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 »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.

1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.

Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:

What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people with an MLB.tv account and no serious responsibilities, I spent a large portion of Wednesday afternoon watching the Pirates-Brewers game. This midweek businesspersons’ special featured one of the most hotly anticipated starting pitching matchups of the season so far: Paul Skenes vs. Jacob Misiorowski.

Skenes, as you know, possesses such electrifying talent it became possible for a Pittsburgh Pirate to become one of the most famous ballplayers in the league. Misiorowski is just three starts into his big league career, but already his prodigious fastball velocity has made him a hipster favorite in baseball circles. Skenesian mainstream celebrity is sure to follow. Read the rest of this entry »

When I volunteered to write about the Aaron Civale-for-Andrew Vaughn swap, I thought I was going to be covering the most interesting trade of the month. At the very least, I thought I’d be putting out the most interesting trade write-up of the day. It’s not that Civale and Vaughn are huge household names, but you don’t often see notable major leaguers traded for one another in June. Trade season isn’t supposed to have started yet! I looked back through the FanGraphs archives to find pieces with the “trade” tag that dealt with June transactions. I found six others:

1. The Phillies acquired Jay Bruce from the Mariners for Jake Scheiner (2019).

2. The Yankees acquired Edwin Encarnación from the Mariners for Juan Then (2019).

3. The Blue Jays acquired Adam Cimber and Corey Dickerson from the Marlins for Joe Panik and Andrew McInvale (2021).

4. The Mariners acquired Carlos Santana for Wyatt Mills and William Fleming (2022).

5. The Rangers acquired Aroldis Chapman for Cole Ragans and Roni Cabrera (2023).

6. The Giants acquired Rafael Devers for Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks (2025).

Then, of course, there’s one you’re reading right now. Of those seven June trades we’ve covered, four took place before the last week of the month: the two from 2019 and the two from the past 72 hours.

Do I feel slighted that mine is no longer the biggest trade story of the month, the week, or even the day? That through no fault of my own and no fault of my editors’, my story has been relegated to a secondary position? No, not really. But if I did, I’d be able to relate quite well to Civale. Last week, the Brewers informed the right-hander he’d be moving to the bullpen. Civale was understandably upset. He’s in his free agent walk year, and moving to a long relief role could diminish his earning potential in the offseason. What’s more, aside from one postseason appearance last fall, he has never worked out of the bullpen in his professional career. Above all else, he remains a perfectly capable back-end starting pitcher. He didn’t cost himself a rotation spot with his poor performance; the Brewers simply had five superior options. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Misiorowski didn’t just flummox the Cardinals. Sure, when the 23-year-old right-hander made his big league debut in front of 26,687 very pumped Milwaukee fans last Thursday night, he confounded the St. Louis lineup until a leg cramp and a lightly rolled ankle ended his evening after five no-hit innings. But he also baffled Statcast. “Sinker,” read the graphic at the bottom of the screen when Misiorowski rocketed a 100-mph four-seamer into the bottom of the zone for the first pitch of the game. His changeup often went down as a sinker, his curveball went down as a cutter, and his slider was sometimes classified as a cutter and sometimes as a four-seamer.

The classifications were working perfectly by the end of the game, but even early on, you can’t really blame Statcast here. For one thing, it didn’t have a baseline expectation to work from because this was Misiorowski’s debut. For another, all of these pitches really did look like fastballs. I don’t just mean that in a jokey way. I mean it very, very literally. Nearly every pitch Misiorowski throws really does look like a fastball; I was planning on writing about it before I even learned about the Statcast side of things. “That’s how I throw,” he said after the game. “Every pitch is trying to throw 100%.” Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a year ago, the Brewers made the best kind of baseball history: weird baseball history. On May 31, 2024, they hosted the White Sox in Milwaukee, shellacking them 12-5. That part wasn’t weird. It’s hard to imagine anything less weird than the 2024 White Sox losing a baseball game (unless it’s the 2025 Rockies losing a baseball game). The weird part was how the Brewers beat the White Sox. They put up 23 hits, and 16 of those hits came on groundballs. That’s the most groundball base hits ever recorded since the pitch tracking era began in 2008. Would you like to see them all? Of course you would.

That’s what a record looks like. Groundball after groundball finding the various nooks and crannies that made the 2024 White Sox defense so similar to an English muffin. We’ve been waiting until this game’s anniversary to write about it. According to Baseball Savant, since 2008, only one other team has surpassed 12 groundball base hits in a single game. The White Sox tallied 15 against the Tigers on September 14, 2017. And that’s it. That’s the only team that came within three groundball hits of Milwaukee. First, let’s talk about how the Brewers pulled off this feat of worm-burning ingenuity.

As with any record, a fair bit of luck was involved. Balls took crazy hops off the mound and the first base bag. The Brewers hit a perfectly placed chopper and sent a ball hugging the third base line on a check swing. They wouldn’t have broken the record if any one of those balls had bounced another way. But as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design, and there was plenty of design involved here too. Read the rest of this entry »

Count me among the multitudes who have been borderline obsessed with the emergence of Pete Crow-Armstrong as a superstar this season. I’m sure he’ll reach a saturation point eventually where hardcore fans get tired of him — it happened to superhero movies, and bacon, and Patrick Mahomes — but we’re not there yet.

Every time I write about PCA, I revisit the central thesis: This is a player who’s good enough to get by on his glove even if he doesn’t hit a lick. But out of nowhere, he’s turned into a legitimate offensive threat. Great athletes who play with a little flair, a little panache, a little pizzaz, tend to be popular in general. The elite defensive center fielder who finds a way to contribute offensively is probably my favorite position player archetype; the more I compared PCA to Lorenzo Cain, Jackie Bradley Jr., Enrique Bradfield Jr., Carlos Gómez… the more I understood why I’d come to like him so much.

In fact, let’s take a moment to talk about Gómez, and his offensive breakout in the early 2010s. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. 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 »

Paul Molitor was a maestro with the bat. Over 21 seasons — 15 with the Milwaukee Brewers and three each with the Minnesota Twins and the Toronto Blue Jays — he recorded 3,319 hits, the 11th-highest total in major league history. Moreover, Molitor’s 605 doubles are tied for 15th most, while his 2,366 singles are 12th most. Walking nearly as often as he struck out (1,094 BB, 1,244 K) the sweet-swinging corner infielder/designated hitter put up a .306/.369/.448 slash line and a 122 wRC+.

Elected to the Hall of Fame in 2004, the St. Paul, Minnesota native went on to manage the Twins from 2015-2018, and prior to that he served as the team’s bench coach and as the hitting coach for the Seattle Mariners. Now an analyst on Twins radio broadcasts, Molitor sat down to talk hitting on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: You played [from 1978-1998]. Did hitters and/or hitting change over the course of your long career?

Paul Molitor: “I don’t think as drastically as we’ve seen over the past 10 years or so. I don’t know if we’ve ever been through a period where the percentage of teams’ runs scored were as closely related to how many home runs they hit. The game is always evolving. Breaking down the game in terms of what plays, the numbers show how driving the baseball, getting extra-base hits, [produces runs].

“I do like the old-school. Trying to get hits is still a good thing. You’re obviously going to have guys in your lineup who are more prone to striking out, but they’re going to get you that two- or three-run homer every now and then. And then you have the guys who create the flow on the bases. If you can run the bases, you give yourself more opportunities to get in scoring position. A perfect example would be the 2025 Red Sox. They put a lot of pressure on teams defensively. I think both can work.

“So yeah, there have been changes, but again, not too much when I played. Guys were always trying to figure out how to get better, but the involvement of analytics has changed some of the approach — everything from uppercut swings to how pitchers are throwing the baseball, spinning the baseball. It all plays a part in the counter strategy that hitters are trying to employ.”

Laurila: What about you, personally? Did you change much over the years? Read the rest of this entry »