his profile. Previously known more for his bat-to-ball skills than for his ability to clear fences, the erstwhile Creighton University Bluejay is now looking to lift.
Having read of Roden’s efforts to generate more power, I asked him how he’s gone about impacting the ball with more authority.
“I think it’s less of the actual impact that’s better,” Roden told me at Blue Jays camp. “It’s more the shape of the ball off the bat, directionally. The exit velocities are high enough to where if I’m getting in the air to the pull side, it’s going to go. That’s where the damage comes from, hitting the ball with more ideal launch angles.”
Roden has a B.A. in physics, so understanding the aerodynamics of ball flight, and the swing paths that produce results, comes with the territory. Explaining his mechanical adjustments was a simple exercise for the Middleton, Wisconsin native. Read the rest of this entry »
Daphne Lemke/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.
But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the current state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over. It’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each American League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.
It might not be long before Captain Kirk is the captain of the Starship Blue Jays. Alejandro Kirk made his MLB debut in September 2020. The only players who have been with the team for longer are Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, both of whom could leave in free agency next winter. If that were to happen, Kirk would become the longest-tenured Blue Jay just days before his 27th birthday. He could end up holding that title for quite some time, too. On Saturday, Kirk and the Blue Jays reportedly agreed to a five-year, $58 million extension. The deal, which begins in 2026, buys out the backstop’s final arbitration season and his first four free agent years, running through his age-31 campaign.
A 23-year-old Kirk burst onto the scene in the first half of 2022. He hit .315, slugged 11 home runs, and walked more often than he struck out over 83 games. His 155 wRC+ ranked sixth among qualified AL batters, far ahead of the next-best catcher. The fact that he was splitting catching duties, and thus DHing on the regular, cut into his overall defensive value, but still, Kirk ranked among the top-10 AL players in WAR. Fans voted him to be the starting catcher for the AL All-Stars, and the honor was well deserved.
Yet, Kirk has never looked like that middle-of-the-order threat since. He produced a 95 wRC+ in the second half of 2022. He followed that up with a 96 wRC+ in 2023 and a 94 wRC+ in 2024. To save you some strenuous mental math, I can tell you that averages out to a 95 wRC+ since the 2022 All-Star break. That means Kirk has been about 5% less productive at the plate than the average hitter, but, to his credit, still 5% more productive than the average catcher. His 10.3% walk rate is great, while his 12.0% strikeout rate is elite. Only seven batters (min. 1,000 PA) have a lower strikeout rate in that span, and none of them boasts a walk rate in the double digits. Unfortunately, the plus power that made Kirk such a complete hitter in the first half of 2022 has vanished: Read the rest of this entry »
