On Saturday in San Diego, Fernando Tatis Jr. homered against the Royals, a towering shot that gave the slugger a moment to admire his work and stylishly set down his bat before trotting around the bases. Beyond that flourish, it was a timely hit, as the three-run, seventh-inning blast expanded a 2-1 lead and helped the Padres to a much-needed victory. Of particular interest to these eyes — and no doubt to those of Padres fans — was the fact that the homer was Tatis’ first since May 27, ending the longest drought of his career.

The 26-year-old slugger connected against a 96-mph sinker from the Royals’ Taylor Clarke. It came off the bat at 107.9 mph, but its estimated distance was a modest 380 feet:

“It was heavy,” Tatis said of his 21-game homerless streak. “Everybody knew it, I knew it, how long it was. I’ve just been grinding.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I won’t try to slow-play it; there was nothing I didn’t like this week. Baseball is freaking great right now. There are huge blockbuster trades that ignite passionate fanbases, for better or worse. The playoff chase is starting to heat up as we approach the All Star break. Crowds are picking up now that school is out. The weather is beautiful in seemingly every stadium. We’ve entered San Francisco Summer, which means it’s a lovely 57 and foggy most days here, ideal baseball weather for me (and you, too, if you live here long enough to acclimate). So I have no bones to pick this week, nothing that irked or piqued me. It’s just pure appreciation for this beautiful game – and, as always, for Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose column idea I adapted from basketball to baseball.

1. The Streaking… Rockies?!
The hottest team in baseball right now? That’d be the Red Sox or Dodgers, probably – maybe the Rays or Astros depending on what time horizon you’re looking at. But if you adjust for difficulty level, it has to be the Rockies, who were one James Wood superhuman effort (two two-run homers in a 4-3 victory) away from a four-game sweep of the Nationals. Add that to their Sunday victory over the Braves, and they’re 4-1 in their last five. That could have been a five-game winning streak!

Sure, baseball is a game of randomness. Every team gets hot for little micro-patches of the season. But, well, this feels like the biggest test of the “anyone can do anything for 10 games” theory in quite some time. These Rockies are terrible. Their everyday lineup features six players with a combined -1.4 WAR this year. Those the starters – the bench is worse than that. Their rotation has an aggregate 6.23 ERA. They’ve been outscored by 196 runs this year; the next-closest team is the Athletics at -128. Read the rest of this entry »

Alright, Dodgers bullpen! This is what we’ve been training for. They hit our guy. This is not a drill. I know it was an accident. I know it would have been the world’s worst time to throw at a hitter, down by a run in the fourth inning, a runner already on base, ahead in the count with the platoon advantage, unprovoked. But none of that matters right now. It’s time to look tough.

Everybody crowd up against the fence like you can’t wait to burst through the door. Time to posture. Strike a pose. This moment right here? This is the reason we watched The Warriors so many times. It’s time to get mean. It’s time to maybe, possibly, not really but you never know just in case, shove somebody a bit. We’re ready to jog out there. We’re ready to flex. Everybody ready for a fight?

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I took a week off to indulge in a little French Open binge-watching, and after one of the greatest finals of my lifetime, I was ready to charge back into baseball. That feeling – charging ahead – has been something of a theme across baseball of late. You want speed? Chaos? Huge tools and do-or-die choices? This week’s list is for you. It starts, as usual, with a nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for originating this format. It also starts, as everything seems to these days, with a green-and-gold blur.

1. The Flash
If you turn on a random A’s game of late, you’re liable to see something like this:

And if you’re lucky, something like this afterward:

Denzel Clarke is on quite the heater right now. That spectacular play doesn’t even come close to his greatest major league feat, this absurd home run robbery:

Read the rest of this entry »

Though the Padres have largely been treading water for the past six weeks while using a rather makeshift rotation — a situation not unlike that of the Dodgers, albeit with fewer ex-Rays (and probably X-rays) — that description does not extend to Manny Machado. The 32-year-old third baseman, who went 3-for-5 while driving in five runs during an 11-1 romp over the Dodgers on Tuesday, has been red-hot lately. Indeed, he’s putting together one of the best seasons of his 14-year career while doing his best to keep the NL West race a tight one.

Admittedly, Machado did not face the Dodgers’ best pitching on Tuesday. The Padres’ NL West rivals are without starters Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki, and Tony Gonsolin, the last of whom landed on the injured list earlier this week due to discomfort in his surgically repaired elbow. On Tuesday, they used an opener, Lou Trivino, who retired Machado on a routine grounder in the first inning. In Machado’s next three trips to the plate, he faced bulk guy Matt Sauer, against whom he connected for RBI singles in the third (88 mph) and fifth (77.8 mph). Sauer, a thrice-optioned righty who was forced to Wear One on behalf of a gassed staff — he gave up 13 hits and nine runs in 4 2/3 innings — finally retired Machado on a grounder in the sixth, but even that drove in a run to give the Padres a 7-0 lead. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the many common themes in mythology, across myriad cultures, is the tragic tale of a protagonist who is undermined and ultimately defeated by the original source of their strength. Oedipus was brought down by his search for truth, Karna by his generosity, and Cú Chulainn by his obligations to his code of honor. Luis Arraez isn’t the hero in an ancient tale, but his ability to hit baseballs at will is the stuff of a modern baseball legend. And like those heroes and heroines in lore, his greatest strength is contributing to his downfall.

Arraez is so fun because he defies an unfortunate aspect of today’s game, what I’ve referred to in the past as its “Anna Karenina problem.” Every lousy lineup seems incompetent in their own way, while most great lineups are nearly indistinguishable from the others. It certainly feels like there’s less run-scoring variety than there was when I was young, a concerningly long time ago. Nobody could possibly mistake Arraez for the greatest player in baseball, but he has won three straight batting titles despite being so very different than the type of player you would see on the cover of a Modern Hitter magazine. He doesn’t work counts to draw walks or pull a bunch of barrels into the stands. Instead, he can turn nearly any pitch into a line drive hit, leading to high batting averages in an era when that has become a relative rarity. In 2025, Arraez has struck out only five times; there are five players this season who have done that in a single game, including former MVP Jose Altuve and two young phenoms, Dylan Crews, Jackson Chourio.

Without boasting the traditional markers of a valuable offensive player, Arraez has nonetheless been one since he broke into the league with the Twins in 2019. He entered this season with a career 120 wRC+ across nearly 3,000 plate appearances, even though he’d hit just 28 home runs. Still, that doesn’t mean Arraez has maintained the same level of nonconformity throughout his career. He remains a contact extraordinaire without much power, but some of his defining characteristics have become more extreme as his career has progressed. With a 103 wRC+, Arraez is having his weakest offensive season, and it’s largely because his signature formula for success isn’t quite mixing the way it did before. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Diego Padres. 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 »

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 »

Brooks Baldwin doesn’t profile as a future star, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a long and productive major league career. Versatility is a big reason why.
A poor man’s Ben Zobrist, the 24-year-old switch-hitter has played every defensive position besides first base, catcher, and pitcher since debuting with the Chicago White Sox last summer. It may be only a matter of time before those three are added to his résumé. Counting his days as a North Carolina prep and a UNC-Wilmington Seahawk, there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t played.

The versatility dates back to his formative years.

“I’ve been playing all over the field since I was 10 years old,” explained Baldwin, who was announced as a third baseman when the White Sox selected him in the 12th round of the 2022 draft. “It’s something my dad instilled in me, not restricting myself to one position. He played pro ball a little bit [in the Cleveland Guardians system], and before that in college at Clemson. He did the same thing.”

Chuck Baldwin’s son has seen time at first base in the minors, and the other two missing positions at the major league level are ones he’s well acquainted with. The chip off the old block caught “pretty often” in his freshman and sophomore years of high school, and pitched all four years. Primarily a starter, he had a fastball in the upper-80s as a senior.

Baldwin has been switch-hitting since he was eight or nine years old. His father’s high school coach, Linwood Hedgepeth, made the suggestion. After watching the naturally-left-handed hitter in the batting cage, the member of the North Carolina Baseball Hall of Fame told the elder Baldwin,’This kid can switch it.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Penn Murfee was mentioned in the interview with Trent Blank that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. Discussing pitch profiles, Seattle’s director of pitching strategy recalled the erstwhile Mariners reliever being “a guy who had cut-ride” on his four-seam fastball.

Murfee is now with the White Sox, and Chicago’s South Side club is in Boston for a weekend series, so I took the opportunity to get his own perspective on the offering. What I learned talking to him at my home base of Fenway Park is that the movement he gets on his heater is circumstantial. Moreover, it’s legal.

“Back in 2021, in [Triple-A] Sacramento, my pitch profile changed from a running arm-side fastball,” explained Murfee, who was in the Seattle system from 2018-2023, the last year-plus of that span in the majors. “For whatever reason, I started choking the ball a little tight, and began throwing what was classified as a cutter. It went to zero inches of horizontal movement. My pitching coach at the time said, ‘Whatever you changed, don’t change it back.’ He said that I went from having a very average fastball to something unique.”

The reason behind the movement change? He stopped using sticky. Read the rest of this entry »