Last month a piece titled “Player’s View: Tales From the Minor Leagues” ran here at FanGraphs. Comprising a collection of current and former major leaguers relating stories from their time on the farm, it was equal parts entertaining and informative of life below the big league level. What you’re reading now is a followup, albeit with a notable twist. The storytellers here are all broadcasters: two who picked up a microphone after their playing days were over, and three more who never played professionally. As was the case with the earlier piece, many of the stories will leave you laughing, if not shaking your head.

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Jeff Levering, Milwaukee Brewers broadcaster:

“There are a lot of great stories. One I’ll always remember is from when I was [broadcasting] with Springfield, in Double-A. We played a night game in Little Rock and needed to get to Tulsa for a game the next day. There was a torrential downpour — the worst rain I’ve seen in my life — and I was in charge of getting the movies for the bus. Our manager at the time was Pop Warner, who is now the third base coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, and he was staunch about no comedies. It was all horror movies, all the time, and the gorier the better — for him. Anyway, most of the guys were asleep in the back, but some of us were watching and it’s getting to be one of the scariest parts of the movie. This was in the middle of a torrential downpour in rural Arkansas.

“Up ahead we see a pair of headlights, but the headlights are sideways in the middle of the road. Our driver doesn’t see it until the last moment and we missed this car, which had spun out in the middle of the road, by a foot — no less than a foot. We ended up going into the left lane and down into the embankment, and right back up. That woke everybody up. From that point on everyone was awake. It was a really bad accident that could have happened but didn’t happen, and it was the middle of the night. Again, we were in the middle of Arkansas. No one would have found us until the next day. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’m not sure that Zach Lowe, the progenitor of this format and an incredible NBA writer, ever thought that it would get spun off into baseball. I’m certain that he didn’t think it would get spun off into baseball by someone who likes both popups and bunts an unhealthy amount. But here we are. Speaking of which, I know what you’re thinking: What does Ben think about the two catcher’s interference infield flies from this week? I thought they were more annoying than amusing, and that’s not what we’re about here at Five Things. So let’s talk about a far more delightful popup, plus some infield hits, pretty pitches, and exciting series.

1. A Schwarbloop
Kyle Schwarber hits majestic home runs. Sometimes they hang in the air for an improbable length of time. Sometimes they get out of the park before you can blink. Not only is there a name for them – Schwarbombs – but Wawa even makes a drink named after them. You can’t get any more Philadelphia than that.
Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Gasser was flying mostly below radar as a prospect when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in July 2022. Pitching in the Midwest League one year after being drafted 71st overall out of the University of Houston, he was putting up solid but by no means eye-catching numbers with San Diego’s High-A affiliate. Earlier in the season he’d been assigned a 40 FV and a no. 14 ranking on our 2022 Padres Top Prospects list.

Shortly after that first piece about Gasser was published, the Padres dealt him to the Brewers as part of the Josh Hader trade, which at the time was widely panned by Milwaukee fans. While the consternation was understandable, the criticism is increasingly abating. Nearly two years later, Gasser is four starts into his MLB career and boasts a 1.98 ERA and a 2.52 FIP over 23 innings. In three of his outings he’s gone at least five frames and surrendered one run or fewer.

How has he gone from a low-profile prospect to a pitcher getting good results at baseball’s highest level? There has been no magic bullet, Gasser said, and he hasn’t made any especially notable adjustments since we first spoke in 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

William Contreras stopped being an unheralded star a while ago. He was merely “the backup catcher” in Atlanta, but he smashed last year as the undisputed starter in Milwaukee and he’s backing it up with another spectacular season. He’s the face of one of Statcast’s new bat speed metrics. He’s a shoo-in All-Star and one of the betting favorites to win NL MVP. So this isn’t a “hey, have you heard he’s good?” article, because of course you have. The real question is, what has he changed this year?

Contreras’ standout skill is his thunderous raw power. He cracked 20 homers in just 376 plate appearances during his breakout 2022 and is one of the hardest swingers in the game. As you might expect, he has swing-and-miss issues, with his 13.4% swinging strike rate the price he pays for trying to crush everything he swings at. But that’s ok. His hard-hit rate, barrel rate, maximum exit velocities, and HR/FB rate are all gaudy.

Here’s the thing, though: While power might be his most obvious carrying tool, Contreras has quietly developed into much more than just a one-note power hitter. You can’t see it in the surface numbers – he’s walking about as much as he always has and striking out as frequently as he did last year – but he’s completely revamped his approach at the plate, and it’s downright sterling these days. In fact, maybe we should be talking less about how Contreras compares to Juan Soto in squared up contact, and more about how he compares to Soto in strike zone mastery. Read the rest of this entry »

Brice Turang grew up swinging a bat, and the fruits of those labors are coming to fruition in his second MLB season. Following up on a rookie campaign in which he logged an abysmal .585 OPS, the 24-year-old Milwaukee Brewers second baseman is flourishing to the tune of a .301/.366/.428 slash line and a 128 wRC+ over 188 plate appearances. Showing that he can be more than a threat on the bases — he swiped 26 bags a year ago and is 19-for-20 so far this season — Turang also has 15 extra-base hits this season, as many as he had in all of 2023.

The son of former big league outfielder Brian Turang, Brice Turang was drafted 21st overall by the Brewers in 2018 out of Santiago High School in Corona, California. He was ranked no. 65 on our Top 100 Prospects list entering last year. At the time, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote that Turang was “almost certain to have a significant and lengthy big league career,” albeit someone who “has never been a sure bet to do enough offensively to be an impact everyday player.” Two months into his sophomore season, one in which the Brewers are surprisingly atop the NL Central standings, Turang is looking like a hitter — small sample size acknowledged — who you just might not want to bet against.

In the latest installment of my Talks Hitting series, Turang discusses his gap-to-gap approach to his craft, which is driven more by competing than data.

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David Laurila: How have you developed as a hitter over the years?

Brice Turang: “A lot of it is that I hit basically every day. My dad owned a facility and I would go with him from three o’clock to nine o’clock every night. I loved it. I loved going to work with him. I’d be in the cage all the time, hitting, [developing] hand-eye coordination. Then, as you get into pro ball, the work you do is more of a quality-over-quantity type of thing.”

Laurila: There wasn’t nearly as much hitting data available when your father played. How does the way you learned from him relate to the present day?

Turang: “I don’t look at the data. I’m up there to compete and hit the ball hard. I mean, the data is what it is. You can put a number on anything, so I don’t really even think about it. I just compete and try to hit the ball hard up the middle, hit a line drive up the middle.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Portland Sea Dogs roster includes three Top 100 prospects, but neither Roman Anthony (15), Marcelo Mayer (42), nor Kyle Teel (83) has been the Double-A affiliate’s best player so far this season. That distinction belongs to a 23-year-old, shortstop-turned-left-fielder whom the Boston Red Sox drafted 69th overall in 2019 out of the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy. Along with playing stellar defense at a new position, Matthew Lugo is slashing .306/.404/.653 with 10 home runs and an Eastern League-best 191 wRC+.

Markedly-improved plate discipline has played a big role in his breakout. Last year, Lugo logged a 5.9% walk rate and a 27.6% strikeout rate. This year those numbers are 13.4% and 22.5%.

The key to his newfound ability to dominate the strike zone?

“Timing,” explained Lugo, who takes his cuts from the right side. “Last year, I had a lot of movement with my hands, which made me inconsistent being on time with the pitcher. My hands were very low, and then when I got to the launch position they were very high; there was a lot of distance for my hands to go through. This year, I’m closer to my launch position before I swing. I also had a [bat] wiggle and this year I just get to my spot with no wiggle. I’m getting into my spot early and have more time to see the pitch, so I’m making better swing decisions.”

The decision to move Lugo off of his natural position and into an outfield corner wasn’t based on defensive shortcomings, but rather on the arrival of Mayer. The high-ceiling shortstop was promoted to Portland last year on Memorial Day weekend, and given his first-round pedigree, he wasn’t going to be the one moving. Read the rest of this entry »

This article isn’t really about Joey Ortiz. Or, well, it is, but it’s also about how numbers will fool you. Let’s start with a few numbers, then. Ortiz is walking 12.9% of the time so far this year, far more than average and far more than he ever did in the high minors. He’s chasing pitches outside of the strike zone only 24% of the time, a huge change in approach. Last year in the minor leagues, that number stood at 34.5%. As a result, he’s swinging and missing far less often. There’s the story of how Ortiz has improved.

Just one problem: That story doesn’t hold up to closer examination. Let’s break the strike zone up into four parts the way Baseball Savant and the Statcast team do it. There’s the heart of the plate (heart), the edges of the plate and the area just off of it (shadow), the area where good breaking pitches often end up (chase), and the land of non-competitive pitches (waste). You’d expect Ortiz to swing less frequently than average at chase and waste pitches. You’d be wrong:

That’s baffling. For comparison’s sake, teammate Rhys Hoskins has similar chase and zone swing rates, and he’s swinging at 17% of chase pitches and 1% of waste pitches. He’s also swinging more frequently than Ortiz at pitches over the heart of the plate.
Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

I don’t love to evaluate teams just by watching them and feeling the vibes, but in deciding what to write about for this morning, I kept coming back to the feeling that the Giants have played a lot of ugly, soulless, lopsided losses. They’re not horrible overall, but they definitely haven’t been good, which puts them in a purgatory of sorts. Fortunately, we’ve got have a good encapsulation in statistical form to prove how disappointing they’ve been. Connor Grossman, a former Sports Illustrated baseball editor who writes “Giants Postcards” on Substack, noted something interesting in Tuesday’s newsletter: That the Giants are 1-20 in games when they give up four or more runs.

I hopped over to Stathead to get a look at how San Francisco compared to other teams in such games, and it’s certainly not a pretty picture. Entering play Tuesday, only seven teams have allowed at least four runs in a game more often than the Giants, and no other team has performed worse when they do. To be clear, these are hard games to win; only the Orioles are breaking even in such games, and the league as a whole is a ghastly 143-425, winning just over 25% of the time. But the Giants’ pitifulness in these situations is setting them further back than any other team; the lowly Marlins, Angels, White Sox, and Rockies are the only other teams with at least 20 losses when they allow more than three runs in a game, but they’ve won more than one of those games. The Giants, of course, had visions of contending this season. Instead, it looks like whatever they were seeing was a mirage.

Here’s the thing: It’s true that the San Francisco offense isn’t good, but it really isn’t bottom of the barrel, either. The problem isn’t so much that the Giants can’t score; it’s that they just can’t score enough runs when they need them. They are scoring 4.8 runs per game when their pitchers give up three or fewer runs, but they are averaging a putrid 2.9 runs in the games when they allow at least four.

San Francisco’s lineup, as it has been for the entirety of the Farhan Zaidi era, was constructed to have the whole be greater than the sum of its parts, even with the additions of everyday bats Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee, and Jorge Soler. Sure, these aren’t Gabe Kapler’s Giants with platoons seemingly all over the diamond, but the team still uses tandems at first base (LaMonte Wade Jr. and Wilmer Flores) and right field (Mike Yastrzemski and Austin Slater). This strategy could have worked, except Flores and Slater aren’t pulling their weight against lefties and the three new guys have all been somewhere between underwhelming and bad. That puts a lot of pressure on the pitchers to be perfect, and this rotation sure isn’t that, even with Logan Webb.

As if to provide further support that they can score, but only when they get good pitching, the Giants beat the Rockies on Tuesday night, 5-0. They’re now 15-1 in games when their pitchers allow no more than three runs.

Rhys Lightning Is Sparking With the Brewers

After missing all of last year recovering from ACL surgery, Rhys Hoskins signed a two-year, $34 million contract with the Brewers that affords him the opportunity to opt out at the end of this season. It’s too early to tell if he’ll decide to test free agency again this offseason, but so far, he’s fared quite well in his new digs.

Over 33 games, Hoskins is batting .218/.324/.437 (118 wRC+), down from his Phillies norm of .242/.353/.492 (126 wRC+) but still solid. Considering he just came back from a serious knee injury, it’s not surprising that he isn’t running well, both by the eye test and the statistics (his sprint speed is down 0.4 feet per second), or that he’s required more maintenance (15 DH days to 18 games at first base), but at the plate he’s been about as good as Milwaukee could’ve hoped.

Hoskins is a far more selective hitter this season, with a swing rate under 40% for the first time since 2019, and his 20.8% chase rate is the lowest it’s been since 2018, his first full year in the big leagues, according to Statcast. More interesting, though, is what happens when he actually does pull the trigger: He’s running the lowest in-zone contact rate of his career, yet he’s connecting more often than ever on pitches out of the zone. His 68.3% contact rate on pitches outside the zone is over six points above his previous career high and a staggering 10 points higher than it was in 2022.

While “hit fewer pitches inside the zone and make more contact outside of it” doesn’t seem like a sound strategy, it hasn’t affected Hoskins’ underlying numbers and may counterintuitively be helping them. The righty thumper’s xSLG and xwOBA are both markedly improved from 2022 and much more in line with his stronger 2021, and he’s also hitting fewer groundballs than at any point in his career. That’s important because the Brewers signed him to slug, not to try and beat out infield singles, and so far, slug is what he’s done. In Tuesday’s 6-5 win over the Royals, Hoskins hit his seventh home run over the season, tied for the most on the team.

Quick Hits

• The Cubs’ streak of scoreless starts ended on Tuesday when Craig Counsell extended Shota Imanaga to the eighth inning, only to watch him give up a two-run homer to Jurickson Profar that gave the Padres the lead. The Cubs came back and won, 3-2, on a Michael Busch walk-off home run to maintain their virtual tie with Milwaukee atop the NL Central.

• The Yankees pounded Justin Verlander for seven runs in their 10-3 win over the Astros on Tuesday. The highlight came when Giancarlo Stanton led off the fifth inning with a 118.8 mph home run; that’s the hardest ball hit off Verlander since at least 2015, when Statcast started measuring exit velocity.

Pat Murphy is nominally in his first season as a full-time MLB manager, having previously helmed the Padres for a 96-game interim stint in 2015. But it’s not like he just fell off the turnip truck; he started coaching so long ago I’m not sure they even had trucks or turnips back then. Murphy had been Craig Counsell’s bench coach for eight seasons when he got promoted this past winter. When he took that job, he’d already been working in baseball for 33 seasons, all but one of them as either a minor league manager or college head coach.

Murphy’s seen some stuff.

About halfway through spring training, when Murphy named Brice Turang his starting second baseman, he accompanied the announcement with some glowing praise: “I think this kid’s gonna make a quantum leap… His swing decisions will be better, his contact will be better, and his damage will come.”

At the time, it seemed like puffery, an attempt to build confidence in a former first-round pick who’d been sub-replacement level in his first major league season. Now, it looks like Murphy, endowed with the wisdom of four decades’ experience, can predict the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Craig Counsell’s new team has come out of the gate strong, sitting above .500 17 games in. However, 15 of those 17 games featured Seiya Suzuki, who the team will now be without for a significant period of time after Suzuki strained his right oblique during Sunday’s game against the Mariners. An injury to his opposite oblique kept Suzuki out six weeks in 2023, and it looks like this one will keep him out at least two-thirds as long.

The outfielder has improved every year he’s been in the majors, performing solidly as a rookie (116 wRC+) in 2022 before taking a step forward with a 126 wRC+ in 2023, including a 149 wRC+ in the second half. It looked as if he was building upon those second-half adjustments in the early going this year, with a 141 wRC+ through his first 68 plate appearances, including three home runs. Things looked great under the hood too, with a hard-hit rate above 50% (in the 92nd percentile), and an xwOBA, xBA, and xSLG all in the 70th percentile or higher.

Suzuki isn’t an easily replaceable player. Jed Hoyer and co. have built an enviably deep farm system, but the corresponding move was for post-prospect outfielder Alexander Canario. Pete Crow-Armstrong has struggled in Triple-A this season, especially since returning from elbow soreness, which isn’t exactly an encouraging follow-up to the center fielder looking overmatched in his first big league action last year. Fellow Top 100 prospect Owen Caissie is getting his first taste of the minors’ highest level, and Kevin Alcántara and Matt Shaw are both in Double-A for now.

Without a shiny prospect savior to fill in for Suzuki, Counsell will instead look to do what he does best: mix and match. Superutilityman Christopher Morel played every day even with Suzuki healthy, trading in his plethora of gloves for a time split between third base and DH in the hopes of making him more consistent at the hot corner. That hasn’t exactly come to pass, with Morel already worth -2 defensive runs saved, though obviously all sorts of small sample size caveats apply. More troubling is that he isn’t making up for it with the bat — he’s mired in a 1-for-21 slump since April 10, lowering his wRC+ to 86 after a very strong start.

That could lead to more playing time for lower-upside bats like Garrett Cooper, Mike Tauchman, and Nick Madrigal, and probably Canario, since it feels unlikely he was brought up just to ride the pine. Counsell mentioned in Seattle that Morel is dealing with a finger injury. If the Cubs think that injury timing up with his slump is more than a coincidental development, they can of course IL him as well, even if that puts even more of an onus on current stalwarts Ian Happ, Nico Hoerner, Dansby Swanson, Michael Busch, and Cody Bellinger. One x-factor could be Patrick Wisdom, who strikes out a ton but has prodigious power. He’s currently rehabbing a back injury in Triple-A and could be back any day now; he’s got flexibility to play all four corner positions.

The Rangers’ Cavalcade of Returning Pitchers, Part One

He’s not Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom or Tyler Mahle, but the Rangers got a big boost to their rotation when they activated last-minute free agent signee Michael Lorenzen from the IL on Monday. He’s a perfectly useful fourth or fifth starter, and he fit that bill in his first start of the year. He threw five shutout innings in the Rangers’ win, though he walked five and threw just 58% of his 79 pitches for strikes. Lorenzen and his $4.5 million contract aren’t really there to pitch exceedingly well, though; he’s there to raise the floor, give the Rangers a chance to win, and perhaps slide to the bullpen later in the season.

Joining Lorenzen in the majors will be Jack Leiter, who is set to make his big league debut on Thursday for at least a spot start and perhaps a more permanent role. The former Vanderbilt standout and second overall pick hasn’t had an easy path to the bigs, following up a 5.54 ERA in 2022 with a 5.19 mark in 2023, making just one rough start in Triple-A. That didn’t necessarily put Leiter in great position to be knocking on the door, but he finally got his control in order, slicing his previous walk rate almost in half as it dipped down to 5.3%.

With those two in the fray and Mahle and Scherzer both recovering well (Scherzer’s timeline, in fact, appears to be accelerated from what was anticipated this winter, and he could be back as soon as early next month), the Rangers rotation will soon theoretically transform from one that’s treading water into a real strength for the club. Assuming health, Nathan Eovaldi, Scherzer, Mahle, and Jon Gray should all have rotation spots locked in, with a spot left for one of Leiter, Lorenzen, Andrew Heaney, and Dane Dunning. Lorenzen, Heaney, and Dunning all have bullpen experience as recently as last year’s playoffs, so a transition for any or all of them wouldn’t be asking anything new of them and could turn the relief unit into a real strength. Any contributions from deGrom would be gravy; he told the New York Post’s Joel Sherman last October that he’s aiming to be ready for August, and no recent developments appear to have changed that plan.

Yelich’s Back Strikes Back

Christian Yelich landed on the injured list yesterday (his placement is retroactive to April 13) with back trouble. Back injuries are unfortunately nothing new for the Brewers’ left fielder, who hit the IL due to that ailment twice in 2021; his barking back also kept him out of action on a day-to-day basis in 2022 and 2023. The former MVP was enjoying an excellent start to 2024, with a 205 wRC+ backed up by a career-low strikeout rate and a barrel rate that trailed only his MVP runner-up season in 2019.

Yelich’s stint on the IL should mean more playing time for defensive standout Blake Perkins, who is playing well in his sophomore campaign; the switch-hitter entered Tuesday’s action with a 177 wRC+. Outside of Jackson Chourio, Pat Murphy will probably rotate through the other outfielders frequently, with Perkins joined by lefty Sal Frelick and righty Joey Wiemer. Owen Miller, Oliver Dunn, and Jake Bauers could also slide from the infield to the outfield if needed.