Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

It’s not exactly uncommon for league champions to struggle the following year. The most extreme versions of this are the Marlins, who sold off just about all of their good players after winning the World Series in 1997 and in 2003. The Nationals, who still haven’t had a winning season since their World Series title in 2019, are a more recent example. But, usually, at least one of the two teams to play in the previous World Series has a strong follow-up season. In fact, over the first 29 seasons of the Wild Card era, only twice have both league champs from the same year missed the playoffs the next season; interestingly, those two years came back to back, in 2006 (White Sox and Astros) and 2007 (Cardinals and Tigers). That’s why it’s quite jarring to see both the Rangers and Diamondbacks under .500 entering play this weekend.

While both teams won on Thursday, they’re not in great position right now. The Diamondbacks are 8.5 games out of first place with a 33-36 record (though they’re just a game out of the final NL Wild Card spot); the Rangers’ 33-35 record has them five games behind the first place Mariners and 3.5 games away from a wild card berth. The sluggish start gave the reigning world champs just a 19.2% chance of making the playoffs entering Thursday; Arizona’s odds weren’t that much better, at 27.9%.

Considering this, let’s look at what has gone wrong for each team and determine how they can avoid becoming the third pair of league champions in three decades to each fall short of returning to the postseason in their follow-up campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »

Luke Raley is a big, strong man. The Seattle outfielder stands 6-foot-4, weighs 235 pounds, and spent much of his childhood in Ohio felling trees with a chainsaw. He’s got a huge arm, and he’s boasted a maximum exit velocity at or above the 90th percentile in three of the last four seasons. Former teammates have called him “a big ball of muscle” and said, “He kind of plays like a monster.” Just last night he launched a moonshot home run that reached an altitude of 104 feet. And yet somehow, if you Google the phrase luke raley feats of strength, this is all that comes up:

First of all, yes, Raley is married. He found out that he got traded to Seattle during his honeymoon, while playing pool volleyball. Second, there’s a pretty good reason that Raley’s strength doesn’t headline his search results: He’s more than just a beef boy. Raley has finesse. In fact, he’s currently tied with Jacob Young for the major league lead with five bunts for a base hit. While Young has a 35.7% success rate on his bunts, Raley is the only player so far this decade to bunt for at least five hits in a season while maintaining a 1.000 batting average on those bunt attempts. Want to guess who’s in second place? That would be 2023 Luke Raley, who went 5-for-6 in his bunt attempts. The big, strong man has a big, strong bunt game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers always seem to have a good bullpen. They have an anchor at the top – either Josh Hader or Devin Williams – and a smattering of other arms behind them that complement what the team is doing. Historically, they’ve used those bullpen arms to back up the weaker members of their rotation as needed, while getting big chunks of innings from their top starters.

In 2024, things have gone differently – but not in the way you’d expect. Hader is gone. Williams is hurt. Abner Uribe, who began the season in a high leverage role, is in Triple-A after a disastrous start. Joel Payamps, who got some save opportunities after Uribe faltered, has been demoted to middle relief work. Naturally, Milwaukee has the fifth-best bullpen in baseball by WAR, the second-best by RA9-WAR, and the best by win probability added. They’ve thrown the most innings in baseball, to boot.

Even stranger, this might be their best bullpen unit in a while. You probably think of the Brewers as having a perennial top five relief corps without looking into the numbers. I know I did. But here are their finishes in a variety of metrics over the past five years:

Read the rest of this entry »

There is no doubt the Milwaukee Brewers have outperformed expectations in 2024. Although they won the NL Central just last season and made the playoffs in five of the last six years, they were hardly postseason favorites on Opening Day. On the contrary, they were the only 2023 division winners that the majority of our staff did not pick to repeat as division champs; just four of the 25 participants in our preseason predictions exercise picked the Brewers to make the playoffs in any capacity. The only NL Central team with less support was the Pirates. Meanwhile, our playoff odds were only slightly more optimistic about Milwaukee’s chances. The Brewers had 18.1% odds to win their division and a 30.0% chance to make the postseason on Opening Day.

Sixty-seven games have passed between now and then, and over those 67 games, the Brewers have become the indisputable frontrunners in the NL Central. What once seemed like it would be the most closely contested division in the league – all five teams were projected to finish within 2.3 games of one another on April 14 – has become Milwaukee’s to lose. The Pirates, Cubs, Cardinals, and Reds are all smushed within half a game of one another, but the Brewers rest atop with a comfortable 6.5-game lead. Their divisional odds are up to 63.0%; their playoff odds, 78.6%. In the NL, only the three powerhouse clubs, the Phillies, Dodgers, and Braves, are more likely to play in October. Read the rest of this entry »

Oneil Cruz is a player of extremes. The 6-foot-7 shortstop — the tallest man ever to play the position regularly — doesn’t just have incredible bat speed and power, he can lay claim to the hardest-hit ball of the Statcast era, and he once held the record for the hardest throw by an infielder as well. But for as loud as his contact is, the frequency with which he makes it has been an issue, as he’s particularly prone to chasing pitches outside the zone. Defensive metrics don’t love him either. Yet he’s the kind of player you can’t take your eyes off, because when it all comes together, it’s a sight to behold — and gradually, it’s been coming together more frequently.

Case in point: Last week found Cruz in a prolonged funk, hitting just .151/.224/.283 in his previous 58 plate appearances dating back to May 15 while striking out 23 times (39.6%) in that span. After going 0-for-4 in last Tuesday’s series opener against the Dodgers, he collected a pair of hits the next night, including this three-run homer off Evan Phillips:

That’s a 462-footer into the Allegheny River, the longest homer of Cruz’s major league career by 25 feet, and the third splash hit of his career; he also had ones on September 6, 2022 and May 3 of this season. The 117.7-mph exit velocity on his shot off Phillips made it his hardest-hit home run to date by 0.2 mph, surpassing an August 28, 2022 dinger in Milwaukee. For both distance and exit velocity, he’s up there with the big boys; the homer off Phillips is the majors’ seventh-longest this year behind three from Aaron Judge (a 473-footer from May 9 being the longest) and ones by Mike Trout, Bobby Witt Jr. and Shohei Ohtani. Cruz’s homer is the fourth-fastest in exit velocity behind two by Giancarlo Stanton (a 119.9-mph shot from May 8 being the fastest) and one by Ohtani. He’s right there in flavor country when it comes to some of the new bat tracking metrics, second only to Stanton in average bat speed (78.0 mph) and fast-swing rate (74.6%); he’s below average in terms of his squared-up rate (23.1%) — that’s the rate at which he obtains at least 80% of the maximum exit velocity for that swing — but a respectable 15th in blast rate (16.2%), the rate at which he squares up balls on fast swings. Read the rest of this entry »

Surely this is just some piece of cosmic performance art. If you’re looking for proof that we live in a simulation, Isaac Paredes’ spray chart is strong evidence. Sure, you’ve heard of pull hitters. What about only-right-at-the-foul-pole hitters, though?

Paredes is doing the same thing he always seems to. Through 259 plate appearances this season, he has the best wRC+ of his career at 147. Think it’s all about his one simple trick for hitting homers? He’s 16th in baseball in on-base percentage. He’s still walking roughly 10% of the time and striking out far less frequently than average. None of it makes sense, and yet it keeps happening.

The “Paredes approach” has been endlessly rehashed at this point. He puts the ball in the air. He pulls the ball in the air. He makes a tremendous amount of contact, and he cuts down on his swing to do so. His bat speed and exit velocity numbers are unimpressive, and he hits a ton of fly balls that would be outs if they went anywhere other than the left field corner. But, well, they keep going to the left field corner, as we’ve already covered.

Let’s put it this way: Here’s a list of pull rate on fly balls for all hitters, from Paredes’ debut in 2020 through the end of last season:

Read the rest of this entry »

J.T. Realmuto can no longer outrun the brutality of his chosen profession. The Phillies catcher, having battled knee discomfort all spring, is having right knee surgery. While Realmuto has dealt with knee pain for weeks, this is nevertheless startling news. Realmuto’s durability is the thing that makes him special; in 11 major league seasons, this is only his fourth stint on the IL (including a COVID quarantine period in 2021), and none of his previous trips have lasted longer than 22 days.

Moreover, Phillies Doomerism, as a mental health condition, is frequently comorbid with Sixers Doomerism. People who suffer from the latter probably heard the word “meniscus” flashed back to Joel Embiid collapsing in a heap and taking the Sixers’ season with him.

It’s not quite that bad. Realmuto is headed for the longest injury absence of his career, but absent some bizarre complication, he’ll be back well before the end of the regular season. Even if that weren’t the case, no baseball player is as important to his team as Embiid is to his. Nevertheless, the Phillies were built under the assumption that Realmuto would always be available. So even a brief absence is going to be problematic. Read the rest of this entry »

Colt Keith is searching for his comfort zone at baseball’s highest level. Currently day-to-day with a sore knee – which occurred during a collision over the weekend — the Detroit Tigers rookie infielder is slashing just .215/.269/.280. Moreover, belying his sturdy 6-foot-2, 245-pound frame and ability to propel pitches far distances, the 22-year-old has gone yard only twice in 201 plate appearances.

The potential for much more is unquestionably there. In January, Eric Longenhagen assigned Keith a 50 FV despite questions about his defense, pointing to the promising youngster’s “offensive prowess… rooted in his raw power.” Barely a week after those words were written, the Tigers signed Keith to a six-year contract worth $28.6 million — this despite his having yet to debut in the majors.

He was even farther away from The Show when I first talked to him late in the 2021 season. The 2020 fifth-round draft pick out of Mississippi’s Biloxi High School had recently been promoted to West Michigan, and whereas he’d been scorching the ball with Low-A Lakeland, he was at the time struggling to hold his head above water with the High-A Whitecaps. That he was scuffling came as little surprise to the self-aware slugger.

“For whatever reason, everything about my swing, and everything I know about baseball, seems to go out the window when I move up,” Keith told me at the time. “Then I have to restart and get used to the better pitching and to the speed of the game. Once I do that, I’m back in the groove.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve written about the Colorado Rockies so many times over the past two years that I think we can all take the normal disclaimer as read. They’re not very good, and they’re probably not going to be very good in the short or medium term.

However, there is some good news. Colorado has put quite a bit of faith in two young players who put up monster defensive numbers at up-the-middle positions: center fielder Brenton Doyle and shortstop Ezequiel Tovar. The latter signed a seven-year contract extension this spring. These guys are so good defensively it almost doesn’t matter if they hit at all. And that’s a fortunate coincidence, because last year, they didn’t hit at all.

That part wasn’t the good news. This is the good news: In 2024, Doyle and Tovar are hitting a little. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Houston Astros. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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 »