During spring training, I asked 10 current big leaguers how they followed the game growing up, and how that has changed since they began playing professionally. As expected, all of them noted significant differences. No longer fans following their favorite teams and players, they consume baseball in a distinctly different way, even as the mediums through which they take in the game remain much the same.

Following up on that March 8 piece, I asked a new subset of baseball professionals much the same question. Four are former players who are now managing, while two are former players who are now broadcast analysts. In each case, how they consume the game has evolved not once, but twice.

Here is what they had to say. Their answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

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John Schneider, Toronto Blue Jays manager:

“For me, it’s always been similar. That maybe sounds funny, but whether it was as a fan, player, coach, or manager, I’ve always been interested in the strategy of the game. Being a catcher, you kind of look at a game that way naturally. What most fans want to see is their favorite players — you want them to hit home runs, things like that — and then as a manager, you’re always wondering what strings another manager might pull, or at least try to pull. So, it’s similar for me, but at the same time obviously a little different. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago Cubs. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth 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 »

Blade Tidwell has a five-pitch arsenal and a future on a big-league mound. Two years removed from being drafted 52nd-overall out of the University of Tennessee, the 22-year-old right-hander ranks among the top prospects in the New York Mets organization. “An old school power pitcher” in the words of our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, Tidwell has made six appearances for the Double-A Binghamton Rumble Ponies this year and has a 2.59 ERA, a 1.85 FIP, and 38 strikeouts in 31-and-a-third innings.

He’s developed a good understanding of his pitch metrics, a process that began when he was playing with Team USA following his 2021 freshman season at UT. Tidwell “started studying analytics” on his own, and would often discuss the subject with fellow Mets prospect Drew Gilbert, his roommate that summer. He subsequently “didn’t dabble too much into it” during his sophomore year — the Columbia, Tennessee native played just two collegiate seasons due to the pandemic — but that changed after he signed a professional contract. There was a lot more to learn… and to improve upon.

His four-seamer, which sits 94-96 mph and tops out at 98, has grown meaningfully since his amateur days. The 6-foot-4 righty got “around 14-15 inches” of ride in college, and now he gets “around 19 inches on a good day.”

Janzen Blade Tidwell — his father picked his middle name, his mother his first name — also gets good movement on his sweeper. Moreover, he can massage the movement by upping or lowing velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the crowd of high-end starting pitchers to sign with new teams over the offseason, perhaps none had wider error bars surrounding his projection than Shota Imanaga. An NPB star for the past half-decade, Imanaga had a track record of success but also many questions about how his skills would translate to MLB. This certainly is reflected in his contract with the Cubs, which came with just two guaranteed years worth $23 million, a far cry from our $88 million estimate. But for the past month and change, the 30-year old rookie has been up there with the league’s best.

Through his first seven starts, Imanaga has allowed just five earned runs, fewest among qualified pitchers. He’s been downright dominant through much of this stretch, proving his stuff is up to major league standards while controlling the strike zone better than almost anyone else. But he’s done so differently than other top pitching talents. Let’s take a look at his pitch arsenal.

From a quick glance at the stat sheet, the first thing that catches my eye is the sheer frequency with which Imanaga uses his fastball. In an era where nearly two-thirds of starters throw non-fastballs a majority of the time, Imanaga’s 58.4% usage (91st percentile) stands out. As pointed out by MLB.com’s David Adler, Imanaga’s heater has been the best individual pitch in baseball by run value, beating out Corbin Burnes’ notorious cutter Tyler Glasnow’s frightening fastball. But while the other heaters at the top of this list sit in the mid- to upper-90s, Imanaga’s four-seamer averages just 92 mph.

The list of starters who sit at 92 or below is rather short, and mostly consists of names that we certainly don’t think of as strikeout artists. In his piece, Adler noted that Imanaga’s fastball has elite induced vertical break (IVB). But carry alone doesn’t always make a fastball effective; Triston McKenzie’s four-seamer, which currently leads the league in fastball IVB, has the highest xwOBA allowed of any such pitch (min. 50 plate appearances). Rather, what makes Imanaga’s offering so special is its plus movement in combination with its ultra-low release point.

Pitchers like McKenzie and Ross Stripling throw from high, over-the-top arm slots, making their backspin (and thus vertical movement) predictable for hitters. In contrast, Imanaga’s delivery from a low three-quarters slot creates a movement profile much different than what you’d expect from his arm angle. Earlier this week, Michael Rosen broke down the biomechanics of Imanaga’s ability to spin the ball so well from an outlier release point, showing how his hip and lower-body flexibility enable him to “get behind” the ball and create backspin. Throughout the league, no starter gets a higher IVB than Imanaga does from such a low release point – those throwing from lower slots are primarily sidearmers whose deliveries generate run at the expense of carry, while the only two hurlers with more IVB (min. 250 four-seamers), McKenzie and Tyler Anderson, have release points about a foot higher.

Because of its low release point and high carry, Imanaga’s four-seamer has the third-shallowest vertical approach angle in baseball, creating the deception that causes batters to swing under it with surprising frequency. Its 12.5% swinging strike rate and 22.1% putaway rate easily exceed the league averages of 10.3% and 17.9%, respectively, as he’s able to throw it for a whiff in any count.

Imanaga gets more fastball whiffs than most, but his swinging strike rate with the pitch is a far cry from Jared Jones’ league-leading 20.1%. To be the most valuable pitch in baseball, Imanaga’s fastball has to work even when he’s not blowing it past hitters. And at first glance, you might think that a low-90s heater that lives in the zone would get sent a long way when batters connect with it. Indeed, homers were the one knock on Imanaga’s game in NPB, as his 2.9% homer rate (1.04 HR/9) last year was highest in the league in a deadened offensive environment. But he’s allowed just three homers across his seven MLB starts, and the Statcast data indicate this low total is more a product of skill than luck.

I’m not saying that a 0.65 HR/9 represents Imanaga’s true talent (ZiPS forecasts a 0.94 mark for the rest of the year), and it’s certainly likely that the results will regress toward his xwOBA as the season goes on, but he’s clearly been keeping pitches away from barrels at an above-average clip, a skill that many evaluators were skeptical of as he made the leap to MLB. Part of this is due to his fastball’s shape – a flat VAA can lead to uncomfortable swings and produce weak outs. While this type of fastball does contribute to a high fly ball rate, opponents haven’t been able to put a charge into their aerial hits thus far. Imanaga’s average exit velocity and hard-hit rates allowed sit around the league average, but his exit velocity allowed on batted balls in the air is a much more favorable 70th percentile. He also has the ninth-lowest line drive rate among qualified starters, almost never allowing squared-up contact.

Imanaga also locates his fastball in places unlikely to produce barrels. Sure, he throws more heaters in the zone than almost anyone else, but he’s not just sending them down Broadway and hoping for the best; instead, he’s consistently hitting his spots at the top edge of the zone. He ranks 10th in fastballs thrown in the upper third of the zone, an area where the flatness of the pitch can play up and create the illusion that it’s rising. Unsurprisingly, his Kirby Index, a stat that measures release angle consistency, ranks in the 90th percentile.

Imanaga’s fastball alone has made him one of the most effective pitchers in the league, and I haven’t even talked about his plus splitter yet. Like the fastball, this is a pitch he throws with remarkable accuracy. Splitters are hard to command – many pitchers’ splitter heatmaps look like giant blobs, and nearly 14% of splitters are wasted, the second highest of any pitch type. But Imanaga repeatedly hits the area at the bottom of and just below the strike zone, an optimal spot for success. His splitter has a 108 Location+ and 57 PitchingBot command grade, both among the league’s highest.

From a pure shape perspective, Imanaga’s splitter doesn’t particularly stand out. It doesn’t have absurd lateral movement like Kevin Gausman’s or fall off the table like Jordan Hicks’; Imanaga’s actually drops a few inches less than average. But when paired with his high fastball, that splitter becomes downright nasty. Thrown from the same release point and angle as his heater, Imanaga’s splitter gets hitters to swing at what they think is a meaty fastball before they have time to realize that the pitch is 9 mph slower and 19 inches lower. He throws it only about half as often as his heater, saving the split for two-strike counts where hitters are in swing mode. And swing they do, coming up empty nearly half the time they offer at it. The end result is that Imanaga’s splitter is one of the best whiff pitches in the league.

The splitter has also been integral in maintaining Imanaga’s minuscule walk rate, as hitters swing and miss at them before they can work themselves into deep counts. Opponents have swung at 47.2% of the out-of-zone splitters he’s thrown, a huge reason his overall chase rate nearly tops the charts. His low walk rate and refusal to waste pitches has worked wonders in terms of efficiency, averaging the sixth-fewest pitches per inning among qualified starters. Imanaga’s quick work of opposing lineups has allowed him to pitch deep into games (averaging six innings per start) while acclimating to more frequent outings as part of a five-man rotation.

Just a month into his MLB career, Imanaga has exceeded all expectations and emerged as an ace. His brilliant pitch execution hasn’t just proven what he can be at his best, they’ve also calmed concerns about what his downside risk can look like. When he signed, it was easy for skeptics to compare him to other hurlers without big velocity and forecast doubt. But Imanaga has shown that nobody else pitches the way he does.

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.

Kyle Harrison was pitching for the Double-A Richmond Flying Squirrels when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in August 2022. Then a fast-rising prospect in the San Francisco Giants system, the now-22-year-old southpaw had broken down the early evolution of his arsenal for me prior to a game at Portland, Maine’s Hadlock Field. Fast forward to this past week, and we were reacquainting at a far-more-fabled venue. Harrison was preparing to take the mound at Fenway Park for his 14th big-league start, his seventh this season.

As I’m wont to do in such scenarios, I asked the dark-horse rookie-of-the-year candidate what’s changed since our 20-months-ago conversation. Not surprisingly, he’s continued to evolve.

“I’ve added a cutter, although I haven’t thrown it as much as I’d like to,” Harrison told me. “Other than that, it’s the same pitches. The slider has been feeling great, and the changeup is something that’s really come along for me; it’s a pitch I’ve been relying on a lot. I really hadn’t thrown it that much in the minors — it felt like I didn’t really have the control for it — but then all of a sudden it clicked. Now I’ve got three weapons, plus the cutter.”

Including his Thursday effort in Boston, Harrison has thrown his new cutter — Baseball Savant categorizes it as a slider — just six times all season. Which brings us to his other breaking ball. When we’d talked in Portland, the lefty called the pitch a sweepy slider. Savant categorizes it as a slurve.

What is it? Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Jones had made just one big-league appearance when my colleague Ben Clemens wrote on April 2 that we should all get irresponsibly excited about the rookie right-hander. Little has happened to change that opinion. When Jones takes the mound this afternoon for the sixth time in a Pittsburgh Pirates uniform, he will do so with a 2.79 ERA, a 3.19 FIP, and 34.8% strikeout rate. Moreover, his fastball has averaged 97.3 mph, occasionally reaching triple digits.

Following his second start, I caught up to the flame-throwing 22-year-old at PNC Park to get a first-hand account of his arsenal and development path. Among the things I learned is that he was especially raw when the Pirates drafted him 44th-overall in 2020 out of La Mirada (CA) High School.

“I didn’t know how to pitch when I signed,” Jones told me. “I just threw fastballs, and throwing hard in high school is a lot different than throwing hard in pro ball. Guys in pro ball can hit the hard fastball, especially if you don’t have anything else.”

Jones did have secondary pitches prior to getting drafted, originally a curveball “that wasn’t very good,” and then a slider that went from “just okay” as a young prep to “pretty good” by the time he’d graduated. Even so, he was admittedly more thrower than pitcher — someone whose elite arm strength allowed him to “just throw fastballs by guys.”

Velocity came naturally to the now-6-foot-1, 180-pound righty. It also came early. “I was in my sophomore year of high school when I hit 97 [mph] for the first time,” explained Jones. “I’ve been a hard thrower for a long time.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ribs have been in the headlines this week, but sadly, not as part of a review of exciting new ballpark barbecue offerings. On Monday, Triston Casas was diagnosed with a fractured rib on his left side, an injury that will result in a prolonged absence and comes at a time when the Red Sox infield has already been depleted. On Wednesday, the Cubs’ Cody Bellinger was diagnosed with fractured ribs on his right side, interrupting his rebound from a slow start.

The 24-year-old Casas left Saturday’s game against the Pirates after injuring himself while fouling off a Mitch Keller pitch. He was initially diagnosed with a strain in his left rib cage and was placed on the injured list on Sunday. An MRI taken on Monday revealed a fracture as well, and the presumption is that his absence will be a long one given that the damage involves muscle and cartilage as well as bone. “Timetable, there’s none. It has to heal on its own. We’ve just got to be patient,” said manager Alex Cora. That sounds like a trip to the 60-day IL could be in order. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Hendricks has long been lauded as a cerebral pitcher, and for good reason. Nicknamed “The Professor,” the 34-year-old Chicago Cubs right-hander not only has an economics degree from Dartmouth College, he relies far more on guile than gas. The antithesis of your prototypical power arm, Hendricks subsists with a heater that sits in the second percentile for velocity. Moreover, he’s no spin monster in terms of breaking stuff. As he’ll readily admit, his four-pitch arsenal is sans a plus breaking ball.

His 2024 season is off to a slow start. Over five turbulent outings, Hendricks has surrendered 37 hits, including a league-worst eight round-trippers, seven walks and 28 runs across just 21 innings. Adjustments are in order, but that’s nothing new for the righty. An ability to adjust accordingly has gone a long way toward his career ledger, which coming into this year included an 84 ERA- and a 3.80 FIP, as well as stingy walk and home run rates. When push comes to shove, Hendricks has proven more than capable of outsmarting big league hitters.

Hendricks discussed his evolution as a pitcher and his overall M.O. on the mound during spring training.

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David Laurila: How have analytics impacted your evolution as a pitcher?

Kyle Hendricks: “Analytics have changed a lot throughout my career, and I’ve had to learn a lot about them. I still don’t know a whole lot, to be honest with you. We have such a good support group behind me on the pitching side, and I rely heavily on them. I’ll go through all my work, throw my bullpens, etcetera, and they’re breaking down all the data, what everything looks like. So, the most it’s probably helped me with is consistency — consistency of pitch shapes, and action on my pitches.

“From there, I’ve always been a guy searching for a better curveball and how to spin a ball better. It definitely can help, just looking at the shape of my curveball, the spin overall, the spin efficiency. Things like that. Those have helped me put a good visual to what I’m searching for in a breaking ball.”

Laurila: It’s interesting to hear you say that you don’t know a lot. Zack Wheeler recently told me that [Phillies pitching coach] Caleb Cotham was his pitching nerd. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming up through the Dodgers system, Michael Busch gained a reputation as “a bat-only prospect,” a player whose offensive skills far outpaced his defensive ones. So when the Dodgers landed Shohei Ohtani in December, it closed the door on the team finding room for Busch as a DH, and they were already set at first base — Busch’s main position in college — with Freddie Freeman in the fold. Busch needed a trade to clear his path, and in January he got one, a four-player deal with the Cubs. So far, the 26-year-old rookie is off to a flying start, ranking high on the leaderboards after reeling off a streak of five consecutive games with a home run.

Busch’s streak, which ended on Tuesday night in Arizona, took place during the Cubs’ nine-game western road trip, beginning with a game-tying two-run homer off the Padres’ Dylan Cease at Petco Park on April 10. Two days later in Seattle, he went deep off the Mariners’ Ryne Stanek. The Cubs lost both of those games, but he helped them win three straight, starting with a solo shot off Tyson Miller in the seventh inning of a 4-1 win Saturday night, then a two-run homer off Luis Castillo in the fourth inning of a 3-2 win on Sunday. Moving on to Arizona, he didn’t waste any time, connecting off Merrill Kelly in his first plate appearance of Monday’s game, an 11-inning, 3-2 win. Read the rest of this entry »