Late-career resurgences from former stars are fascinating to me. This is a terribly difficult game even when you are at your peak strength and athleticism; as your body declines, it only gets more difficult. Some are just unable to adjust to new circumstances, including former stars. But every now and then, you have a hitter who can make the right tweaks to adapt to their new body and changed environment. There are only a handful who do that every year; this season, Evan Longoria is one of them.

After an injury-laden 2022, the future was murky for Longoria. Last year, he went on the IL for hand surgery, an oblique strain, and a hamstring strain, and ultimately missed the last week of the season after taking a 100-mph line drive off the thumb, leading to a fracture. He had no intentions of retiring before or after the fracture, though; it was only a bump in the road that his potential new team would have to consider, since the Giants did not exercise his club option. He ended up signing a one-year, $4 million dollar deal with the Diamondbacks, where he has enjoyed his best offensive season since 2016 by wRC+ and xwOBA. It comes in a limited sample and strategic playing time from Torey Lovullo, but it’s far from a fluke. Longoria is impacting the ball as well as he ever has in the Statcast era. Here is a table detailing his jump in performance and quality of contact relative to recent seasons:

Every single one of these metrics is a personal high for Longoria since 2015, and some by a wide margin, which is pretty remarkable for a player coming off so many injuries in the back half of their 30s. His HardHit% is fifth in the league among hitters with at least 50 batted balls, putting him in between Juan Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on that list. Pair that with great consistency in hitting the ball between eight and 32 degrees, and you have yourself an xwOBACON over .500 — also good for fifth in all of baseball among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve long been a staunch supporter of Ketel Marte. Switch-hitters with short levers are my personal favorite archetype. When you can produce 90th-percentile max exit velocity from both sides of the plate with only mid-teens strikeout rates, you’ll have my attention each and every night. It’s not always the case that switch-hitters have two contrasting swings, but it is for Marte. He is a natural right-handed hitter, which has played out clearly in his performance over the years, but every now and then, everything clicks on both sides of the plate. In fact, since his breakout 2019 season, he has been an above-average hitter from the left side every other year. But this season, he has taken off unlike ever before.

Throughout Marte’s career, there has been a stark difference in his power from the right side versus his left side. Despite being powerful in terms of exit velocity from both sides, he has always been better at creating pull side lift with his natural right-handed swing. That has resulted in a career ISO of .215 as a righty and .155 as a lefty. But like I said, things are clicking for him as a righty this year.

Before diving into the deep details, let’s look at his splits each year since the 2019 breakout:

There is still fluctuation, but in general, Marte is consistently well above average from the right-handed side. Last year was his worst mark since his breakout, and he was still a 125 wRC+ hitter. But with the more advantageous side of the platoon being the left side, his overall production is highly dependent on how he performs when facing right-handed pitching. So for the rest of this piece, I want to shift my focus to that side. This is the best Marte has been as a lefty since 2019, and that warrants an investigation on what exactly he has done to get here. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third 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 I 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 »

Joe Jacques had an anything-but-ordinary big-league debut with the Boston Red Sox on Monday at Fenway Park. The 28-year-old southpaw not only entered a game against the Colorado Rockies with two outs and the bases loaded in the 10th inning; he did so in a downpour. Moreover, the first of the five pitches he threw came on a 1-0 count. Unbeknownst to Jacques until he returned to the dugout, he’d committed a pitch clock violation before the 20-second countdown had started. More on that in a moment.

Drafted 984th overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2016 out of Manhattan College, Jacques had been claimed off of waivers by the Red Sox last December. Almost exclusively a reliever since coming to pro ball, he’d made 146 appearances down on the farm, including 23 with Triple-A Worcester this season. If there were any nerves associated with his taste of high-leverage MLB action, he wasn’t letting on.

“Honestly, I didn’t have that much of an adrenaline spike,” the Shrewsbury, New Jersey native told me on Wednesday. “That’s not the time to be panicking. With the bases loaded, in the rain, you’ve just got to come in and pound the zone. Plus, having been in Yankee Stadium the previous three days — I got hot once — definitely helped my nerves. I was pretty locked in.”

That wasn’t necessarily the case in terms of a pitch clock rule that many fans aren’t even aware of. What happened was initially a mystery to the left-hander. Read the rest of this entry »

I think people tend to overestimate their ability to avoid disappointment. We try to temper our excitement so that we won’t feel let down when something goes wrong, but it doesn’t really work. The bad times are always going to hurt. More importantly, tempering your excitement can limit the joy you experience when things finally go right. Nothing strangles happiness in the cradle like that little voice in your head that keeps whispering, “It’s probably going to fall apart.”

I’m not saying we should all be walking around puffed up with unfounded optimism. I just think that some things warrant excitement, that we should trust ourselves to recognize them, and that we should allow ourselves to enjoy them fully. To borrow a line, I think you ought to follow your heart. That’s all I ever thought about anything.

Last year, over 32 games and 115 plate appearances, a 21-year-old Corbin Carroll put up a wRC+ of 130. Excelling in the outfield and on the basepaths as well allowed him to rack up 1.4 WAR. That’s a 7-win pace. He wasn’t perfect: his walk and strikeout rates were nothing to write home about, and while his .358 wOBA said Alex Bregman, his .293 xwOBA said Raimel Tapia. But in all, it was enough to make Carroll our No. 2 prospect in baseball, net him a downright effervescent ZiPS projection and an eight-year, $111 million contract extension, and establish him as our staff’s runaway favorite for NL Rookie of the Year. Corbin Carroll in 2022 was a first date where you’re talking and laughing and then all of a sudden you look at your watch and realize five hours have passed. He was worth getting excited about. Read the rest of this entry »

Everton-Bournemouth stands out among today’s Premier League matchups, as the former will secure a return to England’s elite division with a win (they could also survive with a loss or a draw, but only if both Leeds and Leicester City likewise fail to win). Everton FC, which is located in Liverpool, was last relegated below the top flight in 1951.

As most EPL fans are aware, Everton’s home grounds, Goodison Park, are located less than a mile from Anfield, the historic home of Liverpool FC. They also know that the principal owner of Everton’s longtime arch rival is John Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group purchased the more-ballyhooed of the two clubs in 2010.

According to a new book by Bruce Schoenfeld, the acquisition happened only after initial reluctance from FSG’s ultimate decision-maker. As chronicled in Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports, Henry proclaimed the following during a business meeting held to assess the possible purchase:

“But I don’t want to own a soccer team.” Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like all of our coverage of the 2023 Diamondbacks here at FanGraphs has focused on the pitching, and it’s not hard to see why. Zac Gallen has looked phenomenal (at times historically so), Madison Bumgarner was abominable (eventually too abominable to roster), and the D-backs have given some intriguing young arms the chance to prove their worth in the big league rotation.

Yet all that being so, the real story of the 2023 Diamondbacks has been the offense. They lead the National League in hitting and rank third with 257 runs scored. They’re fourth in OBP, fourth in slugging percentage, and fifth in wRC+. By and large, the pitching staff has performed as expected – Gallen good, MadBum bad, everyone else somewhere in between – but the offense has been more potent than anyone could have envisioned.

It’s been a team effort in Arizona; among the nine Diamondbacks hitters with at least 100 PA, seven have been above-average at the plate. Corbin Carroll is off to the races. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. has taken a massive step forward. Ketel Marte and Christian Walker have been predictably solid, while Gabriel Moreno and Pavin Smith are holding their own. Leading the way, however, has been none other than Geraldo Perdomo, who is pacing the club in OBP, wRC+, and WAR. What? Read the rest of this entry »

Diamondbacks righthander Zac Gallen is one of those guys who’s always trying to improve. That’s true of almost all pro athletes, these hypercompetitive oddballs constantly in search of new ways to get one over on an opponent. But Gallen, famous for his methodical catch play and insatiable appetite for information, embodies the stereotype more than most.

One skill the 27-year-old Gallen has honed for 2023: managing ticket requests from family. On Wednesday afternoon, Gallen makes his third career start at Citizens Bank Park, less than six miles from his high school baseball field in Pennsauken, New Jersey. So whenever he comes to Philadelphia, there are obligations to meet.

“I think it’s on the tamer side for the most part, but my mom’s side of the family is huge so it’s still a good chunk of tickets for sure,” he says. “Every year when we come back and I’m pitching, I’m trying to get better at managing all the extra stuff that comes with playing in your hometown.” Read the rest of this entry »

Only 62 men and 20 women have scored a goal in a FIFA World Cup Final. It’s a rare achievement that holds a sacred place in sports history. Being the starting pitcher in a World Baseball Classic final is a bit less prestigious — at least for now, check back with me in 60 years to know for sure — but only 10 people can say they’ve done it.

Among them, Diamondbacks right-hander Merrill Kelly. “I’ve said it a million times before, but I’m super grateful I was able to be a part of it. Just the clubhouse in general, the quality of players on that team — by far the best team I’ve ever been on and it isn’t close,” he says. “Obviously, we would’ve liked it to go a different way in the last game.”

The circumstances that led to Kelly starting that game are interesting. When Team USA was setting up its rotation for the group stage, Kelly lobbied manager Mark DeRosa for the toughest assignment of pool play: Mexico. That start went to Padres right-hander Nick Martinez, who got crushed in an 11-5 loss. (This result led to Kelly being on the receiving end of some good-natured trash talk when he and Team Mexico center fielder Alek Thomas returned to Diamondbacks camp.)

When Kelly picked up a crucial win in the pool finale against Colombia three day days later, there was a silver lining to not getting his preferred rotation spot.

“One of the things DeRosa told me to console me was if I pitched against Colombia at home, that would line me up for the championship as well,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy Henry isn’t a Statcast darling. The 25-year-old Arizona Diamondbacks southpaw doesn’t possess elite movement or spin on any of his four offerings, nor does he light up radar guns. What he does do… well, he pitches. Selected by the Snakes in the second round of the 2019 draft out of the University of Michigan, Henry might best be described as a purveyor of the art of pitching.

Fourteen starts into his big-league career — nine last year and five so far this season — Henry has admittedly had relatively modest success. He has a 5.23 ERA over 74 innings and has allowed 75 hits and 33 walks, with a pedestrian 49 punch
outs and a 15.3% K-rate. Writing him up prior to last season, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen opined that “No. 4 starter is a reasonable ceiling” for the crafty left-hander.

Henry discussed his pitchability profile — one that stretches back to his formative days in Portage, Michigan — toward the tail end of spring training.

———

David Laurila: You grew up in a cold weather state. With that in mind, how have you developed as a pitcher?

Tommy Henry: “I would say the biggest development thing for me, as a kid, was that I wasn’t a hard thrower, so I had to learn how to ‘pitch.’ Basically, I had to learn what pitching was. My dad also forced me to throw a changeup at a young age. And honestly, a lot of me developing as a pitcher has been learning through adversity. There are a lot of things you’d like to learn before the adversity happens, but going through experiences and learning from those experiences has probably shaped me into the person I am today the most.”

Laurila: Elaborate on “not a hard thrower.” The term is obviously relative, but you grew up in Michigan, not a baseball hotbed like Florida or Texas. Read the rest of this entry »