So there’s this thing called the old man test. It’s been around for at least five or six years, but it’s making the rounds on the Internet again. The idea is simple enough. You have to put on your socks and shoes without letting your feet touch the ground as you do so. You raise your left foot and keep it in the air while you reach down to the ground to grab your sock, put it on, reach down to the ground to grab your shoe, put it on, and tie it, then you do the same thing with your right foot. It tests your balance, strength, flexibility, and all those other things bodies are supposed to have. If you fail the test, then you’re an old man, I guess? Maybe you instantly turn into an old man? Maybe a healthy old man just appears right outside your window to point and laugh at you? That part’s less clear.

I tend to buy into the idea that the old man test is measuring something important, just because whenever I’ve had to do physical therapy, I’ve been forced to do a lot of one-legged exercises. If you’ve ever been in physical therapy, I bet you’ve had to do them too. There’s nothing physical therapists love more than turning up the difficulty level of an otherwise simple exercise by forcing you to do it while standing on one leg. Once you get good at doing it one-legged, they’ll make you stand on a bouncy ball or something, and if you nail that, they’ll literally just start shoving you to make it even harder. Truly, no one on earth is hornier for balance than physical therapists.

I bring all this up because I noticed something fun about Steven Kwan while playing around with Baseball Savant’s batting stance graphics the other day. The graphics take after ballroom dancing diagrams of old, showing fun little footprints for each player at three points: their resting batting stance, when the pitcher releases the ball, and when their bat actually intercepts the ball. Here’s Kwan’s 2024 graphic:

Kwan has one of the narrowest batting stances in the game, so his front foot moves out toward the mound quite a bit, but aside from that, nothing about it stands out all that much. He’s a little guy with a little stance, film at 11. But this is the calm before the storm. Here’s the same graphic for this month. Keep your eye on the blue footprint:

I was so confused when I watched this. Is Steven Kwan actually stepping on home plate as the pitcher releases the ball? It seemed like something I would’ve noticed before, but there was that blue footprint, right on top of home plate, clear as day. How could anyone start a swing with their body so closed off? And is it even legal to step on home plate in the middle of your swing? That definitely seems like it would be illegal. I pulled up the rulebook and started looking before I realized what was actually going on. If you’re familiar with Kwan’s swing, I’m sure you already know the answer, and it brings us back to the old man test.

Kwan doesn’t step on home plate, but he has one of the game’s most dramatic leg kicks, and right in the middle of it, he dangles his foot directly over the plate. There’s no way to indicate in a two-dimensional diagram that his foot is 18 inches off the ground. Sometimes, and I’m not exaggerating here, Kwan’s entire foot is inside the strike zone while the ball is already on its way to home plate. No batter has ever come closer to tying their shoe in the middle of a pitch:

I went back to Baseball Savant and watched every single qualified player’s batting stance diagram, hundreds of cleats dancing across the batter’s boxes, black to blue to red. I would very roughly estimate that half of today’s hitters don’t move their front foot all that much, but that still leaves scores and scores of players with dramatic leg kicks, their blue front feet moving every which direction. None of those players does what Kwan does. None of them does anything remotely resembling what Kwan does. When batting from the right side, Ozzie Albies does place most of his left foot outside the batter’s box, but that’s mostly because he sets up five inches closer to the plate than Kwan does, and his foot is still nowhere near home plate. Nobody’s diagram looks like Kwan’s because nobody’s leg kick looks like Kwan’s.

Here’s Kwan’s secret. He doesn’t just have a leg kick. He has a leg kick, and then, right in the middle of it, he has second leg kick. It’s a double kick. A normal leg kick just involves lifting your foot off the ground, and it’s maybe worth noting that this is a bit of a misnomer. Everywhere outside the baseball diamond, there’s a difference between raising your leg and kicking. In baseball, they’re one and the same. Regardless, Kwan does that, pulling his knee straight up until his femur is parallel with the ground, but he’s just getting going. At that point, he kicks his foot forward toward home plate and sweeps it out toward the pitcher in a circular motion as he puts it down:

Kwan has a leg kick, and then he has a foot kick. It would not be at all unfair to say that he puts his right foot in and shakes it all about. It’s an impressive display of balance, and so far as I can tell, it’s unique. I didn’t just watch all the diagrams. I watched the swings of every player I could think of who has a big leg kick. I watched YouTube videos that compiled huge leg kicks of the past. The closest leg kicks I could find belonged to Alek Thomas and Gary Sánchez, both of whom move their front foot while they get into their swing, but they’re far from doing a double kick. No one else does this.

Kwan didn’t start executing the double kick all at once. It seems like it’s been coming on for a while now. When he was drafted out of Oregon State in 2018, Kwan had a small, controlled leg kick, with no double kick in sight. I can’t find any video of him from the next two years, but he started 2021 with the very beginnings of a double kick:

It’s very subtle in the video above. By the time Kwan debuted in 2022, the double kick was there to stay, but it’s still evolving. As he told the MLB Network during spring training, he went into the 2024 season looking to impact the ball harder, and that meant a more aggressive leg kick. “Before, I’d get up and then I would just put it right back down,” he said. “So then my hands are able to work and I can manipulate the bat as I need to. But last year, I tried to – hitter leverage, early in the count – really try to get that stride out, and now I’m going out to get it. I can stay in the legs, and then now I can stay slotted, catch it out a little more in front.” The funny thing is that in the video, even as Kwan demonstrated the leg kick (which he called a leg lift), he wasn’t doing the double kick. He may not even know he’s doing it. It’s only in the heat of the game that the double kick happens.

This focus on going out and meeting the ball earlier is likely the reason it only started showing up on the Baseball Savant diagram this season. It has to do with his timing. This year, the second kick actually seems like it’s not quite bringing his foot as far forward or as high, but it’s also quicker. If Statcast could show us its full path, it would likely look nearly identical to the 2024 or 2023 path, but it’s only showing us its position at the moment the ball is released. At that point, Kwan is further along, so his foot is already over the plate. He’s also getting his foot down a fraction of a second earlier, and it’s possible that getting started that little bit earlier is part of the reason he’s running a career-low opposite field rate.

Watch any baseball game and you’ll see 18 different hitters with 18 different timing mechanisms. Nobody’s exactly the same, but they tend to fall in a couple of categories. There are players with quiet feet, players with toe taps, and players with leg kicks. Those leg kicks take their feet in pretty much every direction. Some players lift their leg straight up, some pull their foot way back as a cocking mechanism, some use the leg kick to true up a very open stance, some start narrow and push their foot toward the pitcher. But Kwan is the only one who just dangles his foot there, then kicks it out into the strike zone before he attacks the pitch. It’s a feat of ingenuity as well as a feat of balance. At the very least, he should be every physical therapist’s favorite player.

Cam Schlittler has emerged as the top pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization. His ability to overpower hitters is a big reason why. In four starts since being promoted to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on June 3, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound right-hander has logged a 1.69 ERA and a 40.2% strikeout rate over 21-and-a-third innings. Counting his 53 frames at Double-A Somerset, Schlittler has a 2.18 ERA and a 33.0% strikeout rate on the season.

The 2022 seventh-rounder out of Northeastern University is averaging 96.5 mph with his heater, but more than velocity plays into the offering’s effectiveness. As Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, Schlittler’s “size and arm angle create downhill plane on his mid-90s fastball akin to a runaway truck ramp, while the backspinning nature of the pitch also creates riding life.”

I asked the 24-year-old Walpole, Massachusetts native about the characteristics our lead prospect analyst described in his report.

“Arm slot-wise it’s nothing crazy,” Schlittler said in our spring training conversation. “I’m more of a high-three-quarters kind of guy, but what I didn’t realize until looking at video a couple months ago is that I have really quick arm speed. My mechanics are kind of slow, and then my arm path is really fast, so the ball kind of shoots out a little bit. With my height, release point— I get good extension — and how fast my arm is moving, the ball gets on guys quicker than they might expect.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I won’t try to slow-play it; there was nothing I didn’t like this week. Baseball is freaking great right now. There are huge blockbuster trades that ignite passionate fanbases, for better or worse. The playoff chase is starting to heat up as we approach the All Star break. Crowds are picking up now that school is out. The weather is beautiful in seemingly every stadium. We’ve entered San Francisco Summer, which means it’s a lovely 57 and foggy most days here, ideal baseball weather for me (and you, too, if you live here long enough to acclimate). So I have no bones to pick this week, nothing that irked or piqued me. It’s just pure appreciation for this beautiful game – and, as always, for Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose column idea I adapted from basketball to baseball.

1. The Streaking… Rockies?!
The hottest team in baseball right now? That’d be the Red Sox or Dodgers, probably – maybe the Rays or Astros depending on what time horizon you’re looking at. But if you adjust for difficulty level, it has to be the Rockies, who were one James Wood superhuman effort (two two-run homers in a 4-3 victory) away from a four-game sweep of the Nationals. Add that to their Sunday victory over the Braves, and they’re 4-1 in their last five. That could have been a five-game winning streak!

Sure, baseball is a game of randomness. Every team gets hot for little micro-patches of the season. But, well, this feels like the biggest test of the “anyone can do anything for 10 games” theory in quite some time. These Rockies are terrible. Their everyday lineup features six players with a combined -1.4 WAR this year. Those the starters – the bench is worse than that. Their rotation has an aggregate 6.23 ERA. They’ve been outscored by 196 runs this year; the next-closest team is the Athletics at -128. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember the scene from The Benchwarmers when Clark is up to bat, except that he is absolutely nowhere near the plate? Back when I used to catch and would see hitters set up way off the plate, that was always the image that popped into my head. After an internal laugh, I’d give my sign, then take one big side step to the opposite side of where the hitter was standing to make sure my pitcher didn’t come close to fixating on the inner half. Unless you’re swinging a 40-inch bat and simultaneously have the strength of Giancarlo Stanton, you’re not making good contact on anything away. Gabriel Arias is a prime example of this.

In 2025, there hasn’t been a single hitter who stands farther from the plate than Arias. This is a relatively new extreme. Since 2023, Arias has moved farther and farther from the plate, starting at 31.9 inches in 2023, to 33.0 in 2024, to a league-leading 35.4 this season. For context, let’s take a snapshot of the 2025 leaders:

Most of these players are on the very tall side. That’s not to say you have to be tall to stand off the plate, but if the goal is to make sure your barrel aligns with the heart of the plate, it would make sense that the taller players are the ones who, generally, would benefit from having more space between the plate and where they set up. Conversely, when shorter players set up far off the plate, they increase the area they need to cover with their swings while lacking the length to do so.

That seems to be what’s happening with Arias, who despite being among the shorter players on this list, is standing nearly two more inches off the plate than the next guy, Paul Goldschmidt, and nearly three more inches off it than Aaron Judge, who is six inches taller than the Guardians infielder. How can Arias possibly reach pitches on the outer third of the plate? Here is an example from a game last week:

If I had any video editing skills, I’d overlay Clark as a comparison to highlight just how far this is. It’s an interesting strategy that needs to be reasoned out. Despite his power potential, Arias entered 2025 with a career 74 wRC+, so it’s understandable he would want to make some changes. Setting up even farther away, though, seemed like a bizarre choice, given his average height for a ballplayer and the way it would expose him to outside pitches. Initially, I thought the new setup would hurt him more than it would help. I mean, why would pitchers ever throw him a pitch over the inner third? But then I noticed Arias’ wRC+ is higher this season than it was in 2023 and 2024, up to 88 as of Thursday morning, which is still quite bad but represents a sizable improvement nonetheless. Maybe he was on to something after all.

To see what’s going on here, let’s first zoom in on how this change is playing out on a zone-by-zone basis. In 2023 and 2024, Arias’ xwOBA against pitches on the outer third was .224 and .248, respectively, putting him near the bottom of the league. That number is nearly the same this year, at .235. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten worse. Where he’s standing, the outside corner might as well be Narnia.

My best guess for why he’s setting up farther away is he wanted to have a better shot at damaging inside pitches. Perhaps he often felt handcuffed and thought moving off the plate would give him more space to get his barrel on plane and make it easier for him to elevate pitches. How’s that working out for him?

OK, now we’re talking. In his previous two seasons, he was not competitive against pitches on the inner third. He was both whiffing a lot and not balancing it out with a ton of hard-hit balls. This year, he’s flipped the script by whiffing less and hitting the ball hard more often.

On top of that, he’s making sweet-spot contact at an impressive rate, helping him pull off a .436 xwOBACON on the inner third. Of course, that only accounts for his performance against pitches to one-third of the zone, but it’s still an improvement that has propelled his offensive performance from unplayable to bearable.

At some point, though, pitchers are going to have adjust, right? They can no longer beat him inside like they did before, but there’s a large chunk of the zone still available to them. And that area might be larger than just the outer third. Because Arias is standing so far off the plate and looking to turn on inside pitches, he might also have a tough time covering at least some pitches over the middle, too.

Hitters who shift farther away from the plate should still be able to crush middle-middle pitches, but depending on how their swing works, it could be difficult for them to reach either high or low pitches over the middle. Before diving into how Arias’ swing works, let’s see if the data tell us a bit more about that:

As expected, Arias’ new location in the box has created another hole over the middle third of the plate. His .053 wOBA and .182 xwOBA up top are absolutely brutal under any circumstances, but they’re especially jarring compared to his .366/.394 from last season. The drop-off alone isn’t entirely uncommon because of the small sample sizes when looking at one-ninth of the zone, but to go from above average to fourth worst in baseball is tough. His numbers have also declined on middle-middle pitches. The .123 margin between his wOBA and xwOBA says bad luck may be involved, but there are many hitters with much wider gaps between their actual numbers and their expected one. However, it’s also interesting to see Arias’ improvement on low-middle pitches. He’s always been good against these pitches, but now he’s demolishing them far more frequently than before.

Even so, that leaves a massive area for opposing pitchers to target, and their pitch mix to get Arias out should be fairly simple: Overwhelm him with heaters up, then put him away with soft stuff outside. He has a .177 xwOBA against offspeed pitches and a .234 xwOBA against breaking balls this season. Those numbers are even worse on the outer third, with a .127 xwOBA against offspeed and a .128 xwOBA against breakers. So far, pitchers don’t seem to be giving him a noticeably different pitch mix compared to how they attacked him in other seasons, or even earlier this year, but they are definitely starting to throw more offspeed pitches to locations that are farther away. Maybe they’re catching on, maybe not. Time will tell.

Here is some video of swings he’s taken against outer-third pitches:

Almost everything is off the end of the bat. Any right-handed pitcher that can locate away is going to have a good shot at beating Arias. In almost all of these clips, he’s making contact off the end of the bat and/or swinging off balance. His closed stride helps him cover pitches that are closer to the middle — like the one from Carlos Rodón in the final GIF above — because his swing path is moving more toward the heart of the plate, but his barrel doesn’t stay in the hitting zone on an upward trajectory long enough to have much room for error. So unless he perfectly times his swing to connect with these pitches over the middle, he’s either not going to square them up or he’ll miss them altogether.

It’s clear Arias is trying to maximize his strengths, damaging inner-third and low-middle pitches, even if it means making his weaknesses even worse. So far, that trade-off is working for him. Although he remains below average at the plate, he’s a better hitter now than he was before; that improvement is enough for him to be a valuable player overall because he’s a good defender at multiple infield positions and he runs the bases well. But we’re only a third of the way through the season, and I have my doubts about how sustainable this will be for him. The holes in his plate coverage should be large enough for major league pitchers to exploit. If (read: when) that happens, Arias is going to have to punish every location mistake they make, which is difficult for even the most talented of hitters, or he’s going to have to continue to refine his game. Maybe that means closing off his stride even more to get to more pitches over the middle, or altering his swing to remain on an upward trajectory through the zone for a longer period of time. If his current setup proves to be too extreme, he can always slide ever so slightly closer to the plate. Not too much, just enough to cover a bit more of the zone without compromising his ability to turn on inner-third pitches.

But we’re not there yet. The most important thing to take away from this is Arias has shown he can make a fairly drastic adjustment and have it work as intended. So when pitchers inevitably adjust to him, perhaps he can do it again.

Author’s note: Five Things will return next week. In the meantime, enjoy an article about one of my favorite players.

Do you want to know how much Carlos Santana loves playing baseball? From 2020 through 2023, he played for five teams, got traded midseason twice, and compiled a 94 wRC+. He was 37, had earned more than $100 million in his career, and didn’t have an obvious everyday starting job lined up. He could have hung up his spikes right then – but he took a one-year, $5.5 million deal with the Twins and turned back the clock with a 114 wRC+. Then he signed another one-year deal, this one for $12 million with the Guardians, and kept the train rolling. Through the first third of the season, he’s on pace for his best year in more than half a decade.

What’s his secret? As a fellow 39-year-old, I wanted to find out – for, you know, mostly professional reasons, but also because sometimes my knees hurt after going on a particularly brisk walk. Bad news for me, though. I’ve found out one thing that Santana has done in 2025 to rejuvenate himself, and I’m not sure that I can replicate it in my personal life.

Let me explain. If you look at Santana’s Baseball Savant percentile rankings, you won’t come away impressed:

Yes, we get it, the man has an elite sense of the strike zone, and he’s still great at defense — no big surprise — but it’s a bit of a bummer if we look only at the bar graphs above Chase%; there’s not a ton of loud contact, not a ton of squared-up contact, and he’s rarely hitting the ball on the sweet spot. That’s a lot of blue for a guy running a 123 wRC+ and getting an article written about his late-career resurgence. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cleveland Guardians. 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 »

It’s rough being a reliever. Your whole career is a small sample. Emmanuel Clase has been one of the best pitchers in baseball since pretty much the moment he set foot on a major league mound in 2019, but over his entire career, he’s thrown just 338 innings. Our leaderboard says that total has been bested in 534 different player-seasons. That’s 534 times that one single player in one single season threw more innings than Clase has over his whole career. Clase set a personal best by throwing 74 1/3 innings last season, and on the individual season leaderboard, that total put him in a 79-way tie for 20,484th place. A small sample size means high variance. Over his entire career, Clase has never finished a season with an xFIP below 2.18 or above 3.42, which is pretty stable for a reliever. But after running a microscopic 0.61 ERA last season, his ERA is currently a so-big-you-can-see-it-from-space 5.51. Five-run swings are decidedly less stable.

When things go wrong to this degree, it’s usually because a combination of factors have conspired to make it happen. When you’re as good a pitcher as Clase, it takes both luck and skill to get results this bad. Our focus today will be on the extraneous factors. You know what else is subject to wild variations in short samples? Defense. And defense is letting Clase down in a big way. We’re here today because Mike Petriello asked me to look into something. Petriello is Major League Baseball’s Director of Stats and Research, and it’s my understanding that as such, I am legally required to investigate any statistical anomalies he assigns me. Here’s what he sent my way:

When Clase was on the mound in 2024, the Guardians racked up 5 Outs Above Average. They were great defensively. This season, even though he’s only pitched roughly one-fifth of the innings he did last year, Guardians fielders are already all the way down at -4. That’s an absurdly big swing. How is that even possible? Is it just luck? Read the rest of this entry »

Random relievers can do crazy things in small samples. Who can ever forget Nationals right-hander Justin Miller striking out 57.9% of the hitters he faced across a three-week stretch of 2018? Or Kody Funderburk’s legendary whiff explosion to close out the 2023 Twins season? Guardians reliever Hunter Gaddis is on one of these incendiary strikeout runs, and it’s driving me to madness.

Gaddis might not strike you as operating at the same level of random as Miller and Funderburk. By any set of reasonable standards, Gaddis broke out last season, appearing in nearly half of his team’s games while delivering a 1.59 ERA. But — forgive me — I didn’t really buy it. His 23.7% strikeout rate matched the league average for relievers, and his arsenal didn’t exactly justify a .205 BABIP. Given his pitch shapes and peripherals, I figured Gaddis would settle in as more of a solid middle-relief type than one of the premier backend arms in the league. And then this April happened. 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 »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Normally, this column is a celebration of the extreme athleticism and talent on display across the majors. This week, though, I found myself drawn to the oddities instead. Unhittable 98-mph splinkers? Boring. Let’s talk about a pitcher who can’t strike anyone out and yet still gets results. Some of the fastest human beings on the planet stealing bases? I’d prefer some slower, larger guys getting in on the act. Brilliant, unbelievable outfield catches? I was more fascinated by a play that didn’t get made. The only thing that hasn’t changed? Mike Trout still isn’t to be trifled with. So thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for his incredible idea for a sports column, and let’s get down to business.

1. In-Game Adjustments
In the 15th year of his career, Mike Trout doesn’t stand out the way he did early on. He’s no longer the fastest and strongest player every time he takes the field; he’s more “slugging corner guy” than “perennial MVP frontrunner” these days. But one thing hasn’t changed: Trout’s wonderful ability to adapt.

Landen Roupp faced the Angels last Saturday, and he leaned on his curveball. He always does, to be fair. It’s one of the best curveballs in baseball, with enormous two-plane break, and he throws it 40% of the time, more than any of his other pitches. In fact, he throws his curveball more often than any other starting pitcher. Trout had never faced Roupp before, and so he struggled to deal with the signature offering.
Read the rest of this entry »