This is a trade article, as the Diamondbacks acquired Josh Bell from the Marlins today in exchange for cash considerations. It’s also an injury article, sadly. Christian Walker departed last night’s D-backs/Nationals game with an oblique injury, and was due for an MRI this morning. The results haven’t been made public yet, but trading for Bell is a statement in and of itself, so let’s walk through the trade and injury in combination.
Walker has quietly been the second-best first baseman in the game over the past three years. I don’t mean that hyperbolically; he’s second only to Freddie Freeman in WAR over that time period. He’s done it with good offense and outrageous, comically good first base defense. I don’t think I’m selling this enough. Per Statcast, Walker has been 38 outs above average over that time period. Carlos Santana is second… with 17. DRS scores it 33-20 in Walker’s favor, with Matt Olson at 21. However you look at it, Walker is head and shoulders above everyone else at the position. Last night, he made a standard-for-him, spectacular-for-most play on a foul ball:
After that inning, he came back to the dugout and departed the game. Now we and the Diamondbacks can only wait to hear the injury news. Read the rest of this entry »
While trades of relievers at the deadline are rarely the hottest moves featuring the best prospects, there are usually a lot of them. As the summer reaches its peak, contenders start to think about their bullpens down the stretch and beyond, and with modern bullpens seemingly as densely populated as the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, there’s always room to add a quality arm. Let’s dig through them!
Editor’s Note: This reliever roundup doesn’t include the more recent trades for Carlos Estévez, Nick Mears, and Jason Adam. Ben Clemens will cover those moves in a separate post.)
The Arizona Diamondbacks acquired LHRP A.J. Puk from the Miami Marlins for 1B/3B Deyvison De Los Santos and OF Andrew Pintar
Don’t focus too much on the raw ERA or unimpressive walk rate when judging the merits of Arizona’s trade for A.J. Puk. Partially in response to their myriad rotation injuries in the spring, the Marlins took Puk’s attempt to get back into the rotation seriously, and he started the season there after a successful spring. I still think that was a well-founded experiment, but it didn’t pay dividends for Miami. Puk was absolutely dreadful as a starter, and it wasn’t long before he landed on the IL with shoulder fatigue. His four starts resulted in a 9.22 ERA, a 6.29 FIP, and an alarming 17 walks in 13 2/3 innings. He was moved back to the ’pen upon his return in mid-May, but the damage to his seasonal line was so significant that it still looked underwhelming at the time of the trade (4.30 ERA, 3.62 FIP, 44 IP).
As he has the last few years, Puk has dominated as a reliever; across 30 1/3 relief innings with the Marlins, he had 33 strikeouts and, perhaps most importantly, only six walks. The result was a 2.08 ERA/2.42 FIP, with batters managing a bleak .159/.204/.252 against him. The Diamondbacks are short on lefty relievers, with Joe Mantiply shouldering a very large share of the southpaw burden. Puk has historically been better against righties than Mantiply, so he can be used in more situations.
In return, the offense-starved Marlins pick up a couple of possible bats to add to their farm system. With a .325/.376/.635 and 28 homers combined at two levels in the high minors this year, Deyvison De Los Santos looks impressive at first look, but it’s important to contextualize those numbers. He’s playing in some very high offensive environments and there’s a lot of hot air to remove from those numbers to turn them into expected MLB performance. ZiPS translates his 2024 minor league performance to .263/.302/.428 in the majors and projects for wRC+ lines between 95 and 110 in the coming years with the Marlins. Now, that’s enough for the Marlins to be interested in him and chase any upside, but don’t be shocked if he’s not an offensive force.
Similarly, ZiPS translates Andrew Pintar’s season at .235/.302/.365 and doesn’t see a ton of growth from him offensively, viewing him as most likely to be a spare outfielder if he reaches the majors. I talked a bit with my colleague Eric Longenhagen about him on Friday and Eric still grades Pintar as a fifth-outfielder type, which is about how ZiPS evaluates him. Still, as with De Los Santos, Pintar’s interesting enough for a team like the Marlins to take a chance on him and give him an extended look; projections are frequently wrong, after all, by design!
The Seattle Mariners acquired RHRP Yimi García from the Toronto Blue Jays for OF Jonatan Clase and C Jacob Sharp
With the Blue Jays as short-term sellers, it’s hardly surprising to see them trade Yimi García, who is a free agent at the end of the season. His three-year, $16 million deal turned out to be a success for the Jays; he’s been worth 2.7 WAR and put up a 3.44 ERA/3.28 FIP over 163 appearances across two-plus seasons. This season has arguably been his best, as he’s striking out nearly 13 batters per nine innings. With Gregory Santos limping a bit after a knee injury – not believed to be severe – García slots in behind Andrés Muñoz in the Mariners’ bullpen pecking order. Seattle’s relief corps has been in the middle of the pack, but adding García to a group that features Muñoz, a healthy Santos, and Taylor Saucedo gives the M’s an excellent quartet of high-leverage guys, which could be crucial in what’s shaping up to be a tight AL West race.
Jonatan Clase was listed with a FV of 40 earlier this month when Eric ran down the top Mariners prospects, but with Julio Rodríguez entrenched in center field and backed up by other outfielders who can capably cover the position (namely Victor Robles, Cade Marlowe, and even, in a pinch, newly acquiredRandy Arozarena), Clase’s ability to do so was simply less valuable in Seattle. Beyond that, the team needs more thump in its lineup at this point, and that’s not Clase’s speciality. For the Jays, Kevin Kiermaier is a free agent after the season and the organization has a real lack of center field candidates anywhere near the majors. ZiPS projects Clase at .218/.291/.373 with an 84 wRC+ for 2025 but views him as an above-average defensive center fielder, suggesting that he’s at least a reasonable stopgap option or a useful role player for Toronto. Jacob Sharp has been off the radar as a prospect, a fairly small catcher who is hitting decently well, albeit as a 22-year-old in A-ball.
The New York Mets acquired RHRP Ryne Stanek from the Seattle Mariners for OF Rhylan Thomas
The Mets have an extremely unimpressive bullpen once you get past Edwin Díaz, and now that they are firmly in contention for an NL Wild Card spot this season, they are looking to improve their relief corps. Ryne Stanek hasn’t excelled in Seattle, but the veteran reliever still throws in the high-90s, is durable, and misses bats. Guys like that will always resurface. Especially after trading for García, the Mariners have better options than Stanek to pitch in high-leverage, non-save situations. But that’s not the case in Queens, and he’s a welcome addition to the bullpen.
Rhylan Thomas isn’t a high price to pay and he largely fills a similar role to the departed Clase in Seattle’s organization, though he’s a different type of player. As a high-contact hitter, Thomas may fare well in pitcher-friendly T-Mobile Park. ZiPS sees Thomas as a .263/.313/.333 hitter with plus defense in the corners in 2025.
The Tampa Bay Rays acquired RHRP Cole Sulser from the New York Mets for cash
Cole Sulser is a relative soft-tosser who relies on deception. He had a big breakout season in 2021, but after a trade to the Marlins, he struggled with his command in ’22 and had his season marred by a lat injury that landed him on the 60-day IL. A shoulder injury ruined his 2023 and he’s spent ’24 trying to rehabilitate his value in the minors for the Mets, with mixed results. This is the third time the Rays have traded for Sulser in his career, so they seem to see something in him, and given Tampa Bay’s record with random relievers, I wouldn’t be shocked if he became useful for the Rays next season.
Cash is slang for currency, which can be exchanged for goods and services. It can be vulnerable to inflation, and because of this, it doesn’t represent a stable medium of exchange in some countries. But cash also has the benefit of being very flexible.
The Chicago Cubs acquired RHRP Nate Pearson from the Toronto Blue Jays for OF Yohendrick Pinango
Nate Pearson was rightly a hot prospect back in the day, and there were good reasons to think he’d play a key role in Toronto. Both scouts (he graduated at a FV of 55 here) and projections (ZiPS was a fan) thought a lot of his abilities, but the question was how he’d hold up physically as a starter. This worry turned out to be a real issue, and for the most part since 2019, his seasons have been marred by a wide variety of nagging injuries, costing him significant development time. Pearson throws hard, but he’s still rather raw, a problem given that he turns 28 in a few weeks and he has only two years left of club control after this one — not a lot of time for a reclamation project. The Cubs have decided to take a shot at fixing him. They are short-term sellers, but if Pearson pays off, he could be a significant player for their ’pen in 2025 and ’26.
Yohendrick Pinango is rather raw as well, a corner outfielder with decent power upside who hasn’t really shown that home run pop in the minors so far. The Cubs are kind of stacked with raw, interesting outfield prospects, while the Jays are rather short of them, making Toronto a better home for Pinango. ZiPS only translates Pinango’s 2024 season to a .344 slugging percentage; he hit well in High-A, but that was as a 22-year-old in his third stint there. Like Pearson, Pinango’s a lottery ticket.
I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Strength up the middle is important to any contender, but with so many teams still in the hunt for a playoff spot, it’s no surprise some of them are have some weak spots. Sometimes it’s easier for a team to convince itself that the metrics aren’t fully capturing the strength of a light-hitting player’s defense if they’re playing a premium position, which seems to be the case with the shortstops and some of the center fielders in this year’s batch of Killers. On the flip side, occasionally it’s easier to justify shaky defense if there’s at least a hope of getting adequate offense. Then there are the times that guys get hurt and somebody has to stand out there in the middle pasture looking like they know what’s going on.
While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.
He may not be playing in Arlington tonight, but Christian Walker just wrapped up an All-Star level first half. The Diamondbacks first baseman came into the All-Star break ranked third in the National League with 22 home runs, fifth with 66 RBI, and among the top 15 qualified batters in wOBA (.357), xwOBA (.365), and wRC+ (131). His 10 OAA are third-most among NL fielders, while his 7 DRS, 4.1 UZR, and 8 FRV are all the top marks at his position. Thanks to his spectacular defensive performance, the two-time Gold Glove winner is the only qualified NL first baseman who has provided positive defensive value at first despite the hefty positional adjustment. On top of that, he has played in all 97 of Arizona’s games so far, putting him on pace for more than 700 plate appearances this season.
Add his offense, defense, and durability together and you get 2.9 WAR, which places Walker in the top 15 among NL position players and top 30 in the majors. Considering that 46 position players were invited to the Midsummer Classic this year, it’s hard to deny that Walker is having an All-Star worthy season. At the same time, it’s also hard to get too fired to up about his “snub.” Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman have put up superior offensive numbers and WAR totals, rightfully earning the two guaranteed spots for first basemen on the NL roster. In addition, three NL players with more WAR and arguably even stronger All-Star cases than Walker were also left off the squad: Francisco Lindor, Brandon Nimmo, and Willy Adames. Finally, this isn’t even the most disappointing time Walker has missed out on a trip back to Globe Life Field within the past 10 months. Still, it’s a shame that Walker’s excellent first half will go unrewarded. At 33 years old, the late bloomer is putting together the best season of his career at the plate and in the field. Surely, that deserves to be celebrated. Read the rest of this entry »
The Guardians rate as one of baseball’s bigger surprises. After finishing 76-86 last year — their worst record since 2012 — they’ve rebounded to go 57-33 thus far, and entered Wednesday with the AL’s best record. Their offense is much more potent than it was last year, and despite losing ace Shane Bieber for the season due to Tommy John surgery, they rank second in the league in run prevention at 3.87 runs per game.
While Cleveland’s staff owns the AL’s second-highest strikeout rate (24.2%), a good amount of credit for the team’s run prevention belongs to its defense. By my evaluation of a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages) — the Guardians rate as the majors’ second-best defensive team thus far this season. The Yankees, who spent much of the first half atop the AL East before a 5-16 slide knocked them into second place, are the only team ahead of them.
On an individual level, even a full season of data isn’t enough to get the clearest picture of a player’s defense, and it’s not at all surprising that a 600-inning sample produces divergent values across the major metrics. After all, they’re based on differing methodologies that produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom, spreads that owe something to what they don’t measure, as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or FRVs, catchers don’t have UZRs, and DRS tends to produce the most extreme ratings. Still, within this aggregation I do think we get enough signal at this point in the season to make it worth checking in; I don’t proclaim this to be a bulletproof methodology so much as a good point of entry into a broad topic. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
It’s not exactly uncommon for league champions to struggle the following year. The most extreme versions of this are the Marlins, who sold off just about all of their good players after winning the World Series in 1997 and in 2003. The Nationals, who still haven’t had a winning season since their World Series title in 2019, are a more recent example. But, usually, at least one of the two teams to play in the previous World Series has a strong follow-up season. In fact, over the first 29 seasons of the Wild Card era, only twice have both league champs from the same year missed the playoffs the next season; interestingly, those two years came back to back, in 2006 (White Sox and Astros) and 2007 (Cardinals and Tigers). That’s why it’s quite jarring to see both the Rangers and Diamondbacks under .500 entering play this weekend.
While both teams won on Thursday, they’re not in great position right now. The Diamondbacks are 8.5 games out of first place with a 33-36 record (though they’re just a game out of the final NL Wild Card spot); the Rangers’ 33-35 record has them five games behind the first place Mariners and 3.5 games away from a wild card berth. The sluggish start gave the reigning world champs just a 19.2% chance of making the playoffs entering Thursday; Arizona’s odds weren’t that much better, at 27.9%.
Considering this, let’s look at what has gone wrong for each team and determine how they can avoid becoming the third pair of league champions in three decades to each fall short of returning to the postseason in their follow-up campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
The Blue Jays haven’t yet crashed into a windowpane, never to recover, but 23-26 certainly isn’t what was expected of them entering the season. Before the season, our playoff odds gave them 49% chance to make the postseason. Toronto’s odds peaked at 57.9% on April 22, but since then, the team has fallen off. As of this morning, the Blue Jays have a 24.0% probability to make the playoffs. That leaves them with some serious decisions to make over the next two or so months before the July 30 deadline. Considering their current situation, let’s take a look at their options if they choose not to bolster their big league roster by the end of July.
Stand Pat
This is the most straightforward option: Don’t do anything and hope for some improvements. Every hitter other than Daulton Varsho, Davis Schneider, and Danny Jansen has underperformed this year, and maybe the Blue Jays can stay in the hunt long enough for their bats to catch fire. The organization may determine this is its best option simply because their players probably would have less trade value while they are playing below expectations. If the return package isn’t what the Blue Jays want, why not stay they course?
Only Sell The Rentals
The Blue Jays have a whole bunch of free agents after the 2025 season. And while they could decide to trade those guys (more on this later), Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins may find it best to hold on to them and go for one last run next season. But that doesn’t take the Blue Jays out of the action at the deadline; they have several enticing players on expiring contracts to dangle to contenders.
Justin Turner has slumped horribly recently — entering last night’s game, his wRC+ in May was -21, after 152 in March/April, bringing his seasonal wRC+ down to 96 — but if he can rebound to being solidly above average, contenders would be happy to acquire his righty bat and postseason experience. The Twins, Rangers, and Rays all have gotten wRC+ values below 80 from their designated hitters, and Turner can also fill in at third base, second base, and first.
Yimi García has been one of baseball’s best relievers this season, allowing just one run in 19 innings. He’s also struck out 35% of opponents, and his xERA (1.44) and FIP (2.24) both back up his solid performance. He would make any contender’s bullpen better, and he’s always bounced around between roles, so he doesn’t have to be pigeonholed into a particular inning or situation. It is worth noting that García has never been this good before, and as Ben Clemens wrote in his column yesterday, “you can’t trade your newfound reliever for a shiny prospect,” so it’s unlikely that García alone would net the Blue Jays a strong return package. That said, if Toronto is out of the race, it might as well get something for a 33-year-old reliever who might not be with the team next year anyway.
Lefty Yusei Kikuchi is rather quietly pitching the best he ever has in the majors, with a 2.64 ERA across 10 starts and a career-low walk rate of 5.5%. Teams always need starting pitching, and his above-average rate of inducing grounders and popups will play anywhere.
Rounding out this group is Jansen, who on a rate basis has hit better than any other catcher in baseball, with a 191 wRC+ in 82 trips to the plate entering last night’s game. His injury history should scare teams a little bit; he’s never had more than 384 plate appearances in a season, and that was back in 2019. It’s also worth noting, as our associate editor Matt Martell wrote last year for the New York Times, that teams rarely trade for a catcher during the season because of the particular challenges that come with the position. Even so, I think Jansen is well-suited for the role Mitch Garver held last year with the Rangers: catching sometimes but also getting plenty of plate appearances at DH to make sure his bat stays in the lineup.
Defensive whiz Kevin Kiermaier, righty changeup specialist Trevor Richards, and lefty power bat Daniel Vogelbach round out the group of seven Blue Jays who get to fly freely at the end of the season.
Blow It Up
OK, but what if the Jays do decide to more or less tear it down? After all, it is the struggling big three hitters — Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, and George Springer — who deserve at least a decent chunk of the blame for Toronto’s underperformance. The team didn’t even get a homer from a cleanup hitter until Bichette hit one on Wednesday — 48 games into the season!
I don’t think the Blue Jays would go so far as to trade Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt, or José Berríos, since Berríos is the only one pitching particularly well this year and his opt out after 2026 may complicate things too much to work out a trade, but the rest of that group of players with club control beyond this season could be on the block, headlined by Guerrero Jr. and Bichette.
Vladdy continues to tantalize with his bullet home runs (though he has only five this year) and massive exit velocity, but as we move further and further away from it, his MVP-caliber 2021 campaign looks more like an outlier than a sign of things to come, as it surely appeared to be in its immediate aftermath. Still, he’s in just his age-25 season, and it’s absolutely plausible that another team could bring out the best in him. I’m puzzled trying to figure out what he’d bring back in a trade, since he’s making $19.9 million this year and will probably be up around $25 million next year, but let’s not overthink things. He’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and if his suitors aren’t going to give up at least one top 100 prospect for him, the Blue Jays should tell them to get lost.
Bichette is more or less the same guy at the end of every season, with a wRC+ between 120 and 130 in each of the last four years; over the last three, he’s hit 29, 24, and 20 home runs, respectively. His fielding is always below average (but not terrible), and the only skill that’s on the decline is his base-stealing, with 25 stolen bases in 2021 followed by 13 in ’22 and just five last season, though he already has four this year. On the surface, the man is a metronome, but things get … weird … under the hood. Last year, his first-half wRC+ was 132, followed by 109 in the second half. The year prior, it was just 106 in the first half before he surged to 164 after the All-Star break. That streakiness is why I’m really not concerned about his performance thus far this year; the dude is bound to get hot at some point! It would be foolish of teams to just assume things will even out, but they shouldn’t read too much into his slow start, either. A contending team in need of a shortstop this year, such as the Giants or Guardians, would certainly be interested.
The Blue Jays would get far more modest returns for right-handed closer Jordan Romano, righty relievers Chad Green and Erik Swanson, lefty relievers Tim Mayza and Génesis Cabrera, and utilitymen Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Cavan Biggio, but they could be used as an add-on piece to sweeten the return in a trade for one of Toronto’s top players or to acquire prospect depth in a separate deal. After all, the Blue Jays’ farm system has just two Top 100 Prospects: lefty pitcher Ricky Tiedemann and infielder Orelvis Martinez.
I’m not here to advocate for Toronto to take any particular path; I’m just laying out the options. The worst plan for the Blue Jays would be not having one.
Weekend Windup
Here are some things to keep an eye on as we head into the long Memorial Day weekend:
• Ketel Marte looks to extend his 21-game hitting streak — the longest in the majors this season — when the Diamondbacks begin a three-game set at home tonight against the Marlins. Lefty Braxton Garrett gets the start for Miami, which bodes well for Marte, who is hitting .347 against lefties this year.
• The Cubs and Cardinals will finally meet for the first time this year, opening a three-game set tonight at Busch Stadium. The Cardinals have looked cooked for most of the first quarter of the season, but they enter the weekend just five games out of first place in the NL Central after winning eight of their last 10 games — including being the first team to sweep the Orioles in the regular season since Adley Rutschman came up two years ago.
• Juan Soto returns to San Diego for the first time since the Padres traded him to the Yankees last December, and comes back to town on fire. Over his last six games, Soto is 9-for-23 (.391) with four home runs and seven RBIs. After a mini-slump dropped his average to .301 and his OPS to .917, those numbers are back to .312 and .972, respectively. He’ll be flanked in the lineup as usual by Anthony Volpe, who’s got a 16-game hitting streak, and Aaron Judge, who homered yet again on Thursday for his 15th of the season.
• Once his 10-game suspension for pitching with “sticky stuff” is over, Ronel Blanco is set to return on Sunday against the A’s. While he asserted the substance he got caught using was just rosin mixed with sweat, he’ll surely be under increased scrutiny. Blanco, who has a 2.09 ERA in eight starts so far in 2024, was the first pitcher to be suspended for foreign substances this season after four were suspended last year.
• Nick Lodolo is aiming to return to the Reds rotation on Monday, and boy could they use him. The Reds have floundered to a 4-16 record in their last 20 games, and Lodolo had a 3.34 ERA and 2.90 FIP in six starts before hitting the IL with a groin injury. That was his second IL stint this year, after he missed the season’s first couple weeks while recovering from the leg fracture that cost him most of 2023.
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 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 »
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.
At 13-16, the Arizona Diamondbacks have started their season with something of a whimper. The biggest reason for that, in my opinion, has been the performance of Corbin Carroll, who’s gone from winning Rookie of the Year and finishing fifth in MVP voting last season to hitting just .189/.295/.236 (60 wRC+) with just one home run over 122 plate appearances. There are a couple of silver linings — he’s swiped eight bases despite his struggles and has struck out just 21 times to go along with his 15 walks — but frankly, it’s mostly been a disaster for a guy who should be playing like what he is: the most talented all-around player on the National League’s reigning pennant-winning team.
Firstly, I’ll acknowledge that Carroll perhaps overperformed last year. His batting average, slugging percentage, and wOBA were all notably higher than his expected marks, and his barrel, hard-hit, and sweet-spot rates were all in the 51st percentile or lower. Then again, his .268 xBA, .441 xSLG, and .370 xwOBA were all at or above the 65th percentile — meaning he still would’ve been solid hitter if those were his actual statistics. Moreover, with his first full season behind him, we could have reasonably expected him to improve his skills, and thus his production, as he gained experience.
So far, that hasn’t been the case. He’s been downright dreadful at the plate.
Carroll’s top-level approach is good: He’s not swinging and missing (80th percentile whiff rate) or striking out (81st percentile strikeout rate), and he’s taking his walks (84th percentile walk rate). But there’s only so much value a hitter can provide by walking and making contact if his quality of contact is abysmal, and, well, that’s pretty much the only way to describe it. His 30th-percentile barrel rate is actually his best quality of contact marker, with his percentiles for average exit velocity, hard-hit rate and sweet-spot rate all amazingly in the fourth percentile or lower. He’s basically hitting the ball with the authority of Steven Kwan and Luis Arraez; that can be totally fine for a hitter if he has the bat control that those two have (which leads to elite sweet-spot percentages), but Carroll doesn’t have that, making him punchless at the plate.
On average, Carroll is hitting the ball nearly five mph softer than he did last year. Along with that, his groundball rate has increased by nearly five percentage points. For Carroll, who has as much speed as anyone in baseball, putting the ball on the ground is far from the worst thing, but that spike in worm-killers has come at the expense of his power. Last season, he hit 25 home runs, 30 doubles and 10 triples; one homer and two doubles are his only extra-base hits this year.
When a hitter loses this much punch despite being in his early-20s, the focus, understandably, will turn to injury. Carroll has a history of scary shoulder problems, forcing him to have surgery when he was in the minors and causing him to leave a couple of games last season after painful swings. But I haven’t noticed any wincing or grimacing in the Carroll plate appearances I’ve seen this year, and he hasn’t been lifted from the lineup because of his shoulder. If there are residual issues, Carroll is keeping them private. Instead, he’s theorized that his working to cut down on strikeouts has created a deeper point of contact, which has made it harder for him to get out in front of pitches and drive them. That’s borne out in the data; his overall pull rate is down from 38.4% to 33.7%, and he’s pulling just 6.5% of fly balls compared to 27.2% last year.
This very well could be the root of his struggles: Carroll doesn’t have otherworldly raw power, so if he’s going to tap into the pop he does have — as he did last year — he’s going to need to start pulling the ball in the air again. If that means taking bigger cuts and whiffing a bit more as a result, then that’s a worthy tradeoff for him to get back to being the offensive force we know he can be.
On George Kirby and Command vs. Control
George Kirby is a fantastic pitcher, and one of my favorites to watch. The degree to which he limits walks is so unprecedented in this era that it’s almost comical. (For what it’s worth, I’m not ashamed to admit I had only so much as heard of 12 of the 24 pitchers ahead of Kirby on the list.)
It’s indisputable that Kirby has incredible control, the likes of which we haven’t seen since most pitchers were topping out at 88 mph instead of 98. If anyone breaks the 20-80 scouting scale for control, it’s Kirby. The question, though, is this: Is his command better than any pitcher since Pud Galvin retired in 1892? I would argue no.
For those unfamiliar, control is accuracy (throwing the ball in the strike zone), while command is precision (throwing the ball where you want). We’ll never know for sure where Kirby wants every pitch; there are command-based statistics that attempt to use catcher glove position to approximate, but with PitchCom allowing for more seamless communication, catchers have an easier time deking hitters who may glance back for location. But it’s hard to imagine he wants all of his sinkers where he’s putting them, even as, in fairness to him, opponents are batting just .172 against that pitch.
But they’re hitting .357 off his slider, and while Kirby’s generally able to locate it down and on the glove side, when he misses with it, he tends to leave it up and over the middle third of the plate to righties.
Pitchers aren’t robots, and even the best won’t be able to put the ball where they want all the time. Many pitchers throw the ball outside the strike zone when they miss their spots; Kirby’s misses happen within the zone. That leads to more balls in play, which makes for a more entertaining viewing experience and oftentimes a lower pitch count, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he has the best command of all time. If his command were that impeccable, considering how good his stuff is, he’d be the best pitcher in baseball by far; instead, he’s allowed nearly a hit per inning this year. Don’t get me wrong: He’s very good, one of the best starters in the league, but let’s not overrate him just because he has a lower walk rate than anyone who’s pitched since Benjamin Harrison was president.
Judge’s Hand Gives Big Inning A Head Start
In their 15-5 win on Sunday, the Yankees had a massive sixth inning that was jumpstarted in the oddest of ways. With the score knotted at four, nobody out, and Aaron Judge on first base, Alex Verdugo bounced a routine double play ball to second baseman Brice Turang, who flipped to shortstop Willy Adames, who came across the bag and fired to first. Except the ball never made it there. Instead, it deflected off the raised hand of a sliding Judge and rolled to first baseman Jake Bauers well after Verdugo reached.
After discussion on the field, the umpires elected not to call interference on Judge, which would have resulted in a double play. Verdugo was allowed to remain at first base. The next batter, Giancarlo Stanton, popped up to Turang for the second out before the Yankees rallied for seven runs. Interference is a judgment call and thus is not reviewable, but interestingly, crew chief Andy Fletcher said after the game that he believed his crew missed the call, describing the hand raising as “an unnatural part of his slide.”
Crew chief Andy Fletcher said they missed the call on Judge’s slide.
“On the field we got together and did the best we could to come up with a correct answer. After looking at it on replay, it appears that the call was missed. It was an unnatural part of his slide.”
Here is the rule that Fletcher said Judge violated, per the MLB rulebook: “If, in the judgment of the umpire, a base runner willfully and deliberately interferes with a batted ball or a fielder in the act of fielding a batted ball with the obvious intent to break up a double play, the ball is dead. The umpire shall call the runner out for interference and also call out the batter-runner because of the action of his teammate.”
So, according to Fletcher, interference should have been called and Verdugo should’ve been out because Judge added an unnatural act to his slide to “willfully and deliberately” break up the double play. Except, the raised hand is a natural part of Judge’s slide. “I’ve been sliding like that for years,” he said after the game. “You can look back at any picture you want of me sliding into second base.”
Indeed, I did go back and look, and I found this 2021 video of Judge sliding into second base with his hand high above his head on a stolen base.
So while this perhaps is unnatural for most, it is completely natural for Judge. Maybe this is something that opponents — and umpires — should add to their scouting report on him.
