Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a force of nature. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball, and in a very obvious way: he scalds the baseball to all fields and hits a bunch of home runs. Last year was a down year, and he still left the yard 32 times. He perennially records some of the hardest-hit batted balls in the game. When you think about a prototypical first baseman, Guerrero’s combination of power and hit tool is probably what you’re picturing.

One of the impressive parts of Guerrero’s career has been his ability to limit strikeouts while still getting to his power. See, low strikeout rates aren’t an inherently great thing. If you don’t strike out very often but don’t do any damage when you put the ball in play, you’re not really making a good trade. Adam Frazier is a good example of this type of hitter. He struck out just 12.1% of the time last year, but posted an 81 wRC+ anyway because when he did make contact, it was generally weak. You can probably conjure a picture of this type of hitter on your favorite team. You love that they never give away an at-bat, but hate that they never take matters into their own hands and park one in the seats or smack one off the power alley wall.

Guerrero doesn’t suffer from that problem. He struck out just 16.4% of the time in 2022, but when he made contact, he wasn’t Fraziering it up out there. Let’s get that in numbers: in his career, Frazier is batting .317 with a .456 slugging percentage when he ends a plate appearance with a batted ball, good for a .327 wOBA. Guerrero is hitting .351 with a .616 slugging percentage, which works out to a .403 wOBA. One of these things is not like the other. That’s why low strikeout rates are great statistical markers for power hitters and yet broadly uninteresting in the population as a whole. What you do with those extra balls in play matters a ton, as Michael Baumann covered yesterday, and with far more Pitbull references than I could even think up. Read the rest of this entry »

Billy Wagner was the club’s closer when Craig Kimbrel joined the Atlanta Braves in 2010. Thirty-nine years old by season’s end, Wagner logged the last 37 of his 422 career saves, and he was as dominant as ever while doing so. Over 69-and-a-third innings, the left-hander fanned 104 batters while allowing just 38 hits.

Kimbrel, who was just 21 years old when he debuted that May, was every bit as overpowering. In 21 appearances comprising 20-and-two-thirds innings, the rookie right-hander fanned 40 batters while allowing just nine hits. Along the way, he recorded the first of what is now 395 saves.

I’ve had a Hall of Fame vote for three years, and in each of them I’ve put a checkmark next to Wagner’s name. This coming winter, I plan to do so again in what will be his penultimate year on the ballot (assuming he doesn’t get voted in; Wagner received 68% of support in his last go-round).

Kimbrel will soon celebrate his 35th birthday, and while the end of his career is fast approaching, he’s still pitching. Will he likewise be getting my vote once his name appears on the ballot? And what about Kenley Jansen? Still going strong at age 35, he’s also got 395 saves, tying him with Kimbrel for seventh on the all-time list, directly behind Wagner.

Let’s compare some of their numbers:

Wagner: 422 saves, WPA 28.40, 187 ERA+, 2.73 FIP, 6.0 H/9, 11.9 K/9.
Kimbrel: 395 saves, WPA 22.99, 174 ERA+, 2.38 FIP, 5.2 H/9, 14.3 K/9.
Jansen: 395 saves, WPA 24.72, 161 ERA+, 2.44 FIP, 5.8 H/9. 13.0 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

If you look atop the groundball rate leaderboard, you’ll see some of the usual suspects. Josh Bell and Masataka Yoshida have hit more than two-thirds of their batted balls on the ground this year, while Eric Hosmer and Jean Segura aren’t far behind. Bell, Hosmer, and Segura have been some of the most notable groundball hitters in the majors for years, while Yoshida was a groundball menace in Japan. Even at such an early point in the season, the groundball cream is rising to the top.

At the bottom of the leaderboard, the names are a little more surprising. Noted fly ball hitters Adam Duvall and Brandon Lowe are among the bottom 10, but there are also a handful of players you wouldn’t expect to see. One such player is Daulton Varsho.

Varsho has hit five groundballs this year, good for a 20% groundball rate. Only one qualified batter, Carlos Correa, has hit fewer balls on the ground. However, it was Varsho, and not Correa, who caught my eye, because of his extreme groundball numbers at the very beginning of the season. Over his first eight games, Varsho came to the plate 32 times and put 19 balls in play. Only one was a groundball. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays were our staff pick to win the AL East, moreso due to the strength of their lineup than their pitching, though I think it’s safe to say that nobody thought their run prevention would be this bad, this early. Indeed, the team gave up nine runs to the Cardinals in an Opening Day victory, then lost three straight, surrendering nine runs in two of those games. Whether in Canada or the United States, that’s not a good exchange rate.

It’s not often that a team gives up nine or more runs in three of its first four games, and as you might guess, it’s rarely an indicator of quality. It’s happened just 12 times in the Wild Card era (1995 onward), including twice this year:

The 10 previous teams to get beat up with such frequency to start the season combined for a winning percentage that equates to a 71–91 record. Five of those teams went on to lose 95 or more games, and only two finished at .500 or better, with the 2001 Cardinals the only ones to make the playoffs, and that as a Wild Card team.

That’s not great company to be in, and yet the Blue Jays aren’t alone even among teams in their division; the Orioles gave up exactly nine runs in each of their first three games, making them the fourth Wild Card-era team to allow at least nine in all three and the first since the 2005 Rockies. Yet neither of them came close to allowing as many runs as the Phillies did over their first four games: 37, as compared to Toronto’s 31 and Baltimore’s 27. The reigning NL champions entered Tuesday night with a staff ERA of 9.28 as the team went 0–4; at least the Blue Jays won one game and the Orioles two. Funny enough, the three teams combined to allow four runs in their victories as I was writing this, as if you needed a reminder that such ugliness was unsustainable.

Admittedly, it wasn’t pretty for the Blue Jays’ starters in those four games, as they were rocked for a 10.80 ERA and 6.49 FIP in 18.1 innings. While one turn through the front four of the rotation is just that — a mere 2.5% of the season — the lack of surrounding data feeds into anxieties about what could go wrong. As a matter of due diligence for those who might consider riding the Blue Jays’ bandwagon as well as those who are already hyperventilating, let’s take a closer look.

Alek Manoah had the honor of the Opening Day start after a season in which he made his first All-Star team and finished third in ERA (2.24) as well as the Cy Young voting. Facing the Cardinals, he was staked to a 3–0 first-inning lead but quickly gave back a run via an infield single, an error, a walk, and a single by Nolan Arenado in a laborious 29-pitch frame. After a scoreless second, he served up a two-run homer to Tyler O’Neill in the third, then gave up a two-run homer to Brendan Donovan in the fourth before getting the hook with two outs. Final line: 3.2 innings, nine hits, five runs, two walks, three strikeouts.

Obviously that’s not what you want, but his performance didn’t offer any major red flags. Manoah’s fastball velocity was slightly up from last year (94.1 mph versus 93.8), and while the results on his slider weren’t good (the Cardinals went 4-for-5 with a homer), its velocity and movement were in line with last year (it scored a 117 in Stuff+). Manoah said afterwards he wasn’t aggressive enough. “One thing I’ve got to remember is I’m really good myself,” he told reporters. “Sometimes you might go in there and face a good lineup and the act of giving them a lot of credit makes them even better.”

The Blue Jays did come back to win that one despite Manoah’s struggles. On Saturday, however, they squandered a good effort by Kevin Gausman (six innings, three unearned runs, one walk, seven strikeouts), as starter Jack Flaherty and relievers Drew VerHagen and Andre Pallante kept them hitless through 6.1 frames (albeit with seven walks from Flaherty) before Kevin Kiermaier singled. The unearned runs came with two outs and two on in the third inning, when Matt Chapman’s bobble and throwing error on an Arenado grounder brought in one run and Nolan Gorman followed with a two-run single.

Gausman’s average four-seam velocity was down 1.1 mph relative to last year (93.9 versus 95.0) but off by only 0.5 mph relative to his monthly averages for April and May of that season; he averaged 93.6 mph in his first outing of 2022. Again, probably nothing to worry about.

Far more troubling were the performances of Chris Bassitt on Sunday and José Berríos on Monday. Signed to a three-year, $63 million deal in December, Bassitt had a brutal debut, serving up four homers and allowing nine runs in 3.1 innings. His first official pitch as a Blue Jay, a high changeup to Donovan, ended up going over the right centerfield wall for a 397-foot solo homer. Two pitches later, Alec Burleson hit a high fastball 363 feet over the left field wall. With two outs and one on later in the frame, Gorman destroyed a hanging curveball, sending it to right-center for a projected distance of 446 feet. He hit another two-run homer, 395 feet to right-center off a cutter in the middle of the zone, in the third inning.

By the time manager John Schneider came out to get Bassitt in the fourth, he had secured the worst outing of his career in terms of hits (10), runs, homers, and Game Score v2 (-8). He didn’t walk or strike out a single hitter and induced just four swings and misses and six called strikes from among his 57 pitches, for a CSW% of 17.5%.

As Dan Szymborski noted in his 2023 Bust Candidates rundown, the 34-year-old righty’s velocity was down all spring. “Bassitt’s fastest pitch this spring was 93.5 mph, below his average in more than half of his starts last year,” he wrote. “If he were averaging 90–92 but still hitting 95–96, I’d be less worried, but I’m skeptical that he simply chose to go through a whole month without ever throwing his fastest fastball.”

That trend continued on Sunday, with the velocity on Bassitt’s sinker (his primary fastball) off 1.7 mph relative to last year (91.1 mph versus 92.8), and most of his other pitches were similarly off as well; he reached 93 mph just twice. Afterward, Bassitt found himself “at a loss for words a little bit” because he’d “never had a game” where so many types of pitches from his broad arsenal (he threw eight different pitch types according to Statcast) were hit so hard. Twelve of his 19 batted ball events reached or exceeded 95 mph; among pitchers with at least 10 batted ball events this season, only Chris Sale had a higher hard-hit rate than Bassitt’s 63.2% (Germán Márquez tied him).

“I think it was just mis-executed pitches,” Schneider said. “He just didn’t really hit his spots. A team like that, you can’t make mistakes. I know he focused on the middle of their order, and it was the guys before and after those guys who did damage. I think it just came down to poor execution.”

Absent any reports of injury or discomfort, this should be something Bassitt and the Jays can fix. But if his underperformance ends up being an aberration, Berríos’ struggles against the Royals on Monday had a more familiar ring. He gave up four hits and three runs in the first inning, settled down for a couple of frames, then was tagged for five more hits — four of them with exit velocities of 98.3 mph or higher — in a four-run fourth. He also walked one batter, who scored when MJ Melendez greeted reliever Zach Pop with a sixth-inning homer. The eight runs allowed matched last year’s high and marked the seventh time in his last 28 starts in which he allowed six or more runs.

Berríos’ 93.9-mph average four-seamer velocity was just 0.1 mph off last year, and he did strike out seven with 11 swings and misses (seven on his slurve) and a 30.3% CSW%; his 33.3% chase rate matched his career average. But when he was hit, he was hit hard, with an average exit velo of 94.1 mph and a hard-hit rate of 61.1%. His performance wasn’t as extreme last year — we are talking about one start compared to 32 — but those contact stats were dreadful. His 9.5% barrel rate placed in the 15th percentile, which was at least higher than his 90.0 mph average exit velo (13th), 43.8% hard-hit rate (11th), or 5.11 xERA (ninth); meanwhile, his 5.23 ERA was the highest of the majors’ 45 qualifiers, and his 4.55 FIP was the AL’s second highest. In the context of his being in the first year of a seven-year, $131 million extension, the performance was an unsettling one, to say the least.

Last August, Ben Clemens noted that where Berríos had previously gotten away with leaving a lot of four-seamers in the middle of the strike zone, last year those were getting demolished. More recently, old friend Travis Sawchik added that Berríos threw a career-low 7.1% of fastballs (four-seamers and sinkers) on the edges of the plate against lefties. More:

Berríos allowed a career-worst batting average of .447 to lefties on fastballs in the “heart” of the strike zone, according to MLB’s Statcast data – which was more than .100 worse than his next worst season.

He allowed 29 home runs last year, sixth most in the majors, and left-handed hitters crushed 20 of them; 12 came via Berrios’ fastball. Only Josiah Gray of the Nationals allowed more home runs to lefties.

On the whole, the Statcast value of 17 runs above average on Berríos’ four-seamer made it the majors’ sixth-least valuable heater and the eighth-least valuable pitch of any stripe. Repeating a table from my Madison Bumgarner piece:

While Berrios did throw 9% of his fastballs on the edges of the zone against lefties on Monday, 14.6% of such pitches wound up in the heart of the zone, nearly double last year’s rate of 7.7%. Three of the hits he allowed, including a Nicky Lopez triple, came on such pitches, and the six batted balls those pitches produced averaged 102.2 mph with a .957 xSLG. His 13 pitches in that location to lefties had a .559 wOBA, even higher than last year’s .511. All of which is to say that Berríos still has work to do, particularly against lefties.

Thankfully for the Blue Jays, on Tuesday night, Yusei Kikuchi stopped the bleeding with a five-inning, three-hit, one-run performance in a 4–1 victory over the Royals, with a 455-foot Franmil Reyes homer the only blemish. It was only one victory, and that against a team that lost 97 games in 2022, but the winning has to start somewhere.

If you compare our staff predictions for the season to our preseason Playoff Odds, for five of the six divisions our staff picks line up with the crunched numbers, with the Braves, Cardinals, Padres, and Astros all favored to win, and the Twins and Guardians a tossup. Only in the AL East did our staff go against the odds, picking the Blue Jays over the Yankees by a margin of 19–6 despite the latter’s 42.7%–29.4% edge.

I was one of those 19, my own pick influenced — perhaps overly so — by the mounting casualties within the Yankees’ rotation. First it was Nestor Cortes‘ hamstring and Frankie Montas‘ shoulder, then Carlos Rodón‘s forearm and Luis Severino’s latisimuss dorsi. Of those, Cortes’ injury was minor enough that he still took his first regular-season turn on schedule, and only that of Montas — a shoulder issue that required arthroscopic surgery that could keep him out until late in the season — is serious. Even so, it’s not hard to look at the track records of Rodón and Severino and imagine much longer outages than initially projected.

The Jays’ rotation, though it ranked “only” 11th in our preseason Positional Power Rankings (where the Yankees were first even with their injuries) entered the year seemingly healthy, with the projections for Manoah (2.9 WAR) and Gausman (3.7) feeling a bit light compared to what they’d shown last year (4.1 WAR and 5.7, respectively), suggesting some possible upside. Combine that with a stronger lineup that carried fewer question marks — only at second base did the Blue Jays rank below 11th among the non-pitchers, where the Yankees had three such spots — and you can understand why Toronto was a trendy pick.

The Blue Jays may indeed come out on top, but at the very least, their starters will have to pitch up to their capabilities if that’s to happen. As the first week of their season has shown, it’s not all going to happen simply based on hype.

Matt Duffy is in camp with the Kansas City Royals on a minor-league contract, and as is common for veteran players in his situation, he has multiple opt-out clauses. Whether he ends up exercising any of them remains to be seen. The 32-year-old infielder is on the bubble with days left before the start of the regular season, and even if he doesn’t make the Opening Day roster, there is a chance that he would accept a Triple-A assignment with a call-up in mind. All Duffy knows for certain is that he wants to keep playing.

“I’ve kind of made the decision that they are going to have the rip the jersey off of me,” said Duffy, who has battled injuries throughout his seven big-league seasons. “If I were to call it a career at some point in the next five years, I would find myself saying, ‘Man, I wish I’d have played one more year.’ Life post-baseball is going to be so much longer than anything the grind can throw at me. At the end of the day, I really enjoy what this game does for me in terms of pushing me to learn something new.”

Duffy is 12-for-36 on the spring, and he can provide more-than-adequate defense at multiple positions. Assuming he can stay healthy, he can help a big-league team — be it the Royals or someone else — for the foreseeable future. Even so, he knows that the clock is ticking. While many players who are asked about their post-baseball plans deflect the question, Duffy is forthcoming on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

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 third 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 »

Gerrit Cole faced Jordan Walker for the first time on Wednesday, and he came away impressed. The New York Yankees ace induced a ground-ball out from the top prospect in the St. Louis Cardinals system in the first inning, but then surrendered a line-drive single to him on a 95-mph heater a handful of frames later. When Cole met with members of the media mid-game — standard fare for starters during spring training — I asked him about his matchups with the fast-rising phenom.

“I thought he put a good swing on it,” Cole said of Walker’s knock. “It was a good adjustment from the first at-bat. It was a good pitch, a borderline ball, and one of the better swings of the day, for sure.”

Cole needed clarification as to whom he was opining on before offering the praise. Understandably focusing on preparing for the regular season, he admitted — this with the caveat that he wasn’t being disrespectful — he didn’t know where Walker was hitting in the St. Louis lineup.

Walker was understandably very aware of Cole. Asked about what the five-time All-Star had said — the question came from a St. Louis scribe whom I’d shared the quotes with — he was equal parts pleased and humble.

“It means a lot, man,” said Walker, who is No. 12 on our Top 100 and at age 20 has a legitimate chance to break camp with the Cardinals. “He’s a helluva pitcher. His stuff was really electric today. His stuff was really jumping. His slider was good. So it means a lot to hear that from him. A wonderful pitcher.”

As Cardinals fans are discovering, the 6-foot-5, 220-pound Stone Mountain, Georgia native is more than just a star in the making. He also exudes fun. I asked the effervescent outfielder how he is balancing that trait alongside being hyper-focused in his quest to earn a big-league job. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about catcher Grayson Greiner’s height, Shohei Ohtani’s titanic homers, tight t-shirt, and pepper-grinding in WBC exhibitions, and a few preview-related trivia questions, then continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Toronto Blue Jays (15:02) with Kaitlyn McGrath of The Athletic, and the Kansas City Royals (55:25) with Anne Rogers of MLB.com, plus a Past Blast from 1977 (1:23:45) and trivia answers (1:32:46).

Audio intro: Yo La Tengo, “Shades of Blue”
Audio interstitial: The Joy Formidable, “Into the Blue”
Audio outro: Don Gibson, “Blue, Blue Day”

Link to tall-catchers EW episode
Link to Sam’s Substack
Link to first Ohtani dinger
Link to longer dinger video
Link to second Ohtani dinger
Link to side view of first swing
Link to side-by-side swings
Link to Japan News on homers
Link to MLB.com on the homer
Link to 2022 pepper-grinder story
Link to Nootbaar WBC story
Link to other Nootbaar story
Link to Ohtani’s tight t-shirt
Link to “Shoebae” account
Link to FanGraphs playoff odds
Link to FG payroll breakdown
Link to Blue Jays offseason tracker
Link to Blue Jays depth chart
Link to Kaitlyn’s spring preview
Link to Kaitlyn on the OF dimensions
Link to Travis on the OF dimensions
Link to Statcast park factors
Link to Kaitlyn’s author archive
Link to Royals offseason tracker
Link to Royals depth chart
Link to 2022 rookie PA by team
Link to profile of Quatraro
Link to story on throwing strikes
Link to Anne on “Raid the Zone”
Link to Anne on Royals pitchers
Link to story on KC ballpark sites
Link to 1977 article source
Link to Five Seasons on Goodreads
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to Ryan Nelson’s Twitter
Link to Ward on pitch-calling
Link to Richard Hershberger’s book

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Alejandro Kirk slashed a solid .285/.372/.415 with 14 home runs and a 129 wRC+ last year in his first full big-league season. Moreover, the 24-year-old Toronto Blue Jays catcher drew 63 free passes while going down by way of the K just 58 times. His 10.7% strikeout rate was third best in the junior circuit, behind only Steven Kwan’s 9.4% and Luis Arraez’s 7.1%.

How similar of a hitter is Kirk to Arraez? I asked that question to Blue Jays manager John Schneider prior to Thursday’s game in Dunedin.

“When you talk about contact, not a lot of swing-and-miss, yeah, they’re similar,” replied Schneider. “There’s a little more damage potential with Kirky. But more walks than strikeouts is tough to do at any level, [especially] the big leagues. So, I think when it’s just strike zone command, on-base, and contact-ability, they are pretty similar.”

Arraez, now a member of the Miami Marlins, won the American League batting title with the Minnesota Twins while slashing .316/.375/.420 with eight home runs and a 131 wRC+. Following up on my initial question, I asked Schneider if Kirk has the potential to capture a title of his own. Read the rest of this entry »

Ricky Tiedemann is one of the fastest-rising pitching prospects in the game. Drafted 91st overall by the Toronto Blue Jays in 2021 out of a Huntington Beach junior college, the 20-year-old southpaw not only finished last season in Double-A, he dominated at all three levels where he saw action. Over 78-and-two-thirds innings, Tiedemann logged a 2.15 ERA while fanning 117 batters and allowing just 39 hits. No. 24 on our recently released Top 100, he possesses, in the words of Tess Taruskin, “three potential plus pitches and front-end upside.”

Tiedemann discussed his M.O. on the mound and his power arsenal prior to Thursday’s spring training game in Dunedin.

———

David Laurila: How would you describe yourself as a pitcher? Give me a self-scouting report.

Ricky Tiedemann: “I like to use the fastball a lot — I work off of that — especially now that I’m throwing a little bit harder. Throwing a lot of strikes is my big thing, just keeping it in the zone, along with my slider and changeup. I also try not to keep a rhythm that guys can catch on to; I try to mix it up and work backwards sometimes, starting with a slider and then going fastball in. But I do work with my fastball more than my other pitches.” Read the rest of this entry »