Back in the halcyon days of 2021, things were looking up for Robbie Ray. After a promising but inconsistent start to his career, he put everything together all at once and won a Cy Young award. He hit free agency on the back of that season and signed a deal that guaranteed him five times what he’d made in the majors so far. The future was bright – except that Ray turned around and put up a miserable 2022 campaign, meaningfully worse across the board despite pitching in Seattle, where trained squirrels can go six innings and give up two runs in the pitcher-friendliest ballpark in the big leagues. Then he got hurt. And later got traded as salary ballast. Life comes at you fast.

Ray would hardly be the first pitcher to spike some hardware in a weak year — only six AL pitchers reached 4 WAR in 2021; Ray wasn’t one of them — and then fade away. Rick Porcello says hi, by the way. If Ray’s last act was keeping replacement-level time on the Giants, at least he got his one big payday. Expectations weren’t high, and when he was shut down with an injury only a month after returning in the second half of last year, they fell further still.

Of course, I’m writing this article, so you know that hasn’t continued. Rather than teeter into irrelevance, Ray has come out strong to start 2025. He looks as good as he has since his award-winning season – and arguably even better. So let’s look at how he’s doing it now, because whether you’re a long-time Ray-head or just seeing the first Rays of light this year, he’s a strange enough – and fun enough – pitcher to be worth taking notice of. Read the rest of this entry »

When we last checked in on the Twins, they had stumbled out of the gate, losing eight of their first 12 games — a start that looked particularly dismal given last September’s collapse, which cost them a playoff berth. But times have changed, with the offense heating up and the pitching staff emerging as one of the league’s stingiest. Thanks to a just-ended 13-game winning streak, the Twins now own the American League’s fourth-best record (26-21, .553), though injuries to players such as Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa threaten to stall their momentum.

On May 3, the Twins beat the Red Sox 4-3 in Boston, ending a four-game losing streak that had dropped them to 13-20 and had included two walk-off wins by the Guardians. They beat the Red Sox to close out a road trip, then went home and pulled off three-game sweeps of the Orioles and Giants, punctuated by a 10th-inning walk-off victory. Back on the road, they swept three from the hapless Orioles in Baltimore before taking the first two from the Brewers in Milwaukee, running their record to 26-20. On Sunday, they finally lost again, falling to the Brewers 5-2.

The final three wins of the Twins’ streak were all shutouts, starting with a 4-0 blanking of the Orioles by starter Chris Paddack and two relievers on Thursday, continuing with a 3-0 whitewashing of the Brewers behind Joe Ryan and three relievers on Friday, and concluding with a 7-0 drubbing of Milwaukee highlighted by the work of Pablo López and three relievers on Saturday. In all, the Twins shut out their opponents for 34 consecutive innings (the longest since the franchise moved to Minnesota in 1961), beginning with the fourth inning of Wednesday night’s game, after the Orioles had scored six runs; they extended that streak until the second inning on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

“The reason the Royals are so far down this list is that they don’t have an obvious back of the rotation yet.” That’s what Ben Clemens wrote when the Royals turned up at no. 13 on our Positional Power Rankings back in March. Until Saturday, the lack of depth hadn’t held them back at all. Their five starters, Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, Michael Wacha, Michael Lorenzen, and Kris Bubic, had started 45 of the team’s 46 games. As Michael Baumann wrote last week, Bubic, the biggest question mark of the bunch, has instead pitched like an exclamation point. After taking a no-hit bid into the seventh inning in San Francisco last night, he’s 5-2 with a 1.47 ERA and 2.72 FIP. Put it all together, and the Kansas City starters have a 2.93 ERA and 3.45 FIP, good for the third- and fourth-best marks in baseball, respectively. But that depth is finally going to be tested. On Saturday, the Royals announced that they’d sent both Lugo and Ragans to the injured list.

Lugo and Ragans, who respectively finished second and fourth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2024, have been on opposite sides of the process-results spectrum thus far this season. Lugo is rocking a 3.02 ERA with a 4.52 FIP, while Ragans has a 4.53 ERA and a 1.99 FIP. The good news is that neither injury sounds too serious (with the obvious caveat that because they’re pitchers, either player could spontaneously combust at any moment). Both had been dealing with nagging injuries in recent weeks and seemed to reach the point where it was time to back off rather than risk something more serious. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Riley was relatively raw when our 2017 Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list was published in February of that year. Six weeks short of his 20th birthday, he was coming off of a Low-A season in which he logged 20 home runs and a 124 wRC+, but also fanned 147 times. With lingering concerns about both his contact profile and conditioning, Eric Longenhagen conservatively ranked Riley no. 28 in a then-strong Atlanta system.

Riley has obviously gone on to have a highly successful career. Since debuting with the Braves in May 2019, Riley has put up a 124 wRC+ and 19.9 WAR across parts of seven seasons, slugged 30-plus homers in three different years, and made a pair of All-Star teams. A mainstay in the middle of Atlanta’s lineup, the 41st-overall pick in the 2015 draft out Southaven, Mississippi’s DeSoto Central High School has developed into one of the senior circuit’s top sluggers.

What did Riley’s 2017 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out I shared some of what our lead prospect analyst wrote and asked Riley to respond to it.

———

“Riley began the year struggling with any sort of velocity and then improved the timing of his footwork, quieted his hands and started hitting. Late in the year, he was turning on plus velocity.”

“Very accurate,” Riley said. “Coming out of high school, I hadn’t seen velo a lot, and I kind of had a lot going on with my swing. I needed to make some adjustments. Being a bigger guy, a power guy, it was kind of, ‘All I have to do is touch the ball, get a barrel to the ball.’ It was one of my first steps in learning how to shorten everything up and just get a barrel to it. From there, good things happen.”

“He has plus raw power (at least) and has improved his body composition since high school (when he was a heavy 230). But at just 19, with some general stiffness to his actions, Riley is pretty likely to kick over to first base as he matures.” Read the rest of this entry »

Cal Raleigh has a lot of power. That’s always been his calling card, at least on offense. In each of his three full major league seasons, he’s posted a below-average OBP and an above-average offensive line. In cavernous T-Mobile Park, the hardest place to hit in baseball, his 34 home runs and .436 slugging percentage in 2024 were downright titanic. This year, though, he’s tapped into something new.

Or, well, his results are absolutely something new. One very interesting thing about Raleigh’s spectacular 2025: It hasn’t come from more raw power. Maximum exit velocity? Nothing new for Raleigh. Neither is his average exit velocity, nor his hard-hit rate, both of which are broadly in line with 2024. His bat speed is the same. When he’s trying to hit a home run, he’s doing it the way he always has.

But while his ability to hit baseballs hard might be the same as it’s always been, he’s demonstrating that ability more often than ever before. He’s both putting the ball in the air and pulling his elevated contact more frequently, and more of his batted balls are barrels, too. He’s striking out less frequently, with a career-high contact rate and career-low swinging strike rate.

Nothing is ever so simple that it’s driven by one thing, but I think there’s one important change driving Raleigh’s surge. It’s something he’s been working toward for a few years, in fact. When Raleigh is ahead in the count and pitchers throw him meatballs over the heart of the plate, he’s swinging less than ever before:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves have limped through the first seven weeks of the season at far less than full strength, particularly within their outfield, where they lost Jurickson Profar to an 80-game PED suspension and have taken a very slow and deliberate approach to Ronald Acuña Jr.’s rehabilitation from his second anterior cruciate ligament repair surgery in three years. That outfield has ranked among the majors’ least productive, offset only by the emergence of Eli White. But at least help is on the horizon. Acuña’s rehab stint is finally underway, and he could return to the Atlanta lineup as soon as this weekend.

Acuña tore his left ACL on May 26, 2024 and underwent surgery to repair it on June 4. When he returned from his 2021 tear of his right ACL nine months and one week after surgery, he did not play up to his usual standard in ’22. The Braves resolved to take his rehab more slowly this time around, resisting the urge to accelerate his timeline even with Acuña reportedly hitting 450-foot bombs in batting practice early in spring training, and even with the team stumbling out of the gate by losing its first seven games and 13 of its first 18. The 27-year-old slugger finally returned to action last Tuesday with the Braves’ Florida Complex League affiliate, homering off Kevin Velasco, a 19-year-old righty on the Orioles’ FCL squad:

.@ronaldacunajr24 goes yard in his first rehab start! pic.twitter.com/e5ZFhb9jSF

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) May 13, 2025

Acuña then moved up to Triple-A Gwinnett, where he went 3-for-6 with a homer and six walks in three games against the Charlotte Knights, affiliate of the White Sox, from Thursday through Saturday. The homer, a 102-mph, 420-footer to dead center, was hit off 25-year-old lefty Tyler Schweitzer. Read the rest of this entry »

Before Game 2 of last year’s AL Wild Card Series, I asked Brandon Hyde a kind of stupid question. The Orioles, having been swept in the ALDS the year before, found themselves down 1-0 to the Royals in the series and were facing another rapid postseason elimination. The Orioles’ rebuild had gone on so long, and developed so much talent, that their progression to World Series contention had been assumed.

Hyde, the rare manager who’d survived a 100-loss tanking season through to the playoffs, had yet to win even one postseason game. So I mentioned that in other sports, coaches in his position have levers to pull in such desperate times. Was there anything a baseball manager has up his sleeve in a must-win game?

“I’m planning a spot to onside kick, try to get the ball back as quick as I possibly can in good field position,” Hyde joked in response. “Or I’m going to try to be like UNLV back in the early ’90s with Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson, and try to get up and down the court as fast as possible. Besides that, I’m going to use my relievers as best I possibly can, try to put some zeroes up and try to score some runs.” Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Fluharty is flying under the radar as one of baseball’s most effective lefty relievers. Since making his major league debut with the Toronto Blue Jays on April Fools Day, the 23-year-old southpaw has a 1.96 ERA and a 2.94 FIP over 18 appearances. Moreover, he’s allowed just seven hits in his 18-and-third innings, and prior to surrendering a solo home run to former Jay Danny Jansen this past Tuesday he’d retired 21 consecutive batters. All three of his decisions are in the win column.

His initial two outings were especially challenging. The first batter Fluharty faced in the bigs was Washington Nationals 2024 All-Star CJ Abrams, who lined a run-scoring double. Three days later, the first batter in his second outing was Juan Soto; the New York Mets superstar also stroked a run-scoring double.

I asked the 2022 fifth-round pick out of Liberty University about those welcome-to-the-big-leagues ABs prior to his third appearance.

“Get put into the fire and see what happens,” said Fluharty, who later that same day faced Rafael Devers [E-6], Alex Bregman [K], and Rob Refsnyder [DP]. “I’m glad they have faith in me. While I obviously would have preferred better outcomes in those first outings, it’s all about adjusting. This game is hard.”

The pitches that were turned around for two-baggers? Read the rest of this entry »

If motor preferences were the final word on pitcher performance, Nathan Eovaldi would be sitting on a beach somewhere.

Eovaldi throws from a low slot, releasing his pitches from an average arm angle of 30 degrees. (Zero degrees is fully sidearm; 90 degrees is straight over the top.) Many low-slot pitchers have a supination bias. There are downsides to being a supinator — their preference for cutting the baseball tends to produce crummy four-seam fastballs — but they usually have no trouble throwing hard breaking balls; they can also more easily harness seam-shifted wake to throw sinkers, sweepers, or kick-changes. Low-slot supinators, like Seth Lugo, can basically throw every pitch in the book. High-slot pronators like Ryan Pepiot or Lucas Giolito don’t have that sort of range, but make up for it with excellent changeups and high-carry fastballs.

Eovaldi is, tragically, a low-slot pronator. Not many low-slot pronators make it to the big leagues. The pronation bias blunts their ability to throw hard glove-side breakers, and the low arm angle obviates the pronator’s nominal advantage, killing the carry on their fastball. As Tyler Zombro of Tread Athletics (now a special assistant of pitching for the Cubs) said in his primer video on motor preferences, “I know in stuff models and just off of Trackman alone, this arsenal with this slot is not that attractive.” Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I watch Oneil Cruz hit, I end up thinking about pull rate. It seems like he’s always using his long arms to yank a ball into right field even though the pitch came in all the way on the outside corner. I’m not quite right, though. According to our leaderboards, Cruz ranks 35th among all qualified players in pull rate. According to Statcast, he’s at 55th, not even in the top third. Maybe it’s just that seeing someone do something as bonkers as this can warp your perspective:

But there is more than one way to think about pull rate. Sometimes you get jammed. Sometimes you have to hit the ball where it’s pitched. Sometimes the situation demands that you shorten up and sell out for contact. Those three examples might tell us a bit less about the intent behind your swing, because you didn’t get to execute your plan. We have ways to throw them out. Today, we’ll look into players whose overall pull rate is notably different from their pull rate when they square up the ball. As a refresher, Statcast plugs the respective speeds of the ball and the bat into a formula to determine the maximum possible exit velocity, and if the actual EV is at least 80% of that number, it’s considered squared up.

I pulled numbers from 2023 through 2025 for each player who has squared up at least 250 balls during that stretch. As you’d expect, the numbers are mostly pretty similar. Of the 219 players in the sample, 165 of them have a difference between their overall pull rate and their squared-up pull rate that’s below three percentage points. No player has a pull rate when squaring the ball up that’s more than 6.5 percentage points off their overall pull rate, but there are a few interesting names here. Read the rest of this entry »