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.

I don’t love to evaluate teams just by watching them and feeling the vibes, but in deciding what to write about for this morning, I kept coming back to the feeling that the Giants have played a lot of ugly, soulless, lopsided losses. They’re not horrible overall, but they definitely haven’t been good, which puts them in a purgatory of sorts. Fortunately, we’ve got have a good encapsulation in statistical form to prove how disappointing they’ve been. Connor Grossman, a former Sports Illustrated baseball editor who writes “Giants Postcards” on Substack, noted something interesting in Tuesday’s newsletter: That the Giants are 1-20 in games when they give up four or more runs.

I hopped over to Stathead to get a look at how San Francisco compared to other teams in such games, and it’s certainly not a pretty picture. Entering play Tuesday, only seven teams have allowed at least four runs in a game more often than the Giants, and no other team has performed worse when they do. To be clear, these are hard games to win; only the Orioles are breaking even in such games, and the league as a whole is a ghastly 143-425, winning just over 25% of the time. But the Giants’ pitifulness in these situations is setting them further back than any other team; the lowly Marlins, Angels, White Sox, and Rockies are the only other teams with at least 20 losses when they allow more than three runs in a game, but they’ve won more than one of those games. The Giants, of course, had visions of contending this season. Instead, it looks like whatever they were seeing was a mirage.

Here’s the thing: It’s true that the San Francisco offense isn’t good, but it really isn’t bottom of the barrel, either. The problem isn’t so much that the Giants can’t score; it’s that they just can’t score enough runs when they need them. They are scoring 4.8 runs per game when their pitchers give up three or fewer runs, but they are averaging a putrid 2.9 runs in the games when they allow at least four.

San Francisco’s lineup, as it has been for the entirety of the Farhan Zaidi era, was constructed to have the whole be greater than the sum of its parts, even with the additions of everyday bats Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee, and Jorge Soler. Sure, these aren’t Gabe Kapler’s Giants with platoons seemingly all over the diamond, but the team still uses tandems at first base (LaMonte Wade Jr. and Wilmer Flores) and right field (Mike Yastrzemski and Austin Slater). This strategy could have worked, except Flores and Slater aren’t pulling their weight against lefties and the three new guys have all been somewhere between underwhelming and bad. That puts a lot of pressure on the pitchers to be perfect, and this rotation sure isn’t that, even with Logan Webb.

As if to provide further support that they can score, but only when they get good pitching, the Giants beat the Rockies on Tuesday night, 5-0. They’re now 15-1 in games when their pitchers allow no more than three runs.

Rhys Lightning Is Sparking With the Brewers

After missing all of last year recovering from ACL surgery, Rhys Hoskins signed a two-year, $34 million contract with the Brewers that affords him the opportunity to opt out at the end of this season. It’s too early to tell if he’ll decide to test free agency again this offseason, but so far, he’s fared quite well in his new digs.

Over 33 games, Hoskins is batting .218/.324/.437 (118 wRC+), down from his Phillies norm of .242/.353/.492 (126 wRC+) but still solid. Considering he just came back from a serious knee injury, it’s not surprising that he isn’t running well, both by the eye test and the statistics (his sprint speed is down 0.4 feet per second), or that he’s required more maintenance (15 DH days to 18 games at first base), but at the plate he’s been about as good as Milwaukee could’ve hoped.

Hoskins is a far more selective hitter this season, with a swing rate under 40% for the first time since 2019, and his 20.8% chase rate is the lowest it’s been since 2018, his first full year in the big leagues, according to Statcast. More interesting, though, is what happens when he actually does pull the trigger: He’s running the lowest in-zone contact rate of his career, yet he’s connecting more often than ever on pitches out of the zone. His 68.3% contact rate on pitches outside the zone is over six points above his previous career high and a staggering 10 points higher than it was in 2022.

While “hit fewer pitches inside the zone and make more contact outside of it” doesn’t seem like a sound strategy, it hasn’t affected Hoskins’ underlying numbers and may counterintuitively be helping them. The righty thumper’s xSLG and xwOBA are both markedly improved from 2022 and much more in line with his stronger 2021, and he’s also hitting fewer groundballs than at any point in his career. That’s important because the Brewers signed him to slug, not to try and beat out infield singles, and so far, slug is what he’s done. In Tuesday’s 6-5 win over the Royals, Hoskins hit his seventh home run over the season, tied for the most on the team.

Quick Hits

• The Cubs’ streak of scoreless starts ended on Tuesday when Craig Counsell extended Shota Imanaga to the eighth inning, only to watch him give up a two-run homer to Jurickson Profar that gave the Padres the lead. The Cubs came back and won, 3-2, on a Michael Busch walk-off home run to maintain their virtual tie with Milwaukee atop the NL Central.

• The Yankees pounded Justin Verlander for seven runs in their 10-3 win over the Astros on Tuesday. The highlight came when Giancarlo Stanton led off the fifth inning with a 118.8 mph home run; that’s the hardest ball hit off Verlander since at least 2015, when Statcast started measuring exit velocity.

Steven Kwan has been instrumental in helping the Guardians climb to the top of the AL Central and compile the league’s second-best record (23-12) and largest division lead (2.5 games). Unfortunately, the 26-year-old left fielder won’t be around to help them for awhile due to a hamstring strain, though if there’s a silver lining, the injury has opened the door for the debut of one of their top prospects, 23-year-old Kyle Manzardo.

Kwan felt tightness in his left hamstring and departed after the third inning in Saturday’s game against the Angels. During the inning, he had run into foul territory to make a basket catch on a Mickey Moniak fly ball, and afterwards, showed some discomfort:

Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Soto is a tricky player for me to write about, because the numbers speak for themselves — no literary flourish needed. Trying to get cute while writing about a guy performing miracles isn’t baseball blogging, it’s the Gospel of John.

Nevertheless, Soto is operating on such a level (he’s hitting .316/.421/.559 through the weekend — all stats are current through Sunday’s games) that it begs examination. Soto has the best batting eye of his generation; therefore, for him, every year is a walk year. But this season, specifically, is his final one before he hits the open market in search of a record long-term contract.

It’s been a complicated couple years for us Soto zealots. How can this player demand more money than the (deferral-adjusted) Shohei Ohtani deal? He’s never won an MVP and only finished in the top three once. He’s never recorded a 7-WAR season, never hit 40 home runs. He’s a bad defender, and in the past two seasons, he hit .242 and .275 respectively. If he’s such a uniquely valuable player, how come two teams gave up on him before he turned 25? Read the rest of this entry »

In the seventh inning of Sunday afternoon’s game in Houston, Bryce Miller left a sweeper over the inner third of the plate, and Jon Singleton didn’t miss it, hammering a towering two-run shot to right field that yielded a bat flip and gave the Astros a 4-3 lead. With that, the Mariners were stopped short of tying a major league record — a semi-obscure one, but an impressive one nonetheless: the most consecutive games with a starting pitcher allowing no more than two earned runs. The Mariners did rally to win 5-4, sending them to their sixth straight series victory and lifting their record to 19-15, enough to help them preserve their half-game lead over the Rangers (19-16) in the AL West.

The starters’ streak began back on April 10, when Logan Gilbert held the Blue Jays to one run in 7.2 innings, and extended to 21 games through Saturday. Most of the starts were exceptional, and for the stretch, the unit pitched to a 1.38 ERA and a 2.91 FIP, but two of those starts depended upon the earned/unearned run distinction to extend the streak, and two were short outings of four or fewer innings; one of those starts, Emerson Hancock’s clunker last Wednesday against the Braves, was both. Still, even including unearned runs, their 1.86 runs allowed per nine allowed during the streak is impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

A.J. Preller must have been getting itchy. It’s too early in the season for substantial trades; they generally happen before the start of the year or when the calendar has flipped to July. Teams that thought they were going for it usually haven’t accumulated enough evidence to change that view, and even if they want to trade someone, the potential of finding a higher bidder closer to the deadline makes sellers hesitant to move. But the Marlins and Padres overcame those factors and linked up on a deal that sends Luis Arraez to San Diego for a sampler platter’s worth of prospects: Dillon Head, Jakob Marsee, Nathan Martorella, and Woo-Suk Go.

There’s a lot to unpack in this deal. We’ll start in San Diego and then head east, because the Padres’ side is more straightforward. It’s like this: the Padres had roughly eight batters they wanted to use every day. Luis Campusano is more journeyman than star, but the team seems comfortable with him at catcher. With Manny Machado back to playing the field after an injury limited him to DH to start the year, the infield is set. The outfield likely isn’t changing, either: Jurickson Profar looked like the weakest link before the season, but he’s been the team’s most productive player so far.

Their only plausible route to offensive improvement, then, is at DH. That’s great, though! You can play anyone at DH, more or less. But if you play an excellent defender there, you’re wasting that talent, and the Padres have one of the best defenses in baseball this season, so whoever they acquired probably wasn’t going to displace one of their regulars. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Oakland Athletics. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth 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 »

On April 28, the Mets walked off the Cardinals in the 11th inning. It was a huge moment, made even bigger because the embattled Mark Vientos delivered the knockout blow in just his second big league game after starting the season in the minors. That night, John DeMarsico, director of SNY’s Mets broadcasts, posted a video of the play that was shot from inside the production truck. It’s something he does occasionally, though this video had a twist: the audio from the triumphant final scene of Moneyball was overlaid on the broadcast.

Walk-Off: A behind-the-scenes featurette #Baseballiscinema pic.twitter.com/ZrgRleH9SB

— John DeMarsico (@JohnDeMarsico) April 29, 2024

DeMarsico is renowned for adding cinematic flourishes to SNY’s broadcasts, but when I watched this particular video — hearing dramatic music play as the voices in the truck worked together to decide what shot should come next — I was struck by the way DeMarsico is entrusted with telling the story of the game. SNY’s team is universally acknowledged to be one of the best in the business. At any given moment, DeMarsico can choose multiple shots that would look great and tell the viewer what is going on, but his job is bigger than that. His job is to use those images to craft a narrative. 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.

On Friday night, after a horrendous 9-24 start to the season, the Marlins waved the white flag barely a month into the campaign when they traded back-to-back batting champion Luis Arraez to the Padres for a quartet of prospects. Arraez almost certainly won’t be the last player Miami will swap for prospects this year as new president of baseball operations Peter Bendix looks to reset his beleaguered roster and build for the future.

Considering the team’s position, there are only two Marlins players who should be off limits to prospective trade partners, starting pitchers Eury Pérez and Sandy Alcantara, who are both out for the season after undergoing Tommy John surgery. Alcantara, who signed a five-year, $56 million extension after the 2021 season, should be ready for Opening Day, while Pérez will miss at least a couple months of next season, too.

Let’s take a look at some of the players the Marlins could deal between now and the July 30 deadline.

Jazz Chisholm Jr., CF

Few players in baseball are more entertaining than the lefty-swinging Jazz Chisholm Jr., who’s been viewed as a key piece for the Marlins since his 2021 rookie year. Back then, Chisholm was their starting second baseman, and he’s yet to play as many games as he did in that season, when he came to the plate 507 times over 124 games. Injuries limited him to 157 games over the past two years, but that full season’s worth of production across 2022 and 2023 offered a tantalizing glimpse of what he could offer if he could just stay on the field: .251/.312/.487 (116 wRC+) with 33 homers, 34 steals, and above-average defense at both second base and center field.

Chisholm’s 2024 hasn’t been great thus far (102 wRC+), but he’s stayed healthy and is taking walks more than ever, with a career-low strikeout rate to go with that more patient approach. Lefties have always given him fits in his career (66 wRC+), but he’s got plenty of utility as the strong side of a platoon in center, and teams may be open to moving him back to second base if that better fits their roster. The 26-year-old Chisholm is earning $2.625 million this year and isn’t a free agent until the conclusion of the 2026 season. Maybe those two years of club control beyond this season would make the Marlins hesitant to trade him, but dealing him now would also probably sweeten the return.

Best Fits: Phillies, Mariners, Royals, Guardians

Jesús Luzardo, SP

The Marlins made a savvy deal back in 2021, when they acquired lefty starter Jesús Luzardo from the A’s for 56 games of Starling Marte. Luzardo missed half the 2022 season with a forearm strain, but he was great in his 18 starts. Last year, the hard-throwing lefty broke out in a big way, posting a 3.58 ERA (3.55 FIP) in 178.2 innings and striking out 28% of the batters he faced.

Luzardo stumbled to start this season, with just 26 innings across his first five starts, allowing 19 runs (6.58 ERA), with his strikeout rate tumbling by four percentage points and his walk rate up above 11% before he hit the injured list with a strained flexor tendon on April 26. Typically, that diagnosis portends a long absence, but Luzardo made his first rehab start on Sunday, so his recovery seems to be progressing fairly swiftly, though there is no timetable yet for his return. Like Chisholm, Luzardo has two more years of club control after this one.

Best Fits: Dodgers, Rangers, Giants, Twins, Astros

Bryan De La Cruz, OF

Bryan De La Cruz hasn’t had a flashy career to date; he has a 99 wRC+ across his four seasons and hasn’t produced 1.0 WAR in any of them. But he’s always felt capable of more: In 2022, his xwOBA and sweet-spot percentage were both elite, with the latter being the best in baseball. His thump took a step back last year, but his sweet-spot percentage remained excellent. This year he’s trading ideal contact for hitting the ball harder; he’s barreling more balls than ever but his sweet-spot rate is down nine points.

It seems as if De La Cruz doesn’t exactly know what type of hitter he should be, with the constant fluctuations preventing a true breakout. He’s never been a good hitter, which limits his utility, but some of the stronger teams at hitting development could look to iron out some kinks with the hope that things will start to click for him. He’s not a free agent until the end of the 2027 season, but he seems as good as any player to benefit from a change of scenery.

Best Fits: Phillies, Rays, Mariners, Cardinals

Of course, the Marlins should look to deal away more than just these three players. The problem is many of their trade candidates are struggling — shortstop Tim Anderson, first baseman and DH Josh Bell, outfielder Jesús Sánchez, starting pitchers Trevor Rogers and Edward Cabrera, and reliever Anthony Bender — while others are injured: starter Braxton Garrett, corner infielder Jake Burger, and reliever A.J. Puk. Closer Tanner Scott is healthy and his 2.77 ERA is promising, but his peripherals (5.54 FIP, .194 BABIP, and a walk rate that is 3.2 percentage points higher than his strikeout rate) are bad enough to suppress the return package.

Some of these players probably will be traded, if for no reason other than to shed some payroll. Anderson, Bell, and Scott are all free agents after this season, so the Marlins should be willing to trade them for a can of beans come late July if they can’t get anything else for them. For the others, Miami can afford to hold onto them if the right deal doesn’t come to fruition before the deadline and look to trade them in the future.

…

Alek Manoah Looks Like Himself, for Better and Worse

On Sunday, Blue Jays righty Alek Manoah returned to a big league mound for the first time since August 10, finally making his way back after months beleaguered by ineffectiveness, injuries and mechanical issues.

The questions surrounding the sharp downturn of Manoah’s career won’t go away after a four-inning outing in which he threw 92 pitches, gave up seven runs, walked four batters, and hit another. Understandably, that performance will evoke far more memories of his troubling 2023 season than it will cause fans to think fondly back to his 2022, when he finished third in Cy Young voting. His command was shaky, featuring plenty of up-and-arm-side misses with his fastball:

That gave the Nationals a lot of easy takes; they offered at just 18% of pitches outside the strike zone, well below the league average of 31%. Batters did make less contact than league average on swings both inside and outside of the zone, but they didn’t do much swinging: Washington swung at only 36% of Manoah’s offerings, 10 percentage points below average.

The good news is Manoah’s velocity ticked up notably from last year, with his heater averaging 94.3 mph compared to 92.6 mph. But ultimately, if he wants to stick in the rotation and resurrect his career, he’ll have to make more competitive pitches; the stuff doesn’t matter if hitters can just wait it out and take their bases. Because the Blue Jays are expected to be without the injured Yariel Rodriguez and Bowden Francis for a while, Manoah should have ample opportunity to figure things out at the major league level.

Kyle Harrison was pitching for the Double-A Richmond Flying Squirrels when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in August 2022. Then a fast-rising prospect in the San Francisco Giants system, the now-22-year-old southpaw had broken down the early evolution of his arsenal for me prior to a game at Portland, Maine’s Hadlock Field. Fast forward to this past week, and we were reacquainting at a far-more-fabled venue. Harrison was preparing to take the mound at Fenway Park for his 14th big-league start, his seventh this season.

As I’m wont to do in such scenarios, I asked the dark-horse rookie-of-the-year candidate what’s changed since our 20-months-ago conversation. Not surprisingly, he’s continued to evolve.

“I’ve added a cutter, although I haven’t thrown it as much as I’d like to,” Harrison told me. “Other than that, it’s the same pitches. The slider has been feeling great, and the changeup is something that’s really come along for me; it’s a pitch I’ve been relying on a lot. I really hadn’t thrown it that much in the minors — it felt like I didn’t really have the control for it — but then all of a sudden it clicked. Now I’ve got three weapons, plus the cutter.”

Including his Thursday effort in Boston, Harrison has thrown his new cutter — Baseball Savant categorizes it as a slider — just six times all season. Which brings us to his other breaking ball. When we’d talked in Portland, the lefty called the pitch a sweepy slider. Savant categorizes it as a slurve.

What is it? Read the rest of this entry »

First base defense is complicated. It isn’t one of the most difficult positions, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own challenges. Players in the latter half of their careers who have lost athleticism sometimes adopt the position as their new home, which is interesting because it is much more difficult to learn a new position when you’re past your athletic prime. But because first base doesn’t require top tier athleticism, it’s not uncommon for that to happen. Bryce Harper’s case is a perfect example of this.

Between Philadelphia’s crowded outfield and its interest in keeping its star healthy as he ages through his 30s, first base became a viable option for the former MVP when the position opened up and he was returning from Tommy John surgery in record time. Last year, he handled it well — even if he at times ventured too far off the bag for grounders in the hole, as if he were back in right field trying to cut the ball off in the gap — given that he was learning the position on the fly.

It was a bet on Harper’s baseball skills and IQ that seems to have worked out well. His defensive metrics looked solid in 2023 (+3 OAA); of course, considering the small sample, we shouldn’t take these numbers as bond, but they were encouraging nonetheless. Now, with a full offseason of learning the position and a month’s worth of plays, we have a better idea of what his true talent is at the position. Later in this article, we’ll watch some video of Harper playing first to evaluate where he stands. But first, let’s take a look at the numbers.

So far in his first base career, Harper has a +6 OAA and a Success Rate Added between three and four percent. His OAA this season is +3, which is the highest among first basemen. Basically, the numbers indicated that Harper had a solid foundation already, and with more experience, he’s become one of the top defenders at his position.

For the rest of this piece, we’ll use video to break down Harper’s handling of three fundamental facets of the position: his footwork on groundballs that he takes unassisted, his feeds and feel for flipping to pitchers, and his opportunities to make outs at second. There are other aspects that go into first base defense — such as catching pickoff attempts, securing scoops, and receiving cutoffs before delivering relays — but I’m most interested in his skills fielding groundballs. With that said, let’s start by looking at grounders hit close enough to the bag for Harper to make an unassisted putout:

Unassisted Groundballs

Two things stick out to me right away: Harper is good at working from the ground up, and he almost always keeps his body moving in the right direction. Any shortstop would tell you that progressively moving your feet and body weight toward your target as you field the ball is crucial. The same premise holds for first baseman.

With a slow chopper, you have to stagger your feet to make sure you stay under control and don’t overplay the baseball and get a bad hop. When working toward the first base line, as Harper has done so well, you balance how hard the ball was hit with the angle you take to it; on harder hit balls, you put your body on the line to protect against a double, whereas when a deep chopper comes, you reorient your center of mass toward the bag to make sure you’re ready for a race with the runner or to throw to the pitcher. Harper looks very comfortable making these decisions. I snuck the liner from Matt Olson in there to show how quick he can be on his feet. Not every first baseman can move like that. Now, let’s move on to a more complicated task: flipping to the pitcher.

Flips to Pitcher

Harper has done well sticking to the fundamentals here. He has a rhythm established with Zack Wheeler in particular, but his execution of leading each pitcher to the bag is on point. He maintains composure throughout each of the throws, even when the batter-runner is a speedster like Elly De La Cruz. Urgency and pace are important aspects of fielding grounders at first because you can get caught in a foot race with a runner. But if you’re consistent with your delivery and have a good feel for speeding up your arm when necessary, there is no need to rush your feet.

I’m impressed by Harper’s ability to make plays moving to his right. He uses his right foot to plant or pivot very well. That has a lot to do with his athleticism. He gets into good positions to stay under the baseball and make reads with his hands. The next clips highlight that even more:

Potential Plays to Second

There are three different moves that you can make as a right-handed thrower when deciding to deliver a fire to second from the various first base positions (shallow, medium, deep) — you can pivot toward your throwing shoulder to square your body to the bag, you can spin toward your forehand and non-throwing shoulder to square your body, or you can make the throw on the run. Harper clearly has a feel those three moves.

On the grounder hit by Olson, Harper’s footwork is fantastic as he spins, turns, and throws, and his delivery is to the correct side of second base. Then on a similar grounder (the third play), he realizes he doesn’t have a throwing lane and decides to take the sure out at first. On the hard groundball from Mike Trout, Harper switches his feet very quickly (like a catcher would) and delivers the ball right on top of the bag. The only hiccup comes in the final play in the clip, when he gets the groundball near the outfield and decides to hold it instead of making a spinning throw to second. If he fires to second instead, the Phillies have had a shot at an inning-ending double play. This is something to keep your eyes on as Harper continues to develop at the position. It’s the longest throw a first baseman will make and requires a quick decision. He’s clearly comfortable making the spinning throw from a shallow depth, but this last piece will help him become more complete at the position.

In general, I’m impressed with how comfortable the Phillies slugger looks at his new position. His fundamentals are on point. He can pop off the bag quickly after holding a runner on and get his feet in check to move in any direction. Even when he makes a mistake, it’s not because he isn’t prepared with his feet. This might not be a Mookie Betts-level position switch, but it’s still worth appreciating.