Everyone loves a beginning — the christening of a new battleship, the birth of a new zoo giraffe, the major league debut of a top pitching prospect. On Tuesday night in Philadelphia, San Francisco Giants lefty Kyle Harrison emerged from his pupal stage. It went… pretty well: 3 1/3 innings, two earned runs, five hits, one walk, five strikeouts, one hit batter.

In a short start, Harrison pared his repertoire down to — with very few exceptions — just his fastball and slider. He gave up lots of hard contact, including a home run, but also, said manager Gabe Kapler, Harrison “missed a lot of bats. He missed bats in the zone. His fastball was carrying.”

Harrison entered the night as the no. 17 overall prospect on The Board, and the no. 5 overall pitching prospect. Every team in the playoff hunt could use a fresh, talented starter, the Giants more so than just about anyone. San Francisco is running a rotation out of the mid-20th century: Two very good starting pitchers and then a lot of improvisation. Webb, Cobb, and pray for fog. Or something like that. If you can do better than a slant rhyme, I’m all ears. Read the rest of this entry »

Because I was raised on Saturday morning cartoons of a certain vintage — some of which I’ve recently shared with my going-on-seven-year-old daughter — I have Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner zooming through my brain with alarming frequency. In nearly every episode, there’s a moment when the coyote runs off a cliff and then, improbably, hangs in midair for several seconds before plummeting several hundred feet to the desert ground. Welcome to the 2023 Giants.

At 65-60, the Giants entered Tuesday occupying the NL’s third Wild Card spot, half a game behind the Cubs (65-59) for the second spot, and half a game ahead of the Diamondbacks (65-61), a game ahead of the Reds (64-61), and a game and a half ahead of the Marlins (64-62). Somehow, they’ve hung on this long despite playing sub-.500 ball for nearly the last two months with an offense so comically inept you’d think it came out of an ACME crate.

Dial back to June 10, when the Giants were a middling 32-32, seven games out of first place in the NL West and a game and a half back in the Wild Card race, with an offense that had hit for a 101 wRC+ (.246/.321/.413) while averaging 4.52 runs per game to that point. Two days and two wins later, they moved into a tie for the third Wild Card spot with the Brewers, and save for a brief span from July 6–8, they’ve remained in the playoff picture ever since; as recently as August 8, they were 62-52 and had a claim on the top NL Wild Card spot. Read the rest of this entry »

In the 1991 comedy King Ralph, an American lounge singer becomes the King of England when the entire royal family is electrocuted in a freak photography accident. Despite its Academy Award-winning screenwriter and a cast of well-respected actors, the film fell flat, making it an apt comparison for the 2023 Mets, although that’s not why I bring it up today. After a series of unfortunate and unexpected injuries, Aaron Civale finds himself a key cog with the Rays and, therefore, in the race for the AL East crown. Tampa Bay’s rotation doesn’t have much in common with the British monarchy (there’s far too much turnover and not nearly enough silly hats), but just like Ralph Jones, Civale wouldn’t be in this position if so many others in front of him hadn’t bit the dust.

The Rays entered the season with one of the best rotations in the American League: Shane McClanahan, Tyler Glasnow, Drew Rasmussen, Jeffrey Springs, and Zach Eflin. No other team could boast a projected ERA and FIP under 3.80 for all five of its primary starting pitchers. On top of that, no. 37 overall prospect Taj Bradley was nearing his big league debut, and Josh Fleming, Yonny Chirinos, and Luis Patiño were around to provide depth. Our positional power rankings had the Rays rotation third in the AL and eighth overall.

On the other side of the equation, the Guardians entered the season under no pressure to trade Civale. On Opening Day, their postseason odds sat at 44.7%. Two-thirds of the FanGraphs staff picked them to make the playoffs, myself included. Now, this is the Guardians we’re talking about, so high postseason odds won’t stop them from trading a talented, young player, but Civale was set to make only $2.6 million this season, and he’s arbitration-eligible for two more years. Cleveland had little incentive to trade him unless the offer was too good to refuse. Considering his injury history, his 4.92 ERA last season, and the oblique strain he suffered this April, the chances of such an offer materializing seemed slim. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams befuddles me. There’s no question that he has plus raw power in his bat. Look at this year’s statistics; he’s sitting in the 81st percentile for maximum exit velocity. But despite that fact, he’s in the 10th percentile for average exit velocity, and the 17th for hard-hit rate. He’s a power hitter! He’s a slap hitter! Both are true.

Likewise, I’m not quite sure what to make of the rest of his game. He has blazing straight line speed, and he uses that to his advantage on the basepaths. We have him down as the third-most valuable baserunner in the majors this year, behind only Esteury Ruiz and Corbin Carroll. But almost all of that value comes on stolen bases – he’s 25th in UBR, which measures non-steal advancement. And on defense, he has tremendous range and an average throwing arm, but grades out somewhere between average (DRS) and poor (OAA) anyway. His profile is a series of contradictions.

The thing is, all of these have been true about Abrams since the Padres drafted him in the first round in 2019. He was a divisive prospect from the start; it was never clear whether he’d end up as a slugging second baseman or a rangy, leadoff-hitting shortstop. Then the pandemic canceled the 2020 minor league season, and he missed most of 2021 with injury even as the Padres aggressively promoted him. Suddenly he was debuting in the big leagues at 21 as an injury replacement for, gulp, Fernando Tatis Jr. Life comes at you fast. Read the rest of this entry »

Troy Melton is fast emerging as one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Drafted in the fourth round last year out of San Diego State University, the 22-year-old right-hander has a 2.33 ERA and a 3.21 FIP in 81 innings between Low-A Lakeland and High-A West Michigan. Featuring plus command and a firm fastball that he delivers from a deceptive slot, he’s fanned 84 batters while allowing 21 walks and 66 hits. Over his last three starts, the Anaheim native has allowed just a pair of runs in 17 innings, with 10 strikeouts and nary a free pass.

Assigned a 35+ FV by Eric Longenhagen at the time our Tigers Top Prospects list came out in June, the young right-hander has since moved up to the 40+ FV tier thanks to his “burgeoning upside.” In the opinion of our lead prospect analyst, “his fastball’s impact alone should be enough to make him a good big league reliever even if his secondary stuff doesn’t develop.”

Melton, who has a marketing degree from SDSU’s Fowler College of Business, discussed his development path earlier this month.

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David Laurila: I was told that you have plus stuff. Would you call yourself a power pitcher?

Troy Melton: “I think I’m a mesh of a power guy and a control guy. Coming up in high school, I really didn’t throw very hard, so I kind of had to learn how to pitch. That definitely helped. There are always things to work on with command — you’re never going to be perfect — but that is something I feel I’m good at. I can throw four pitches for strikes, and kind of quadrant up with them too.” Read the rest of this entry »

It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Jose Altuve is at it again. The man is running a wRC+ of 160 or better for the third time in his career; in one of those seasons, 2017, he was voted AL MVP. The other was just last year. Rumors of his demise, which circulated throughout a disastrous 2020 season, have long since subsided.

And not a moment too soon, I might add. The Astros, held in check by the Rangers most of the season, are back on their heels after a three-game sweep at the hands of division rival Seattle over the weekend. The pitching staff has taken a step back from its unhittable late-2022 apotheosis. Primary offseason acquisition José Abreu was hitting like a utility infielder before a back injury put him on the shelf. Jeremy Peña’s power stroke has deserted him, as has Cristian Javier’s unique brand of fastball-heavy trickeration.

Houston looks a little wobbly, for the first time since at least 2020; setting aside that season’s unique circumstances (and the Astros made it to Game 7 of the ALCS anyway), the team has not wobbled this much since 2016. But Altuve, hitting .327/.420/.529 since his return from a broken thumb suffered during the World Baseball Classic, has held things together.

If that really is Jose Altuve. Read the rest of this entry »

You could be forgiven for viewing Julio Rodríguez’s follow-up to last year’s AL Rookie of the Year season as something of a disappointment — the numbers certainly bear that out. Even so, the 22-year-old center fielder had already appeared to turn a corner this month before going on a hitting binge for the ages. Over a four-game span from Wednesday through Saturday, Rodríguez collected 17 hits, a major league record. Those hits were hardly afterthoughts, as they helped the Mariners extend their latest winning streak to six games, a run that’s pushed them into a Wild Card spot.

Rodríguez began his jag by going 4-for-6 in Wednesday’s 6-5 win over the Royals. He led off the game with a double off James McArthur, sparking a three-run first inning, and added RBI singles in the second and ninth innings. Then he went 5-for-5 in Thursday’s 6-4 win against the Royals, driving in five runs via an RBI single off Angel Zerpa, an RBI double off Max Castillo, and a three-run eighth-inning homer off Carlos Hernández that turned a 4-2 deficit into a 5-4 lead. He added a solo home run on Friday off the Astros’ J.P. France in a 2-0 win, and then went 4-for-6 in a 10-3 rout of Houston on Saturday, coming around to score on two of his four singles. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland A’s have not been shy about calling up their top prospects this season, including a slew of the most highly-ranked young players in their system. Many of those prospects have already begun to sculpt the narrative of their early big league careers, to largely disappointing results. Mason Miller dazzled in his first few outings, but was felled by injury soon thereafter. Kyle Muller has bounced between the majors and Triple-A, with a meager mid-teens strikeout rate and an ERA above 7.00 at both levels. Esteury Ruiz has been as spectacular as expected on the basepaths, but his Triple-A offense was a mirage that has dissipated in the majors. And while Ken Waldichuk’s stuff seemed noteworthy in the lead up to the season, his walk rate has ballooned and his fastball was at one point measured by Statcast as the worst in the league, at 16 runs worse than average. As of now, to borrow a phrase, he’s just Ken.

This past month has seen the promotion of three more of Oakland’s promising young prospects: Tyler Soderstrom, Zack Gelof, and Lawrence Butler. The most recent of those promotions was Butler, who joined the A’s major league roster on August 11 after tamping down his strikeouts and finding himself on an ultra-fast track (he started the season at Double-A). With just a handful of games under his belt, it’s too soon to read much into his performance. Soderstrom and Gelof, meanwhile, both debuted in mid-July. And while Soderstrom is the more highly ranked prospect, his bat has been too quiet to make up for his strikeouts at the big league level. Instead, it’s Gelof whose name is currently accompanied by a string of fire emojis in the Baseball Savant search bar. Read the rest of this entry »

Charlie Morton just keeps chugging along. Three months shy of his 40th birthday, and in his 17th big-league season, the right-hander is 12-10 with a 3.54 ERA over 24 starts with the Atlanta Braves. His most recent outing was especially impressive. Relying heavily on his knee-buckling bender, but also topping out at 96.9 mph with his heater, he dominated the New York Yankees to the tune of six shutout innings with 10 strikeouts.

How much longer can he continue to defy Father Time and excel against baseball’s best hitters?

“I don’t think about that,” Morton replied in response to that question. “I think about, ‘When am I going to go home?’ I always thought the game was going to dictate when I went home. If you look at my career, there was no reason why I wouldn’t think that. There was no reason to think that I was going to start having the best years of my career at age 33, or that my best years would be in my late 30s. There was no reason to think I would still be throwing the ball like I am now. It would have been illogical.”

Morton’s career has indeed followed an unforeseeable path. From 2008-2016, playing primarily with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he went 46-71 with a 4.54 ERA over 161 starts. Since his 2017 age-33 season, he has gone 82-40 with a 3.54 ERA over 185 starts. Morphing from “Ground Chuck” into more of a power pitcher played a major role in the turnaround, but whatever the reason, Morton went from mediocre to a mainstay in frontline rotations. Since his transformation, only six pitchers have started more games, and only two (Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer) have been credited with more wins. Read the rest of this entry »

Padres fans in 2023 don’t have a ton to be excited about. The Friars have been in win-now mode for the last four seasons and are staring down their second losing campaign during that span. One of the two winning seasons was kind of ruined — for everyone in the world — by a raging pandemic, leaving fans with only one year that was both normal and an enjoyable experience since 2010. Unlike a lot of teams with a similar performance record, it’s not for lack of investment in the team. Just a few months after the gigantic trade that brought Juan Soto to town, the team signed Xander Bogaerts to a $280 million contract and kept Manny Machado from opting out with an even spicier $350 million pact. The Padres also agreed on a $100 million contract for Joe Musgrove and locked up Yu Darvish for $108 million. That’s more than $800 million, so we’re not talking about the case of, say, the White Sox having issues in part because they couldn’t be bothered to fill giant holes in the lineup because that would have required money.

As gloomy as the season feels right now, there are still legitimate reasons to think the Padres are a good baseball team. Their 68–54 Pythagorean record is 10 wins above their actual record, and records derived from run differential are more predictive than win-loss record. The projections all still agree there’s a lot to like and similarly have a good record, relatively speaking, of predicting the future. And this holds true even when talking about teams with the largest disagreement between the projections and the record. Looking at the 25 teams that FanGraphs like better than their seasonal winning percentage the most, coin flips missed their rest-of-season winning percentages by an average of 86 points, season to-date records by 81 points, and FanGraphs records by 65 points. Those 25 teams had played .396 ball through August 14 of their seasons; FanGraphs projected a .476 RoS winning percentage, and the actual RoS winning percentage for those teams was .458. We weren’t imagining things.

But the fundamental problem the Padres face is that it’s simply far too late to be the team they hoped they were. Our projections still believe they are a .572 team, but that’s only good enough for a 19% chance of making the postseason with a divisional probability that rounds to zero; the ZiPS projections have it at 15%. While those are still pretty good odds, especially compared to how the season has felt, it’s still far more likely than not that this year ends up being a dark companion to the 2021 season that also ended in stunningly bleak fashion.

And here’s the problem: the Padres project to be worse in the future than they are now. You could say that about most teams, but the Padres are also a team that has a massive amount of payroll already tied up in a declining roster, an unsigned Soto approaching free agency, and probably not a lot of room left to grow in a payroll sense. Complicating things even further is the financial collapse of Bally Sports, as the team has not yet figured out how to replace that revenue. Forbes estimated the Padres lost $53 million in 2022, and things are likely to get worse from there. Peter (Seidler) actually saw a wolf.

Running some up-to-date projections for players signed long-term demonstrates the enormity of the team’s challenge. I’m going to start with the Padres’ core of six players who have guaranteed contracts with annual salaries of at $10 million or more through at least the 2026 season. Whatever happens elsewhere on the team, these six are almost certainly going to be part of the foundation.

You may cringe looking at the end of Machado’s contract, but ZiPS already expected that before the season. Machado put together a strong enough July — though he’s slumped since then and is nursing a sore hamstring — and experienced a clear return to defensive form to cause his 2024-and-on projections to tick up slightly. While ZiPS didn’t like the deal, it doesn’t like it any less than it did in February.

Bogaerts was mired in a deep slump in May and June, aided by a sore wrist, but has hit a more Xanderian .290/.351/.413 since the start of July, in-line with preseason expectations. As with Machado’s recent deal, the Padres go into this contract knowing that they’re paying for Bogaerts to decline.

This is a bit of an awkward projection because it highlights an assumption in team construction that turned out not to be true. Typically, a decent defensive second baseman who can credibly fake playing shortstop will usually fare well at first base, but that just has not happened, at least so far, with Jake Cronenworth. With Ha-Seong Kim 김하성 firmly entrenched as a starter, the Padres have a player with value but not a logical place to play him in order to get that value. The difference is extreme enough that ZiPS thinks that Cronenworth is now more than a win per season less valuable at first than second base.

Add in the fact that Cronenworth is having a down year (and a pretty odd one in terms of Statcast data), and there’s just a lot less reason to like his future than there was before.

Where the positional gods punished the Padres with Cronenworth, they were far kinder here. Tatis’ bat isn’t quite where it was, but he’s actually turned out to be an excellent defensive outfielder, at least so far. Given his age, he’s the one player who projects to finish out his contract as a plus contributor to the team.

ZiPS was always fairly pessimistic about the Darvish extension, and without him reversing the continued slow decline in his peripherals, it hasn’t changed direction since the start of the season. While I always say “hitters age, pitchers break,” Darvish is at an age where cliffs do, in fact, beckon. ZiPS didn’t even want to project the final two seasons of his extension; I’ll be kind and not force it to, so we’ll call those zero-WAR seasons, which is sunnier than what ZiPS would say if I made it.

The performance projections of Musgrove have stayed about the same — hardly surprising considering that when he was healthy, he was having a similar season to last year. But his return this season remains up in the air, and new injuries create new risk for a pitcher, so his projected innings totals have dropped considerably.

OK, let’s throw everybody into one table, complete with their salaries.

If the projections hold true, these six will make up less than a third of the WAR needed to be a 90-win team as soon as 2026, when they combine for $120 million in salary. Unless the team continues to spend more and more money, it’s going to get harder and harder to use dollars to patch holes, which means that the farm system has to get back to producing very quickly. The Padres aren’t likely to be able to win on the backs of these six players for very long, which means that they likely have to come up with a whole new core of talent around these players.

The risk here is one of dynastic failure. I’m not calling the Padres a dynasty in terms of baseball success, but more how the term has been used historically. Lots of warlords in history managed to get a throne, but to establish long-term rule, they had to survive the transition to the next rulers. The Astros are an example of a team that has avoided dynastic failure; only a handful of the players on the team that won the World Series in 2017 were still on the roster when Houston won the World Series in 2022. Only Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman remain among the Astros’ offensive contributors today, and the only pitcher still in Houston, Lance McCullers Jr., won’t pitch again until 2024 [and Verlander who I forgot about for some very odd reason -DS]. They basically came up with nearly an entirely new team in five years.

Baseball history is riddled with successful teams that were unable to transition to the next era without a significant interregnum, such as the Utley-Howard Phillies and the Tigers during the peak Miguel Cabrera years. But those Phillies won a World Series, and while the Tigers didn’t, they had more playoff success than these Padres teams have had. To achieve that success, the Padres are going to have to be extremely creative over the next five years, lest they end up as one of the great “what ifs” in baseball history. Spending money and having a few big stars won’t be enough.