With the NL playoff bracket basically settled (a statement I could live to regret if the Mets keep losing), I’ve started to think about how the various participants match up against each other. Not only did five of these six teams make the playoffs last year, all of those five have made it to October at least three times in the past four postseasons. The Cubs — a recidivist NLCS participant in the mid-2010s who last made the postseason in 2020 — are the closest thing we have to new blood.

Absent some shocking reversal of fortune in the next two weeks, we’re in for an October of sequels. But while there’s often at least one standout team in the bracket — usually the Dodgers, but not always — this year the top six teams in the NL seem fairly evenly matched. At least, every team has flaws.

The most interesting team, at least to me, is the presumptive no. 1 seed: the Milwaukee Brewers. As much of a postseason fixture as the Brewers have become, and as many early-round thrills as they’ve delivered, they’ve only bothered the NLCS once in the past decade, out of six trips to the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

I was doing some research on hitting the ball in the air the other way when I came across this striking leaderboard:

The five guys who hit the ball hardest the other way when they lift it? Four enormous sluggers and Brice Turang. I was overjoyed by this result at first. I wanted to find a hitter who gets to more power to the opposite field than to the pull side. If Turang is hitting the ball this hard to the opposite side, hard enough to number among the top sluggers in the game, surely it’s because of some particular feature of his swing that manifests only to the opposite field. Let’s just add in pull-side average exit velocity and…

Wait, what the?! Turang hits the ball as hard as Alonso? He has more pull power than Kurtz? This merits further investigation. Luckily, FanGraphs has already been all over it. Esteban Rivera wrote about Turang’s increased bat speed all the way back in May. Michael Baumann highlighted Turang as a potential elevate-and-celebrate candidate. Over at Baseball Prospectus, Timothy Jackson noted that Turang’s bat speed gains have stuck. In fact, his 4.2-mph increase in average swing speed is the largest improvement in the sport. All those gains have brought his swing speed all the way up to… the 22nd percentile. Huh? The guys on that leaderboard with him are in the 94th, 94th, 98th, and 92nd percentiles, respectively. Clearly, swinging harder can’t be the only explanation for Turang’s breakout performance. Let’s go a little deeper than “bat faster ball go far,” shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a rough season for Francisco Alvarez — and specifically his hands. The 23-year-old catcher fractured a hamate in his left hand while taking batting practice on March 8, and after undergoing surgery, missed the first four weeks of the regular season. He scuffled upon returning, to the point that the Mets optioned him to Triple-A Syracuse in late June, but particularly since returning in late July, he hit well until he sprained the ulnar collateral ligament of his right thumb (as opposed to the UCL of his elbow) while making a headfirst slide on August 17. The injury, which requires surgery to fix, appeared to be season-ending, but to the Mets’ surprise, Alvarez has been able to swing the bat without pain, so he began a rehab assignment with Triple-A Syracuse on Wednesday. Unfortunately, in his third plate appearance of the game, he was hit on the left pinkie by an 89-mph sinker and had to leave the game.

Alvarez, who also missed seven weeks last year due to surgery to repair a torn UCL in his left thumb, was sent for testing after being removed. At this writing, the Mets have yet to reveal his prognosis, but this may set back his return, and he’ll still need another surgery this offseason. When available, he’s been one of the Mets’ more productive hitters, a big step up from the team’s other catchers on the offensive side. In 56 games, he’s hit for a career high 125 wRC+ (.265/.349/.438) with seven homers in 209 plate appearances, good for 1.4 WAR. Luis Torrens, who hit well while serving as the team’s regular catcher during Alvarez’s early-season absence, has slumped to the point that he’s batting .218/.282/.320 (73 wRC+) in 245 PA, and third-stringer Hayden Senger has been even less productive, hitting .180/.227/.197 (22 wRC+) in 67 PA.

[Update: On Thursday afternoon, Alvarez revealed that his pinkie is fractured. He said he hopes to play again this season, but a timeline for that has yet to be determined.]

The Mets, who are now 72-61, just swept a three-game series against the Phillies (76-57) at Citi Field to pull within four games of the NL East leaders. They’ve won eight of their last 11 games after losing 14 of 16 from July 28 to August 15, a skid that bumped them down to third in the NL Wild Card race, though they now have a 4 1/2-game cushion over the Reds (68-66). They’ve got some other injuries that could affect their drive for a playoff spot, but in that, they’re not alone. What follows here is a roundup of fairly recent injuries among NL contenders, some that slipped through the cracks in our coverage during recent weeks and others that merit mention so long as we’re on the topic; an alarming number of these involve fingers. I’ll go division-by-division, and follow this with a similar AL roundup. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not telling our readers anything they don’t already know, but defense is a very important part of baseball, especially at the up-the-middle positions. You probably watch enough baseball to list the best and worst couple of defenders at each position with a fair amount of accuracy; I bet you’d nail most of them off the top of your head (aside from Trea Turner, I think the 2025 FRV list is damn good), and that you have a proper appreciation for the importance of defense at the premium positions, even if it comes with some amount of sacrifice on offense.

In the prospect realm, though, things are trickier. Prospect hit data from TrackMan and Hawkeye has become common in public-facing analysis and discourse, but defense remains something of a black box. There aren’t many publicly available minor league defensive stats, and so much of evaluating defense is still best done visually, at least in my opinion. I wrote a version of today’s piece a few years ago, wherein I performed the same sort of video deep dive that I use to evaluate top shortstop prospects’ defense, and ripped and edited together key plays from that deep dive to share with you.

This year, I’m turning that exercise into a series. I’m going to batch together a few players at a time until I’ve gone through all of the 50 FV shortstops, as well as a few key prospects with lesser grades. That will include all of the players linked here, plus a few more. Read the rest of this entry »

Beginning last Thursday and continuing through the weekend, several key rehabbers made appearances in the upper levels of the minor leagues. A few might have a meaningful impact on playoff races, while others are scuffling. I dish on eight pitchers below. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is a great time for reflection in the baseball world. The trade deadline has passed, which means what you see is pretty much what you get roster-wise. The playoff picture is generally clear, but no one has clinched yet. It’s too early to think about postseason rotations, but too late to think about turning the year around. The urgency mostly isn’t there – unless you’re a Mets fan trying to ward off 25 years of ghosts, of course. But the downtime of the baseball season has its own small delights, and even when you aren’t watching the brightest stars on the biggest stage, baseball is awesome. So thanks as always to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the column format, and let’s get going.

1. Opportunity
The Twins might have traded away a ton of their major league roster at the deadline, but that doesn’t mean they’re filling up the lineup with replacement players they found at a local tryout. Seven of the nine everyday position players on the current squad were drafted by Minnesota in the first two rounds. The other two, Alan Roden and Kody Clemens, aren’t exactly nobodies – they’re both third round draft picks the Twins acquired this year, and of course Clemens’ dad is famous too.

It’s tough sledding for Quad-A players looking for a major league shot. But while the starters still look like your average major leaguer when it comes to their amateur pedigree, the bench is another matter. Mickey Gasper was a 27th rounder who didn’t debut until he was 28. But he’s only the second-most improbable Twin. Ryan Fitzgerald went undrafted in 2016, didn’t reach Triple-A until he was 27, and finally got his major league break earlier this year as a 30-year-old. He went 0-3 in a single game as an injury replacement, pinch-ran in another, and got sent back down. Sometimes life in the bigs is nasty, brutish, and short.
Read the rest of this entry »

Pitching analyst Lance Brozdowski has been on Brandon Woodruff since the Brewers right-hander returned from a 2023 shoulder surgery on July 6. Brozdowski has written about Woodruff twice, first breaking down the ways that he looks like a different pitcher this season. His second piece was titled “How Is Brandon Woodruff Doing This?” I’d like to really dig in and answer that question, both because when Brozdowski asks a question it’s usually a good one and because Woodruff’s numbers really are confusing. As Michael Baumann noted a few weeks ago, Woodruff’s return coincided almost exactly with Milwaukee’s recent unbeatable stretch. “If Woodruff is well and truly back,” Baumann wrote, “for my money he’s a bigger add than any starter who’s likely to get moved at the deadline.” Woodruff has gone 4-0 with a 2.29 ERA, a 3.73 FIP, and a 34.9% strikeout rate over his six starts, and he’ll likely be a huge part of the team’s playoff rotation, but whether he’s back is still very much an open question.

Before we get into everything, we should talk about Woodruff’s arsenal, which at least for a little while looked pretty different this season. A month ago at Brewer Fanatic, Matthew Trueblood analyzed Woodruff’s repertoire during his minor league rehab assignment, and wrote that in order to be successful, “Woodruff will need to reinvent himself.” The pitcher seemed to agree, at least at first. This season in the majors, he has thrown a four-seamer, sinker, changeup, cutter, curve, and sweeper. The cutter is new, with the sweeper replacing his traditional slider. However, he hasn’t thrown the sweeper since his second start (likely because it was the second game in a row the other team homered on the pitch), and he’s also drastically reduced his cutter usage over his last two starts. He’s also nearly evened out his fastball usage. In recent years, Woodruff led with his four-seamer, but now he’s throwing it 34% of the time and his sinker 31%, leading with the sinker against righties and the four-seamer against lefties. His curveball is down to 5% and his changeup has held steady at 17%. In other words, Woodruff is throwing a fastball 65% of the time, and that number jumps to 77% of the time if you count the cutter:

Let’s start with the reasons for suspicion, and please note that this section makes up five full paragraphs. Luck is a big component here. Woodruff is currently running a .143 BABIP and a 100% strand rate. Eight of the nine earned runs he’s allowed have come on home runs. Those are massively unsustainable numbers. The league averages a .289 BABIP and 72.5% strand rate. Even though he’s spent his entire career pitching in front of an excellent Milwaukee defense, Woodruff has never run a BABIP below .269 or a strand rate above 82% (except in 2023, when he only made 11 starts). No matter what else happens, we should expect his BABIP to add at least 100 points and his strand rate to drop by at least 20% going forward. Read the rest of this entry »

Since July 1, three major league offenses have been head and shoulders above the rest of the field. First, the Toronto Blue Jays, who have benefited not only from a white-hot Bo Bichette, but from having the opportunity to slather a hapless Rockies pitching staff in runs this week. Third in wRC+ but second on this list for editorial purposes: The Athletics, whose offensive run is mostly Nick Kurtz. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much; Kurtz alone is responsible for 2.6 of the vagabonds’ 6.7 position player WAR since July 1, and 39 of their 165 weighted runs created.

The other member of this trio is the Milwaukee Brewers, a team with limited name recognition, whose offense has been propped up by (among other things) a 28-year-old rookie who got cut loose from the Rockies’ minor league system in 2022.

Here’s one of those other things propping up Milwaukee’s offense: Andrew Vaughn, one of the greatest college hitters of the 2010s and a former top-three pick, but also a legendary draft bust as of eight weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to have a bit that one of the joys of the postseason was watching the wider baseball-watching public discover a previously unknown Rays pitcher when he mowed down the Astros in the first nationally televised game of his career.

It’s a little harder to pull that off as a position player: Go from complete unknown to key regular on a playoff team. In fact, a lot of the most important position players in this pennant race — Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, Manny Machado — were names before they even joined their current teams.

On the other hand, you’d be forgiven for not knowing Isaac Collins. Read the rest of this entry »

You might’ve been worried that the Brewers had slept through the trade deadline. Maybe general manager Matt Arnold had overslept, or maybe the Twins were hogging all the cellphone bandwidth in the Midwest. But no, sure enough, Milwaukee got on the board right at the last minute, first by sending Nestor Cortes to San Diego, and then by making an unusual trade for Arizona teammates Shelby Miller and Jordan Montgomery.

Wow, that’s a reliever with a sub-2.00 ERA and a guy who pitched the Rangers to a championship two years ago. For just a player to be named later or cash? Sounds like a steal… wait, both of them are hurt, and both of them are free agents at the end of this year. That can’t be right. Read the rest of this entry »