Now that the lower minor leagues’ regular seasons are over, teams have commenced with instructional league activity in a traditional sense, with a select group of players from several of their affiliates working out and scrimmaging at their spring training complexes. While “Bridge League” (the unofficial period of scrimmage activity that occurs after the late-July conclusion of the Complex Level schedule) frequently includes some newly drafted players, most of the rosters are made up of the guys who have been on the complex all year. But once “instructs” begin, the talent and quality of play of these games ascends to a different level as teams test their most interesting young players or get an intimate look at prospects who might be up for a 40-man roster spot during the winter. The snowbirds haven’t returned in full because the weather here in Arizona is still pretty gross, so driving across the metro is easier now than it will be in a few weeks (and during next year’s spring training). For that reason, I decided to focus my early looks on teams based in the western half of the Phoenix metro, farther from the house. Read the rest of this entry »

“Don’t grade trades on deadline day,” said the wise man. It takes months to find out if Jhoan Duran will put the Phillies over the top, years to learn how Carlos Correa’s second stint in Houston will go, and perhaps as much as a decade to learn exactly how much the Padres might eventually regret trading Leo De Vries.

At least, so says the wise man. “Hogwash,” says I. Let’s grade the midseason trades now. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I dug into the data a little to see if there was any empirical basis to the suspicion that the Brewers lineup might not be cut out for October. The result was a new metric, if you want to call it that, called MeatWaste%. This number — the percentage of pitches that end up either in the dead center of the strike zone or out in Baseball Savant’s Waste region — I used as a proxy for pitcher quality. MeatWaste pitches are gifts to the batter, the kind of offering that produces an instant swing decision and either an easy take or a full-force swing.

I found two things: First, that the Brewers are better, relative to the league, on these two pitch locations than they are on the whole. And second, that these easy opportunities come around often in the regular season, but disappear in close playoff games. Simple enough, though there are limits to what this finding allows us to infer about the Brewers’ future. It’s why they play the games, after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Freddy Peralta is having arguably the greatest season of his excellent eight-year career. The right-hander has ridden a career-best 2.69 ERA to a career-high 16 wins. However, I used the word arguably for a reason. Peralta’s 3.64 FIP is just the fourth best of his career, and his 3.93 xFIP is tied with 2024 for his fifth best. There’s a gap of 0.95 runs per nine innings between his FIP and his ERA. When you multiply that times his actual innings total of 163 2/3, FIP thinks he should’ve given up just over 17 more earned runs than he actually has allowed. None of this is surprising. Pitchers underperform or overperform their peripherals all the time. The interesting thing is that Statcast says that no pitcher has benefitted as much from the defense behind him as Peralta. When he’s has been on the mound, the Brewers defense has been worth just under 14 fielding runs. It’s neither this simple or this clean-cut, but it’s easy to combine these two numbers and make an inference: Defense can explain more than 80% of the difference between Peralta’s FIP and ERA.

On the other end of the spectrum is Peralta’s teammate Brandon Woodruff, who returned from shoulder surgery in July and has gone 6-2 over 11 starts and 59 2/3 innings. He’s posted a 3.32 ERA, 3.26 FIP, and 3.40 xFIP. In other words, FIP thinks Woodruff has gotten exactly what he’s deserved. However, Woodruff’s xERA is a scant 2.27. When you combine all those numbers, it means Statcast thinks several batted balls that should have resulted in outs instead fell in for non-homer base hits. The difference is a bit over six runs. Coincidentally or not, Statcast says the Milwaukee defense has been at its worst behind Woodruff, costing him just under five runs, once again just about 80% of the gap between an ERA estimator and his actual ERA.

That’s why we’re talking about Peralta and Woodruff. No two teammates have a bigger gap between the fielding run value of the defense behind them. It’s nearly an 18-run gap! It’s jarring. With 26 FRV, Statcast thinks the Brewers have the fourth-best team defense in the game, but somehow none of that brilliance has been shining on Woodruff. We’re going to use Statcast data to break down, as best we can, the reasons behind it. Hopefully, the comparison will show the various ways a team can provide defensive value. Let’s start with the catching numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »