Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for coming up with the idea for the column, because it’s a great excuse to watch a ton of baseball and write about plays that make me smile. This week had a little bit of everything: close and fun games, lopsided and fun games, idiosyncratic batter behavior, and even an all-time major league record (nope, not a good one). Let’s get started. One quick note: Five Things is taking a week off next week for workload management. No word on whether I’ll be assigned to FanGraphs Triple-A to keep my typing arm fresh, but the column will return a week from Friday.

1. High-Stakes Games in April
Two division leaders faced off in Seattle on Monday night. The juggernaut Braves need no introduction; they have the best record in baseball and won 104 games last year. The Mariners have ridden a dominant rotation to the top of the AL West despite a sputtering offense. The first game of the series pitted Bryce Miller against Max Fried, and while neither was projected as their team’s ace coming into the season, they both looked the part in this game.

Miller started things off with his customary dominant fastball. He got Ronald Acuña Jr. looking and Ozzie Albies swinging in the first inning, and kept going from there. When Miller’s fastball is cooking, it’s hard to imagine making contact against him, never mind getting a hit:

Fried got off to a slow start this year after missing half of last season with injury, but he’d just thrown a three-hitter against the Marlins, and he picked up right where he left off. He baffled the Mariners with an array of fastballs, sliders, and delightful slow curves:

These two battled long into the night, exchanging scoreless innings and confident struts. One thing they didn’t exchange was baserunners; through six innings, they combined for three walks and no hits allowed. They traded strikeouts – 10 for Miller, seven for Fried – and made every 2-1 count feel like a rally.

The Braves lineup is too good to hold down forever. Acuña recorded the first hit of the game with a smashed groundball single in the seventh. Then he stole second. Then he stole third. Then Albies cracked a ground-rule double to bring him home. Miller recovered to escape the inning with no further damage, but Fried and the relievers that followed him could work with that. They made it through eight innings without any damage, setting up a dramatic clash between Atlanta closer A.J. Minter, trying to protect that one-run lead, and the two goats of the Seattle offense so far, Jorge Polanco and Mitch Garver. Polanco led off the bottom of the ninth with a single through the six hole before Garver clobbered a walk-off blast:

More games like this in April, please. More games like it in May and June. I like whimsical baseball just as much as the next person – probably more, in fact. But when games are this well played and this tight, it’s like a little piece of the playoffs escaped October and landed in my living room. My heart couldn’t handle every game being like this, but getting one every once in a while is a delight.

2. Wyatt Langford in Space
Wyatt Langford’s debut has been uneven, to be kind. He’s hitting .239/.311/.312, not exactly the offensive juggernaut Rangers fans expected after he tore up the minors last year. He has top-of-the-scale power; he hit six homers in spring training this year, and 10 in fewer than 200 minor league plate appearances last season. So far, that power hasn’t shown up. He only has a single home run in the majors this year. But oh boy, was that home run fun:

It feels weird for a power hitting DH to have an inside-the-park home run and no regular ones, but Langford is a strange DH. The fact that he isn’t a plus corner outfielder is surprising, because he can absolutely fly. Statcast clocks his average sprint speed so far this year at 29.6 ft/sec, one of the fastest marks in the sport. That somehow hasn’t translated to defense yet, but on offense? The man can move.

For a lot of players, this would be a triple. I clocked him at just under 15 seconds around the bases, and that could have been even faster if he didn’t think he hit a homer at first:

Now, did the Reds defense help out? Sure. Jake Fraley didn’t play the carom well at all; if he’d simply been less aggressive chasing the ball into that corner, this would have been a double or triple at most. But that one mistake is all it took (and for the Sam Miller enthusiasts out there, note Elly De La Cruz taking the cutoff throw from right field). But even accounting for the defensive miscue, Langford’s speed is what made this play happen.

Langford doesn’t seem like a track star to me, though I’m not sure how much of that is because I keep seeing “DH” next to his name. (He was playing left field in this game, for what it’s worth.) But watching him round the bases, you can’t miss it:

I particularly liked this close-up angle the Rangers posted:

Maybe it’s the red gloves. Maybe it’s the stride length. There’s just something simultaneously soothing and surprising about seeing him round the bases. He’s a large man with flailing arms, but there’s a grace to it too; his torso and head barely bounce around even as he accelerates to full speed. It’s a joy to watch, is my point. And Adolis García loved it just as much as I did:

3. Walk Offs
It all started with a mistake. In the bottom of the first inning last Thursday, Yoshinobu Yamamoto missed just low to Joey Meneses in a full count. Umpire Brian Walsh didn’t see it that way:

You can see Meneses at the edge of the frame looking back in shock. That was a ball! But the game moved on. The next three-ball pitch Yamamoto threw was a walk to Joey Gallo. The next one after that? Another one to Gallo with a different result:

I do think that one was a strike, but Gallo clearly didn’t. And now the battle lines were set: The Nationals were walking to first on every three-ball pitch they saw. Jacob Young got the memo:

And then on 3-2, he got the memo again:

Jesse Winker looked to me like he was ready to trot off – but Yamamoto’s 3-2 curveball caught so much of the plate that he instead pivoted around and marched back to the dugout:

Yamamoto was commanding the edges of the plate masterfully, and getting some help there to boot. But I loved Washington’s strategy. Just trot down to first base if it’s close. Maybe you’ll influence the umpire. Yamamoto threw eight pitches in three-ball counts in the game. The Nats swung at one and ran down toward first on five. That’s aspirational living right there. Maybe Mike Rizzo should put up a sign that says “no one cares how fast you run down to first base on strike three.” Or maybe he shouldn’t – I had a lot of fun watching them do it.

4. Revenge
You can only pull off this play when a catcher is hitting:

Don’t get me wrong, José Ramírez is a great defender. That was a heck of a play, a difficult barehanded scoop and an impressive off-platform throw. Not many third basemen can combine those two so smoothly. But if pretty much anyone else on the Braves were running, that would have been a single. Travis d’Arnaud is a 35-year-old catcher, and he moves like one, with 18th percentile sprint speed and 10th percentile home-to-first splits.

A series of unlikely events needs to happen for that to be such an unlucky out. Replace Ramírez with a slightly worse defender and it’s a hit. Replace d’Arnaud with a slightly faster runner and it’s a hit. Take a mile per hour off of the contact, or move it just a bit more away from Ramírez’s path, and it’s a hit. Part of being a good defender is making a lot of these edge-case plays, but I’m sure d’Arnaud was unhappy about losing a hit that way.

It’s OK, though, because he got his revenge two nights later. With two out and no one on in the top of the 10th, Ramírez singled off of A.J. Minter. He got a huge jump on the second pitch of the next at-bat and stole second standing up. Or at least, he thought he did:

Blink and you’ll miss it. Orlando Arcia’s swipe tag was way late, and it didn’t even make contact. A reverse angle is even more confusing. I have no idea why Ramírez didn’t slide, but he looks pretty clearly safe on this one:

Surely replay would fix this, right? Wrong:

What a remarkably perfect throw. Without meaning to, d’Arnaud hit Ramírez’s back pocket batting gloves from 130 feet away. Ramírez was out the moment Arcia caught the ball. The after-the-fact swipe was just instinctual, because Arcia has caught thousands of throws like that in his life but probably never received one that precise. I’ve heard of letting the ball do the work on a tag, but this takes that to a new level.

If Ramírez had been faster, there would be no play. If he’d been slower, he probably would have slid – honestly, he should have anyway. If the throw had been three inches off in either direction, the tag wouldn’t have been there. Ramírez stole one from d’Arnaud thanks to a series of just-so events. It’s only fair that d’Arnaud did the same to him.

5. Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory
With their loss to the Astros on Sunday, the Rockies fell to 7-21 in their first 28 games, which is bad enough. Even worse, they trailed at some point in each of those games. That tied a “record” set by the 1910 St. Louis Browns for most consecutive games trailing to start a season. Any time you’re tying a record set by the Browns, something has gone wrong.

Luckily for them, the next game, on Tuesday, offered a quick reprieve. They ambushed the Marlins with five runs in the top of the first, and Ryan Feltner was absolutely dealing. He faced the minimum number of batters through six innings, with the two singles he allowed quickly erased by a double play and a caught stealing, respectively. He needed only 79 pitches to get through eight scoreless innings. Bud Black sent him back out for the ninth to try for his first career complete game, a shutout to boot.

Things started to go wrong right away. Vidal Bruján snuck a single through the infield, Feltner hit Christian Bethancourt to add another baserunner, and then Luis Arraez doubled Bruján home to open the scoring ledger for Miami. Feltner’s first complete game would have to wait, because the Rockies needed this win. Closer Justin Lawrence came in to slam the door. But uh… he walked Bryan De La Cruz, and then Dane Myers (in the game because Jazz Chisholm Jr. got ejected for arguing balls and strikes) singled home two runs, and then Josh Bell singled to load the bases, and then Lawrence hit Jesús Sánchez to make it 5-4, and then… well, you get the idea. By the time Jalen Beeks came in to replace Lawrence, the game was tied and there was still only one out. But Beeks wriggled out of the jam without conceding anything further. The Rockies still had a chance to bury this accursed streak – they hadn’t trailed at any point in this game.

They scored a run in the top of the 10th when Ryan McMahon stroked a two-out double. But it wasn’t to be. De La Cruz doubled in the bottom of the inning to even the score. Then Myers – c’mon, the guy who wasn’t even supposed to be in the game! – won it for Miami with a seeing-eye single. Or maybe De La Cruz won it by remembering to touch home. Or maybe catcher Elias Díaz lost it with a bobble:

Oh boy, that one’s gonna sting. The Rockies can’t get out of their own way. They’ve trailed in the two games they’ve played since this collapse, too, extending the record to an outrageous 31 straight games trailing to start the season. Include the end of last year, and it’s 37 straight games trailing. I’m sorry for the Rockies fans enduring this, and for Patrick Dubuque for choosing to live the Rockies fan life for a year in this year of all years. At this point, there’s not much you can do other than stare, like rubbernecking but for sports.

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

It would be an overreaction to declare a good-on-paper team dead in the water after 20 games, but the Twins certainly weren’t doing themselves any favors with their 7-13 start. A few games before that, I wrote about their anemic offense, which at that point was third worst in the league overall, and second worst against right-handed pitching. But, as the Twins seemingly have figured out, the best way to recover is to simply not lose again.

Since their 6-1 loss to the Tigers on April 21, Minnesota has won all 10 of its games. That lineup that was so bad? Well, with the help of some summer sausage, the Twins have beefed up their offense, which leads the majors with a 167 wRC+ since the streak began.

Nearly every position player on their roster has contributed during the 10-game span, with five hitters posting a wRC+ above 200 since the losing stopped: Trevor Larnach (241), Ryan Jeffers (233), Willi Castro (229), Edouard Julien (218), and Jose Miranda (210). Meanwhile, after a dreadful start to his Twins tenure, veteran first baseman Carlos Santana has caught fire, too, blasting all four of his home runs this season during the winning streak.

Twins pitchers have been closer to good than great over these 10 games, with a 3.40 ERA and 3.56 FIP. They’ve kept opposing lineups in check despite some uncharacteristic struggles from ace Pablo López, who’s allowed seven runs combined over a total of nine innings in his last two starts. Flamethrowing closer Jhoan Duran, who returned from the IL with a scoreless inning on Tuesday in his first appearance of the season, should fortify the bullpen, and setup man Justin Topa is expected to be back soon.

But even the best of times can’t come without some heartbreak. Byron Buxton left Minnesota’s most recent win with soreness in his right knee, the same one he had two surgeries on last year. After entering camp healthy enough to play center field for the first time since 2022, he has appeared in all but two of the 30 Twins games so far this season, and was beginning to heat up at the plate following a slow start. They sent him for an MRI but have not yet announced the results. Buxton’s injury history is not encouraging, and depending on the MRI, he could join another often-hurt slugger, Royce Lewis, on the IL.

Things will get tougher for the Twins beginning Friday. Their winning streak has included a three-game sweep of the Angels sandwiched between two sweeps of the White Sox for the other seven wins — hardly stiff competition. Minnesota faces the Red Sox, Mariners, and Blue Jays for three games each before its next off day, and potentially having to continue the streak without Buxton could require even more creativity from manager Rocco Baldelli, who’s already using platoons at both corner outfield spots, second base, and DH. The hot-hitting Castro could see more time in the outfield if Buxton is out, and rookie Austin Martin, who was optioned when shortstop Carlos Correa returned from injury earlier this week, could come back up to carry some of the load.

Jacob Young and the Nationals’ Outfield Puzzle

When I played baseball, all I was good at doing was beating out infield grounders and bunting my way on so I could steal two bases and score on a hit. (I think I hit one ball in the air to the outfield in my whole playing “career”). North Chicago suburbs don’t exactly have a lot of catching depth in the youth ranks, nor could many infielders make a good enough throw to first to get me out, so I was a good player as long as I could actually make contact with pitches (which lasted until I was about 13). All of that to say: I love one-tool speedsters who don’t do much else on offense. I loved Tony Campana as a kid, was a Billy Hamilton believer for far too long, and now I’m hanging my hat on Nationals outfielder Jacob Young.

Young is 24 years old but comes with little pedigree; we’ve never ranked him as a top prospect within the Nationals organization since they drafted him in 2021 out of the University of Florida. He’s never been explosive with the bat: At Florida, he hit just eight home runs across 571 plate appearances with a metal bat. He had the same number of round-trippers in more than twice as many minor league plate appearances in the minors, and he’s still looking for his first major league dinger. But goodness, he can run.

Young was caught stealing for the first time in the majors on Wednesday, ending a 25-for-25 run to start his career. Those 25 steals came in just 54 games: a 75-steal pace over 162. His 98th-percentile sprint speed has buoyed his production, with a .306 average backed up by an xBA of .288. He doesn’t take walks, but he rarely strikes out, giving him enough of a floor perhaps to be a solid fourth outfielder.

When Victor Robles, Stone Garrett, Joey Gallo, and Lane Thomas return from injury (the first two are on rehab assignments), the Nationals will have some personnel decisions to make, but Young should stay for as long as he’s producing. Eddie Rosario has been absolutely awful (-19 wRC+); meanwhile, Alex Call has been great in limited time, but considering he was called up after Young, Call is probably behind Young on the depth chart. The rest of the puzzle may be harder to figure out without another injury, but it might be time for the feel-good Joey Meneses story to end when Gallo returns, and Gallo himself may have to perform better to keep his spot. All of that maneuvering could set up an outfield with Young, Robles, and Thomas, with Jesse Winker at DH and Gallo or Meneses playing first.

The Orioles Strike First

A four-game series this early in the season doesn’t tell us a whole lot about how a division race will turn out come October. So let’s not make any sweeping declarations about who will win the AL East just because the Orioles took three of their four games at home this week against the Yankees to move into first place. That said, the O’s looked like more complete team, though certainly the margin is tight.

Except for Thursday’s game, which Baltimore won 7-2, the pitching was excellent for both teams in this series. Interestingly enough, the only Orioles pitcher the Yankees beat was Corbin Burnes, who went six innings on Wednesday and whose only blemish was the two-run home run he allowed to Oswaldo Cabrera with two outs in the fifth. Those were the only runs scored in that game, as Luis Gil and the New York bullpen shut out the Baltimore bats. The score was flipped two nights earlier in the series opener, with the O’s shutting out the Yankees. In the second game of the series, Dean Kremer went seven innings and allowed two runs, both on solo home runs, in a 4-2 Baltimore win.

The biggest difference right now seems to be on offense, specifically that the Orioles have the more dynamic lineup. The two teams have produced about the same at the plate this season, based on wRC+, but the Yankees — as they’ve been for years — are more reliant on the home run. Five of New York’s six runs in the series came on homers, with only one dinger — the one Cabrera hit — coming with someone on base. Conversely, the O’s are better equipped to string hits together to score without the long ball.

Anthony Volpe represents the only real base-stealing threat on the Yankees — though after swiping two bags Wednesday, Juan Soto has four steals already this season — and overall, they’re the second worse base-running team in the majors by BsR, with only three players (Volpe, Cabrera, and Gleyber Torres) grading out as above average. Meanwhile, the Orioles rank fourth in BsR, and Gunnar Henderson alone has been worth 2.4 runs on the bases. Relatedly, the Yankees have hit into more than four times as many as double plays as the Orioles have this year, killing potential rallies before they really have a chance to get started.

It’s easy to take a totally nihilistic view of pitching prospects in general. You’ll get your hopes up over a 13-strikeout start at the College World Series, twiddle your thumbs as innings limits and service time shenanigans delay the path to the majors by two years, and be left scratching your head when the pitcher’s UCL gives out anyway, just two months after his big league debut. Next thing you know, you’re watching a 29-year-old, whose coming was once as breathlessly anticipated as the Messiah’s, toodle around for 140 lackluster innings a year.

Such a viewpoint would be facile, the type of cynicism that, to quote the author Joe Klein, “passes for insight among the mediocre.” But baseball fans come by their pessimism honestly; as anyone who’s read a Nick Hornby novel knows, nothing fosters obnoxious nihilism like repeated heartbreak.

MacKenzie Gore was the high schooler with the big leg kick and unreal velocity for a lefty. Then he was arguably the top pitching prospect in baseball. Then he was trade fodder — but still a key component of the deal that brought Juan Soto from Washington to San Diego. And in 2023, Gore was fine. He made 27 starts, threw 136 1/3 innings, and posted a 4.42 ERA. Did he look like a future Cy Young winner? No. Was this worth giving up on Soto and risking sending the franchise into a tailspin? No. But he was competent in a big league rotation, and not all pitching prospects even achieve that. Read the rest of this entry »

Roughly a month’s worth of the 2024 season is now in the books. The American League East looks great. The Brewers and Guardians are standing up for the Central divisions. The White Sox can only beat the Rays, and the Astros somehow can’t beat anyone. Enough time has passed that I feel confident saying all of those things. On the other hand, it still feels too early to be certain about which players are over- or under-performing. But that doesn’t mean our opinions can’t change a bit. There’s enough data to make some educated guesses, so let’s put on our speculation caps. Here are four players — two hitters and two pitchers — who have risen in my estimation over the last few weeks. Tomorrow, I’ll follow up with four players who have gone the other way.

Elly De La Cruz, SS, Cincinnati Reds
I already thought De La Cruz had the potential to be one of the best players in baseball before the season started. Quite reasonably, though, I was worried about the downsides. A guy who struck out 33.7% of the time last year is always risky, and that’s particularly true given how he did it. He swung more often than league average at balls and less often than average at strikes; he also made less contact than average. You can have one of those three things be true, or maybe even two of three if you make up for it elsewhere, but three of three? Yikes. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams has that look this year. After showing a glimpse of his offensive potential in 2023, his skills are on full display to start the season. Abrams’ projectable frame always seemed like it could facilitate him adding power. Whether he ever got to that power was dependent on his swing mechanics.

Up until this year, the lefty had a steep, pushy entry into the hitting zone. That resulted in a suboptimal launch angle distribution. In 2023, he had a 32.6% sweet-spot rate, which was in the 30th percentile. (A player’s sweet spot percentage is defined as the percentage of their batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.) So instead of hitting balls at launch angles that would result in line drives and hard-hit fly balls, Abrams hit a ton of popups and groundballs. His swing had a limited range of quality contact points.

He may have swatted 18 home runs, but those long balls were mixed in with consistent mishits. When you swing down into the hitting zone like Abrams did last year, it can lead you to be what a lot of hitting coaches call a collision hitter. If your bat path doesn’t have much room for error, you might still run into some homers from time to time, but there is only a tight window for you to do so. Rather than your barrel moving up through the entire hitting zone, it only does so at one point in space. That might be hard to conceptualize, so let’s check out some video of Abrams last year, focusing primarily on how his hands descend when he starts his swing. Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Nationals are 10-11 coming out of last weekend’s 2019 World Series rematch with Houston, which is a mild surprise. I thought they’d finish way off the back of the pack in the NL East, and based on how the Marlins have faceplanted out of the gate, it seems I owe the Nationals an apology. And this is not a case of a mediocre team coming off the blocks hot by beating up on a bunch of glorified Triple-A opposition. Washington has played some pretty solid competition, with a series win against the Dodgers on the road sprinkled in there, too.

When a team exceeds expectations like this, there’s usually a good bullpen involved. Sure enough, Nats closer Kyle Finnegan has been strong (though his underlying peripherals are concerning), but the team’s real standout has been Hunter Harvey. Harvey made his first appearance in Washington’s second game of the season, entering in the eighth inning of a tie game in Cincinnati. It didn’t go well; he allowed two runs in one inning of work. But the offense bailed him out, tagging no less a reliever than Alexis Díaz for three runs in the top of the ninth. So despite a rough day at the office, Harvey escaped with a win.

And perhaps as a token of gratitude, Harvey has been basically untouchable since. In his past nine outings, totaling 10 innings, Harvey has struck out 17 batters, walked none, and allowed just a solitary run. He’s recorded holds in seven of those appearances and a positive WPA in all nine. His FIP in that span is below zero.

Far out. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

You don’t need me to tell you that the A’s aren’t a good team, nor a particularly entertaining one. Esteury Ruiz, arguably the club’s most fun position player, is down in Triple-A looking to build on his spring training success and become a more consistent everyday player than he was last year, when he led the majors with 67 steals but also had a wRC+ of just 86 and was, as far as DRS is concerned, horrible in the outfield (-20). That leaves the A’s without many players worth tuning in for, with the roster littered with post-prime veterans, waiver claims, and former prospects who’ve lost their shine. But Mason Miller’s career is just getting going, and it’s delightful to watch.

The flame-throwing righty burst onto the major league scene last year with a 3.38 ERA in four starts, including seven no-hit innings against the Mariners in a May outing that was just the third of his career. But a minor UCL sprain kept him out until September, when he was used in two or three inning spurts, topping out at 54 pitches. That perhaps foreshadowed how he’d be used this season, with David Forst saying at the Winter Meetings that he’d likely work out of the bullpen in an effort to limit his innings (and injuries). In the very early going, the move has not only kept Miller healthy, but allowed him to turn on another gear. He’s now pitching with absolute dominance as a reliever instead of teasing it as a starter. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

The Red Sox trounced the Angels on Sunday to bring their record to an excellent 8-3 in the early going. But the night before, they lost shortstop Trevor Story to a significant injury that could end his season, when he subluxated his shoulder diving for a grounder. Despite his slow start (67 wRC+), things were looking up for Story. He was fully healthy and at his natural position for the first time since he joined the Red Sox; he had slid over to second upon signing with the team ahead of 2022, when Xander Bogaerts was still around, and played just 43 games last year after undergoing internal brace surgery on a torn UCL in his elbow.

Indeed, Boston entered this season optimistic that Story’s health and production would return. And after offensive anchor Justin Turner left in free agency, the Sox were relying on Story’s righty bat to balance out a heavily left-handed middle of the lineup, which features Rafael Devers, Masataka Yoshida, and Triston Casas. Without Story, that job falls mostly on Tyler O’Neill’s chiseled shoulders.

Story’s injury is the second that Boston’s middle infield will have to weather; offseason acquisition Vaughn Grissom was set to play second base, but he strained his hamstring early in spring training and isn’t expected to be back until late April at the earliest. That leaves a ragtag middle infield, with two more lefties, Enmanuel Valdez at second and David Hamilton at short, expected to see most of the playing time up the middle. Righties Pablo Reyes and Bobby Dalbec will fill in against tough lefties, though the latter is more of a corner infielder. Valdez has been anemic in his first 35 plate appearances this year — his wRC+ is -13 — but he was solid in much more extensive rookie campaign last year, with a 102 wRC+. Hamilton’s start has been the opposite story: He mashed his first homer on Sunday in his first game back up after posting a 25 wRC+ in his first 39 big league plate appearances in 2023.

Both are decent role players and average-ish hitters (Hamilton is a 50-grade hitter, Valdez 45), with Hamilton also possessing blazing speed. But even when Grissom comes back, at least one of them will have to be a bit more than that somewhere on the middle infield. More importantly, O’Neill needs to keep hitting something like he is (I don’t think he’ll keep up his 73-homer pace), and Yoshida needs to get going.

…

Unlike the Red Sox, the Nationals are doing what was generally expected of them: playing .333 ball. What does intrigue me, though, is how the defense has been aligned.

Despite keeping Victor Robles around instead of non-tendering him, he was relegated to the bench to start the year, only picking up a couple of starts (one against a lefty, and one with Jesse Winker out due to illness) before hitting the IL after suffering a hamstring injury in that second game. Instead, the Nationals not only rostered two lefty-hitting, outfield-playing non-roster invitees in Winker and Eddie Rosario, but they’re starting them both — with Rosario in center!

Rosario is 32, not fleet of foot (13th-percentile sprint speed), and not a very good outfielder; he was solid last year in left field but graded out negatively there in 2022, and of course center requires covering more ground. Even with Robles hurt and Jacob Young (who profiles more as a fourth outfielder-type) on the roster in his stead, playing Rosario up the middle doesn’t really make much sense. Offseason signee Joey Gallo is only 30, and he is more experienced and has performed better out there than Rosario has in his career — Gallo has five defensive runs saved in 463 innings patrolling center — but he has been relegated to first base entirely so far, with Joey Meneses as the regular designated hitter.

In a vacuum, I can understand why Washington wants to keep Lane Thomas in one spot; he’s the only outfielder on the roster who starts against righties and lefties alike, and his strong arm plays well in right. I can also understand, in a vacuum, wanting Meneses at DH, leaving Gallo (the only other player with extensive experience there) at first; Meneses isn’t a good first baseman! But if those decisions lead to playing an average-at-best left fielder in center field, one of the most consequential defensive positions on the diamond, they’re not the right ones.

…

One position switch that is paying off, though, is Spencer Steer’s multi-season willingness to keep switching positions. Ostensibly, he’s a third baseman; that’s where he played most of his innings in his first big-league action in 2022 and where he started out last year. But when Elly De La Cruz and Matt McLain came up, Steer slid across the diamond to first with Joey Votto sidelined by shoulder surgery. When Votto came back and Christian Encarnacion-Strand came up? No problem, Steer made 13 starts at second and played the outfield for the first time outside of nine innings in 2022.

All that bouncing around in 2023 didn’t affect his bat, as he finished sixth in Rookie of the Year balloting and put up a 118 wRC+. But having a full year of experience at the plate and settling in as the full-time left fielder could have Steer really turning a corner here in 2024. His 237 wRC+ is of course unsustainable, and it’s just nine games, but he’s walking at the same rate of over 10% and striking out less. He also has 10% of last year’s barrel total (three already) in just 6% of the plate appearances.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the J.D. Martinez and Michael Lorenzen signings, Eury Pérez‘s elbow, Jackson Holliday not making the O’s Opening Day roster, and MLB’s crowded, mediocre middle, then preview the 2024 New York Yankees (16:49) with The Athletic’s Chris Kirschner, and the 2024 Washington Nationals (1:14:13) with The Washington Post’s Andrew Golden.

Audio intro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jimmy Kramer, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG post on JDM
Link to JDM deferral info
Link to FG post on Lorenzen
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With the start of the season just two weeks away, it’s time for one of my most beloved/hated/dreaded annual traditions: making my picks for breakouts and busts. For those of you who haven’t read one of these pieces in the past, these are my picks for the players who are the most likely to change the general consensus about them over the course of the 2024 season. And since we’re talking about generally low-probability outcomes — this isn’t a list of players with better or worse projections than last year — there’s no exercise with more potential to make me look super smart… or dumb. For every J.P. Crawford or Steven Kwan triumph, there’s an instance of Andrew Vaughn-induced shame.

As usual, let’s start with a quick table of the triumphs and humiliations of last year’s picks:

It was about an average year. Vaughn and Christian Walker were the biggest misses, and Jordan Walker’s lousy defense kept him from being a win. Now on to this year’s picks.

The Breakouts

Spencer Torkelson, Detroit Tigers
Spencer Torkelson’s .233/.313/.446 line certainly didn’t knock any socks off, but he was a (relative) beast over the last two months of the season, hitting .244/.329/.526 with 16 homers. Now, I always warn folks to not read too much into monthly splits because there’s a tendency to think that splits coinciding with a good explanation are enough to overcome the small sample size issues, and because the endpoints are selective. The two-month split, however, isn’t why Torkelson’s here. Rather, there was a lot of evidence to suggest that he was underperforming his peripherals for most of the season up until that point. From the beginning of the season through August 8, Torkelson was the biggest zStats underachiever with significant playing time. Using only Statcast data with no information as to actual results, ZiPS thought that in that span Tork should have been an .868 OPS hitter; his actual OPS was .688. His OPS after that day? .921! Remember, Torkelson was a top-five prospect in baseball entering his rookie season in 2022, so even though his first year was a disaster, he’s not some 31-year-old beer leaguer coming out of nowhere.

Patrick Bailey’s Bat, San Francisco Giants
I can’t really call it a full breakout since Patrick Bailey already had an overall breakout season, thanks to defense that crushed even the loftiest of expectations. What puts him here is that people may be sleeping on his bat. No, I don’t think there’s any chance he starts hitting like Buster Posey, but Bailey’s otherworldly defense and lackluster bat (wRC+ of 78) appears to have pigeonholed him as a typical no-hit, all-glove backstop. I think that would be a mistake. Catchers have really weird developmental curves and I can’t stress enough how difficult it is for a catcher to nearly skip the high minors; he only played 28 games above A-ball before debuting in San Francisco. He hit .251/.351/.424 in the minors – again, not star quality but far from a total zero – and even without full developmental time offensively, he wasn’t completely destroyed by MLB pitching. In fact, he showed surprisingly solid plate discipline and power for a prospect with so little experience with the bat. Both ZiPS and our Depth Charts project Bailey to have an 82 wRC+, but I would not be shocked if he finished the season with a mark between 95 and 100, which, if his defense holds up, would make him an elite catcher overall.

Wyatt Langford, Texas Rangers
I don’t have a formal rule about it, but when ZiPS projects a player with little or no MLB experience to lead in a significant stat, I should take it very seriously since ZiPS doesn’t often go nuts about minor leaguers. The last player I can think of is Luis Arraez, who had a 21% chance of hitting .300 for his rookie season, according to ZiPS, which also projected him to have the highest batting average in baseball by 2020. ZiPS thinks Wyatt Langford is going to lead the majors in doubles and be one of the best offensive rookies in recent years. He was one of the few college hitters that ZiPS saw as nearly ready for the majors in 2023, and it liked him more than similarly advanced hitters Nolan Schanuel and Dylan Crews. Since ZiPS is my sidekick – or maybe it’s the other way around – I gotta have its back!

Anthony Volpe, New York Yankees
Anthony Volpe had a solid rookie season, but given his elite prospect status, it was a mild disappointment that he was only league average. Because of this, I think people are now underselling his offensive upside. He hit for a lot of power for a 22-year-old shortstop (21 home runs, .174 ISO). He also stole 24 bases on 29 tries, including successfully swiping each of his first 15 attempts, and was worth 3.5 base running runs. Two of his biggest problems were that he didn’t get on base enough (.283 OBP, 8.7 BB%) and struck out too much (27.8 K%), but these weren’t issues for him in the minors, and some of his fundamentals here are promising — he actually gets off to fewer 0-1 counts than most players with his strikeout rate. All of this suggests that he should figure things out with more major league experience. ZiPS also thinks he should have had a .312 BABIP given his Statcast data, instead of his actual mark of .259, which indicates that some of his woes were likely do to bad luck.

Keibert Ruiz, Washington Nationals
As with Volpe, I think Keibert Ruiz’s low BABIP, especially his .223 BABIP in the first half, made his season look a lot weaker than it was. ZiPS saw a .270 BABIP as a more reasonable number for him as a hitter in the first half, and that number continued to rise in the second half; he had a .285 zBABIP by the end of the season. Giving Ruiz back some of the batting average makes his actual .226/.279/.360 first-half line look a lot less abysmal and his .300/.342/.467 one in the second half look less like a fluke. In fact, except for a bit more power, most of the difference between his first half and second half was BABIP, so the halves weren’t quite as different as they appeared. Overall, his zStats line of .274/.330/.445 reflects a much more advanced hitter than we saw overall in 2023.

As I reminded people with Bailey, catchers tend to have a weird developmental pattern, and Ruiz has been no exception. Ruiz was a top prospect for a long time before hitting the Double-A wall, and his standing fell quite a bit in the eyes of prospect watchers. But he re-established himself as a top prospect to a degree that he was a huge part of Washington’s return when it traded Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers in 2021. I think people forget how young he still is at 25, and being older is not as big of a deal for a catching prospect than for someone at any other position.

Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds
Elly De La Cruz is a common breakout pick for obvious reasons, but I’m including him here specifically because his plate discipline wasn’t as bad as it looks from the raw stats. ZiPS actually thought, from his plate discipline data, that his strikeout rate should have been more like 27% instead of nearly 34%, enough to knock off 27 strikeouts. And given that he should be a high BABIP player, because he was the fastest man in baseball last year, putting more balls in play would benefit him more than it would most players. Overall, his zStats line last year was .273/.323/.449, compared to his actual line of .235/.300/.410, meaning the holes in his game aren’t quite as deep as his reputation would suggest.

And if you don’t buy that, he did show better plate discipline as the season progressed. I’ll again warn of the dangers of storylines that coincide with splits, but things like offensive swing percentage stabilize very quickly, mitigating some of the sample size issues. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at the graph below and conclude that De La Cruz got caught up in the hype of his initial success and became too aggressive. As a result, he started struggling before coming to realize that he had gotten away from the approach that made him such a dynamic player in the first place.

Dominic Canzone, Seattle Mariners
One should be suspicious of Pacific Coast League stats, but Dominic Canzone’s .354/.431/.634 line last year was good even by PCL standards, enough for a 151 wRC+ in the league. However, that success didn’t follow him to the majors. He probably doesn’t have a lot of upside, but the rate of his improvement over the last couple of years suggests that there’s a chance he could have a nice little Geronimo Berroa-esque run.

Tucupita Marcano, San Diego Padres
This one is kind of a stretch because I don’t see an obvious path for Tucupita Marcano to get much playing time. He hasn’t hit at all in the majors yet, but he’s also had a weird minor league career; he’s still just coming off his age-23 season and has made some progress at translating his minor league plate discipline to the majors. ZiPS isn’t in on him, but Steamer is, and if he can managed his 94 wRC+ Steamer projection, along with a decent glove (though more at second base than short) and his speed, he’ll at least be interesting. Gotta have one out there pick, no?

The Busts

Cody Bellinger, Chicago Cubs
I don’t think Cody Bellinger will fall anywhere near the depths of his brutal 2021 season, but there are reasons to be suspicious of last year’s resurgence. He changed some of his mechanics and altered his approach, especially in two-strike counts, to make more contact, and those adjustments should be sustainable. It’s the power numbers that are a bit preposterous, to the degree I can’t think of any comparable player who managed to maintain this amount of power with mediocre-at-best exit velocity numbers. Statcast’s expected slugging percentage knocks 88 points off his actual one, and the ZiPS version (zSLG) is 20 points meaner than that.

J.T. Realmuto, Philadelphia Phillies
This one hurts, especially for a player ZiPS was so excited about in 2015-2016 before his breakout. But the decline in J.T. Realmuto’s offensive numbers in 2023 is supported by the drop in his peripheral numbers; he was just a bit worse at everything last year. He’s also a catcher entering his mid 30s. This is a gut thing more than a projection thing, but I suspect any kind of a leg injury would be a bigger deal for a surprisingly quick player like Realmuto, whose offensive stats already reflect his speed, than for your typical catcher.

Isaac Paredes, Tampa Bay Rays
Isaac Paredes is a good hitter, but is he really a 140 wRC+ guy? In both Statcast and ZiPS, Paredes had an even larger disparity between his actual power numbers and his peripherals than Bellinger. That said, there’s some good news, because unlike Bellinger, Paredes has done this before. There were 20 hitters in 2022 that hit at least five more homers than zHR expected, and 18 of them went on to hit fewer home runs in 2023. Paredes was one of the two who hit more (the other was Pete Alonso). Because Paredes has such a low hard-hit percentage, I’m not completely on board yet.

Lane Thomas, Washington Nationals
One thing about Cinderella stories is that people tend to overrate them after the ball. Most of these stories don’t involve permanent stardom; Joey Meneses and Frank Schwindel are two example of people getting too excited about an older breakout guy. Unlike Schwindel, Lane Thomas is probably still a league-average player, on the level of his 2021 and 2022 seasons, but I’d be shocked to see him hit 30 homers again. He’s probably a stopgap center fielder/fourth outfielder type, and I’m seeing him surprisingly high in some fantasy rankings.

Dominic Fletcher, Chicago White Sox
I was pretty shocked to see the White Sox trade Cristian Mena for Dominic Fletcher, even with the assumption that ZiPS is being too exuberant about Mena in ranking him at the back of the top 50 prospects. If you evaluate him the way our prospect team does, a fourth outfielder for a 45 FV prospect is quite a rich gain. And it’s looking like the Sox will give Fletcher a pretty good chance at getting the majority of the playing time in right field. It’s not as bad as the team’s irrational excitement about Oscar Colás last year, but there’s just not a lot of support for Fletcher’s maintaining his .301/.350/.441 line from his brief stint in the majors. That’s ridiculously higher than his zStats slash line of .249/.290/.376, which works out to a difference of 125 OPS points.