The NFL season kicks off tonight, with another game tomorrow, 13 more on Sunday, and a Monday Night Football matchup set to cap off the Week One slate. Millions will be tuning in, although not everyone will be able to watch their favorite team (or keep close tabs on their fantasy football squad). Among those missing out will be the vast majority of big leaguers. At the same time that pigskin luminaries like Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes are performing on the gridiron, major leaguers will be plying their trade on the baseball diamond. When you’re a professional athlete, forgoing other pastimes — watching other sports is but one of many — comes with the territory.

What is it like to miss out on things you’d be enjoying were it not for your responsibilities as a ballplayer? I asked several big league players for their perspectives on that very subject. Here is what they had to say.

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George Springer, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder: “I wouldn’t ever say ‘Why do I have to play today?’ but I love football. I’m a big football fan. When the NFL gets going, and college football gets going, it’s exciting for me. A lot of it is just a break from the constant everyday grind of baseball, having a chance to go to an NFL game, to a hockey game, to a concert. Anything like that. Read the rest of this entry »

Podcasts hosted by athletes — I don’t know about all that. But I did enjoy a recent clip from Mookie Betts’ podcast where he was talking to Cal Raleigh, who was comparing Zack Wheeler — perhaps the best pitcher in baseball — to his batterymate Bryan Woo.

“[Wheeler] is kind of like Woo,” Raleigh said. “He glides down the mound. And it’s so effortless. Some guys just have that natural glide down the mound, easy, and [the ball] just gets on you.”

Coincidentally, in a conversation in late August, Phillies minor league pitching coach Riley McCauley made the same comparison.

“[Woo] is very Wheeler-ish,” McCauley told me. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals survived Willson Contreras‘ first extended absence due to injury, going 24-16 while their catcher/designated hitter was sidelined for six weeks due to a fractured left forearm. Despite his loss, the ineffectiveness of cornerstones Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, and a host of other issues, they were still in contention for a playoff spot when the July 30 trade deadline approached — not in great shape, but with a roster worth augmenting for the stretch run. But by the time Contreras suffered a fractured middle finger on his right hand as a result of an errant Pablo López pitch on August 24, it was clear that this wouldn’t be the Cardinals’ year. They had already shaken up their roster with a couple of notable demotions, and by the end of the month, they let deadline acquisition Tommy Pham depart via waivers.

The Cardinals aren’t the only team whose playoff hopes withered some time between the trade deadline and Labor Day, just the one that made the most noise on the transaction wire. Based on the changes in our Playoff Odds, here are the teams that suffered the steepest declines from the close of play on July 29 (i.e., the day before the deadline) through Monday:

Read the rest of this entry »

Lucas Erceg’s story is fairly well known. A position player for his first seven professional seasons, the 2014 second-round draft pick converted to the mound in 2021 and went on to make his big-league debut last May after being traded from the Milwaukee Brewers to the Oakland Athletics. The transition has been a resounding success. Now with the Royals — Kansas City acquired the 29-year-old right-hander at last month’s trade deadline — Erceg has eight saves to go with a 3.40 ERA, a 2.87 FIP, and a 27.3% strikeout rate over 50-and-a-third innings on the season.

Pitching and hitting are different animals, and that includes the data and technology used to help hone one’s craft at the professional level. With that in mind, I asked Erceg if the degree to which he is analytically-inclined has changed along with his job description.

“I’ve always been kind of minimal with that” Erceg told me prior to a game at Detroit’s Comerica Park. “I think the more I start to look at numbers, and hyper-focus on what they are telling me, the more I’ll overcorrect instead of just making those day-to-day progressions.”

Erceg feels that he was guilty of overcorrecting during his hitting days down on the farm. Looking back, he realizes that he was prone to listening to too many voices, and as a result ended up “kind of bouncing around from idea to idea, never finding consistency.” The potential — especially in the power department — was there, but he ultimately stalled out developmentally as a slugger. In his final season as a position player, Erceg slashed .219/.305/.398 in Triple-A.

Moving to the mound coincided with a mental shift for the Menlo College product. Read the rest of this entry »

At the trade deadline, all fans are equal. No matter their age, location, partisan commitments, gender, religion, emotional disposition, or level of statistical curiosity, they have one thought: “Man, our bullpen stinks. Our GM really needs to do something about it.”

By and large, the GMs agree. That’s why a quick survey reveals that roughly a bajillion pitchers got traded this deadline season. OK, it’s not that many. Between July 1 and July 30 this year, I counted 44 major league pitchers who were traded to a playoff contender. For transparency’s sake, I judged “major league pitcher” subjectively. Some of these trades amount to one team sending the other a Low-A no-hoper or a bag of cash in order to jump the waiver line for a guy they like. And then the team in question waives the guy they traded for three weeks later.

In short, I love you, Tyler Jay, and we’ll always have that killer Big Ten regular season in 2015, but you don’t count as a major league pitcher for the purposes of this experiment. 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.

While esteemed FanGraphs writer Michael Baumann has spent this season anchored to South Jersey, the same can’t be said about the right-handed pitcher of the same name. Since that linked interview from July 2023, pitcher Mike Baumann (hereafter referred to as “Baumann”) has thrown 60 innings with a 5.10 ERA, with his 49 strikeouts, 26 walks, and 11 home runs producing a similar 5.39 FIP. Nothing special, and certainly nothing either Baumann is too happy about.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re not a Mariners fan, you maybe haven’t noticed how good of a season Collin Snider is having. While most of the attention — at least pitching-wise — has gone to Seattle’s stellar starting rotation, the 28-year-old right-hander has quietly logged a 1.01 ERA and a 2.07 FIP over 27 relief appearances comprising 26 2/3 innings. Moreover, he has fanned 30 batters while issuing just six free passes and allowing 22 hits, only one of which has left the yard.

Snider was cut loose twice over the offseason, first by the Kansas City Royals, with whom he’d spent parts of two mostly nondescript seasons, and then by the Arizona Diamondbacks, who had claimed him off waivers. The Mariners signed him off the scrap heap in early February, and they’re certainly glad they did. The sample size is admittedly small — again, he’s made just 27 appearances — but the results have nonetheless been noteworthy. To little fanfare, Snider has been superb.

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David Laurila: You’ve obviously taken a huge step forward this year. Did changing organizations play a role in that?

Collin Snider: “I think changing orgs had a big role in it. I had a meeting in spring training with the pitching staff here, and they showed me the difference in my numbers pitching ahead in the count and pitching behind in the count. There was a substantial difference in good results versus bad results. From that point on it was more of just, ‘Get your stuff over the plate early and often.’ My stuff plays well enough that I didn’t have to really try to do anything else after that.” Read the rest of this entry »

About two weeks ago, Kyle Kishimoto wrote about a shift in the AL West race as the Astros, who had been trailing the Mariners all year, pulled level in the division. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t revisit a topic so soon, especially because Kyle was himself issuing an update to his own previous appraisal of Seattle’s success. But between Kyle’s two posts, the Mariners blew a 10-game division lead to Houston. And in the two weeks since then, well at the risk of steering directly into stereotype, let’s take a look at a graph.

On the morning of August 5, when Kyle’s second piece ran, the Mariners were still actually slight favorites to win the AL West. In the ensuing 15 days, their division title odds dropped by 43.4 percentage points, to just 10.8%. Seattle’s odds of making the playoffs in any fashion are now just 16.4%, which is down 41.6 points. Only three other teams have seen their playoff odds move even 20 points in either direction in that time. One is the Padres. The other two are the Astros and Royals, two of the major beneficiaries of the Mariners’ ongoing slide. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. It’s an incredible time to be a baseball fan, particularly one who isn’t tied to a single team or division. There are three tight division races, and both wild cards hold some intrigue. Some of the brightest stars of the game are playing incredibly well right now. The A’s are on a kelly-green-clad respectability streak that is both improbable and delightful. The White Sox are fun to watch for their ever-evolving pursuit of futility (more on that below). There’s no time for August doldrums when the games are this exciting. So no more talking vaguely about what a great week this was; let’s get right to it. And thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format I’m borrowing here.

1. Barry Would Never

Perhaps the least likely story of the season, on an individual level, is Tyler Fitzgerald, who has turned into one of the great offensive forces in the game overnight. After putting up average offensive numbers as he climbed through the minors across four seasons plus the lost COVID year, he has established an everyday role on the Giants and unexpectedly caught fire this season. He’s now hitting home runs faster than I can count and getting his name in Giants history next to Barry Bonds for his power feats. (As an aside, this clip of Bonds and Greg Maddux discussing an old at-bat is amazing, and I highly recommend it.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Miller has improved on his 2023 rookie season with the Seattle Mariners. Especially notable are his ERA (3.46 versus last year’s 4.32), FIP (3.70 versus 3.98), and OPS against opposite-handed hitters (.685 OPS versus .917). At the same time, many of his numbers have been strikingly similar. When I spoke to the 25-year-old right-hander at the end of July — he’s since made two starts — his win-loss record and average fastball velocity were identical to last year’s marks, as were his FB% and HR/FB%. His strikeout rate differed by just a few percentage points.

I cited those similarities to the righty, then proceeded to ask him what differentiates this season’s version of Bryce Miller from last year’s.

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Bryce Miller: “I think that type of stuff is very similar, but the lefty-righty splits are quite a bit different. Last year, lefties batted over .300 against me. This year, it’s around .215. I think the addition of the splitter has been big, and I’ve also been locating better. If you look at the heat maps from last year, a lot of the fastballs were in the middle of the plate. This year, I’ve gotten them [elevated] a little better for the most part. So getting the heaters up and the splitters down has helped me out a lot with the lefties. That’s really been the main thing.”

David Laurila: Why is the splitter so much better than the changeup you were throwing? Read the rest of this entry »