Tyler O’Neill didn’t take long to adapt to a new team. Traded to the Red Sox in December after spending six years with the Cardinals, O’Neill claimed sole possession of a major league record by homering on Opening Day for the fifth straight season. As we approach the two-week mark of the season — yes, it’s early — he finds himself atop major leaderboards and has helped Boston get off to a 7-4 start.

On Tuesday at Fenway Park, O’Neill launched a towering solo shot over the Green Monster off Orioles ace Corbin Burnes to put the Red Sox up 1-0 in the first inning:

The Statcast-estimated distance of 413 feet made that O’Neill’s longest of this season so far. It was his sixth homer, momentarily moving him out of a tie with Mookie Betts, Marcell Ozuna, and Mike Trout, though Trout countered with his sixth later on Tuesday night. Nonetheless, O’Neill has matched Fred Lynn’s hot 1979 start for the most homers by a Red Sox player in the team’s first 11 games of a season, doing so while making just nine starts and a pinch-hitting appearance. By comparison, last season O’Neill didn’t hit his sixth home run until August 11, and finished with just nine in 72 games.

O’Neill began the season by homering off Mariners reliever Cody Bolton on Opening Day in Seattle. In doing so, he broke a tie with Yogi Berra (1955–58), Gary Carter (1977–80) and Todd Hundley (1994–97) for the most consecutive Opening Day games with a home run. (And you thought you were glad baseball was back!) He closed out the Seattle series with a homer off Bryce Miller on March 31, took the Angels’ Griffin Canning and José Soriano deep on April 5, then added a dinger against Chase Silseth on April 7.

Unfortunately for the Red Sox, O’Neill’s blast on Tuesday was their only run of the day; they lost 7-1. And oddly enough, the 28-year-old left fielder hasn’t driven in anyone else despite his six home runs, which is more a commentary on his teammates than his own failings; he’s 1-for-3 with a pair of walks with runners in scoring position. Regardless of his RBI total, he’s swinging a very hot bat overall, hitting .344/.488/.906. It’s not every day you’re miles ahead of two future Hall of Famers for the major league lead in key categories, so we’ll note that his slugging percentage is 126 points ahead of the second-ranked Trout, and his 276 wRC+ is 32 points ahead of the second-ranked Betts. Meanwhile his on-base percentage merely leads the American League.

Of course, O’Neill has played just 10 games, the first nine of them against the Mariners, A’s, and Angels — all on the road — and there’s only so much we can take from that, but the number one thing is that he’s healthy, and that’s a big one, because save for his monster 2021 season and his brawny physique (“listed at 5-foot-11 and 200 pounds, of which about 198 pounds is biceps and quads,” wrote Michael Baumann), injuries have largely defined his career.

Drafted by the Mariners out of a British Columbia high school in the third round in 2013, O’Neill became a Cardinal in the Marco Gonzales trade four years later. He debuted in the majors on April 19, 2018, but spent much of that season and the next one bouncing back and forth between Triple-A and the majors, with five (!) trips to the injured list thrown in for good measure. After spending all of 2020 in the majors and on the active roster — and even winning his first Gold Glove, but hitting a miserable .173/.261/.360 — he finally got something close to a full-length season under his belt in 2021, hitting .286/.352/560 (143 wRC+) with 34 homers, 15 steals, and 5.3 WAR in just 136 games, but accompanying that with two more trips to the IL. He added a second Gold Glove that year, and finished eighth in the NL MVP voting, but since then he hasn’t come close to replicating that season, with injuries limiting him to just 168 games, 23 homers, a 98 wRC+ and 2.0 WAR across 2022–23, another two-year span that included five trips to the IL:

Thus the 28-year-old O’Neill entered this season having played more than 100 games in a major league season just once, and more than 72 just twice. Between his injuries, a crowded field of alternatives, his increasing price tag, and a spat with manager Oliver Marmol — who publicly questioned O’Neill’s effort running the bases during a heavy rain last April 4 in St. Louis, calling his effort “unacceptable” — O’Neill fell out of favor in St. Louis. On December 8, the Cardinals traded the pending free agent to the Red Sox in exchange for a pair of righty relievers, Nick Robertson and Victor Santos.

So far, the change of scenery seems to agree with him, though it’s worth noting that Tuesday’s game was his first at Fenway with the Red Sox. One game, one homer? That’s a pretty good rate!

In light of O’Neill’s long history of leg woes, it’s worth pointing out that as of now he’s hitting the ball harder than in the past two seasons. I present these stats while acknowledging that we don’t have enough data to draw strong conclusions about what’s happening yet; this is as much about his decline from 2021 as it is his torrid start:

Bear in mind that, as Baseball Prospectus’ Russell Carlton has noted, exit velocity stabilizes around 40 batted ball events, and barrel rate at 50 BBE, while groundball, fly ball, and hard-hit rates do so at 80 BBE. Within this small sample, this year’s exit velo and barrel rate at least look more like 2021 than ’22 or ’23. On a rolling basis of 25 plate appearances, both his xSLG and xwOBA show that his season-opening hot streak resembles only two or three stretches from the past two seasons, while he had a handful of such stretches in 2021:

The other thing to note about O’Neill is how much he’s tightened his approach so far. He’s a guy with a lot of swing-and-miss in his game, so much so that even as he ranked no. 61 on our Top 100 Prospects list in 2018, he had 30/40 grades (present/future) on his hit tool, and from 2018–23, he struck out 30% of the time, seventh among hitters with at least 1,500 PA in that span. Production-wise, he’s near the upper end among guys with strikeout rates in that neighborhood; of the hitters with the 30 highest strikeout rates over at least 1,000 PA within that span — everybody from 28.8% up — his 111 wRC+ ranks fourth, behind only Luke Voit (123), Giancarlo Stanton (122), and Teoscar Hernández (117).

Entering this season, O’Neill had swung at 72.5% of pitches within the strike zone, including 71% last year; so far this year, he’s cut that down to 50.8%. Similarly, his overall swing rate of 48.1% entering this year (44.9% last year) is down to 36%. His swinging strike rate of 15.4% (11.2% last year) is way down to 6.4%, and his strikeout rate, which was 25.2% last year, is at 19.5%. Mind you, none of these stats have stabilized — swing rate takes about 50 PA (he’s at 41) and strikeout rate requires roughly 60 PA — but those are at least promising trends.

We’re obviously still early enough in the season that any trend could be a mirage, a two-week heater or skid that might not merit closer scrutiny if it were located in mid-June or the dog days of August. Still, when combined with his hot streak, the health and change-of-scenery aspects of O’Neill’s situation are at least worth keeping an eye on. He’s not going to continue slugging .906, but for a team whose outfielders entered this season ranking 22nd in the majors with a combined 96 wRC+ since 2020 — i.e., the post-Betts era — this counts as a welcome development.

How would the Norfolk Tides do if they played in the majors? That might sound like an odd question, but it’s one that I’ve been asked four times in the last week. It even came up on Reddit. What’s driving this curiosity isn’t a sudden surge in rabid Tides fandom, but rather the heavy concentration of offensive talent the Orioles have in Norfolk, which until today, included one of the favorites for AL Rookie of the Year, Jackson Holliday. And since I’m one of a handful people with the exact tools of nerdery to answer this query, I couldn’t let it go unanswered. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t really have strong opinions about the AL Central this year, either aesthetically or competitively. I picked the Tigers to win the division because I like their young pitchers, I had to pick someone, and I didn’t want to just choose the same 12 teams that made the playoffs last year. But if the Twins or Guardians, or even the Royals finished first, I wouldn’t be unduly surprised.

Mostly, I want to go the entire season without having to watch Byron Buxton leave the field on a gurney, for much the same reason I’d like to visit the Grand Canyon before I die. I’ve never actually seen it, but I’ve heard it’s wonderful. Apart from that, I’ve got an open mind.

Even so, the first two weeks of the season have brought some remarkable results. Stephen Vogt now has a better winning percentage than any manager in MLB history (minimum 10 games), as the Guardians jumped out to an 8-3 start. The Tigers and Royals are right behind, and Kansas City has had one of the best rotations in the league so far.

These three teams have one thing in common, other than their division: They’ve all played the White Sox. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cincinnati Reds. 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 »

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.

Finally, after what felt like the longest less than two weeks of our lives, the moment has arrived: The Baltimore Orioles are calling up shortstop Jackson Holliday, the top prospect in baseball. He will make his MLB debut with the Orioles as soon as Wednesday, sliding in at second base because Baltimore already has Gunnar Henderson, another former no. 1 overall prospect, at shortstop.

The 20-year-old Holliday exceeded even the rosiest of expectations in spring training, hitting .311/.354/.600 with two home runs in 48 plate appearances. But he didn’t make the Opening Day roster despite all that, with general manager Mike Elias citing Holliday’s performance against lefties in the minors and his need to further acclimate to the keystone as reasons to delay his big league career. But, with Holliday off to a bonkers start at Triple-A (.333/.482/.605 with a 189 wRC+) and the Orioles, at 6-4, in need of a jolt, now was the right time to bring him up.

Like both Adley Rutschman and Henderson before him, Holliday is great at everything but perhaps not truly elite at anything. No, he doesn’t have the raw power or speed of Wyatt Langford, the American League’s other tantalizing rookie, but Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin grade Holliday as a future five-tool star with plenty of development still ahead of him.

Ben Clemens wrote that it would be the wrong decision for Baltimore to keep Holliday down past the Super Two deadline (typically 30 or so days into the season), not only because it would be a bad-faith gesture to Holliday, but also because it would be a terrible baseball move. With the Orioles’ offense looking more good than great in the early going, they’re making the right choice to call him up now: Holliday is simply better than the players he’s replacing; Jorge Mateo is best used as a super-utility man and Ramón Urías has struggled to start the season. Moreover, the O’s had little service-time incentive to keep him stashed in the minors; if he wins the AL Rookie of the Year award, they will be rewarded with an additional draft pick and Holliday will receive a full year of service, no matter how long he’s on the big league roster. Assuming he’s ready for the majors, the Orioles stand to benefit more from having him on the roster for as long as possible.

So now, and apologies for what you’re about to read… What a bright time, it’s the right time to call up Holliday.

Blake Snell Will Be Fine

From a results standpoint, Blake Snell’s Giants debut was not a good one. Facing the Nationals at home on Monday, he allowed three runs on three hits and two walks while striking out five, and it took him 72 pitches to get through three innings. But with his late signing, lack of a true spring training, and relatively quick ramp-up, San Francisco should consider the start a muted success. Sure, the Giants lost 8-1, but Snell got through the outing without injury — something that is hardly a guarantee for any pitcher, especially so far this season — and he should be built up for about 90 or so pitches his next time around. Overall, that’s encouraging.

Besides, it wasn’t all bad when you take a look under the hood. Snell’s stuff didn’t look too far off from the arsenal that won him his second Cy Young award last year. As you’d expect, his average velocity for all four of his pitches was down, but none alarmingly so: His fastball dipped just 0.1 mph, while his slider had the biggest velocity drop, at 1.1 mph. As a result, his spin rates also decreased, but again, this shouldn’t be concerning.

Additionally, Snell got 11 misses on 25 swings (44%), and 33% of his pitches resulted in either a called strike or a whiff; both rates were higher than his marks from last year. The quality of contact against him was anemic as well, with the seven balls in play averaging an exit velocity of just 80 mph. This is who Snell is: an elite contact suppressor and whiff-inducer who will more often than not run into high pitch counts because he avoids the middle of the plate.

As recently as a month ago, I was lamenting the state of the Giants rotation, but things are looking up now. Snell joins Logan Webb to give them a formidable frontline duo, one that is as strong as any other in baseball. Meanwhile, their decision to convert offseason acquisition Jordan Hicks into a starter has gone better than anyone could’ve expected, and they also have top prospect Kyle Harrison. And let’s not forget that San Francisco’s staff has more reinforcements on the way. Alex Cobb was initially on track to return from offseason hip surgery ahead of schedule, perhaps as soon as sometime this month, before he suffered a mild flexor strain; the setback will keep him out until early May. Lefty Robbie Ray, the 2021 AL Cy Young winner, could make at least a handful of late-season starts once he’s back from Tommy John surgery; and Tristan Beck and Sean Hjelle could be factors as well.

To be clear, this team still has flaws — its offense has been one of the worst in the National League and its relievers collectively were below replacement level entering Tuesday — but Snell and the starting staff will be just fine.

The Free-Swinging Giancarlo Stanton

I’m confident in saying Snell is the same player he was at last season’s peak, but I have no idea how to evaluate Giancarlo Stanton, the most enigmatic player in baseball. He is still hitting the crap out of the ball despite overhauling his conditioning in the offseason and coming to camp noticeably slimmer, and his surface-level numbers so far are good: .250/.268/.550 with three home runs and a 134 wRC+.

But as the OBP foreshadows, Stanton’s plate discipline has eroded, and I’m just not sure he can make this work. He’s chasing 45.7% of the pitches he sees outside the zone, which is the worst rate of his career by 15 points. His contact rate is also down, and his overall swing percentage is above 50% for the first time in his career. Stanton has always been streaky, but usually his plate discipline is indicative of where his results will be.

The concern here is that this solid start is nothing more than luck, that Stanton is flailing but essentially running into a few homers with guesswork. If that’s the case, it might be wise for pitchers to stop throwing him anything near the zone to see if he’ll keep chasing. In the meantime, it’s too soon to know what to make of Stanton.

The 40-Year-Old Legend

I really thought it might be curtains on Jesse Chavez’s career when he got rocked in his first spring training outing, and I really, really thought it was when the White Sox released him last month. After all, if he couldn’t crack the bullpen that sure looked like it was going to be the worst in baseball, whose would he join?

Well, of course, I discounted both the Braves connection and his apparent comfort pitching in Atlanta. Soon after being released, Chavez signed a minor league deal, and later had his contract selected to give him a spot on the Opening Day roster. And as he’s done whenever he’s worn an Atlanta uniform, he’s piling up outs.

The 40-year-old has allowed just one run in 6.1 innings across three appearances, helping to save the rest of the bullpen in each outing. Indeed, he’s still kicking in what’s set to be his last season, all while pitching with guile and a funky arm action (and wearing sunglasses no matter the lighting or time of day). Each outing brings him closer to retirement, but I’m convinced Chavez’s vibes will live forever.

Well, That Didn’t Last Long

Some quick finality on the Julio Teheran signing, which I wrote about on Friday: He was DFA’d after just one start, in which his former Braves squad trounced him for four runs on just eight outs, with six hits and a couple of walks to boot.

We’ve since learned that his $2.5 million contract is not, in fact, for the full $2.5 million, but that it’s rather a split contract that pays him at that rate in the majors but only $150,000 in the minors. Still, the MLB split makes it implausible that anyone claims him, and it also makes it a near-guarantee that he accepts an outright assignment to Triple-A, since he’d be forfeiting his right to earn that hefty rate if he’s needed back in the bigs again.

A month after signing starting pitcher Brayan Bello to a six-year extension, the Boston Red Sox are at it again, this time extending rookie center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela on an eight-year deal worth $50 million. If Rafaela sticks in the majors long enough this season to earn a year of service time, this extension will prolong his free agent eligibility for two years; either way, he’ll be paid a guaranteed salary through the 2031 season.

How you feel about Rafaela comes down to just what you think about his defense. Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin rated Rafaela as the only prospect on THE BOARD last year with a 70 present value for defense and the only one with a future value of 80. They were hardly alone in their praise for his glove, either, as other outlets such as Baseball Prospectus and MLB Pipeline also gave complimentary reviews to his leathercraft.

While prospect writers have occasionally missed on the eventual defensive performance of prospects – Gregory Polanco comes to mind – Rafaela certainly hasn’t shown anything in his limited time in the majors that refutes these views. Measuring minor league defense, as opposed to viewing it, is fraught with obvious peril, but the defensive estimates that ZiPS uses for minor leaguers also love his glove. ZiPS uses a Total Zone-esque measure from Gameday hit locations, similar to Sean Smith’s methodology from nearly 15 years ago. Yes, we’d prefer to have something like OAA or DRS or even UZR for minor leaguers publicly available, but we don’t, so we have to generally be more conservative about conclusions drawn from the data. But for what it’s worth, these estimates, which I call zDEF, had Rafaela as an elite defensive center fielder in the minors in 2023.

Incidentally, zDEF had Rafaela at +3 as a shortstop total for his minor league career, so if the circumstances warranted it, it wouldn’t necessarily be the craziest thing to see him follow in the footsteps of another former Red Sox prospect, Mookie Betts, and move back to shortstop at some point, though that certainly is not why Boston signed Rafaela long term.

Let’s run the eight-year ZiPS for Rafaela.

All told, ZiPS would happily offer him an eight-year, $67 million — $17 million more than what the Red Sox gave him.

One thing to take into consideration: So long as Rafaela’s glove is excellent, he doesn’t need to take a big offensive step forward to be worth his contract. ZiPS has Rafaela hitting for a skosh more power, enough to get his OPS+ and wRC+ into the 100 range during his peak years, but not sufficient to make him a superstar. As a result, his projections keep him in the solidly above-average territory – he’ll likely have an All-Star appearance or two during an up year – but comfortably below star status. These offensive numbers make him slightly better offensively than the inevitable comp given for him, Jackie Bradley Jr., who put up a 93 OPS+ over parts of eight seasons in Boston and was a few runs better defensively than Rafaela’s projections. Suffice it to say, if ZiPS’s natural conservatism with minor league defensive numbers ends up lowballing Rafaela, he’d be a steal at this price and put up WAR numbers in the range of Kevin Kiermaier’s best years.

As an offensive player, Rafaela remains a work in progress. In nine games this season entering Tuesday, he’s hitting .233/.286/.400 with two triples and an 85 wRC+. He’s actually gotten better at making contact, going from a 69% contact rate at Triple-A last year to 73% in the majors so far. Admittedly, this improvement has come in a small sample — he’s made just 124 big league plate appearances combined between his 2023 late-season debut (72.1% contact in 89 PA) and this year (76.3% in his 35 PA) — but it is still encouraging.

That said, he remains far too aggressive at the plate, especially when you consider his specific profile as a hitter. Unlike his teammate Rafael Devers, who also swings at a pretty high rate of pitches out of the zone, Rafaela doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard; Devers has power to spare, so even though he doesn’t make as much hard contact on pitches out of the zone — his average exit velocity drops to 85.5 mph, down from 94.9 mph on in-zone pitches — he can still do damage. Rafaela doesn’t have that luxury. Instead, he is a speedster (ranking 28th in sprint speed this season among 202 qualified players) who plays his home games at Fenway Park, one of baseball’s best parks for batting average. He should be incentivized to have a more contact-oriented game than most other batters. His contact skills appear to be improving, but he won’t get the most out of his game if he keeps chasing pitches that’s he unlikely to hit.

The Betts trade and the departure of Xander Bogaerts are still, rightfully, pain points for Boston fans. But since then, the Red Sox seem to be making a better effort to retain the players they develop, first with the Devers extension in January 2023 and now with Bello and Rafaela. Ultimately, winning is the only thing that will make things better in Boston. Keeping Rafaela in town should be an important step toward that.

It’s been a hot start to the 2024 season for the Boston Red Sox. They started the season with a 10-game road trip to the West Coast and arrived home Monday at 7-3 after a four-game split in Seattle, a three-game sweep in what will likely be their final trip to play the A’s in Oakland, and a 2-1 series win over the Angels. While Boston hasn’t exactly met the highest of competition yet — this week’s home-opening series with Baltimore should be a serious test — the Sox entered Tuesday with the second-best run differential in the majors, at +26. Aside from the Trevor Story’s injury, which as Jon Becker explained yesterday is going to test Boston’s uninspiring middle infield depth, it’s been an encouraging first two weeks for Alex Cora’s club.

Somewhat unexpectedly, pitching has been the story of Boston’s early success, after the Red Sox redesigned their pitching infrastructure over the offseason. In this regard, two of the most important additions to the club are not current players but former big league pitchers: Craig Breslow, who replaced Chaim Bloom as the team’s chief baseball officer, and Andrew Bailey, the new pitching coach. After pitching as a reliever for 12 years in the majors, including parts of five seasons with the Red Sox, Breslow spent five years in the Cubs’ front office working to overhaul their pitching program. One of Breslow’s first moves was to hire Bailey, his former Red Sox teammate. Bailey, a two-time All-Star and the 2009 American League Rookie of the Year, came over from the Giants, where he held the same role and helped to develop the likes of Logan Webb, Kevin Gausman, and Carlos Rodón into some of baseball’s top pitchers recent years. Boston also hired Justin Willard to a role it titled “director of pitching.”

Entering Tuesday, Red Sox pitchers lead the majors with a 1.49 ERA, a 2.92 FIP, a 3.08 xFIP, 10.49 strikeouts per nine, and 2.4 WAR. Two times through the rotation, Tanner Houck hasn’t allowed a run, and Nick Pivetta, Kutter Crawford, and Garrett Whitlock have allowed one earned run each. The bullpen has supported this rotation capably, too — in 37.1 innings, Boston relievers rank second in baseball with 0.8 WAR, third with a 1.45 ERA and 3.40 xFIP, and fourth with a 3.18 FIP. All of this from a staff that features mostly the same members from a group that struggled last season. It’s too early to know for sure if 2024 will be any different, but this is an auspicious start. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2022, Jordan Hicks briefly converted from relieving to starting for the Cardinals. The experiment didn’t go particularly well. He made eight starts and lasted a combined 26.1 innings with an ERA of 5.47. He walked nearly 20% of the batters he faced, barely struck anyone out, and seemed to struggle to adjust from his old role. He threw sinkers or sliders 94% of the time, didn’t dial down his velocity much, and looked exactly how you’d expect a closer cosplaying as a starter to look. So much for that experiment; he promptly returned to late-inning duty.

When the Giants signed Hicks this offseason, rumors of his return to the starting ranks bubbled up, but I didn’t believe it. After all, we’d already seen this exact experiment before. But fast forward to today, and Hicks looks like a revelation. Through two starts, he’s thrown 12 innings and allowed a single earned run. His strikeout rate has barely budged from his career average, and he’s only issued two free bases (one walk, one HBP). It’s a remarkable turnaround, and one that I can’t help but dive into. How has he done it? Read the rest of this entry »

I think Mitch Williams deserves at least some of the blame.

See, I’ve been contributing to ranked lists of ordered baseball players for most of my adult life, and in general, people like to see their favorite team ranked highly. Baseball fans are pretty solipsistic, like dog owners, and struggle to imagine a world in which their special attachment to a particular thing is not shared by every sapient being on the planet. How dare you say Clayton Kershaw is better than Aaron Harang, and other salutations.

When our positional power rankings declared the Phillies to have the best bullpen in baseball two weeks ago, I don’t want to say Phillies fans reacted badly. (Not least because I’m the last person on Earth who wants Phillies fans to be perceived as a monolith, to be judged by their noisiest members.) Rather than hostility, it was more like the bemused skepticism with which one greets a man who knocks on your door trying to sell you solar panels. Sure, it sounds nice… but what’s the catch? Read the rest of this entry »

If last week’s news that Eury Pérez would need Tommy John surgery was bad, Saturday was a whole lot worse. Within a span of five hours, the baseball world learned that the Guardians’ Shane Bieber, the Yankees’ Jonathan Loáisiga, and the Braves’ Spencer Strider have all incurred significant damage to their ulnar collateral ligaments, with Bieber headed for Tommy John surgery, Loáisiga set to undergo season-ending surgery as well, and Strider headed to see Dr. Keith Meister, the orthopedic surgeon who will perform the surgeries of the other two.

The losses of those pitchers is a triple bummer, not just for them and their respective teams — each of which leads its division, incidentally — and fans, but for the sport in general. Underscoring the seriousness of the issue, by the end of Saturday both the players’ union and Major League Baseball traded volleys regarding the impact of the introduction of the pitch clock on pitcher injuries in general.

Bieber, a two-time All-Star, won the AL Cy Young award and the pitchers’ Triple Crown during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but missed significant time in two out of the past three years due to injuries. In 2021 he was limited to 16 starts due to a strain of his subscapularis, the largest of the four muscles that make up the rotator cuff, and last year he made just 21 starts, missing 10 weeks due to elbow inflammation. He had pitched very well this season, with a pair of scoreless six-inning outings, each totaling just 83 pitches. He struck out 11 A’s in Oakland on Opening Day and then nine Mariners (without a single walk) in Seattle on April 2.

Bieber experienced more soreness than usual while recovering from the Opening Day start, but the 29-year-old righty and the team decided to proceed without extra rest, according to MLB.com’s Mandy Bell, who wrote, “Bieber wanted to see if he could push through this, considering he hadn’t felt any pain in Spring Training.”

The discomfort persisted during Bieber’s second start, after which the team ordered additional testing, “which revealed the injury to the same ligament he had problems with last year,” wrote Bell. If I’m not mistaken, that last bit of information is new, as previous reports of last year’s injury did not specify as to the inflammation’s cause. “He really put in a ton of work this winter and throughout spring training, and we all felt he was on a good path to stay healthy and contribute for the balance of the season,” said president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti on a Zoom call with reporters. Antonetti additionally lauded the pitcher’s “sheer toughness and grit” in maintaining a high level of performance, while manager Stephen Vogt sounded a similar note in saying, “The amount of work that this guy’s put in over the last few years, the things that he’s pitched through, that’s a testament to who he is.” But those supportive statements raise the question of whether this juncture could have been avoided had Bieber taken a longer time to heal from the damage found last summer, as teammate Triston McKenzie did. Missing from that comparison, however, is information regarding the severity of the two pitchers’ tears, details to which we’re not privy.

As a pending free agent, Bieber is in a tough spot, as he’ll enter the market under a cloud of uncertainty, likely cutting into a payday that’s ceiling has already been reduced by his previous outages. As for the Guardians, their remaining rotation looks so shaky that it ranks 27th in projected WAR via our Depth Charts, and their Playoff Odds have decreased since Opening Day (from 33.5% to 32%) despite the 7-2 start that has put them atop the AL Central.

The 26-year-old McKenzie, who was limited to four starts last season by a teres major strain as well as his UCL sprain, was rocked for five runs (four earned) in 3.1 innings in his first outing on Monday against the Mariners. His four-seam fastball averaged just 90.5 mph, down two miles per hour from 2022, when he was fully healthy. Carlos Carrasco, now 37, is coming off a 6.80 ERA in 20 starts with the Mets. Both Tanner Bibee, a 25-year-old righty, and Logan Allen, a 25-year-old lefty, are coming off strong rookie seasons and have pitched well in the early going, but Gavin Williams, a 24-year-old righty who posted a 3.29 ERA and 4.05 FIP in 16 starts as a rookie last year, began the year on the injured list due to elbow inflammation himself and has not yet been cleared to begin a rehab assignment. Out on rehab assignments are 25-year-old righty Xzavion Curry, and 32-year-old righty Ben Lively, both of whom were sidelined by a respiratory virus during spring training. Both split time between starting and relieving last year but turned in ERAs and FIPs over 5.00, the former with the Guardians, the latter with the Reds. Joey Cantillo, their top upper level pitching prospect, is out for 8-10 weeks with a left hamstring strain.

As for the 29-year-old Loáisiga, he’s been so beset by injuries throughout his career — including Tommy John surgery in 2016 — that he’s thrown 50 innings in a major league season just once (70.2 in 2021) and has totaled 50 innings between the majors and minors just two other times, in 2018 (80.2, mostly as a starter) and ’22 (50 exactly). He was limited to 17.2 innings last year due to in-season surgery to remove a bone spur in his elbow, then less than five weeks after returning was sidelined by inflammation in the joint. Three appearances into this season, he was diagnosed with a flexor strain and a partially torn UCL, though based upon the reporting, it sounds as though he’s a candidate for the internal brace procedure that requires less recovery time. Via MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch:

Meister’s initial reading of an MRI performed on Thursday in New York suggests that Loáisiga could avoid undergoing what would be his second career Tommy John surgery, with the estimated recovery for Meister’s preferred procedure spanning 10-12 months.

It was Dr. Jeffrey Dugas who invented the internal brace procedure, in which collagen-coated FiberTape suture is used to anchor the damaged UCL, speeding up recovery by eliminating the time needed for a tendon to transform into a ligament. Meister has pioneered the combining of traditional Tommy John surgery with the use of the internal brace; when it’s referred to at all as different from traditional Tommy John, it’s as a “hybrid” procedure. It’s what Jacob deGrom had last year (with Meister performing the procedure), and it sounds like what Shohei Ohtani (who was operated on by Dr. Neal ElAttrache) underwent last fall as well. In a March 7 piece in the Dallas Morning News, Meister said he’s done over 300 hybrid surgeries since 2018, which suggests the distinctions are being blurred when we track such surgeries.

Regardless of the type of surgery, Loáisiga’s absence has dealt a significant blow to a bullpen that already looked considerably less formidable than in years past. After ranking third in the majors with 7.2 WAR in 2021 and fifth with 5.9 in ’22, the unit slipped to 16th (4.2 WAR) last year, and ranked 19th in our preseason positional power rankings; Yankees relievers are now down to 22nd. Beyond closer Clay Holmes and setup man Ian Hamilton, it’s a largely unfamiliar if not untested cast, featuring a pair of ex-Dodger southpaws (Victor González and Caleb Ferguson), a trio of righties with career ERAs above 5.00 (Nick Burdi, Dennis Santana, and Luke Weaver). Moreover, the 31-year-old Burdi has never thrown more than 8.2 innings in a major league season, and another righty, Jake Cousins, has just 55.2 career innings, 30 of which came in 2021. Maybe pitching coach Matt Blake and company can find some diamonds in the rough, and maybe the likes of Tommy Kahnle, Lou Trivino, and Scott Effross can recover from their various injuries and surgeries to provide help later this season, but this is a clear weakness for a team off to an 8-2 start.

Strider is coming off a stellar season — his first full one in the rotation — in which he led the NL in strikeouts (281), strikeout rate (36.5%), FIP (2.85), and wins (20) while making his first All-Star team and placing fourth in the Cy Young voting. After throwing five innings of two-run ball while striking out eight on Opening Day against the Phillies, he surrendered five runs in four innings against the Diamondbacks on Friday, then complained about elbow discomfort afterwards. The Braves sent the 25-year-old righty for an MRI, after which the team’s official Twitter account shared the bad news:

Spencer Strider today underwent an MRI that revealed damage to the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He will be further evaluated by Dr. Keith Meister in Arlington, TX, at a date yet to be determined.

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) April 6, 2024

Strider already underwent his first Tommy John surgery as a sophomore at Clemson in 2019. While it’s not a guarantee yet that he’ll need a second one, the Braves sound resigned to it, with manager Brian Snitker telling reporters, “The good news is he’s going to get whatever it is fixed and come back and continue to have a really good career.” Strider at least has security even if he’s never the same, having already signed a six-year, $75 million extension in October 2022, the largest pre-arbitration extension ever for a pitcher.

The Braves will certainly feel his loss. Of their remaining starters, 40-year-old righty Charlie Morton has been reliable and durable, taking the ball at least 30 times in each of the past three seasons, but 30-year-old lefty Max Fried was limited to 14 starts last year by hamstring and forearm strains as well as a blister on his index finger. Lefty Chris Sale, 35, missed 10 weeks last year due to a stress fracture in his scapula, which limited him to just 20 starts — nine more than he totaled over the three prior seasons combined while missing time due to Tommy John surgery and a stress fracture in his rib. Thirty-year-old righty Reynaldo López is starting again after spending nearly all of the past two seasons as a reliever. Twenty-four-year-old righty Bryce Elder was an All-Star last season but was optioned to Triple-A Gwinnett to start the year after a second-half fade and a rough spring. Prospects AJ Smith-Shawver, a 21-year-old righty, and Dylan Dodd, a 25-year-old lefty, are also at Gwinnett; the former was no. 63 on our Top 100 Prospects list. Ian Anderson and Huascar Ynoa are both recovering from Tommy John, the former from April 2023 and the latter from September ’22. One way or another, the Braves will cobble things together, but they can’t afford too much else to go wrong.

Saturday’s flood of UCL-related headlines followed a week that featured the bad news about Pérez as well as Tommy John surgery for A’s reliever Trevor Gott. On Saturday evening, Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark released a statement that targeted the pitch clock as the culprit for so many arm injuries:

Despite unanimous player opposition and significant concerns regarding health and safety, the Commissioner’s Office reduced the length of the pitch clock last December, just one season removed from imposing the most significant rule change in decades.

Since then, our concerns about the health impacts of reduced recovery time have only intensified.

The league’s unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset – the players.

The league quickly countered:

This statement ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries. Nobody wants to see pitchers get hurt in this game, which is why MLB is currently undergoing a significant comprehensive research study into the causes of this long-term increase, interviewing prominent medical experts across baseball which to date has been consistent with an independent analysis by Johns Hopkins University that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries. In fact, JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average. JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not.

Particularly in the wake of the recent in-house drama that resulted in a challenge to his leadership of the union, Clark’s statement is probably better understood as a political one than a scientific one. The majority of the players he represents are pitchers, and they may be looking for a target for their anger and fears regarding increased injury rates. It’s worth noting that those players — or at least the major leaguers who were part of the union when the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement was hammered out in March 2022 — agreed to the structure of the Joint Competition Committee, which contains six owners, four players, and one umpire; “unanimous” is more likely referring to those four players rather than the 6,000-plus the MLBPA now represents.

As the league’s statement notes, and as The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh reported last week, MLB has been conducting a comprehensive study of pitcher injuries since October, and once it’s done (perhaps later this year) “intends to form a task force that will make recommendations for protecting pitchers.” The group will “try to come up with some solutions and implement some solutions,” according to Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who as the biomechanics research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute and as an injury research adviser for MLB is one of the experts being consulted.

To varying degrees, Fleisig, Meister, ElAttrache and the now-retired Dr. James Andrews have all publicly pointed to the extra stress on arms induced by the quest for increased velocity, increased spin, and maximum effort as the primary causes of increased pitcher injury rates, a quest that starts in youth baseball, while players’ bodies are still developing. Leaguewide data from the pitch-tracking era particularly points to the way major league players and teams have chased velocity:

The average four-seam fastball velocity has consistently crept up by 0.1–0.2 mph per year, with a couple jumps of 0.3 mph; while it’s down thus far this year, velocities tend to increase once the weather warms up. The percentage of four-seamers 97 mph or higher more than tripled from 2008–23, and shot up 54% from 2019–23. The average spin rate for four-seamers increased by only about 2% from 2015 — the first year of Statcast — to ’23, and while the average spin rate for all breaking pitches combined increased by about 12% in that span, most of that jump was in the first two seasons. Those spin rates have been pretty consistent since then, but the total volume of breaking balls has increased.

The idea that the pitch clock could be contributing by making pitchers dial up to maximum intensity with less time to recover between pitches has intuitive appeal, but injury rates had already risen before the clock’s introduction last year. As Baseball Prospectus’ Derek Rhoads and Rob Mains noted, the total of 233 pitchers who landed on the injured list last year was about the same as in 2022 (226) and ’21 (243), up from ’19 (192). Likewise for the number of Tommy Johns as measured by year, starting with the day that pitchers and catchers report (as opposed to a calendar year): 28 for last season, compared to 26 for 2022, 31 for ’21, 27 for ’20, and 16 for ’19. In a study published last June, my colleague Dan Szymborski found no meaningful relationship in injury rates with regards to the pitchers whose pace increased the most from 2022 to ’23, at least to that point. The Hopkins study that MLB cited has yet to be published, though it’s hard to believe that the league hasn’t shared its preliminary findings with the union. Notably, Clark did not point to any study that produced a result that reflected his constituency’s concerns.

On the subject of velocity, the link between Strider’s high velo and the propensity for such pitchers to require Tommy John is hard to miss. Of the top 15 starting pitchers in terms of average four-seam fastball velocity from 2021–23, 10 have undergone at least one surgery to repair their UCLs, and Strider is in danger of becoming the fourth to need a second:

Some of those pitchers have had little trouble recovering and maintaining their elite velocities after their first such surgery, but as the sagas of deGrom and Ohtani illustrate, that hardly makes them immune from needing a second procedure. As the big contracts of so many of the pitchers above remind us, velocity gets pitchers paid, and so discouraging them from throwing at maximum effort with such frequency may be a tough sell, particularly when the next guy is willing to do so, damn the consequences.

This is all one big, thorny mess that won’t be solved overnight. The sad fact is that dozens or even hundreds more pitchers will be injured before we see if MLB can introduce meaningful steps to curb injury rates. In the meantime, teams will just turn to the next man up — and if he gets hurt, the next man up after him — to get by.