The Cubs signed Cody Bellinger to a one-year deal in December, hoping that the combination of improved health and a change of scenery could help the slugger rebound from a pair of dismal seasons in the wake of injuries to both his left leg and right shoulder. Though the 27-year-old center fielder started the season slowly, he’s since heated up and just completed his most productive calendar month since his MVP-winning 2019 season. He may not beall the way back to his award-winning form, but he’s in a much better place that he was in his final years with the Dodgers.

Though he went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in Wednesday’s 2–1 loss to the Nationals, Bellinger is hitting .291/.364/.573 with seven homers and a 149 wRC+. He finished April with a 158 wRC+, his highest for any month in the past five seasons:

You’ll note the token representation of months from the 2020–22 seasons there (to be fair there were only two from 2020 due to the pandemic); I went to 11 on the list above just to include the last of those, as they’re the only ones in which Bellinger even hit at a league average clip. On the flipside, within the same span he had five months with at least 59 PA and a 72 wRC+ or worse, and three ranging from 83–94 in terms of wRC+. At his worst, he hit an unfathomable .118/.186/.215 for an 11 wRC+ in 102 PA in July 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Muncy’s career has had its ups and downs in recent years… or steps forwards and backwards, depending upon which plane you prefer for directional metaphors. Lately the slugger has been on a home run binge, one involving a mechanical tweak — a slight step backwards with his left foot at the start of his swing — that he adopted last year and then briefly abandoned this spring.

This weekend, Muncy took over the major league lead in home runs with 11. He went yard four times during the Dodgers’ four-game visit to Wrigley Field from Thursday through Sunday, starting the festivities with a solo shot off starter Javier Assad on Thursday night, adding a pair of late-inning blasts off Mark Leiter Jr. and Brad Boxberger on Saturday (the first of those a two-run homer), and capping his weekend with a two-run drive off Marcus Stroman on Sunday. The last of those gave the Dodgers the lead and helped them take three games out of four from the Cubs.

Muncy’s hot streak didn’t just begin last Thursday; it’s been going on for two weeks. After homering just once while going 4-for-33 in his first nine games, he bookended a three-game series at Oracle Park with a pair of two-homer games, then homered in losing causes in series openers against the Cubs and Mets at Dodger Stadium. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, the internet dealt with countless cases of “Is that really who I think it is?” as Twitter removed verification checkmarks for unpaid users. Yet when baseball fans did a double-take, it wasn’t because of a spam account that looked suspiciously like Jeff Passan or Ken Rosenthal. Instead, it was because of a shortstop who looked suspiciously like Mookie Betts.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts teased fans earlier this week, revealing that Betts could play shortstop on Wednesday. Instead, it was Luke Williams who took to the field at game time. Fans got their hopes up for Betts the following day, but once again, it was Williams on the lineup card. Indeed, it wasn’t until the seventh inning of yesterday’s ballgame that Roberts finally made good on his word; he pinch-hit for Williams with Betts, and Betts would stay in the game at shortstop. Williams may have earned the nickname Captain America for his performance with the US Olympic baseball team, but Betts was the superhero – or should I say super-utility player – everyone wanted to see. Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Kershaw didn’t need his 200th career win to burnish his Hall of Fame credentials, but on Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium, in his first start with the milestone within reach, he secured it in brilliant fashion. In an outing bookended by his pitching out of jams, Kershaw tossed seven scoreless innings against the Mets, a team he has utterly dominated throughout his career.

In securing the milestone, Kershaw joined Justin Verlander (244 wins), Zack Greinke (223), and Max Scherzer (203) among active pitchers, and Hall of Famers Don Sutton and Don Drysdale as those who won at least their first 200 games as Dodgers. He became the 121st pitcher in major league history to reach the plateau, and just the 13th to do so entirely with one team:

200+ wins, 1 team.

Clayton Kershaw just joined an exclusive list. pic.twitter.com/yCZYTsEgPw

— MLB Stats (@MLBStats) April 19, 2023

Before we go further, it’s time for the usual caveat about pitcher wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon the stat, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one doesn’t need to know how many wins a pitcher amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value — and single-season totals in particular can be wildly misleading — those totals do affect the popular perceptions of their careers and still carry a certain cachet among players. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season is only a week old, but the Dodgers have to be quite satisfied with the early returns from their outfield. Mookie Betts aside, the unit entered the season full of question marks, and those only got larger once manager Dave Roberts had to start moving players around to cover for Gavin Lux’s season-ending ACL tear. Yet through the team’s first six games, rookie James Outman, holdover Trayce Thompson, and newcomer Jason Heyward have each produced some impressive performances that offer hope they can help to offset the team’s notable offseason departures.

Lux was supposed to be the Dodgers’ regular shortstop, and while the team soon traded for Miguel Rojas to be the regular, his loss pulled Chris Taylor into the mix to a greater degree than expected. In turn, the Dodgers have brought Betts into the second base mix; recall that the future Hall of Fame right fielder — you heard me — began his professional career in the middle infield, and spent the last two weeks of his 52-game rookie season filling in at the keystone for the injured Dustin Pedroia.

Given the anticipation that both Taylor and Betts would spend more time on the dirt, the Dodgers found room for both Heyward, a 33-year-old non-roster invitee who was released by the Cubs last year, the penultimate one of his eight-year, $184 million contract, and Outman, a 25-year-old prospect who entered the season with four games of major league experience. Both lefty swingers are on the roster in addition to the righty-swinging Thompson, who enjoyed a nice little breakout in the second half of his age-31 season, and lefty David Peralta, a free agent whom the Dodgers signed to a one-year, $6.5 million deal mid-February. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Vargas couldn’t swing. I don’t mean that in the insulting way that little leaguers sometimes do — “hey batter, you’ve got nothing, you can’t even swing.” I mean that he was medically prohibited from swinging. That didn’t stop the Dodgers from playing him this spring, as Davy Andrews detailed for this very site last month. It did mean, however, that he had to watch every pitch thrown to him, ball or strike, and simply take it. Not exactly the way he expected to enter his first spring training with a big league job nailed down, I’m sure.

The pinky finger fracture that kept Vargas from swinging has healed, but you might not know it from his batting line so far this year, because it seems he took that lesson to heart. Five games into his 2022 season, he’s come to the plate 18 times. In nine of those plate appearances, he’s walked. That 50% walk rate is amazing on its own, and I’ll come back to that, but the way he’s gotten to it is downright stunning.

The key to walking a lot is not swinging at bad pitches, and Vargas is doing that to a fault. Per Statcast, he’s swung at four of the 50 pitches he’s seen outside the strike zone in 2023. That’s the best rate in the majors, which is impressive on its own; 205 batters have seen at least 25 pitches outside the strike zone already this season, and every single one of them has swung at them more frequently than Vargas. We’re talking all the various plate discipline geniuses already enshrined in the pantheon of good eye; they’re all looking up at Vargas’ extreme selectivity. Read the rest of this entry »

The ribbon has been cut on the 2023 season and I wanted to push a few prospect updates live to The Board, including a few tweaks to the Top 100 list. This update also includes publication of scouting reports such that every rookie currently on an active roster now has a current record on The Board, and a few additions the farm systems I’ve already audited during this cycle based on things I saw during spring training.

Let’s start with injury-related updates to the Top 100. Phillies top prospect Andrew Painter has a partially torn UCL and is approaching the end of his four-week shutdown period. Rule of thumb: Among a similarly talented group of players, you’d most want to have the healthy guys. Painter slides from fifth overall to 12th, right behind newly minted big leaguers Anthony Volpe and Jordan Walker, who are comparably talented, healthy, and making a big league impact right now. This is just a cosmetic change to the list; Painter’s evaluation hasn’t changed. If it turns out he needs Tommy John, whether or not I slide him any further will depend on its timing. If rest doesn’t work and his surgery is timed such that he also misses all of 2024, that’s the worst case scenario for Painter and the Phillies. We know for sure that Nationals pitching prospect Cade Cavalli needs Tommy John, so in a similar fashion he falls within the 50 FV player tier, sliding from 63rd overall to 99th, right next to Mason Miller of the A’s, with whom he now shares injury-related relief risk.

Tigers prospect Jackson Jobe, the third overall pick in 2021, is going to miss three to six months due to lumbar spine inflammation. This injury is more novel than a TJ, and Jobe isn’t exactly coming off a great 2022. Unfortunately, this situation merits a more meaningful shift, but I still want to reflect the upside of a healthy Jobe, so he downshifts to the 45+ FV tier, where the most talented of the young high-variance prospects reside. Assuming he comes back late this season, he’ll be one of the higher-priority evaluations in the minors. Read the rest of this entry »

“You can never have too much pitching” is an adage that predates the bombing of Pearl Harbor and a notion that’s at least as old as Old Hoss Radbourn’s sore right arm. Every team goes into the season expecting that its rotation will need far more than five starters, and one pitcher’s absence is another’s opportunity to step up, but that doesn’t make the inevitable rash of spring injuries any more bearable. This week, we’ve got a handful of prominent ones worth noting, with All-Stars Carlos Rodón and Tony Gonsolin likely to miss a few regular season turns, top prospect Andrew Painter targeting a May return, and José Quintana potentially out for longer than that.

The latest-breaking injury involves Painter, the freshest face among this group. The fast-rising 19-year-old Phillies phenom placed fifth on our Top 100 list. Moreover, the 6-foot-7 righty, who sports four potentially plus pitches, had already turned heads this camp, reaching 99 mph with his fastball in his spring debut on March 1 (Davy Andrews broke down his encounter with Carlos Correa here). While he topped out at Double-A Reading last year after two A-level stops, he was considered to be in competition with Bailey Falter for the fifth starter’s job, and had a legitimate shot at debuting as a teenager, though his 20th birthday on April 10 didn’t leave much leeway.

Alas — there’s always an alas in these stories — two days after Painter’s outing, manager Rob Thomson told reporters that he was experiencing tenderness in his right elbow, and several subsequent days without updates suggested there was more to the story. Indeed, an MRI taken on March 3 revealed a sprained ulnar collateral ligament, with the finding subsequently confirmed via a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, hence the delay. The Phillies termed the injury “a mild sprain” that isn’t severe enough to require surgery. The team plans to rest Painter for four weeks from the date of injury (so, March 29) and then begin a light throwing program that under a best-case scenario would have him back in games in May. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Vargas will take his first swing of spring training today. That wouldn’t be that notable, except that Vargas has already played in six spring training games and had 11 spring training plate appearances. He just hasn’t swung yet. That’s been necessary because of a hairline fracture in his right pinkie he suffered while taking groundballs. Vargas is the Dodgers’ fifth-ranked prospect, and with Gavin Lux out for the season and Messieurs Turner and Turner off to Boston and Philadelphia, Los Angeles needs him at second base. The Dodgers want Vargas getting game reps at the keystone and seeing live, competitive pitches. So there he is, playing despite the fact that he’s not medically cleared to swing the bat in a game.

Just seeing pitches is plenty important. You don’t need to swing to track pitches and work on your timing. Take Kyle Schwarber, whose heroics in the 2016 World Series came after a horrific knee injury cost him most of that season. After acing his six-month checkup and being cleared to hit, Schwarber flew out to the Arizona Fall League, where he could see as many pitches as possible before the Series. He played in two real games and two simulated ones, but the real work happened in the cage, much of it with the bat on his shoulder. Per Tom Verducci, “Schwarber hit or tracked 1,300 pitches in four days — many out of a pitching machine that fired major-league quality breaking pitches, some from two Class A pitchers the Cubs brought in to pitch to him in the simulated games and some from coaches.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Kenta Maeda pitching well despite PitchCom giving away his signs, spring training injuries (5:26), the upsides and downsides of pitchers beginning to call their own pitches with PitchCom (9:03), and the reasons why hitters collectively seem to swing more often than they should (20:18). Then they continue (and pass the halfway point of) their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Los Angeles Dodgers (40:01) with Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic, and the Chicago Cubs (1:19:32) with Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic, plus a Past Blast from 1976 (2:07:56).

Audio intro: Faye, “Swing State”
Audio interstitial 1: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Requiem K. 626 – Lux Aeterna”
Audio interstitial 2: Andy Fairweather Low, “Halfway to Everything”
Audio outro: Lucy Dacus, “Triple Dog Dare”

Link to ESPN on Maeda
Link to Turner-Hernández video
Link to EW shart discussion
Link to Rob Arthur on sign-stealing
Link to article on training w/o games
Link to Greinke calling own pitches
Link to Maddux calling own pitches
Link to old EW on calling own pitches
Link to Scherzer on PitchCom legality
Link to ESPN on pitchers calling pitches
Link to article on Padres pitch calls
Link to article on Burnes pitch calls
Link to article on Giants pitch calls
Link to tweet about Ohtani pitch calls
Link to article on Cole pitch calls
Link to article on Severino pitch calls
Link to video of Scherzer pitch calls
Link to hitter run values on swings
Link to Tom Tango thread on swings
Link to Devan Fink on swings
Link to Eno Sarris on swings
Link to Swing decision Run Value
Link to Vargas not swinging
Link to Tango on approaches by count
Link to Tango on sliders
Link to Tom Verducci on sliders
Link to Rob on playing deeper
Link to Rob on BABIP/defense
Link to Russell on OBP > BA
Link to FanGraphs playoff odds
Link to FG payroll breakdown
Link to Dodgers offseason tracker
Link to Dodgers depth chart
Link to Ben Clemens on the Dodgers
Link to Fabian on Syndergaard
Link to article on Heyward’s swing
Link to Fabian’s spring preview
Link to Dodgers first-round picks
Link to Fabian’s author archive
Link to Cubs offseason tracker
Link to Cubs depth chart
Link to EW preview series wiki
Link to 2019 Pitch Lab piece
Link to 2022 Pitch Lab piece
Link to Sahadev on Hendricks
Link to Sahadev on Ricketts
Link to Sahadev on Bellinger
Link to Sahadev on Madrigal
Link to Sahadev on Taillon
Link to Sahadev on sweepers
Link to EW Bellinger roundtable
Link to Woodward on back-picks
Link to Sahadev’s spring preview
Link to Sahadev’s author archive
Link to 1976 article source
Link to HoF site on the shorts
Link to Paul Lukas on the shorts
Link to Chris Creamer on the shorts
Link to Costanza uniforms video
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to MLBTR on Painter
Link to NPB triple-digit uniform
Link to CPBL no. 999
Link to triple-digit ump uniforms
Link to Spaceman uni source
Link to Lee wearing 337

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