On Sunday, the Angels made 22-year-old James Wood the first player to receive four intentional walks in a single game since Barry Bonds in 2004. You could argue the plan worked, too, as Wood came up with at least one runner in scoring position all four times, and the only one of those runners to score did so on a bizarre, inning-ending double play. If the Angels’ goal was to avoid the big inning, then they nailed it. If their goal was to win the game, well, hope springs eternal; the Nationals won, 7-4, in 11 innings. The obvious takeaway is the 6’7” Wood is a terrifying talent, but just as obvious is how out of step with current baseball thinking – or really any baseball thinking – this move was.
Wood is having an incredible season, launching 22 home runs, walking 14.5% of the time, and batting .283. His 156 wRC+ makes him the eighth-best hitter in the game this season and a genuine contender for the National League MVP. However, it’s impossible to argue that he’s in Bonds territory. Bonds earned four IBBs four different times that year. He was in the midst of his fifth straight 45-homer season and 13th straight 30-homer campaign. He held the single-season home run record and was closing in on the all-time one. He put up a 233 wRC+ en route to an absurd 11.9 WAR in 2004. He was in his own league. Moreover, the game has progressed in its thinking since 2004, and it’s now widely understood that an intentional walk is rarely the smart move.
Stathead, which uses Retrosheet data from back before intentional walks were an official stat, lists 12 instances in which a player received at least four intentional walks in a game. This John Schwartz article from the 1980 Baseball Research Journal can teach you even more about the earlier history of the IBB, including the contention that Mel Ott received five intentional passes during the second game of a doubleheader on October 5, 1929 (though Retrosheet only lists three of Ott’s five walks that day as intentional). So this is an extraordinarily rare feat, and fully a third of the times it has happened in baseball history, it was specifically happening to Bonds in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »
You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” Maybe because your Aunt Debbie shared a post from her favorite social media influencer. Maybe because you passed the time during a layover at the airport perusing the self-help books in the Hudson News near your gate. Like most self-help tropes, whether or not it hits for you depends a little on your life circumstances and a little on how you choose to apply it. When it comes to sports fandom, emotional hedging can be a useful tool to avoid disappointment, or maybe you prefer projecting confidence to manifest a desired outcome. And if you’re a Phillies fan, you’ve perfected the art of oscillating wildly between the two over the course of a single game. You even have a handy meme with a meter that only ever points to one extreme or the other:
(Please excuse the mismatched needle sizes and logo alignment. These images are precious internet relics that have been downloaded, clumsily edited, re-uploaded, compressed, and decompressed hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The pixelation is earned like callouses on the hands of a skilled laborer.)
But the formula seems to assume that expectations are set and controlled by the person in search of a happy existence. The entire notion is upended when mathematical models based on historical outcomes become the source for baseline expectations. In this scenario, if your team is outperforming expectations, then you can enjoy the banked wins, but you do so in fear of the rainier days that surely lie somewhere in the team’s future forecast. Whereas if your team is underperforming expectations, things might feel dire, but there’s reason to believe sunnier days lie ahead. Read the rest of this entry »
I will break all this down. You will get your thousand words. But sometimes a graph does most of the work for you, so let’s just get to it. Here’s the WAR put up by the catchers of every team so far this season:
Wait, sorry. Wrong graph. That one only has 29 teams. My mistake. Let me throw the Nationals on there real quick:
So yeah. That changes things a bit. What the hell is happening in Washington DC? I’m not sure any of the million ways you could answer that question would provide good news, but this catcher situation is its own kind of ugly.
Nationals backstops have put up -1.7 WAR this season, a full 1.5 worse than the Angels in 29th place. These are not replacement-level killers. These are killers who live far beneath the earth’s surface, digging tunnels, crushing people with rocks, blowing them up — wait, I guess I’m just describing Dig Dug, but you get the point. Washington’s catchers rank 29th in wRC+ and 30th in baserunning and overall offense. They rank 28th in catcher ERA. According to Statcast, they rank 30th in blocking, 30th in framing, and – hey, look at that! – 13th in caught stealing above average. So it’s not all bad.
We have team positional splits going back to 2002, and over that period, the 2009 Pirates and 2019 Rangers are the worst teams on record, with -3.1 WAR each. The Nationals catchers are on pace for -3.8 WAR. They’re on pace to break the record before Labor Day! Over our 24-season sample, the Nationals’ -1.7 catcher WAR has already sunk to them to the 14th-worst total ever recorded. They needed just 75 games to put up more negative value than the other 707 teams on the list. They dropped three spots just last night! This is truly execrable stuff. So let’s ask again, what the hell is happening behind the plate in DC? Here’s the bottom of the catcher leaderboard. Note that unlike the numbers you’ve seen so far, the table below shows total WAR accrued by catchers, not just WAR accrued while playing catcher:
Well, that’s one way to end up at the bottom of the list. Only two players have caught a game for the Nationals this season, and they rank second- and third-to-last in WAR. Keibert Ruiz has not been the worst offensive catcher in baseball, but because he ranks sixth in plate appearances, he has accrued the most negative offensive value. His defense grades out as the worst among all catchers according to Statcast’s fielding run value, and fourth worst according to DRS. Riley Adams is right behind him, thanks to a -19 wRC+ and his own defensive struggles. So far this season, 28 different individual catchers have hit more home runs than the Nationals have as a team at the catcher position.
As for the other players on the list, Jacob Stallings was so bad that he was released by the Rockies. Endy Rodríguez and Ben Rortvedt have also lost their respective jobs. Maverick Handley was just filling in and is back in Norfolk now that Gary Sánchez has returned from a wrist injury. You see where I’m going here. Almost everyone on this list has been bad over a tiny sample. Some of them were only pressed into service because of an injury in the first place. The only players on this list who are still receiving regular playing time are Ruiz and the WAR-defying Martín Maldonado, whom we should probably be calling The Big Intangible. Playing this badly will cost you your spot – even over a small sample, even in Colorado – but not in Washington.
The Nationals came into the season ranked 27th at catcher in our Positional Power Rankings, with a projected 1.5 WAR. They’ve already raced past that total in the opposite direction, but it’s not like this scenario was unforeseeable, or even unprecedented. Here’s what Leo Morgenstern wrote about Ruiz at the time: “Here’s the good news: Our projections think Ruiz can hit like he did in 2023 and catch like he did in 2024. It isn’t a sexy profile, but it’s enough to merit a starting job at the big league level.”
Instead, Ruiz is hitting like he did in 2024, and his defense metrics have regressed to right between the numbers he put up in 2023 and 2024. That’s a bummer, but it’s certainly not a shock. Adams is experiencing some bad batted ball luck – he’s probably not going to keep running a .103 BABIP – but he came into the season with a career 89 wRC+, and his defense has graded out roughly the same as it did in previous seasons. In other words, Ruiz and Adams are so far behind their projections because the projections assumed they’d regress to the mean, but they’ve instead gotten even worse. Ruiz is currently on pace to put up -2.0 WAR. According to our database, that would be the 13th-worst catcher season in major league history. And somehow, even though he’s only gotten into 20 games, Adams is on pace for the 28th-worst of all-time.
Unfortunately, for as far below replacement level as Washington’s catchers have been, there aren’t any obvious replacements available. When Eric Longenhagen ranked the Nationals top 32 prospects last May, Drew Millas was the only catcher who made the list. He ranked seventh with a Future Value of 45, but he’s currently running a 75 wRC+ in Triple-A Rochester. His 28.6% hard-hit rate puts him in just the eighth percentile (among Triple-A players with at least 150 PAs). As a whole, Washington’s catchers throughout the minors are running a 101 wRC+, which ranks 25th. They only have one catcher above Single-A with a wRC+ above 75. Millas will probably be up at some point. He’s had cups of coffee in each of the last two seasons, and even after his lousy start, the projection systems see him as better than both Ruiz and Adams right now.
The bigger problem is that there isn’t all that much reason for the Nationals to change course. Ruiz is in the third year of an eight-year deal (with club options for two more years beyond that). The team is tied to him, and publicly at least, still considers him part of the exciting young core that is now starting to coalesce. James Wood, MacKenzie Gore, and CJ Abrams are thriving. Luis García Jr. just put up a three-win season and is running good underlying numbers despite iffy results. Dylan Crews is still waiting for his own topline numbers to catch up to his impressive peripherals. Brady House just arrived in Washington. But the Nationals are still nowhere near being a competitive team. The supporting pieces aren’t there. The pitching staff isn’t there. Regardless of Dave Martinez’s recent comments in support of his coaching staff, the team also ranks at or near the bottom in both defense and baserunning.
The Nationals started the season with a 3% chance of making the playoffs, and they’re now down to 0.1%. They’re still acting like they don’t expect to compete, largely limiting their acquisitions to one-year deals for veterans they can flip at the deadline. Maybe general manager Mike Rizzo will decide it’s time to sign some players and make a run at it after the season ends, but this year is already lost. The best the team can hope for at the catcher position right now is snagging an underperforming veteran on the waiver wire to take Adams’ place and Millas performing solidly in a call-up. And if Ruiz’s performance doesn’t turn around, they’re almost certain to set a particularly ignominious record.
Brady House is a high-ceiling slugger knocking on the door of the big leagues. Drafted 11th overall by the Washington Nationals in 2021 out of Winder-Barrow High School in Winder, Georgia, the 22-year-old third baseman is slashing .299/.352/.521 with a 128 wRC+ over 256 plate appearances with the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings. Befitting his sturdy 6-foot-4 frame and plus power from the right side, House has hammered 14 doubles and 12 home runs.
His approach might best be described as old school. Asked about his M.O. at the plate, the promising youngster told me his primary goal is simply to hit the ball hard and get on base. And he definitely hits the ball hard. His max exit velocity this season is 112.4 mph, which ranks in the 90th percentile at the Triple-A level. As for his ability to leave the yard, House doesn’t hunt for homers so much as he buys into the process.
“I hit the most home runs when I go up there not trying to hit a home run,” he said. “If I go up there just trying to get a base hit, it just ends up accidentally happening.”
It’s not by accident that House hits home runs in all directions. He called using the entire field an important part of his approach, and the data back up the words. His spray chart shows three homers ripped to right, four blasted to center, and five launched to left. His overall pull rate is actually a career-high 49.4%, but that’s not necessarily by design. While an adjustment is part of the equation, how he’s being attacked is playing a bigger role in his pulling more pitches. Read the rest of this entry »
Ron Washington has formed strong opinions over his long time in the game. One of them is built on old-school common sense. The 73-year-old Los Angeles Angels manager doesn’t believe in hefty hacks from batters who don’t possess plus pop, and that’s especially the case when simply putting the ball in play can produce a positive result. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t like home runs — “Wash” is no fool — it’s just that he wants his hitters to play to the situation. Moreover, he wants them to play to their own strengths.
The subject came up when the veteran manager met with the media prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. Zach Neto had gone deep the previous day — it was his 10th dinger on the season — and Washington stated that he doesn’t want the young shortstop thinking home run. I proceeded to ask him if he likes any hitter thinking home run.
“That’s a tough question,” he replied. “You’ve got guys that are home run hitters — that’s what they do — and you’ve also got guys that are home run hitters who are ‘hitters.’ There are guys that can walk up to the plate, look for a pitch, and take you deep if you throw it. Neto is not one of them.
“The game of baseball has transitioned itself to the point where everybody is worried about exit velocity and launch angle,” added Washington. “Even little guys have got a launch angle. They’re supposed to be putting the ball in play, getting on the base paths, causing havoc on the base paths, and letting the guys that take care of driving in runs drive in the runs. But for some reason, the industry right now… everybody wants to be a long-ball hitter. And I see a lot of 290-foot fly balls. I see a lot of 290-foot fly balls where they caught it on a barrel. If you caught the ball on a barrel and it only went 290 feet, you’re not a home run hitter. I see a lot of that.”
What about hitters that do have plus power? Does Washington like them thinking home run? That follow-up elicited any even lengthier response. Read the rest of this entry »
This year, Josh Bell returned to Washington with a new goal in mind. “What this team needs is slug,” he told reporters during a Zoom call when he signed back in January. He explained that although he’d always prided himself on making contact and avoiding strikeouts – Bell’s career strikeout rate is 14% below the league average and his slugging percentage is 5% above it – he was finally ready to make use of his 6’3” frame and trade contact for power:
That’s kind of in my DNA, but understanding MVPs the last few years, they hit 40-plus homers and they might strike out 150-plus times, but that doesn’t get talked about. The slug is the most important thing. That’s where WAR is. That’s what wins games… I have a big frame, and I should probably hit more than 19 home runs a season. Hopefully, a year from now I can be looking back on a season where I had 40-plus and break my own records for slug in a season. That’s the goal.
Bell came into the season with a more upright stance, a slightly higher leg kick, and a new mission. “I feel like I’m not afraid to strikeout more if it means less groundballs,” he said in February. “I know when I’m at my best, I don’t hit the ball on the ground. I strike out a little bit more. So if I can take one and get rid of the other, then I’ll be in a good place and the average should stay the same or go up. Time will tell.”
I bring all this up because Bell has seen a huge change in his batted balls this season, but it’s very definitely not the change he hoped to see. So far this season, he’s running a .173 ISO, a bit down from his career mark, but more or less in line with what he’s done for the last several years. His hard-hit rate and exit velocity are nearly identical to last season’s marks. So in terms of both results and raw contact quality, he’s not more powerful, but he’s not less powerful either. The experiment may have failed, but it didn’t blow up the laboratory. Read the rest of this entry »
Count me among the multitudes who have been borderline obsessed with the emergence of Pete Crow-Armstrong as a superstar this season. I’m sure he’ll reach a saturation point eventually where hardcore fans get tired of him — it happened to superhero movies, and bacon, and Patrick Mahomes — but we’re not there yet.
Every time I write about PCA, I revisit the central thesis: This is a player who’s good enough to get by on his glove even if he doesn’t hit a lick. But out of nowhere, he’s turned into a legitimate offensive threat. Great athletes who play with a little flair, a little panache, a little pizzaz, tend to be popular in general. The elite defensive center fielder who finds a way to contribute offensively is probably my favorite position player archetype; the more I compared PCA to Lorenzo Cain, Jackie Bradley Jr., Enrique Bradfield Jr., Carlos Gómez… the more I understood why I’d come to like him so much.
In fact, let’s take a moment to talk about Gómez, and his offensive breakout in the early 2010s. Read the rest of this entry »
Every time I watch Oneil Cruz hit, I end up thinking about pull rate. It seems like he’s always using his long arms to yank a ball into right field even though the pitch came in all the way on the outside corner. I’m not quite right, though. According to our leaderboards, Cruz ranks 35th among all qualified players in pull rate. According to Statcast, he’s at 55th, not even in the top third. Maybe it’s just that seeing someone do something as bonkers as this can warp your perspective:
But there is more than one way to think about pull rate. Sometimes you get jammed. Sometimes you have to hit the ball where it’s pitched. Sometimes the situation demands that you shorten up and sell out for contact. Those three examples might tell us a bit less about the intent behind your swing, because you didn’t get to execute your plan. We have ways to throw them out. Today, we’ll look into players whose overall pull rate is notably different from their pull rate when they square up the ball. As a refresher, Statcast plugs the respective speeds of the ball and the bat into a formula to determine the maximum possible exit velocity, and if the actual EV is at least 80% of that number, it’s considered squared up.
I pulled numbers from 2023 through 2025 for each player who has squared up at least 250 balls during that stretch. As you’d expect, the numbers are mostly pretty similar. Of the 219 players in the sample, 165 of them have a difference between their overall pull rate and their squared-up pull rate that’s below three percentage points. No player has a pull rate when squaring the ball up that’s more than 6.5 percentage points off their overall pull rate, but there are a few interesting names here. Read the rest of this entry »
Lucas Giolito is looking to return to form following elbow surgery that cost him all of last year. Now 30 years old and in his first season on mound with the Boston Red Sox, Giolito has made a pair of starts — one solid, another squalid — in which he has surrendered 15 hits and nine runs over 9 2/3 innings. At his best, he’s been a top-of-the-rotation pitcher. From 2019-2021, the 6-foot-6 right-hander fashioned a 3.47 ERA and a 3.54 FIP while making a team-high 72 starts for the Chicago White Sox.
Turn the clock back 10 years, and Giolito sat atop our 2015 Washington Nationals Top Prospects list. Our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel was understandably bullish about Giolito, writing that the 2012 first-round draft pick had true no. 1 upside.
What did Giolito’s FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Giolito to respond to it.
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“Giolito was nationally known by scouts all the way back to when he hit 95 mph at age 15.”
“I always threw hard,” Giolito said. “I was one of the hardest throwers in Little League and everything like that. I started long tossing a lot around the time I got to high school, and just kept building and building. I think I hit 90 when I was 14, and then 95 maybe closer to my 16th birthday. So yeah, it kept going up until I blew my elbow out.
“Probably,” Giolito responded when asked if the velocity was too much, too early. “There wasn’t too much understanding on the medical side, like strengthening, stability — all the stuff that we’re doing now to maintain the little muscles, the big muscles, to support your body when it’s outputting that much force. I was also very skinny. My shoulder blades winged out. I didn’t have much muscular development at that age, but I was moving very fast. It eventually caught up to me.”
“[He] was in the running to go 1-1 as one of the top prep pitchers of all time, until he was shut down with a sprained UCL in his elbow. This led to an expected Tommy John surgery one outing after he signed for an $800,000 overslot bonus as the 16th overall pick.”
“I remember having an outing where I think the Astros’ GM came to see me pitch in person,” Giolito said. “I pitched really well that day. I was on top of the world. It was like, ‘Oh my God, I might be the first-overall pick if I just continue what I’m doing for the rest of the season.’ It was the next outing, or maybe two outings later, where I hurt my elbow. I had to shut down. We didn’t want to do the full TJ yet, because we thought that would hurt me in the draft. Plus, if I was going to get TJ, I wanted to be in a professional organization where you get access to the best care. I tried to rehab it.
“Going into the draft, I had no idea,” added Giolito, a product of Harvard-Westlake High School. “I thought I’d be picked somewhere in the first three rounds, that a team would take a flier on me. I didn’t know I’d be in the first round. That was kind of the beginning of the pre-draft-deal era, but I literally was watching the draft on the TV when they said my name. That was when I found out I was drafted in the first round.
“The Nationals picked me. I was a prep arm with a blown-out elbow, which is a big, big risk. I have Stephen Strasburg to thank, because he was a big prospect who came up, blew his elbow out, got Tommy John, and had a relatively successful recovery from that. The Nationals kind of saw me in that same vein. It was, ‘OK, we’ll get this guy. He’ll have TJ, but we feel confident with this.’”
“The stuff was all the way back this year as he dominated Low-A at age 19/20 in his first full year coming off of surgery. The Nationals were understandably conservative with pitch and innings counts.”
“My first full season back they had my innings count at 100,” Giolito recalled. “I got to 100 innings and they shut me down, and that sucked, because our team was so good. Our starting rotation consisted of me, Reynaldo López, Nick Pivetta. Austin Voth was in the rotation, but he got sent up to High-A at some point that year. We had a really nasty one-two-three with me, Reynaldo, and Nick, but then I got shut down with a few weeks left in the season and had to be a cheerleader. We ended up losing in the playoffs.”
“His knockout curveball, which gets 65 or 70 grades from scouts, is his signature offspeed pitch.”
“Not any more,” replied the righty. “I still have it, but I don’t throw it as often. I always say that Tommy John gave me my changeup. When I was recovering I messed around with changeup grips a lot and found one that was comfortable. I threw it a lot in that same season you mentioned, that Low-A season. I threw a ton of changeups, because the curveball made my elbow hurt that first season back.
“My curveball was good in the minor leagues — I still used it — but we mixed that changeup in a lot. Over time, especially when I developed the slider, the changeup really became the big pitch for me.”
“He has true no. 1 starter upside.”
“Yeah, I mean, I had that with the White Sox for a couple of years,” Giolito said. “I still have confidence that I have true no. 1 starter upside. I just have to come back from this thing and develop some good consistency.”
It can be difficult to contextualize just how unusual James Wood’s offensive profile really is. He hits the ball so very hard. He hits the ball in the air so very never. In his major league debut last season, the Nationals outfielder put 198 balls into play. Only five of them were fly balls to the pull side. Of the 403 batters who put at least 100 balls in play last season, that 2.5% rate put Wood in 385th place. As for those five pulled fly balls, they turned into two home runs, two doubles, and one very loud flyout.
That seems like a promising avenue for further investigation, doesn’t it? The kind of batted ball that turns into an extra-base hit at roughly the same rate that dentists recommend, you know, brushing? If Wood could figure out how to pull the ball in the air with any sort of regularity, he’d be one of the game’s great sluggers. And yet here we are a month into the season: Wood has not at all figured that out, and somehow he’s one of the game’s great sluggers anyway. He’s running a 153 wRC+ and a top-10 isolated slugging percentage because his prodigious power allows him to get the absolute most out of one of the least optimized profiles in the game. Read the rest of this entry »
