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.

If you’ve read even a couple installments of this column, you know that roster changes are my favorite things in baseball. Free agents, trades, extensions, IL stints… I don’t really care; they’re all interesting and fun to follow! My love for such machinations isn’t limited to players, though. I’m also a big fan of managerial and coaching changes, so much so that I have a personal Excel workbook that contains nothing but a list of the current coaching staffs.

So, now that we’ve reached the point of the season when the managerial carousel starts spinning — David Bell’s firing by the Reds on Sunday was the latest move — this is a great time to look over who teams could have on their candidate lists. At least three teams will be in the hunt for managers: the White Sox, Reds, and Marlins. Miami hasn’t officially moved on from Skip Schumaker, but he’s already discussing his tenure in the past tense. Teams with a managerial vacancy almost always cast a wide net, so I’ll do the same in running down some options. Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to talking to him in Wrigley Field’s home clubhouse in late August, my knowledge of Ethan Roberts mostly consisted of his being a 27-year-old, right-handed reliever with limited big-league experience and a high spin rate. I also knew he’d had Tommy John surgery in 2022 as that was mentioned, along with his spin, when he was blurbed as an honorable mention on our 2023 Chicago Cubs Top Prospects list.

The 2018 fourth-round pick out of Tennessee Technological University has added to his résumé since we spoke and now has 27 appearances for his career, 18 of them this year. His numbers in the current campaign include a 2.66 ERA and 23 strikeouts over 23-and-two-thirds innings. Three days ago he tossed a scoreless frame against the Washington Nationals and was credited with his first big-league win.

Roberts learned that he spun the ball well upon entering pro ball. Not long thereafter, he learned that not all spin is created equal.

“It was my first time around technology,” explained Roberts. “I threw a bullpen and my fastball was spinning pretty high. It was spinning like 2,800 [RPMs] —right now it’s more 2,600-2,700 — and I actually throw it very supinated. It’s kind of like a natural cutter. But yeah, when I got on technology there, in Arizona [at the Cubs spring training complex], I was like, ‘I don’t know what any of this means, but thanks for telling me.’”

Which brings us to his spin characteristics, as well as to pitch classifications. 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 final stretch of the season is now upon us, and it sure is going to be fun. The Orioles and Yankees are jockeying for the AL East title, with a first-round bye almost certainly going to the winner. The NL Wild Card is a beautiful mess, with four teams fighting for the three spots and two other clubs, the Cubs and Cardinals, still lurking in the distance. And the under-the-radar Tigers are roaring, trying to pull out a last-minute postseason berth after selling at the trade deadline.

Last month, when I wrote about the players who were added off the waiver wire, I mentioned that another batch of waiver claims would come at the end of August, after more teams fell out of contention. So now that we’re well into September, let’s take a look at some of the notable players who’ve switched teams over the last few weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

One thing I love about writing for FanGraphs is getting the chance to cover players who otherwise would receive little (if any) attention from sources outside of their own team’s market. On this little part of the internet, pieces about the Joe Blows of the league aren’t just allowed, they’re encouraged. Yet, almost 10 years ago, the great Jeff Sullivan hemmed and hawed before writing about one such player:

For a while, I’ve personally been interested in Tyler Clippard. I’ve considered on several occasions writing about him, and about him specifically, but on every one of those occasions, I’ve talked myself out of it, because it just never seemed relevant enough. Generally, people haven’t woken up and thought, today I’d like to read in depth about Tyler Clippard.

I get what Jeff meant. I felt the same way before I wrote this article, hence this introduction. Still, it’s a funny train of thought coming from a writer who was so well known for making his readers care about topics they didn’t realize they would have cared about until they started reading. There was no need for Jeff to justify the subject matter of his article, least of all at FanGraphs. It’s also funny because Clippard was coming off an All-Star season in which he pitched to a 2.18 ERA and 1.5 WAR in 75 games. He had been one of the best relievers in baseball for the past five years. Clearly, the landscape of baseball blogging has changed over the past decade; a player with Clippard’s resume wouldn’t even qualify as a niche topic anymore. Indeed, Clippard might as well be a Shohei Ohtani-level mega-star compared to the reliever I’m writing about today. 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 »

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.

As we’ve covered in this column a few times, the only way to acquire major league players from other teams for the rest of the season is via waivers. We have yet to see an Angels-level dumping of impact players en masse this season, but there has still been some movement since the trade deadline passed. Let’s take a look at some of the notable players who changed teams recently, as well as some guys in DFA limbo who could get claimed in the coming days.

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 »

Thomas White is having an impressive first full professional season. Drafted 35th overall last year by the Miami Marlins out of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the 19-year-old left-hander has a 2.84 ERA, a 2.99 FIP, and a 29.6% strikeout rate over 76 innings between Low-A Jupiter and High-A Beloit. His late-May promotion to the higher of those two levels came for a simple reason. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen explained when assigning him a 45+ in early June, White’s stuff was simply too good for the Florida State League.

I had an opportunity to talk to the promising youngster when Beloit played at West Michigan earlier this week, and one of the things I made it a point to learn about was the mindset that augments his arsenal. I began by asking him how much of a role analytics are playing in his development.

“I’m starting to learn more about the actual numbers and how all that stuff works,” White told me. “At the end of the day, I like to just go out and get outs — I’ve never been a big tech guy — but I definitely know a lot more about my pitches now that I have access to all the data. So, I’m still learning, and I want to learn, but the best measurement for me is how hitters react to them.”

The pitches that hitters are reacting to include a four-seam fastball that has been averaging, according to White, 95.6 mph and 17.5 inches of vertical ride. He is also throwing a two-seam changeup and a sweeper-slider. Currently in the works, but not yet part of his repertoire, is “a shorter gyro pitch,” either a cutter or a hard slider. 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.

Last week, I explained how players can still change teams even as trades are no longer allowed. Now that we’re a week-plus into August, I’d like to run down the list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers before the month ends, which is the latest that a team can claim them and still have them be eligible for the playoffs. Players placed on waivers are first offered to the worst team in the league, then to the other clubs in ascending order all the way up to the one with the best record at the time of the waiver placement.

I’ll be focusing on teams with playoff odds below 5%, though contending teams teams could see if a rival wants to bite on an onerous contract. (Spoiler alert: they will not.) As a reminder, when a player is claimed off waivers, it’s a straight claim. The team that loses the player gets nothing more than salary relief, as the new team is responsible for the remainder of the contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a little insight into my writing process. When I turn on my computer in the morning, my mind completely devoid of ideas apart from the knowledge that Meg is going to message me in a couple hours asking if I plan on working today, the first thing I do is look at our leaderboards. Maybe just seeing a name will jog something loose, or maybe I’ll learn about someone doing something exceptionally good or bad.

It’s fun to write about the extremities of baseball, and fun to read about them. It’s why we fight over who gets to write about Aaron Judge, or Paul Skenes, or the White Sox. We aim to please.

But I also have a soft spot in my heart for the unremarkable. My very first week on this job, I wrote an ode to Cal Quantrill, declaring him “the averagest pitcher north of the Rio Grande.” Well I’ve been noodling on averageness. Who’s the anti-Judge or anti-Skenes? The anti-Jose Altuve? Who is the least remarkable player in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »