I’ll level with you at the start of this: I never quite bought into what Luis Arraez was doing. When he won the batting title last year, I was skeptical. When he was traded from Minnesota to Miami before the season, I loved the Twins’ side of the deal. When he was flirting with a .400 batting average at the All-Star break, I relegated him to Honorable Mention status on our top 50 trade value list. He just perpetually flummoxed me, slapping singles while I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Arraez has been downright putrid of late. He’s been below replacement level since the start of August. He’s batting .262 with a .282 OBP in that span, which is hard to fathom for a guy who is still only striking out 6.7% of the time. This isn’t a victory lap article, though. It won’t last. It can’t last. I don’t believe in this version of Arraez any more than I believed in the .400 hitter from June.

In trying to solve this mystery, I let other people guide me. Honestly, I’m not the person to figure out what Arraez is doing wrong, because I never quite understood what he was doing right. So instead, I read a bunch of articles about the good times. Then I looked to see whether Arraez had stopped doing the things that had so recently made him special. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Rockies and starting pitcher Germán Márquez agreed on terms to a two-year contract extension worth a guaranteed $20 million. This was a lost season for Márquez, as an elbow injury and eventual Tommy John surgery resulted in him only making four starts. Unsurprisingly for a pitcher suffering a major injury, the second year of his new deal is heavily incentivized, with two roster bonuses and three inning bonuses. Márquez is expected to miss the first half of the 2024 season, but if he throws 160 innings in 2025, he’ll net a cool $22 million for the season. The contract also includes a $1 million assignment bonus, paid by his new team if the Rockies should trade him.

An elbow injury that requires a scalpel is never a welcome sign for anyone, but for Márquez, originally a free agent this fall, it was a particularly hard blow. The hope had been that he would bounce back from a pedestrian 2022 season that saw his FIP balloon to nearly five and his strikeout rate fall about 10% from 2021. While my thoughts on how the Rockies have been run since, well, 1993 are well-known, he was one of their biggest coups in franchise history. It’s hard to prove the Rays wrong on a young pitcher, but that the Rockies did, picking up Márquez and Jake McGee from Tampa Bay for Corey Dickerson and Kevin Padlo in 2016. Despite being only 28, he already looms large in Rockies history.

Jiménez’s three-year peak as an elite pitcher makes him the king of the mountain, but Márquez is only a couple good months behind him. When you consider offense as well (Márquez was once a Silver Slugger), the latter is already the leader. And while I can’t expect anyone in Denver to appreciate this, it certainly matters to me that my most recent memory of Márquez isn’t Buck Showalter throwing him into a playoff game for no particular reason.

Lest you think Márquez’s lofty standing is me damning the Rockies with faint praise, he’s long been one of the best-projected young pitchers in ZiPS WAR:

Naturally, his position in the rankings dropped as he failed to maintain his 2018 strikeout rate, but some of the decline is natural due to having fewer tomorrows remaining. With the kind of bounceback that ZiPS expected, he would have been looking at a pretty good payday in free agency. Here’s what his long-term projections for 2024 and beyond looked like before the start of 2023. I’m using a neutral park for this one since Coors Field is… complicated.

Based on that projection, ZiPS recommended a seven-year, $126 million extension or $116 million over six years. That’s not Gerrit Cole money and reflects the increased risk stemming from his 2022, but nine figures can buy an impressive haul of goods and/or services. It certainly would have been a better use of money than, say, signing an aging third baseman from the Cubs to play left field for $182 million.

I went ahead and told ZiPS that Márquez has missed time due to Tommy John surgery (I normally do this after the season) and re-ran the numbers.

ZiPS would have suggested two years at $18.2 million, but the difference between that and $20 million, in the context of MLB, is basically nothing. In any case, the fact that he is a pitcher who has survived Coors Field is almost certainly worth a bit more cash, even if ZiPS isn’t specifically valuing that here. In other words, the Rockies made a move that I cannot complain about.

Where does Márquez fit into the future of the Rockies? That’s a much trickier question. While the best result for him is that he makes a grand return next July and returns to his 2017–21 peak form, resulting in him getting that $100 million contract in a couple of years, I’m not sure the Rockies will take fullest advantage of this sunny scenario. If the organization is going to become competitive again, it has a lot of work to do, and Márquez rocking the NL inside out in 2025 likely makes him more valuable to the Rockies in terms of who they can acquire for him rather than his actual performance.

Trading veterans, especially veterans who had an important past in the story of the franchise, always appears to be psychologically difficult for Colorado’s ownership. But that’s a problem for the future Rockies. The team made a good move in extending Márquez to a low-risk, high-upside contract, and that’s good enough for me to pause my grumbling.

Apparently, the Yankees can’t have nice things even after shifting their focus to next season. Less than two weeks into his major league career, and just two days after he hit the fourth home run of his brief stay with the Yankees, long-awaited prospect Jasson Domínguez — nicknamed “The Martian” for his otherworldly collection of tools — has been diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He’ll soon undergo season-ending surgery that will likely sideline him for part of 2024 as well.

The 20-year-old Domínguez, who has been on prospect hounds’ radars since he signed out of the Dominican Republic for a $5.1-million bonus in 2019, entered the season ranked 50th on our Top 100 Prospects list and third on the Yankees list as a switch-hitting 50 FV prospect with a projected ETA of 2025. He did not figure in the Yankees’ immediate plans for this season, having split his 2022 campaign between A-level Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. He finished the year with a 10-game cameo at Double-A Somerset; the last five of those games were in the Eastern League playoffs, capped by a two-homer, six-RBI performance in the championship series clincher.

This season, Domínguez hit .254/.367/.414 (117 wRC+) with 15 homers, 37 steals, and a 15.2% walk rate at Somerset, albeit with a dramatic improvement from the first half to the second. Before the All-Star break he scuffled, batting just .204/.345/.346 (95 wRC+) with 10 homers, 23 steals, and a 28.4% strikeout rate, numbers mitigated somewhat by his plate discipline (17.7% walk rate) and his age in a league where he was nearly four years younger than the average position player. He caught fire after the break, doing a better job of making contact and translating his 65-grade raw power into game power, hitting .354/.416/.549 with five homers and 13 steals from July 14 through August 20 while trimming his strikeout rate to 19.3%. He not only netted Player of the Week honors in the final week of his run at Somerset, he earned a promotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Read the rest of this entry »

You already know the deal with the Blue Jays, so much so that I barely have to mention it. The good players on their team? They’re major league legacies. As kids, they were in major league clubhouses. There are cute pictures of them, chubby-cheeked, watching their famous parents win various accolades. Their major league success was hardly preordained, but let’s just say it didn’t come out of nowhere.

That lazy narrative had already sprung a few leaks, even before this year. Matt Chapman and George Springer don’t quite fit the bill. Kevin Gausman and Jordan Romano don’t either. Cavan Biggio isn’t even a starter. But there’s perhaps no better counter-example than Davis Schneider, the Jays’ newest star. Schneider flew so far under the radar that the metaphor doesn’t work; he was almost subterranean. He was a 28th-round draft pick in 2017, a round that doesn’t exist anymore. He didn’t reach Double-A until the end of the 2022 season. Now he’s the best hitter on the Jays, and in at least a few contrived ways that I’ll endeavor to show you in this article, he might be the best hitter of all time.

I know what you’re thinking. “Really, Ben? The best hitter of all time? He’s not even the best hitter on his own team right now.” To that I say, sure, you might think that. But that’s based on your perception of the future. If we limit our analysis to merely what has happened on the field, no Blue Jays hitter even approaches Schneider’s magnificence. Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed last week’s Buntpalooza, you’re going to love this, because I’m making up new stats again.

Let’s start with Rickey Henderson. You probably know that in 1982, Rickey set a still-unchallenged single-season record of 130 stolen bases. Which is a lot. Of course it’s a lot; this was the highest-volume season by the best basestealer who ever lived. I just referred to him as “Rickey,” because he was so great he can go by his first name on first reference, like “LeBron” or “Tiger” or “Weird Al.”

Nevertheless, I worry that we don’t appreciate how extremely a lot 130 stolen bases is in one season. One way to look at it is in distance; 172 stolen base attempts (Rickey also got caught a league-high 42 times that year), at 90 feet each, constitutes almost three miles of ground covered. The man ran the best part of a 5K in stolen base attempts alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, in a piece titled “Royce Lewis Has Arrived in Grand Fashion,” Jay Jaffe noted that the Minnesota Twins third baseman had “clubbed his third grand slam in an eight-game span” in the team’s contest against the Cleveland Guardians that Monday. My colleague added that, per the Elias Sports Bureau and MLB.com’s Sarah Langs, Lewis joined Lou Gehrig, Jim Northrup, and Larry Parrish as the only player in MLB history to “bunch three such hits so closely.”

Lewis has done more than hit grannies. Since making his big league debut last season, the first overall pick in the 2017 draft has slashed a healthy .310/.355/.541 with 14 home runs and a 147 wRC+ over 245 plate appearances. Staying on the field had been an issue. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote in June, “Lewis’ career has been marred by persistent injury.” But as Longenhagen noted, “He is back and ready to make an immediate impact on Minnesota’s playoff push.”

I was in Cleveland for last week’s Guardians-Twins series, and thus was present for Lewis’ 3-for-4, six-RBI, grand slam performance. Prior to the game, I sat down with the red-hot rookie to talk hitting. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cubs signed Seiya Suzuki before the 2022 season, it was part of a bold strategy to accelerate their return to contention. They weren’t quite ready for their close up that year, but the general plan was pretty clear: add a few pieces then, tack on more the following season, and aim for a good team sooner rather than later.

Good news! That plan has worked. The Cubs are in playoff position in mid-September, just like they drew it up. They supplemented 2022’s free agency exploits with a double dip last offseason. Cody Bellinger and Dansby Swanson have been right at the forefront of the charge, though Swanson has slumped recently. But for a bit, it looked like Suzuki might not be a part of Chicago’s plans.

He coasted through 2022, a solid righty bat but hardly one of the best hitters in the league. He started off this season in a funk, dealt with injuries, and finally got benched in early August. It was a long fall for someone so heralded, but honestly, you can see what the Cubs were thinking. Through that point in the year, Suzuki was batting .249/.328/.389, good for a 96 wRC+, and striking out a worrisome 25.3% of the time. He’d slumped as the year wore on, to boot; he had a wRC+ of 59 in the months of June and July. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, I took a look at the Rays pitching staff. Despite having the best offense in the league, the team had fallen back to earth after a red-hot start to the season. Surprisingly, their biggest weakness was relief pitching, an area where the team has long had a reputation for excellence. Even with strong offensive showings and a league-leading wRC+, their revolving door of bulk guys and back-of-the-bullpen options simply wasn’t keeping runs off the board. Headed down the stretch, the Rays boast the fourth-best record in baseball and sit just three games back of the AL-leading Orioles in the East. The bullpen has turned it around in a big way. When I last checked in on them in June, their relievers ranked 29th in FIP. Since then, they’ve been in the top five:

One of the biggest reasons for this improvement has been greater stability in the starting rotation. Despite Shane McClanahan going down with a torn UCL after the early-season losses of Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs, this is the closest thing the Rays have had to a regular rotation all year. After missing two months with an oblique injury, Tyler Glasnow has returned to form, with a sub-three ERA and a 34% strikeout rate. They’ve also made the most of Zach Eflin’s elite command; he currently ranks fourth among AL pitchers in WAR and has almost doubled his previous career high. They moved aggressively at the deadline, trading top slugging prospect Kyle Manzardo for Aaron Civale, who’s improved his K-BB% by nine points since leaving Cleveland. And finally, they’ve converted up/down reliever Zack Littell into an effective starter, because what can’t they do? Since being added to the rotation at the end of July, his 5.8 innings per start ranks in the top quarter of all starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Zac Gallen couldn’t even wait until the sun went down to thumb his nose at my attempt to sort out the NL Cy Young race — or at least at the notion that he was out of it. While I mentioned Gallen in passing in a piece focused on Spencer Strider and a few other pitchers who appeared to have the best statistical cases for the award, I had little to say about Gallen, who spent much of this season as the league’s frontrunner but has faded in the second half, and was coming off back-to-back bad starts that had further puffed up his numbers. On Friday afternoon, the 28-year-old righty threw a three-hit complete-game shutout against the Cubs in a 1-0 win, prompting me to take a second look at situating him within the race as the candidates head into the home stretch.

Building off a 2022 campaign in which he posted a 2.54 ERA, 3.05 FIP, and 4.2 WAR en route to a fifth-place finish in the Cy Young voting, Gallen jumped out to the front of the race early this season. He ran off a streak of 28 consecutive scoreless innings from April 4–26, with an eye-opening 41-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio along the way. He finished June with a 2.72 ERA and 2.06 FIP, led the NL in FIP (2.85) and fWAR (3.8) at the All-Star break, and earned the starting nod for the All-Star Game opposite Gerrit Cole. He’s been the consensus pick for the Cy Young in four monthly polls of MLB.com voters.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles have the best record in the American League, and youthful talent is a big reason why. Gunnar Henderson is the odds-on favorite to capture Rookie-of-the-Year honors, while Adley Rutschman has already reached star status in just his second MLB season. The dynamic duo are the first-place team’s co-leaders in WAR.

They aren’t the only players making an impact. The well-balanced Mike Elias-constructed club has also received meaningful contributions from the likes of Anthony Santander, Ryan Mountcastle, and Austin Hays. On the pitching side, a mix of veterans and less-established arms have more than held their own, in some cases outperforming expectations. From the better-known to the lesser-known, a multitude of players have played important roles in the 90-wins-and-counting success.

With that in mind, who has been the most-underrated player on the 2023 Orioles? I asked that question to four people who see the squad on an everyday basis — two broadcasters and a pair of beat writers — prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

Nathan Ruiz, who covers the team for the Baltimore Sun, chose Danny Coulombe.

“A lot was made of the All-Star combo of Yennier Cano and Felix Bautista, but Coulombe has come in and kind of been that main left-handed reliever all season,” said Ruiz. “He’s been really good with inherited runners, which is something they have generally struggled with. Cionel Pérez was really good for them last year, but they felt they needed another lefty so they acquired him [from the Minnesota Twins] for cash around the cusp of the season and he became a solid piece for them right away. He’s been dependable at the back end of the bullpen.”

Melanie Newman went with Kyle Bradish.

“He’s got an ERA that’s sitting there with Gerrit Cole right now,” the Orioles broadcaster opined. “We all talk about Yennier Cano and Felix Bautista, and our back end — what they’ve been able to do so far — but Kyle has been consistent. For whatever reason, when we’re on the road in a big spot, those are his best moments. That’s what you want out of a guy, and you forget that he’s only in his second year. His breaking pitches are disgusting. I don’t think he gets enough credit.”

Danielle Allentuck opted for Ryan O’Hearn.

“He has kind of been the guy who, whenever they need the big hit — he’s either coming off the bench or already in the lineup — has been providing it,” the Baltimore Banner reporter told me. “He’s been that kind of spark for them. He’s turning his career around here. We’re talking underrated, and I don’t think a lot of people know about him. He’s not the big name. He wasn’t a big superstar, but he’s come here and turned things around for himself, and the team.” Read the rest of this entry »