Spencer Schwellenbach had just two big-league games under his belt when he was featured here at FanGraphs early last June. The most recent of them had come a few days earlier at Fenway Park, where he’d allowed six runs and failed to get out of the fifth inning. Two starts into his career, the Atlanta Braves right-hander was 0-2 with an 8.38 ERA.

Those initial speed bumps quickly became a thing of the past. Schwellenbach allowed three runs over his next two outings, and by season’s end he had made 21 appearances and logged a 3.35 ERA and a 3.29 FIP. Counting this years’s 10 starts, the 24-year-old Saginaw, Michigan native has a 3.41 ERA and a 3.41 FIP over 185 innings. Moreover, he has a 23.5% strikeout rate and just a 4.7% walk rate. Relentlessly attacking the zone with a six-pitch mix, Schwellenbach has firmly established himself as a cog in Atlanta’s rotation.

On the eve of his returning to the mound in Boston last Sunday, I asked the 2021 second-round pick out of the University of Nebraska what has changed in the 11-plus months since we first spoke.

“Honestly, when we talked last year I was just throwing the ball to the catcher,” claimed Schwellenbach, who was a shortstop in his first two collegiate seasons and then a shortstop/closer as a junior. “It was really only my second year as just a pitcher, so I was very young-minded with how I pitched. Now that I’ve got 30 or so starts, I have an idea of what I’m trying to do out there. Being around guys like Max Fried, Charlie Morton, and Chris Sale last year was obviously big, too. I learned a lot from them, as well as from [pitching coach] Rick Kranitz.”

Morton, who is now with the Baltimore Orioles, helped him improve the quality of his curveball. Their mid-season conversation was the genesis of a more efficient grip. Read the rest of this entry »

Before Game 2 of last year’s AL Wild Card Series, I asked Brandon Hyde a kind of stupid question. The Orioles, having been swept in the ALDS the year before, found themselves down 1-0 to the Royals in the series and were facing another rapid postseason elimination. The Orioles’ rebuild had gone on so long, and developed so much talent, that their progression to World Series contention had been assumed.

Hyde, the rare manager who’d survived a 100-loss tanking season through to the playoffs, had yet to win even one postseason game. So I mentioned that in other sports, coaches in his position have levers to pull in such desperate times. Was there anything a baseball manager has up his sleeve in a must-win game?

“I’m planning a spot to onside kick, try to get the ball back as quick as I possibly can in good field position,” Hyde joked in response. “Or I’m going to try to be like UNLV back in the early ’90s with Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson, and try to get up and down the court as fast as possible. Besides that, I’m going to use my relievers as best I possibly can, try to put some zeroes up and try to score some runs.” Read the rest of this entry »

Charlie Morton has been about to retire for a while now. The lanky curveball specialist first made headlines in the early 2010s; he’d been struggling over his first three major league seasons, so he came up with a novel, but hilariously simple, solution: Copy what Roy Halladay was doing. It worked for a while, but injuries piled up, and it wasn’t until Morton landed with the Astros in 2017 that he really, truly put it together.

In the first season of a two-year deal with the Astros, Morton set new career highs in wins, WAR, and strikeouts. He not only won a championship for the first time in his career, he was the winning pitcher in Game 7 of both the ALCS and the World Series, and got the last out of the season in the latter case. He turned 34 five days after the Astros’ championship parade, and by the following spring he was already musing publicly about hanging up his spikes. Read the rest of this entry »

The good news for the Baltimore Orioles is they won the first game of their three-game series against the first-place New York Yankees on Monday night. The bad news is the win only improved the team’s record to 11-17, the fourth-worst mark in baseball. As it stands Tuesday morning, the Orioles sit in last place in the AL East, and with nearly a fifth of the season over, it’s getting harder to dismiss the poor start as merely a blip.

Where the Orioles have struggled is not that hard to pinpoint: nearly everywhere. The rotation has combined for a 5.62 ERA/5.14 FIP and 6.4 strikeouts per nine innings, numbers that firmly place Baltimore at the bottom of the league. The defense hasn’t been much better, and after a decent start, the offense has evaporated over the last two weeks.

The season is longer than just April, of course, and the Orioles theoretically still have plenty of time to right the ship. But do they have the deckhands? To show whether or not they do, I took the current Orioles depth chart, and estimated the projected WAR based on playing time, using both ZiPS WAR from the preseason and the updated ZiPS WAR I ran overnight. Let’s start with the offense. Read the rest of this entry »

It was June 2024, and Matt Bowman was in a tough spot. He was 33 years old and fresh off his third DFA in six weeks. In his one appearance as a Mariner, he recorded just two outs, gave up one run on one hit — a home run — and one walk. As a righty reliever on the wrong side of 30 with a 92-mph sinker, he was about as fringey as they come.

That day in Seattle could have been his last time on a big league mound. Instead, he tried something crazy. Once the owner of an unremarkable delivery, Bowman now throws from the most extreme horizontal release point in the sport. And it looks like it has saved his career. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Normally, this column is a celebration of the extreme athleticism and talent on display across the majors. This week, though, I found myself drawn to the oddities instead. Unhittable 98-mph splinkers? Boring. Let’s talk about a pitcher who can’t strike anyone out and yet still gets results. Some of the fastest human beings on the planet stealing bases? I’d prefer some slower, larger guys getting in on the act. Brilliant, unbelievable outfield catches? I was more fascinated by a play that didn’t get made. The only thing that hasn’t changed? Mike Trout still isn’t to be trifled with. So thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for his incredible idea for a sports column, and let’s get down to business.

1. In-Game Adjustments
In the 15th year of his career, Mike Trout doesn’t stand out the way he did early on. He’s no longer the fastest and strongest player every time he takes the field; he’s more “slugging corner guy” than “perennial MVP frontrunner” these days. But one thing hasn’t changed: Trout’s wonderful ability to adapt.

Landen Roupp faced the Angels last Saturday, and he leaned on his curveball. He always does, to be fair. It’s one of the best curveballs in baseball, with enormous two-plane break, and he throws it 40% of the time, more than any of his other pitches. In fact, he throws his curveball more often than any other starting pitcher. Trout had never faced Roupp before, and so he struggled to deal with the signature offering.
Read the rest of this entry »

The worst part of a long rebuild is about a third of the way through, when the teardown is nearly finished and the daunting enormousness of the task starts to sink in. At that point, the old guard is gone but the core of the next good team is still in the minors at best — sometimes, the next superstar is still in ninth grade.

But someone has to go out there and log some minutes for the tanking ballclub. And in every rebuild — sometimes because of keen scouting or inspired development, but often as not just through sheer volume — one or two of those random unfortunates breaks out and survives into the next competitive window.

I’ve long been fascinated by players in this situation, because they fall into one of two categories. First, there’s the Rhys Hoskins class. Hoskins was an uninspiring college first base prospect who exploded into the one bright spot on some late-2010s Phillies teams that I cannot describe accurately on a family website. 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 my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Heston Kjerstad turned 26 in February, and he only has 158 major league plate appearances. That’s more than you or I had at that age, but it’s not a lot relative to expectations. This was a highly polished SEC corner bat who went second overall five years ago, though for reasons I’ll get into, Kjerstad wasn’t your garden variety no. 2 pick. After a token call-up at the end of 2023, in 2024 he spent more time in Triple-A (where he posted a 160 wRC+ in 56 games) than in the majors (where he posted a wRC+ of 116, which isn’t lighting the world on fire, but is still good, especially for a rookie).

Nobody wants to get their shot because of an injury, but Colton Cowser busting his thumb on Sunday leaves a two-month hole that Kjerstad has to, has to, has to exploit. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.

But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the current state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over. It’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each American League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.

Stay tuned for the National League movie lineup in a subsequent post. Read the rest of this entry »