Randy Vásquez has struck out 19 batters in his first three starts of 2026. He didn’t record his 19th strikeout in 2025 until May 14, in the third inning of his ninth start.

Vásquez has simply dominated in the earliest days of the new season. He opened the year with six shutout innings against the Tigers, striking out eight. He picked up a mere three strikeouts in his second start against the Red Sox, but his stuff was just as good, generating whiffs on 32.6% of swings. And then he picked up eight more strikeouts on Thursday against the Rockies. He now has a 1.02 ERA, a 2.57 FIP, a 27.5% strikeout rate and a 5.8% walk rate, pitching like a top 20 starter in the majors to begin 2026.

Weird, right?

It’s not that Vásquez was terrible before this year. He posted a 3.70 ERA and 4.96 FIP across 26 starts in 2025, and his performance was similar in the two seasons prior. That’s a pitcher who can stick in the backend of most rotations and serve as useful depth. But it wasn’t clear what Vásquez did well, or how he might take the next step to becoming a true mainstay in the majors. He walked more batters than average. He didn’t really limit hard contact. And his 14.8% strikeout rate was the lowest among any starting pitcher with at least 200 innings from 2023 through 2025. He was just kind of there. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremiah Estrada’s path to big league success was bumpy. Drafted out of Palm Desert High School in California in 2017, the now-27-year-old right-hander battled multiple injuries, including one that required Tommy John surgery in 2019. There was non-health-related adversity as well. Estrada spent his first seven professional seasons in the Chicago Cubs organization, and he didn’t always see eye to eye with the club’s pitching coordinators and coaches. They were occasionally at cross purposes when it came to optimizing his repertoire.

Estrada reached the big leagues with Chicago in 2022, although it wasn’t until two years later that he found much success. Cast aside by the Cubs, with whom he’d thrown just 16 1/3 big league innings over parts of two seasons, he has thrived since being claimed off waivers by the San Diego Padres prior to the 2024 campaign. Over 145 appearances, Estrada has logged a 3.35 ERA, a 2.85 FIP, and a 36.1% strikeout rate over 139 2/3 frames. His Friars ledger also includes four saves and an 11-9 won-lost record.

Estrada discussed his nonlinear, and often frustrating, path to big league success over a pair of conversations. The first came in early March at the Padres’ spring training complex, while the second was conducted at Fenway Park this past weekend.

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David Laurila: How much have you changed since coming to pro ball?

Jeremiah Estrada: “I’d say a lot, and not just what happens on the field. With the baseball side, you learn what’s important and what’s not important, but that’s pretty much like life. Right? Life starts to kick in. Even though many of our lives are different, we worry about the same things. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Grant is one of the game’s most entertaining color analysts. Teamed with play-by-play announcer Don Orsillo, the man affectionately known as “Mud” is a big part of why the San Diego Padres TV booth polled as baseball’s best in Awful Announcing’s 2025 local broadcaster rankings. Now in his 11th season alongside Orsillo, Grant first began working Padres games in 1996. His previous partners in the booth include the legendary Dick Enberg.

Grant was a pitcher prior to becoming a broadcaster, toeing the rubber for six teams across the 1984-1993 seasons, including the Padres, with whom he made 126 of his 233 appearances. All told, he went 22-32 with eight saves and a 4.31 ERA over 638 2/3 innings.

How well does he remember his matchups against certain batters he faced? As I’ve done previously with David Cone, Mark Gubicza, and Jeff Montgomery — those pieces can be found here, here, and here — I decided to find out by challenging him to a career quiz. Not only did he oblige, he supplied fun anecdotes along the way.

I began by asking the pitcher-turned-broadcaster which batter he faced the most times. Read the rest of this entry »

Going into yesterday, Mason Miller had thrown 37 pitches on the season, 19 of them fastballs averaging 101 mph, while another 17 were sliders that elicited a 60.0% whiff rate. There was also one changeup. Delivered to Luis Arraez on a 1-1 count, the ninth-inning offering was wide outside and taken for a ball.

Why did the San Diego Padres closer throw his seldom-used changeup to the three-time batting champ on Wednesday night? Low leverage was certainly a factor; the Friars had scored four times in the bottom of the eighth to turn a 3-1 lead into a far safer 7-1 advantage. It nonetheless represented an outlier for the 27-year-old flamethrower. Over the previous two seasons, only 2.3% of his pitches were changeups.

I asked him about it when the Padres visited Fenway Park on Friday,

“A changeup is a good pitch, but I’m not going to feel comfortable with it if I’m not throwing it,” Miller told me. “I’m picking my spots. There are certain guys it matches up well against. [Arraez] is a guy who isn’t going to swing and miss, so I’m not going to be hunting a strikeout. If I can get softer contact on it… any time you have a guy who isn’t fast and he puts it on the ground, that’s an opportunity for an out.”

Arraez didn’t kill any worms in his matchup with Miller, instead lining a 2-1 fastball to right field for a single. Not that it mattered. The righty proceeded to fan the next three batters, one on a 101.5-mph heater, and two on nasty sliders. While those pitches were pristine, the execution on his lone changeup was another story. Read the rest of this entry »

Trey Yesavage profiles as a strong Rookie of the Year candidate, but he won’t have a chance to begin building his case in the near term. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander landed on the injured list due to shoulder impingement and won’t be ready when the season gets underway later this week. His return is expected to come sooner rather than later — fingers are crossed throughout Canada — but for now, Yesavage is on the shelf.

Five months ago he was turning heads in the World Series. With just six MLB outings under his belt — three in the regular season, and three across the ALDS and ALCS — Yesavage bedeviled LA batters with an array of high-riding heaters and diving splitters. He was especially dominant in Game 5, fanning a dozen Dodgers while allowing three baserunners and a lone run over seven frames.

His meteoric rise and eye-popping postseason performances raised his public persona, but the Pottstown, Pennsylvania native hasn’t otherwise changed since being drafted 22nd overall in 2024 out of East Carolina University. He’s still polite and unassuming, and his overpowering arsenal has remained in place.

“I’m pretty much the same dude,” Yesavage told me at Blue Jays camp last week. “The pitches are the same. The velocity and movement are the same. I also don’t look at [the metrics] all that much. Whenever Trackman is up on the board, all I really look at is the vert on my heater, and the velo. The only questions I’ll ask my pitching coach are to make sure that my most-used pitch is in line.”

That would be his four-seam fastball, which averaged 94.7 mph and 19.5 inches of induced vertical break across his smattering of regular season outings. Thrown at a 45.2% clip, the offering was augmenting by a slider (28.4%) and a splitter (26.4%), the last of those offerings being the righty’s most lethal weapon. A quintessential complement to his well-elevated heaters, Yesavage’s splitter induced a 57.1% whiff rate and a .111 BAA against big-league hitters.

He began tinkering with his signature pitch in the middle of his three collegiate seasons, but it wasn’t until his draft year that the efforts bore fruit. Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago, the Padres went shopping over the long weekend and landed a bunch of old guys who seemed pretty washed. I was glib in my appraisal of those moves, suggesting that they’d only work out if A.J. Preller had a time machine.

The Padres live in a perpetual state of roster turnover, which occasionally leaves gaps. That’s how you end up with no. 4 starter Germán Márquez, or platoon first baseman Nick Castellanos. But those two are on major league deals; they were always likely to make the roster in some capacity, regardless of how you feel about those late-2010s stalwarts now.

But nothing so concrete was promised to Walker Buehler, who came to camp in Peoria on a minor league deal with a non-roster invite. Read the rest of this entry »

Collin Snider is with Chicago looking to recapture what he had two seasons ago with Seattle. Currently in camp with the Cubs, the 30-year-old right-hander was a pleasant surprise for the Mariners in 2024, logging a 1.94 with a 27.8% strikeout rate over 42 relief outings comprising 41-and-two-thirds innings. Last year was a different story. Hampered by a flexor strain and unable to get back on track, Snider struggled to the tune of a 5.47 ERA across 24 appearances in the majors, then posted an even uglier 8.06 ERA across 25 games with Triple-A Tacoma. Cut loose by Seattle in November, he subsequently inked a deal with the Cubs in December.

Despite the dismal results, Snider wasn’t without suitors. He had options — every team can use more pitching — and in the case of the Cubs, he also had connections. Tyler Zombro, the NL Central club’s Vice President of Pitching Strategy, previously worked at Tread Athletics, where Snider trained in previous offseasons. As the erstwhile Vanderbilt Commodore put it, “That really steered my decision. I like the way the pitching development is here.”

Asked about his poor 2025 performance, Snider pointed to how his injury contributed to bad mechanical habits that resulted in a drop in velocity, as well as “pitch shapes that weren’t the same.” He knew what was happening, but correcting it was another matter.

“I was very rotational, throwing too side-to-side, whereas I need to be north-south,” Snider said. “Side-to-side made the velo go down, because I couldn’t get behind the baseball. I was aware of what was going on, but I didn’t know why I was doing it, or how to make the adjustment quickly. It ended up being one of those things where I needed the offseason to straighten it out.”

Snider averaged 92.5 mph with his four-seamer last season, whereas in the prior two years that number was 94.2 and 95.3. His sweeper was also impacted by his delivery being out of sync. Read the rest of this entry »

Xander Bogaerts is on the verge of multiple milestones. Barring injury, the 33-year-old San Diego Padres shortstop will reach and surpass 400 doubles, 200 home runs, and 1,000 runs scored this season. He also has a shot at 2,000 hits, needing 178 more to arrive at that mark. And then there is the defensive side of the equation. Defying most expectations, Bogaerts is on the doorstep of having started 1,500 games at his middle-of-the-infield position.

As you may recall, Bogaerts’s bat was his calling card when he ranked as the top prospect in the Boston Red Sox system. Few doubted his ability to hit, but the likelihood that he would remain a shortstop was another story. Echoing the opinion of many throughout the industry, our December 2011 writeup of the then-19-year-old Oranjestad, Aruba native included the following:

“Defensively he plays a solid shortstop but he’s expected to slow down and shift over to third base before he reaches the majors.”

I’ve addressed that possibility with Bogaerts multiple times over the years, initially for a print-publication story I wrote when he was in Double-A. Quoting a scout, I titled the piece, “Looks Like a Shortstop to Me.”

All these years later, Bogaerts recalls the conjecture surrounding his future in the field. When I caught up to him at Padres camp last weekend, it was the first thing he mentioned when I posed this question: Had you been told at age 20 that your career would follow the path it has, would anything have surprised you? Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, Sunday Notes led with David Cone following in Mark Gubicza’s footsteps. Just as his fellow pitcher-turned-broadcaster had done, Cone tackled a challenging career quiz, augmenting his answers — some of them correct, others amiss — with entertaining anecdotes about batters he faced along the way. Today we’ll hear from another 1980s-1990s hurler who is now a broadcast analyst: Jeff Montgomery, who played with Gubicza in Kansas City, is the Royals’ franchise leader in both appearances (686) and saves 304).

I began by asking the 64-year-old Wellston, Ohio native which batter he faced the most times.

“I’m going to say either Chili Davis or Kirby Puckett,” guessed Montgomery, naming a pair of players who narrowly missed being the correct answer. Upon being informed that it was neither of the two, the erstwhile closer pondered for several seconds, only to throw up his hands. “You got me,” he admitted. “Who was it?”

I told Montgomery that it was Paul Molitor, whom he faced 30 times, allowing just seven hits, all of them singles.

“Oh, Molly. There you go,” responded Montgomery, “Molly was the type of hitter who was never going to be easy. He had the ability to really wait on pitches. He was basically bat-to-ball, and his bat-to-ball skills were incredible. There were honestly times when I thought the pitch was in the catcher’s mitt, and the next thing I knew I was watching our right fielder chasing the ball down the line. Molly’s bat was that fast.

“I think I did pretty well against him,“ Montgomery added. “But I do remember one game in the Metrodome. We were in extra innings, it was a bases-loaded situation, and I had him 0-2. I’d thrown Molly a couple of sliders away, and decided to come in with a fastball. He leaned into it for a walk-off hit-by-pitch.” Read the rest of this entry »

I try to be humble and open-minded as an analyst; there’s so much we don’t or can’t know at the time a player signs with a team. And the future? She is as capricious as she is mean-spirited. Nothing is guaranteed.

So I look at the Padres’ busy Presidents’ Day weekend — in which they signed Nick Castellanos, Griffin Canning, Germán Márquez, Walker Buehler, and Ty France — and think to myself: I don’t know for a fact that A.J. Preller doesn’t have a bunch of European polymaths in the basement of Petco Park developing a time machine. That might sound farfetched, but “stick a bunch of smart guys under a stadium and see what happens” is literally how we got the world’s first working nuclear reactor. If Preller turns out to be the General Leslie Groves of time travel, he’ll have earned his contract extension and then some.

If Preller can retrieve previous versions of these players from the ethers of subspace, we’ll look back on this weekend (or forward, considering we have the ability to move through time in this hypothetical) as a definitive one in the 2026 NL West race.

Assuming no paradigm-shifting technology is to come, this seems OK. Read the rest of this entry »