About two months ago, pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, marking a ceremonial end to the winter and the beginning of a new season. But as players showed up to camp and exhibition games began a couple weeks later, two pitchers were notably absent.

Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, our fifth and sixth ranked free agents entering the offseason, each signed contracts dangerously close to the start of the season, with the latter coming off the market just two days prior to Opening Day. Both had to settle for much shorter-term deals than they were expecting, with combined guarantees undershooting our crowdsourced projections by $188 million.

As the first to sign, Snell was the first to make his debut, starting the Giants’ 11th game of the year after pitching in simulated games against his teammates. Montgomery reported to Triple-A, making two starts in Reno before being activated by the big club last Friday. His first start of the year, interestingly, came against the Giants and opposite Blake Snell, so it offered an early look at how this unconventional offseason might have impacted each pitcher.

Snell vs. Montgomery was an exciting matchup thanks to their track records of excellence and the intrigue surrounding their offseasons, but also one that came with many unknowns. How would Montgomery fare in his first major league action of the season? Would Snell bounce back after two consecutive poor outings? How much rust would each deal with after a month of ramp up time?

Snell’s top of the first inning was relatively uneventful; he used his slider and changeup to record three straight outs after a leadoff single. Next, it was Montgomery’s turn to face a Giants lineup stacked with right-handed platoon hitters like Austin Slater and Tom Murphy. Slater led off, and Montgomery’s first offering of the year was a sinker that clocked in at 91.4 mph, two ticks shy of last year’s average. He sat in that velocity band throughout the game, a symptom of the late start to his spring. Slater eventually grounded out on a curveball low in the zone, and the next two hitters were also retired on routine grounders.

Outside of being left-handed pitchers on short-term contracts, Snell and Montgomery have little in common, especially with respect to their pitching styles. Snell refuses to conform to the so-called strike zone, rapidly changing batters’ eye levels with fastballs above it and breaking balls below it. His brand of high-strikeout, high-walk baseball has netted him two Cy Young awards, though he ran a more pedestrian 96 ERA- across the four seasons separating them. Montgomery, on the other hand, prefers to live in the zone with his plus command and arsenal of downward-breaking pitches. He’s never reached the heights of Snell’s peak years, but has outproduced him by WAR over the past three years.

Snell pitched a clean second inning, capped off by a seven-pitch showdown against Gabriel Moreno. After falling behind in the count 3-1, he got Moreno to swing and miss below the zone, then foul off the next pitch to keep the count full. He threw two fastballs and four sliders to get here. So what did he do next?

This is an example of Snell at his best, the version that knows where each pitch is going even when not throwing strikes. Primed for a fastball or slider that would have ended up down the middle had it been aimed at the same spot out of the hand, Moreno went down on a curveball that dropped two feet more than any of Snell’s other pitches. Last season, Snell’s 310 swinging strikes on out-of-zone pitches ranked second in baseball, and most of them came on breaking balls that tunneled well with his fastball before falling off the table.

Unfortunately, Snell failed to execute this strategy for the rest of his start, as too many offerings leaked over the middle of the plate. In the third, a slider and changeup down the middle resulted in loud contact from Blaze Alexander and Ketel Marte. In the fourth, Alexander struck again, this time against the fastball. Snell allowed four more hits in the fifth before being pulled mid-inning, failing to complete five frames for the third consecutive start. The Diamondbacks collected nine hits, the most he’s allowed in a start since 2019.

Most of the hits Snell allowed were the result of the Diamondbacks capitalizing on pitches down the middle, which were uncharacteristically frequent from someone whose pitches tend to magnetize away from the zone. But in this three-start sample, Snell has been leaving more pitches over the heart of the plate, resulting in both more loud contact and fewer swinging strikes in the zone.

While Snell’s command certainly isn’t where it was last year, Montgomery had no such issues locating his pitches throughout his start. He landed an impressive 23 of his 30 sinkers in the strike zone, taking advantage of its high groundball rate; batters have slugged under .375 against in each of the past two seasons. With a strike-stealing machine in his arsenal, many matchups against Montgomery ended in either an early groundout or a pitcher-friendly count that allowed him to deploy his curveball and changeup, the latter of which earned four of his eight whiffs on the night. While he spiked a few curveballs in the dirt, he had excellent feel for locating his changeup, consistently landing it on the armside half of the plate.

Without his typical velocity, Montgomery struck out just three batters (one of which came on a pitch clock violation). Instead, he recorded outs by keeping his pitches away from barrels and limiting the quality of contact against him, tallying nine groundouts in six innings of work while allowing a hard-hit rate of just 32%. Aside from a Jorge Soler homer that marked the only blemish on Montgomery’s record, none of the other batted balls he allowed were particularly threatening; over two-thirds of them had an xBA below .200.

Another trend to watch from Montgomery’s start was his increased use of his changeup and curveball. He’s thrown his fastballs about half the time throughout his career, but he dropped that usage to about 40% in his first game with the Diamondbacks. This shift may simply be the result of good advance scouting — Giants’ right-handed hitters currently rank 28th in wOBA against non-fastballs — but it could also be part of Arizona’s teamwide shift toward more diverse arsenals, especially from its starting pitchers. This season, Merrill Kelly has added a slider to his kitchen-sink arsenal while Slade Cecconi is throwing far more splitters at the expense of his fastball. Montgomery’s curveball has been a successful out pitch and could potentially generate even more outs if he continues to throw it 30% of the time; during his career, batters have generated a pitiful .177/.209/.307 line against it.

Montgomery was removed from the game after six innings and 78 pitches, and Arizona’s offense teed off in the late innings of the game, which ultimately resulted in a 17-1 wallop. Both starting pitchers still have more ramping up to do at the big league level, with Montgomery working back to regular season velocity and Snell still searching for his command after three bad outings. That said, I think there’s reason to be optimistic about both pitchers. Even with an 11.57 ERA, Snell’s peripherals are nearly in line with last season’s numbers, and he tends to improve as the year goes on, with a career FIP nearly a run better in the second half of seasons. Montgomery showed off his advanced pitchability despite his diminished stuff, with a possible arsenal change that could lead to improvements.

If the Houston Astros were to sing a jovial song consisting of a list of their favorite things, April 2024 would definitely not make the cut. At 7-16, the Astros are looking up at everyone in the AL West, even the Oakland Athletics, a franchise that barely exists as a going concern in 2024. Cristian Javier’s injury adds another name to the injured list, and though he isn’t expected to miss a lot of time, his absence further depletes a struggling team that needs all the help it can get to climb its way out of a hole that keeps getting deeper.

How bad is a 7-16 start? Well, only two teams have ever overcome such a rough season-opening stretch to later make the postseason.

Only the 1914 Boston Braves had a worse start, going 4-18-1 over their first 23 games. It may be tempting to use that tale as inspiration, but the fact that their turnaround was enough to earn them the appellation of “Miracle” Braves reflects the improbability of the feat. Excluding the Astros, 103 teams have started a season with precisely seven wins in 23 games; the average finish for these teams was, pro-rated to 162 games, a 67-95 record.

But all is not doom and gloom. Almost 20% of these teams played at least .500 ball the rest of the way (18 of 103), and this looks a bit worse because of the simple fact that a lot more lousy teams start off 7-16 than good ones do. It doesn’t necessarily follow, then, that a team we believed to be a quality one will have a fate as bleak as what happened with the clubs we thought would be much worse. How often do teams that we expect to be good start off this slow? I’ve never gone back and re-projected whole leagues before I started running team projections in 2005 – though it is on my voluminous to-do list – but I do have nearly two decades of projections to look at. So, I took every team that stood at single-digit wins after 23 games and looked at how they were projected entering the season.

After chopping off the teams from 2020, since 23 games was a massive chunk of that season, we end up with 117 teams, including the Astros on seven occasions (though only one of those Houston clubs finished above .500). Seven of those 117 teams did go on to win 90 games, and not surprisingly, it was largely made up of teams projected to be good; those seven teams had an average preseason projection of 86.3 wins.

Let’s pivot back to the 103 teams that began the season with exactly seven wins in their first 23 games so we can figure out how they did after their wretched starts and compare their actual finishes to their projected ones. Collectively, these 103 teams had a .458 winning percentage after their 23-game starts, compared to their overall .469 winning percentage projected before the season. I also did a quick-and-dirty method to get every team’s in-season projection after game no. 23, and the projected winning percentage for the rest of the year was .460, barely above the .458 actual mark. I tested only ZiPS, but I expect other similarly calculated projection systems to have similar results.

So, what do the projections say about the Astros right now? I ran a full simulation after Sunday’s games were complete.

The Astros are hardly dead in the water and are helped out by the fact that the best teams in the AL West so far are still hanging right around .500. But it’s been enough to slash five projected wins from Houston’s preseason total and drop its playoff probability by about a third. In other words, after this awful start, the Astros are more likely than not to miss the postseason, according to ZiPS. The situations in which they make the playoffs are now largely upside scenarios rather than average ones. And that means the calendar is now an enemy.

How long can they afford to keep winning three out of every 10 games before their playoff hopes evaporate? To estimate this, I’ve continued giving the Astros a roster strength of .300 (projected winning percentage vs. a league-average team in a neutral park) and re-checking every five games.

At the rate the Astros are playing, they’re basically toast in five more weeks. Even playing .500 ball over this span carves off another meaty slice of their playoff probabilities (15.6% division, 31.6% postseason). Any shot they have at turning things around has to involve getting better pitching. The Astros are second in the league in on-base percentage and slugging percentage, and of the nine players with at least 50 plate appearances, seven of them have a wRC+ above 100, with three of them above 150. Alex Bregman (76 wRC+) will almost certainly get better, but I’m less confident about José Abreu, whose horrifying start (-32 wRC+) is even more abysmal than last year’s putrid April (45 wRC+).

Meanwhile, Astros starting pitchers have the fourth-worst strikeout rate (18.8%) and the second-worst walk rate (11.3%) in baseball. To get better pitching quickly is going to be a challenge due to injuries. As noted briefly above, Javier is going to miss at least a couple of starts. And while Framber Valdez is nearing a return, José Urquidy isn’t fully throwing from a mound yet, and Luis Garcia and Lance McCullers Jr. are months away. Justin Verlander’s return isn’t enough to flip the script instantly. That leaves Houston in an awkward situation in which it needs pitching before the deadline, but perhaps not as much afterwards. I usually counsel teams not to panic, but given the urgency of this situation, I think the Astros need to be aggressive at identifying and acquiring pitchers. The Marlins may not be keen on giving up Edward Cabrera given his low salary, but the Astros should at least have the conversation about a trade for him.

Houston remains an excellent team, but starting 7-16 means that the clock is ticking very loudly. And if the Astros just stand pat, by the All-Star break they might find themselves turning their attention toward 2025.

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.

Remember when the Mets started their season with five straight losses? It sure seems like they don’t. They’ve since gone 12-4, including a six-game winning streak that was snapped by Tyler Glasnow and the Dodgers on Sunday.

Nothing can come easily for any team, though, even one on a roll, and they’ll now have to keep their winning ways going without Francisco Alvarez. The 22-year-old catcher tore a ligament in his thumb on a slide into second base on Friday, and will ultimately need surgery that could keep him out as long as eight weeks; a return in early June looks like a best-case scenario. Alvarez has struggled at the plate so far this season; he had just one home run and an 86 wRC+ after clobbering 25 dingers and posting a 97 wRC+ last year as a rookie. While he has struck out less often, his balls in play have been far less dangerous, with downturns in average launch angle, sweet spot percentage, and hard hit rate. Still, it goes without saying that his upside is far greater than that of the current tandem, Omar Narváez and Tomás Nido, especially in the power department. Alvarez’s 25 homers last year were more than Narváez has hit since the start of 2020 (though he did hit 22 in 2019) and more than Nido has in entire MLB career (over 800 plate appearances).

That all sounds pretty bleak, but the Mets are hoping that in the absence of Alvarez, they will continue to get production from several unlikely contributors whose strong starts have propelled the team’s early success. In addition to Pete Alonso, who has six home runs and a 126 wRC+, the offense has been driven by — of all people — Tyrone Taylor (122 wRC+) and DJ Stewart (172 wRC+). Stewart leads the team in wRC+ even though he was the last man to earn a 26-man roster spot and was initially viewed as likeliest to be sent down whenever the Mets were ready to bring up J.D. Martinez, who signed toward the end of spring training and needed to ramp up for big league action in the minors. But Stewart has earned his stay with the way he’s slugging. Read the rest of this entry »

When I interviewed him 12 months ago, Logan O’Hoppe told me that he keeps two journals. One is for baseball. The other is for life. As the then-rookie catcher explained, “It’s tough to stay in a consistent headspace day to day,” and writing down his thoughts helps keep him centered.

One year later, he’s not only taking his game to a new level — O’Hoppe has a 137 wRC+ over 70 plate appearances — he’s also upping his journal input. I learned as much when I asked the LA backstop if he ever writes about the ballparks he visits. Moreover, I learned those visits are atypical of most major leaguers’.

“I’ve got three different ones now,” O’Hoppe explained when the Angels played at Fenway Park earlier this month. “One is for the game-planning stuff with the pitcher, and another is for hitting; those are obviously all baseball. With the third one, yes, I write a lot about the ballparks. It keeps my perspective in line. Early on last year, when I was really new to [the big leagues], I tended to think that this was the end all be all, and that the results were everything. I’m trying to realign my perspective and understand the results for what they are. I feel like it’s really helped me to come to different ballparks like this one, and sit alone in stadiums that I was at growing up.”

Adam Wainwright did something similar toward the end of his career, visiting various locales in ballparks, such as press boxes and concourses, prior to games. O’Hoppe is doing something similar, only on the front end of his career. Read the rest of this entry »

No manager defined the era of baseball marked by artificial turf and distant outfield fences as Whitey Herzog did. As the manager of the Royals (1975–79) and Cardinals (1980, ’81–90) — and for a short but impactful period, the latter club’s general manager as well — he assembled and led teams built around pitching, speed, and defense to six division titles, three pennants, and a world championship using an aggressive and exciting brand of baseball: Whiteyball. Gruff but not irascible, Herzog found ways to get the most out of players whose limitations had often prevented them from establishing themselves elsewhere.

“The three things you need to be a good manager,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite in 1981, “are players, a sense of humor and, most important, a good bullpen. If I’ve got those three things, I assure you I’ll get along with the press and I guarantee you I’ll make the Hall of Fame.”

Herzog was finally elected to the Hall in 2010, an honor long overdue given that he was 20 years removed from the dugout and had never been on a ballot. He passed away on Monday in St. Louis at the age of 92. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitching for Triple-A Indianapolis on Thursday, Paul Skenes extended his streak of scoreless innings to 12 2/3 to start the season. In his fourth start, Skenes whiffed eight of the 14 batters he faced against the St. Paul Saints, Minnesota’s Triple-A affiliate.

Skenes is the best pitching prospect according to our prospect rankings, so I doubt I have to use too much of this space to convince you that Skenes is an impressive talent. Across nine professional starts since being the first pick in the 2023 draft, he has struck out an eye-popping 37 batters in 19 1/3 innings, just under half of all batters he’s faced. In addition to those strikeouts, he’s allowed just four walks – this is not a case of a flamethrower with only a casual acquaintance with the strike zone – and has yet to allow a professional homer. He ranked only fifth among pitching prospects in the ZiPS Top 100, which may not sound quite as electrifying, but given that ZiPS is designed to be suspicious of players with almost no professional experience, it was high praise to consider him that highly after he’d recorded only 6 2/3 innings as a professional before 2024.

Skenes throws hard, and entering Thursday’s game, he had the highest average fastball velocity of any Triple-A pitcher.

Suffice it to say, Thursday didn’t do anything to change where Skenes lands on this ever-so-slightly dated ranking, as his 41 fastballs against St. Paul averaged 100.5 mph. His slowest fastball traveled at 99.1 mph, enough that it would be the offering of a lifetime for many pitchers. Adding in his most recent start, his contact rate on those fastballs is the third lowest in Triple-A (min. 30 fastballs), behind only Edwin Uceta and Mason Englert.

Velocity, of course, doesn’t mean much if your secondary pitches aren’t good. But Skenes is no slouch here, either.

The table above includes his seven whiffs on the 10 secondary pitches he threw Thursday. Clearly, Skenes isn’t a pitcher using velocity to try to make up for lackluster secondary offerings. He knows how to miss bats just as well with chicanery as he does with brute force. He’s so thoroughly dominated hitters that he’s been heavily using just his fastball, changeup, and slider; he’s thrown one curveball in total over his last two starts (against Toledo on April 12), and on Thursday, he threw his “splinker” (splitter-sinker) twice against St. Paul. When Skenes isn’t leaving batters futilely swinging at gaseous oxygen and nitrogen, they’ve generally been hitting those pitches into the ground, not the stands.

Back before the season, ZiPS already saw Skenes as a league-average starter in 2024 despite almost no professional experience. For his four starts in 2024, ZiPS translates those numbers as one homer, three walks, and 20 strikeouts in 12 innings, for an ERA of 2.72. Add in that and the Statcast numbers that stabilize very quickly and Skenes’ ZiPS projections are now aligned with his Steamer ones.

In terms of run prevention, Skenes’ projection for the rest of this season is better than the three top members of Pittsburgh’s rotation, Martín Pérez, Mitch Keller, and Jared Jones. And that sunny optimism comes from a mean ol’ projection system, which doesn’t have the ability to get a shiver down its transistors when it sees Skenes exile batters like they’re Bruce Banner walking away to sad piano music.

Now, even without looking at this through the cynical lens of service time shenanigans, you can understand why the Pirates are being conservative with Skenes, though you certainly don’t have to agree with what they’re doing. As noted, Skenes doesn’t have a lot of professional experience and they are trying to keep his workload down. He throws the ball ridiculously hard, and extreme velocity does come with the risk of elbow damage and, therefore, Tommy John surgery. But that risk will be there at whatever level he’s throwing, and the whole purpose of giving a pitcher minor league experience is for him to learn how to get big league hitters out. I’m a believer in the idea that you have to challenge a prospect, and the only players who can challenge Skenes at this point are in the majors.

Besides, the Pirates can still manage Skenes’ workload in the majors. They can continue to give him three-inning appearances and ramp him up gradually with some creativity. Let him start and throw those three-inning specials or tandem starts or just have him pitch three or four innings in relief when the opportunity arises. Even if they’re not confident enough in his durability to start him, Skenes can certainly throw quality bullpen innings and reduce the workload of the rest of the ‘pen. Earl Weaver, my favorite manager ever both for objective and subjective reasons (hey, I’m from Baltimore), was certainly quite happy to break starters in as relievers for a while. Jim Palmer, Doyle Alexander, Scott McGregor, Dennis Martinez, and Mike Flanagan all spent good chunks of time as relievers before Weaver put them into the rotation.

[Note: As my colleague Jay Jaffe just reminded me, Weaver wasn’t manager until ’68, so Palmer was Hank Bauer, not Weaver -DS]

This becomes even more of an imperative when you consider where the Pirates are in the standings. If they were playing like the White Sox, maybe calling up Skenes in a furious attempt to avoid losing 110 games wouldn’t be worth upsetting the apple cart. The Pirates may have cooled down since their torrid start, but at 11-8, they are just a game out of first place in the NL Central. ZiPS currently projects the Pirates to have a 10.3% chance of winning the division and a 23.3% chance of making the postseason. If Skenes throws 100 innings in the majors this year, rather than the 60 that ZiPS currently projects when doing its season simulations, Pittsburgh’s odds to win the division climb to 14.2% and its probability to snag a playoff berth jumps to 28.9%. In a tight NL Central race, with all five teams having a plausible shot at winning the division, every game truly matters.

For years, the Pirates have been sacrificing the present to build for the future, so they shouldn’t sacrifice that future to play for a premature present. That said, because Skenes is clearly ready to face big league hitters, there’s no point in keeping him in the minors. It’s time for the Pirates to promote him and make their future the present.

Reid Detmers, right?

On Wednesday evening, the Angels’ 24-year-old lefty had arguably his worst start of the season so far: 5 1/3 innings against the Rays, with seven hits and two runs (one earned) allowed, and only four strikeouts. Worst start of the season so far. One earned run.

After Wednesday night’s action, Detmers led all qualified major league starters in FIP, at 1.61, and shared the lead in pitching WAR. His 1.19 ERA was seventh in the majors. And his success has come against reasonable competition; in four starts, all Angels wins, he’s faced the Rays, the Red Sox (twice), and the Orioles. That first start in Baltimore came in Game 3 of the Angels’ season; in Games 1 and 2, Baltimore had smeared Patrick Sandoval and Griffin Canning all over the park like mosquito viscera on a truck driver’s windshield. Detmers held the Orioles hatchlings to a single run over five innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things, where I highlight some strange and amusing happenings from the last week. We’re getting into the rhythm of the season now; 20 games in, you start to get a feel for how watching your team will feel this year. Are they going to be exasperating? Do they look like a fun group? Have a few new players completely changed the vibe from last year? Are they hitting so many homers that they had to make a new dong bong homer hose?

That’s part of the fun of watching baseball, in my opinion. Playoff odds are one thing, but how you feel watching your guys get from point A to point B matters a lot more in the long run. If you’re reading this article, I’m willing to bet that you’re watching dozens of hours of baseball throughout the year – perhaps even hundreds. The playoffs for your team might last 15 hours of game time. The little things are the point, and there were some great little things this week. As always, I’d like to thank Zach Lowe, whose basketball column inspired this one in both name and content. Let’s get going.
Read the rest of this entry »

Three out of every four FanGraphs and RotoGraphs staff members picked the Twins to make the playoffs, with 18 of us predicting them to win the AL Central. (Yes, I was one of them.) And who could blame us? Sure, Minnesota lost Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda from last year’s division-winning team, but the Twins would also get a full season of Chris Paddack, a revamped and improved bullpen, and — hopefully — a full year of Byron Buxton, Carlos Correa, and Royce Lewis anchoring what looked like a strong lineup.

So, naturally, those plans went awry almost right away. The bullpen has been ravaged by injuries, Lewis hurt himself on Opening Day and will be out for yet another extended stretch, and Correa, who was off to a strong start after recovering from his plantar fasciitis that bugged him all of last year, is now on the IL with a strained oblique. Not helping matters is that Buxton isn’t hitting, striking out 36.1% of the time with an anemic wRC+ of 51. The injuries to Lewis and Correa (not to mention Max Kepler, though his stay looks like it’ll be for the minimum 10 days) have eroded Minnesota’s depth, and Buxton’s poor performance is emblematic of the lack of production from the rest of the lineup.

Entering Thursday, the 6-11 Twins had the league’s third-worst wRC+, at 80, and that’s with Correa’s 165 wRC+ in 44 plate appearances. Young lefties Edouard Julien (99 wRC+) and Alex Kirilloff (151 wRC+) are doing their part, which may make you think (as I did when I started researching this column) that the Twins are awfully exposed against left-handed pitching. But they’re actually doing fine (95 wRC+) against southpaws, with both of those lefties beating up on same-handed pitching, albeit in small samples. Additionally, Buxton’s struggles have not carried over to his 13 plate appearances against lefties, and Ryan Jeffers and Manuel Margot are also hammering them.

You probably know where this is heading, then. The Twins are horrible against righties (76 wRC+). In fact, the bumbling White Sox (73 wRC+) are the only team that has been worse against righties than Minnesota. Buxton has a 31 wRC+ across 48 plate appearances vs. righties, and Willi Castro’s 50 wRC+ against righties would look good only in comparison to the marks of some of his teammates and because it is significantly better than his -24 wRC+ vs. lefties. Meanwhile, Margot, Christian Vázquez, and Kepler have all been essentially useless against righty pitching, with wRC+ numbers below zero.

So, what exactly can the Twins do? It’s an uninspiring answer, but not much. Correa and Lewis won’t be back anytime soon. Buxton is going to be given every chance to swing his way out of his slump, and as long as he stays healthy, the Twins should be cautiously optimistic that he’ll turn things around. Aside from that, their best hope is that Kepler will be much more productive when he returns from his knee contusion, which may well have affected his hitting. Matt Wallner was optioned to Triple-A after starting his season terribly (2-for-25 with 17 strikeouts), and surely there’s hope that he’ll come back looking more like the guy who had a 144 wRC+ in 254 plate appearances last year. Otherwise, there won’t really be any saviors rising up from within. Austin Martin is already up in the majors, and Brooks Lee hurt his back and has yet to play a minor league game this year. The Twins will have to make due with what they have until guys get healthy or they find a way to swing a trade or two sometime this summer. In the meantime, it’s not looking great.

Meet the Mets’ Breakout Reliever

Early season leaderboards are always fun, and in just about all cases they shouldn’t be viewed as indicative of what’s to come for the remaining 90% of the season. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take note of surprising players at or near the top of them. So, who leads all relievers in strikeout percentage? The resurgent Craig Kimbrel? The hellacious Mason Miller? Nope, atop the list is Reed Garrett, who didn’t even make the Mets’ Opening Day roster. He wasn’t even one of the last cuts; he was optioned on March 15, a full two weeks before the season started. But since getting the call on April 1 he’s been nearly unhittable, with a ridiculously low wOBA allowed of .177.

Garrett, 31, put up a 7.11 ERA in 44.1 MLB innings before this year, and there wasn’t really anything that we were publicly aware of that made anyone think a breakout was coming. But it’s not hard to see where Garrett’s success has come now that we’ve got the data. He’s deemphasizing his two fastballs, throwing his four-seamer and sinker a combined 26% of the time, with his sweeper, splitter, and slider giving hitters fits.

The splitter — which he’s nearly tripled in usage since 2022 — has been especially lethal, with two-thirds of swings against the pitch coming up empty. The radically different pitch mix makes for changes that look sticky and should allow Garrett to continue his rapid ascent up the bullpen hierarchy. Once viewed as an up-and-down pitcher by virtue of having an option remaining, he looks here to stay.

Leiter Gets Lit Up in Poor Debut

Well, not every MLB debut can go swimmingly. Jack Leiter’s first game as a Ranger started off well enough, with two strikeouts in a scoreless first. But the wheels came off soon after; he allowed four runs in the second and three more in the third and his day ended after just 11 outs.

To my eye, the stuff looked just fine, with his fastball up to 98 mph and averaging 96, but he just didn’t have feel for his offspeed pitches. Hitters really weren’t fooled overall. His 28% CSW rate was right at league average, but it was only 21% on his curveball, slider, and changeup, which made up 47 of his 85 pitches.

Whether Leiter sticks around in the rotation remains to be seen. The Rangers already have six healthy starters as it is, and Cody Bradford’s IL stay should be a short one. And let’s not forget that Tyler Mahle, Max Scherzer, and Jacob deGrom are all lurking for returns later in the season as well.

Dating back to August 31, 2023, the Padres have the best record in baseball. They have the second-highest run differential in that time, trailing only the Brewers, against whom they just took two out of three on the road. To be clear, these are fun facts for the jumbotron rather than meaningful or predictive metrics. After all, the Padres of late 2023 look quite a bit different from the Padres of early 2024, and their performance from last September is doing most of the heavy lifting. Even so, it’s enough to make you stop and think, “Hey, these Padres are still pretty good!”

That’s not to say the Padres ever looked like a bad team. However, it would have been easy to write them off, at least subconsciously, after last year’s disappointing performance and the offseason that followed. The Padres ranked second in the NL in pitching WAR and third in position player WAR last season, yet they finished just 82-80. And although they were able to secure a winning record on the final day of the regular season, they certainly lost more than they gained over the winter. As their three biggest competitors in the NL West added six of our top nine free agents (and 10 of our top 21), the Padres lost their best hitter (Juan Soto), their closer (Josh Hader), their ace (Blake Snell), and three more capable arms from the rotation (Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, and Nick Martinez), all while slashing payroll by nearly $90 million. Read the rest of this entry »