In Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers don’t lack for superstars with potent bats, but so far this season, Will Smith is swinging — and, notably, not swinging — just about as well as any of them. The two-time All-Star catcher is off to an exceptionally hot start, particularly with runners in scoring position, and the Dodgers recently shook up their roster with an eye towards helping him maintain a high level of production later into the season.

The 30-year-old Smith is hitting .333/.456/.511, good enough to lead the NL in on-base percentage and to rank third in wRC+ (175) behind only Freeman (191) and Ohtani (182). Often batting ahead of either Max Muncy or Michael Conforto — both of whom have struggled thus far this year — he’s been pitched around to some degree, and he’s shown exceptional plate discipline:

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Though Roki Sasaki’s deal with the Dodgers wasn’t anywhere close to the winter’s biggest, few free agents were so coveted or came with as much hype attached. Known as “The LeBron James of Japanese baseball” for his exploits in high school, he was dominant — even transcendent — during his 2021–24 NPB run with the Chiba Lotte Marines. As he went through the posting process, his combination of youth and a tantalizing repertoire featuring an elite, 80-grade splitter as well as a fastball with triple-digit velocity generated widespread interest by teams, though a dip in that velo last year did rate as a cause for concern. Now, eight starts into his career with the Dodgers, the 23-year-old righty has been underwhelming, and now he’s hurt, too. On Tuesday, the team placed him on the 15-day injured list due to a shoulder impingement, continuing the dizzying level of turnover within the rotation of the NL West leaders.

This is the latest turn in what’s been a rocky rookie season for Roki. Through 34.1 innings — about 4 1/3 per start — he’s carrying a 4.72 ERA, a 6.16 FIP, and a 6.13 xERA. He’s struck out just 15.6% of batters, while walking 14.3% (the highest mark of any pitcher with at least 30 innings), and has served up 1.57 homers per nine. His 21.9% chase rate is the third-lowest at that 30-inning cutoff.

Batters have struggled to do anything with Sasaki’s splitter, which he’s thrown in the zone just 29.6% of the time; they’ve chased it 30.4% of the time, and overall have hit .137 and slugged .237 against it. Even so, his 35% whiff rate on the pitch is well off the 56.5% whiff rate it generated last year in NPB according to Sports Info Solutions. Batters have fared better against his slider (.250 AVG/.417 SLG, 33.3% whiff) and his four-seamer (.253 VG/.494 SLG, 10.1% whiff), rarely chasing either (14% of the time for the former, 15% for the latter). All six of his home runs allowed have been off of four-seamers, as have two would-be homers robbed by Andy Pages; his xSLG on that pitch is a worrisome .663. His 17.8% whiff rate on four-seamers in the upper third of the strike zone or higher is better, but batters have still slugged .692 on pitches there, with a .903 xSLG. Read the rest of this entry »

The world has changed in a lot of ways over the last dozen years, some good, and some… not. One thing that doesn’t change, however, is the status of Freddie Freeman at or near the top of the first base dogpile.

If at any point over the last decade you made a list of baseball’s top first basemen and didn’t include Freeman, you hopefully crumpled your list and started over again. Freeman will celebrate the 15th anniversary of his 2010 major league debut with the Braves later this year, and more than 2,000 hits and 350 homers later, he’s likely just rounding out the text on his bronze Hall of Fame plaque. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani leads the National League in runs. It’s not even close. He has scored 44 times in 2025. That’s 10 more runs than Fernando Tatis Jr., the next highest-scoring NL player. A couple of qualified NL batters haven’t even scored 10 runs yet this season.

Ohtani does not lead the National League in RBI. Not even close. If you visit our leaderboards and sort by RBI, you’ll have to click to the second page of names to find the reigning NL RBI king. Ohtani is tied for 36th in the senior circuit with 21 runs batted in. That’s only one more than the league median for a qualified hitter. Here’s another way to put it: The average NL batter has one RBI for every 8.8 plate appearances. Ohtani has averaged one RBI every 8.7 PA. It’s not so often that Ohtani is on the second page. It’s not so often that he’s a rounding error away from league average.

Runs and RBI might not be the best metrics for evaluating past performance or projecting the future, but they’re still two of the foremost storytelling statistics. So far, the story of Ohtani’s season is that he is scoring runs at an almost unbelievable rate but driving them in at a pedestrian pace. Since the beginning of the Live Ball era in 1920, we have records of 11,326 individual player seasons of at least 500 PA. In just 481 of those seasons, fewer than 5%, did the player finish with a higher run-to-RBI ratio than Ohtani’s current mark of 44:21 (2.095). As per usual, Ohtani stands out even among that small group of players. Take a look at this list of every player from the past decade who’s had a single-season run-to-RBI ratio higher than Ohtani’s 2.095. I’d like you to try and see if maybe, just maybe, you have a keen enough eye to spot the difference between Ohtani and the others: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. With the first month of major league baseball in the books, I’m settling into the rhythm of the regular season. Baseball writing in the morning, baseball on TV in the afternoon, and usually baseball on TV in the evening. Every so often, I’ll skip two of those and go to the ballpark instead. The actual baseball is falling into a rhythm, too. The Dodgers have the best record in baseball, Aaron Judge is the best hitter, and Paul Skenes is the best pitcher, just like we all expected. But part of the rhythm of baseball is that the unexpected happens multiple times a day, and that’s what Five Things is for. With a nod of recognition and thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the column format, let’s start the shenanigans.

1. Stopping at Third
The math is pretty easy: A double with runners on second and third scores both runners. Sometimes it even brings home a guy standing on first at the start of the play, too. Last week, though, things got weird. First, Jacob Stallings flat out demolished a ball off the right field wall, but Hunter Goodman didn’t have the read:

Hey, that happens. There are a few plays like this in the majors every year. The batter can tear around the bases as much as he wants, but runners have to stop and make sure it’s a hit first. Goodman couldn’t be sure that the ball would hit the wall, and with no one out, he quite reasonably played it safe. Blake Dunn played the carom perfectly, and again, with nobody out, Goodman didn’t try his luck at home. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Scott is 15 appearances into the season, and by extension 15 appearances into his four-year, $72 million Dodgers contract, and a lot of things are working as normal. He has a 2.40 ERA, almost exactly the same as the 2.31 he posted in a breakout campaign with Miami two years ago. He has a 2.93 FIP, just one hundredth of a run up from his mark last season. He has eight saves, which is commensurate with his role: Closer on a really good team.

But he hasn’t walked anyone. In 15 innings, having faced 54 batters, he hasn’t walked anyone. This falls into the most annoying April blog category of: “Please don’t mess with my premise before this article runs,” but as of this writing, Scott has thrown more innings than any pitcher in the league with zero walks. Only three pitchers with two or fewer walks on the year have thrown more innings than Scott.

That’s because he’s pounding the zone. Scott’s first-pitch strike rate is an astounding 85.2%, the highest number in baseball. That’s helped by a 45.1% chase rate, which is the highest mark in the league among pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. But Scott is also throwing in the zone a career-high 57.1% of the time, which is in the 87th percentile for pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »

A certain joke has been making the rounds for a while now. It’s really simple. It goes, “Tommy Edman, power hitter? [Pause for laughter].” I made this joke myself during the Tokyo Series. If and when the joke is actually funny, it’s because Edman doesn’t have the traditional look or profile of a power hitter. That kind of incongruity makes a great premise both for jokes and for a startlingly high proportion of children’s movies. A switch-hitting, 5-foot-9 utility player who wants to be a power hitter is roughly as quirky as a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, a robot who wants to find love, or a snail who wants to be a race car driver.

Edman never reached double-digit home runs until he got to the majors, and he has still never hit more than 13 in a season. However, I think it’s time we changed our inflection. Tommy Edman is a power hitter, or at the very least, he’s half a power hitter. That might come as a surprise, even to those of us who have been rooting for him (and thinking of him as Cousin Tommy) ever since his debut in 2019.

All three of those home runs are from this year, and all three were hit harder than 108 mph. Edman’s eight homers this season are tied for sixth in baseball. He also ranks 27th among qualified players in slugging percentage (.514) and 16th in isolated slugging percentage (.271). However, it goes without saying that a hot start like this won’t last forever. Edman is hitting the ball hard, but his bat speed is still well below average. He’s succeeding by pulling tons of balls in the air, and while I would love to see him hold onto those gains like high-contact guys Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner before him, we’ll have to wait and see where things settle. For that reason, I don’t necessarily want to focus on this power surge. I want to think bigger. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

You lose some, and then you lose some. On Sunday at Oracle Park, the Mariners not only fell to the Giants 5-4, but they were forced to remove Victor Robles from the game after he injured his left shoulder making a remarkable catch on the game’s penultimate pitch. His injury is just one of a handful of notable ones suffered in the past several days.

Robles, who broke out last season after being released by the Nationals and signed by the Mariners, had played every inning of every game in right field until the injury. With the score tied 4-4 in the bottom of the ninth, one out, and Luis Matos on first base, Patrick Bailey fouled a drive into the right field corner. Robles sprinted 113 feet, leapt to grab the ball, and then fell over the half-height padded fence and into the netting. After extricating himself, he fell to his knees in obvious pain, rolled the ball to second baseman Ryan Bliss as Matos tagged up and reached third base, and remained on the ground. While he was tended to by Mariners head athletic trainer Kyle Torgerson, Giants manager Bob Melvin challenged the catch ruling, but the call on the field was upheld [as a reader pointed out, Matos was sent back to second under stadium boundary rules]. Finally, Robles was carted off the field, with Torgerson helping him to support his injured left arm.

Miles Mastrobuoni moved from third base to right field to replace Robles, but he didn’t need to for very long, because on the next pitch after play resumed, Wilmer Flores singled in Matos to send the Mariners to defeat, dropping them to 3-7. Medical personnel at Oracle Park popped Robles’ shoulder back into place, and after undergoing X-rays on-site, he was initially diagnosed with a dislocated left shoulder and placed on the 10-day injured list. The results of the follow-up MRI he underwent on Monday afternoon have yet to be announced. Read the rest of this entry »

During the course of my spring training coverage (especially right at the end), I ran into the Giants affiliates a couple of times as I trailed the Brewers and Dodgers farm systems. I saw enough to make a few tweaks to the Giants prospect list, which I have brief notes on below. You can see the complete updated list over on The Board. I’ve also included notes on a few recent trades.

Toolsy Outfielders With Strikeout Risk Who Have Moved Up

Dakota Jordan’s swing has changed (mostly his posture throughout the swing), and I think it gives him a better chance to hit. I was way out on him making any kind of viable contact before last year’s draft, but he has loud showcase tools (power/speed) and now we’ll see if the proactive changes make a difference for his contact ability. He has also looked good in center field, including highlight reel play in which he collided with the wall at Papago Park, but then forgot how many outs there were and spiked the baseball:

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