Like many of us, Jake Burger is tuning in to as many World Cup matches as his schedule allows. The Texas Rangers first baseman is a big fan of “the beautiful game,” and has been for well over a decade. Moreover, it isn’t just the US national team that captures his attention. Burger is an ardent supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, one of the more prominent sides in the English Premier League.

How and when did the 30-year-old St. Louis native come to embrace a team based in North London?

“I became a Spurs fan probably around 2011-2012,” Burger told me. “Gareth Bale and Luka Modrić were my two favorite players. It kind of started with me playing [the FIFA video game] and knowing a lot of those names. Modrić was a wizard out there. Bale, too. Then, obviously, Harry Kane came over to Spurs and I became a big fan of his. They kind of went on a run when Mauricio Pochettino came in [as manager], so following them just became more a part of my life.

“In 2019, I got to go over there to the new stadium and watch a game,” Burger added. “They played Bournemouth and won 3-2. I went over with Ryan Burr and Jimmy Lambert, who were in the White Sox organization with me, and we saw a few other matches, as well. Lambert is a Liverpool fan, and Burr a Man City fan, so along with the Tottenham game we went to a Manchester Derby and a Merseyside Derby; we saw Liverpool play Everton.”

Being a Tottenham fan this past season was anything but easy. Had they lost their final match, they would have been relegated from England’s top league for the first time in nearly 50 years. Much to the relief of Spurs supporters everywhere, they defeated Everton 1-0 to remain safe. Read the rest of this entry »

Taylor Ward has made a big league career out of lifting and pulling the ball. Drafted in the first round in 2015, he didn’t find a full-time role in the majors until 2022, but he ran with the job as soon as he got it. Despite unexciting bat speed, Ward consistently ambushed fastballs and tucked them over the left field fence. He clobbered 98 home runs from 2022-25 for the Angels, posted a 119 wRC+, and racked up 11 WAR over the span, one of the team’s best players. Then he got traded to the Orioles this winter with only one year left until free agency, and decided to completely remake his game.

I’m only partially kidding. See, Ward might have made his name as a 25-homer-a-year type, but he’s abandoned that style completely in Baltimore. He’s launched only three long balls this season, and his barrel rate, average exit velocity, and fly ball rate are all career lows. His average bat speed is down 1.5 miles an hour, now in the fifth percentile league-wide. Even when he does get the ball in the air, he’s pulling it at a career-low rate; only 19.4% of his elevated contact goes to left field. That’s why his isolated power has declined from .192 as an Angel to .103 as an Oriole. And oh yeah, he’s having one of the best seasons of his career.

That’s right – Ward might not be hitting for power, but he’s getting on base at a preposterous clip. His 18.8% walk rate is third in baseball. His .403 OBP is fifth. He’s not barely surviving on some weird BABIP spike or doing anything visibly unsustainable. He just started swinging slower and making more contact, more or less, and the results have been downright incredible; his 126 wRC+ would be the second-best mark of his career if he can sustain it the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

You might not have noticed, but Rico Garcia has been one of the best relievers in baseball this season. Over 30 appearances, the 32-year-old Baltimore Orioles right-hander has a 1.29 ERA, a 3.25 FIP, and a 31% strikeout rate. Moreover, he has allowed just nine hits in 28 innings of work and boasts a record of 3-1 with four saves.

If you don’t follow the Orioles, you can be excused for not being familiar with Garcia. Claimed off waivers from the New York Mets last August, Garcia came into the current campaign having thrown just 70 big league innings since debuting in 2019, and he’d done so while pitching for seven different teams. Truly a journeyman, the 30th-round pick in the 2016 draft out of Hawaii Pacific University possessed a ledger that included one win, four losses, zero saves, and a 5.27 ERA.

What is behind his breakthrough? Based on conversations with both Garcia and Orioles pitching coach Drew French, that is a question without a simple answer. While the righty has never been better, it isn’t as though he has seen his velocity suddenly skyrocket, introduced a nasty new pitch, or discovered a secret formula. Read the rest of this entry »

Shane Baz features a five-pitch mix: a four-seam fastball and a knuckle curve being the most prominent in terms of usage. The Baltimore Orioles right-hander also throws a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. And then there is the offering that reluctantly remains in his back pocket. Baz would love to one day unleash his knuckleball on major-league hitters.

“I threw one when I was a kid, up until I was probably 13 or 14,” explained Baz, who was a big Tim Wakefield fan while growing up in Tomball, Texas. “It was my only off-speed pitch up until then — I was just fastball/knuckleball — so I’ve got a lot of experience with it. I actually try to throw it in every bullpen [session]. I’ll definitely get it into a game, eventually. I just have to convince [pitching coach Drew] French to let me throw it. Maybe next spring training I’ll be able to mix some in and show him what it looks like in a game. I mean, it’s pretty good.”

Baz went on to say that that he threw his pet pitch with a three-finger grip — “fingers on the horseshoe, right by the label” — in his younger days, but once his hands got bigger he went to “the traditional two-finger knuckleball.” And while he basically stopped throwing it in games once he matured and developed more pitches, he’s never lost his affinity for baseball’s butterfly.

At 96.1 mph, Baz’s four-seamer is above average for velocity, but while extra oomph is advantageous for heaters, that isn’t the case for low-spin floaters.

“I can get it up to about 80, but those aren’t as good,” Baz said. “I think it’s best when it’s like 70 to 75. That’s when I have the best control of it and can keep the spin really low. When I’m trying to throw it hard, it starts spinning more and not having as much knuckle effect.”

His overall understanding of the pitch is impressive, and that includes spin properties. Read the rest of this entry »

Reasonable people can disagree on who the best draft prospect of the 21st century is. I think there’s a pretty good case for Adley Rutschman: A switch-hitter with patience and power, a plus defender at a premium position, a College World Series champion who’d been tested repeatedly against the toughest amateur competition in the world and come out on top routinely.

I get why you’d want the tantalizing upside of Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Mark Prior, but to me no other prospect combined a big league starter-level floor with the ceiling of a superstar the way Rutschman did. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week in Baseball. In keeping with the increasingly lenient definition of “this week” that I’ve been using of late, we’ve got stuff from all throughout May in this column. May is a great time to watch baseball. (It’s always a great time to watch baseball, but May is particularly good.) The weather is heating up. Ballparks are swelling with the start of summer crowds. Tarps are coming off. So please join me on a trip through the league, from fun teams to watch to nifty little plays. And as always, thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the inspiration.

1. The Go-Go Nats
Nationals fans have endured seven years in the wilderness since the team’s 2019 title. Washington’s season-high win total in that span was 71 (2023 and 2024). This year’s team is finally playing around .500 ball, though our projections think the Nats will end up right around that 71-win high-water mark again. (We have them down for 74 at the moment.) But while the winning hasn’t quite come back yet, the fun has.

This year, the Nationals are dominating on offense. They’re leading the majors in scoring by a mile, averaging an enormous 5.49 runs per game. They’ve hit the most doubles in baseball – in fact, they have the most extra-base hits in baseball. They’re top 10 in on-base percentage, top five in slugging, and top five in stolen bases. They’re first in overall baserunning value. They’re third in BaseRuns-projected scoring. This isn’t smoke and mirrors. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Only an act of science could get Jeremiah Jackson to take a walk.

Jackson entered Sunday with 65 plate appearances in 2026. He’d picked up 19 hits, including five homers and a double. He’d also struck out 17 times, grounded into two double plays, lined a sacrifice fly, and taken a wayward breaking ball off his back toe. He’d worked through pretty much every standard outcome for a plate appearance to begin the new season — but he hadn’t drawn a walk. In fact, Jackson entered Sunday as the batter with the most plate appearances in the majors to have not recorded a base on balls.

That was initially the case again Sunday as the Orioles wrapped up their series in Cleveland. Jackson struck out in the second inning, hit a sharp line drive single in the fourth, and reached on an error in the fifth.

Then he stepped to the plate to lead off the eighth. On the mound was nasty lefty Erik Sabrowski, fresh out of the Guardians bullpen. Sabrowski started him with a big curveball in the dirt. Jackson laid off for ball one. Sabrowski pumped his signature fastball, but it ran too far inside for ball two. Sabrowski tried to skim the other side of the plate, but missed too high for ball three.

Then it happened. Sabrowski threw another fastball, this time over the center of the plate. But he again missed too high — way too high — for ball four. Jackson had drawn his first walk of 2026.

Except, he hadn’t. Just as Jackson was prepared to set his bat down, the umpire called strike. Jackson paused, tapped his head, and proceeded with setting down his bat and removing his equipment, with a curious eye toward the video board. In zoomed the animated ball, revealing that the pitch was indeed way up and out of the zone for ball four. Jackson walked to first. Read the rest of this entry »

Davey Lopes was my first favorite ballplayer. In retrospect, I’m not sure how my eight-year-old self settled upon Lopes in a star-laden lineup featuring power hitters Dusty Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, and Reggie Smith, who the year before (1977) had become the first quartet of teammates to homer 30 times apiece in a season. I have a much better grasp of how Bill James helped my teenage self appreciate Lopes for his combination of high on-base and stolen base rates with mid-range power, but James wasn’t communicating those ideas via mass-market paperbacks circa 1978. Perhaps it was Lopes’ position atop the lineup I memorized while learning to decode box scores (my theory) or the Topps baseball card set that began my collection. Maybe it was simply his instantly recognizable, bushy mustache (my friends’ theory), but one way or another, even before later heroes such as Fernando Valenzuela and Jim Bouton, Lopes was my guy.

The news that Lopes passed away on April 8 at age 80 due to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases — a brutal double bill — reached me while I was traveling in Austria with my own 84-year-old parents and additional family as we tracked down the Vienna addresses of my long-deceased paternal grandparents. I had no shortage of thoughts regarding mortality, and yet the hits kept coming. Lopes wasn’t even the most recent former All-Star-second-baseman-turned-manager to pass away, as Phil Garner, his National League rival and then predecessor in managing the Brewers, died of pancreatic cancer on April 11. So it goes.

Though he didn’t debut until well past his 27th birthday, Lopes spent 16 seasons in the majors (1972-87), the first 10 with the Dodgers, whom he helped to four pennants and a championship while making four All-Star teams, winning a Gold Glove, and becoming team captain. From 1973–81, he manned the keystone in the longest running infield in major league history, along with Garvey at first base, Cey at third, and Bill Russell at shortstop — a unit that formed the foundation of those pennant-winning teams under managers Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. “He was the catalyst of the engine. It was 700 horsepower with the four of us, and the equation was his ability to get on base,” Garvey told CBS LA in the wake of Lopes’ death. Read the rest of this entry »

For most of the first two weeks of the 2026 season, just about everything was coming up Yankees. In what was supposed to be a highly competitive division, the Yankees burst out of the gate with eight wins in their first 10 games. None of those victories came against pushover teams, and they were also convincing wins, with the lineup scoring more than twice the team’s runs allowed. Just as importantly, the teams expected to rival the Yankees all got off to mediocre (or worse) starts. The Bronx Bombers had a 3 1/2 game cushion in the AL East, about as large as one can reasonably hold in a tough division after 10 games. Then, things happened.

After the games of April 7, ZiPS had the Yankees with a projected two-game edge in the East, and a 35% chance of winning the division. While these numbers didn’t suggest dominance or anything remotely resembling a guarantee, that was a four-game swing from the preseason projected standings (New York was initially two games back of Boston) and a solid bump from their 20% odds to win the division.

While none of the games were one-sided affairs, the Yankees proceeded to drop five in a row against the Athletics and Rays, only winning on Monday in the ninth inning against the Angels after a Jordan Romano meltdown. Had they lost, it would have left the Yankees without a share of first place for the first time this season. Read the rest of this entry »