Rowdy Tellez has stopped swinging. Not entirely; he’s tied for ninth in the National League with 12 home runs and 20th with a .494 slugging percentage. But this year, the Brewers slugger has cut at just 35.3% of all pitches, the second-lowest rate in baseball after the famously choosy Juan Soto. It’s uncharacteristic of Tellez, representing an eight-point drop from last year and a 13.2-point drop from his 2021 campaign. The new approach has done wonders for his chase rate: his O-Swing%, which was 35.2% in 2021 and 31.0% in 2022, is now 33rd in the majors at 25.9%. And while he’s never been a terribly impatient hitter, cutting back on swings at bad pitches has meant a rising walk rate, which isn’t quite Soto-esque at 12.0% but is a marked improvement from his 7.1% rate two years ago. That alone will get you on base an extra 30 or so times over a full season.

Tellez started to change his approach last year, swinging at fewer and fewer pitches than he had through the first three-plus seasons of his career. For most of his time in Toronto, he offered at somewhere between 48% and 50% of pitches he saw, but right around the time he was dealt to Milwaukee in 2021, he got a fair bit more aggressive with pitches over the plate, cutting at 73.9% of strikes and just 34.5% of pitches outside the zone. Since then, the aggression at the plate has given way to radical levels of patience:

Now, stop me if you can guess what the problem with never swinging the bat is: he’s taking a lot more strikes. While everyone else in the league is swinging at a majority of the pitches they see in the zone, Tellez is offering at just 47.4%, nearly seven points lower than any of his contemporaries. If he keeps this up, he’ll be the first qualifier to swing at less than half of pitches in the zone since David Fletcher in 2019 and ’20. In the 22 seasons of our Z-Swing% data, his 47.4% rate would be second-lowest over a full season, beating only Brett Gardner’s 44.8% in 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third 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 I 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 »

The calendar just flipped over to June, and somehow we have yet to write even one article about the best position player in all of baseball this season. Not that it’s a surprise; nothing about the best position player in all of baseball is a surprise.

If you Google “Freddie Freeman” and “killer,” in just the first page of results, you’ll find references to Freeman as a Nats killer, a Braves killer, a Mets killer, a Phillies killer, and a Cubs killer. (If you don’t use the quotation marks, you’ll get references to Freeman as a Mets killer and a Nats killer, plus a bunch of headlines about an actual murderer.) But here’s the thing: if you look at Freeman’s performance against every team in baseball and rank them by wOBA, only one of those five teams is even in the top 12. It feels personal no matter who you root for, but Freeman is just an everybody killer. It’s a conundrum straight out of Catch-22.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”

(The Braves are the one team that’s actually in the top 12; they’re number four. Freeman has a .361 average and a 206 wRC+ against them, and for obvious reasons he may actually want to kill them.) Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Steer is emerging as a solid big league hitter. One of three prospects acquired by the Cincinnati Reds from the Minnesota Twins at last August’s trade deadline in exchange for Tyler Mahle — Christian Encarnacion-Strand and Steve Hajjar were the others — Steer is slashing .289/.356/.498 with a 124 wRC+ over 225 plate appearances. One year after homering 23 times between two minor league levels, and twice more after a September call-up, he’s gone deep eight times in 2023.

Eric Longenhagen has been bullish on his bat. Back in January, our lead prospect analyst wrote that the 25-year-old corner infielder has “a well-rounded hit/patience/power toolkit,” adding that he is “a good hitter who will stabilize an infield spot in Cincinnati for the next half decade or so.” Longenhagen ranked the 2019 third round pick out of the University of Oregon no. 2 in Cincinnati’s system; he was no. 47 on the preseason Top 100.

Steer sat down to talk hitting prior to Tuesday’s game at Fenway Park. Read the rest of this entry »

May was a successful month for the Tigers, a franchise which in recent years has been lacking in happily remembered calendar pages. Detroit’s .577 winning percentage in May (15–11) is its best full month since a .615 mark (16–10) all the way back in July 2016. And while it would be a stretch to say that everything has been coming up bengal, given that the team’s run differential is still slightly in the negative for the month, the bleakness of the AL Central has allowed the Tigers to come within a game of the division lead. Even Spencer Torkelson, whose bat disappeared in 2022, has been playing better baseball, putting up a 119 wRC+ in May. Unfortunately, fate wasn’t even kind enough to give Detroit the whole month; a couple of days before the calendar flip, injuries to Eduardo Rodriguez and Riley Greene have ended May on a decidedly sour note.

These Tigers certainly aren’t strangers to injury. Every team faces injuries sooner or later, but Detroit managed to win in May despite an entire rotation’s worth of promising pitchers — Tarik Skubal, Matt Manning, Spencer Turnbull, Casey Mize, and Beau Brieske — out with injuries. The contributions of Rodriguez and Greene had a lot to do with that. The former’s hot April start continued in May with a 2.03 ERA/2.61 FIP over five outings; the latter hit a star-level .365/.435/.573 for the month. That came crashing down on Tuesday with two bits of very unwelcome news. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Olson is striking out a lot. Exactly 30% of the time, to be precise. His swinging strike rate has never been higher. He’s only posted a lower contact rate once, in his disastrous 2020 campaign. Obviously, then, you know how he’s doing this year: incredibly well. His 140 wRC+ is the second-best mark of his career. Clearly, something interesting is going on, so let’s take a look at what it might be.

Honestly, the strikeouts are nothing new for Olson. His career 24.1% strikeout rate isn’t ideal for a top-tier hitter, particularly one with limited defensive value. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of his game. You can succeed while striking out a lot, but you have to do a lot of other things well to strike out a quarter of the time and be a great hitter.

Throughout his career, Olson has mostly done that. Take his 2019 season, when he struck out 25.2% of the time. He hit for a ton of power – even playing in the cavernous Coliseum, his ISO was in the top 15 in the majors – and walked enough to post a reasonable OBP. But you can see the downside easily. Consider 2022, for example. Olson again struck out roughly a quarter of the time – 24.3% – and walked a similar amount. He again posted a top-15 ISO; a lower number, to be sure, because 2022 had far fewer homers than 2019. But he ran a .274 BABIP, and that along with the fact that he was playing in a better offensive environment but putting up similar numbers meant he was only 20% above average rather than 35% above average.

Seen next to each other, these two seasons explain the chief worry with Olson. Without much change in his underlying skills, he was only 20% above average offensively last year:

That’s still a nice player, but a first baseman with that kind of batting line is hardly an All-Star. It was the 13th-best batting line for a first baseman in the majors, hardly better than his replacement in Oakland, Seth Brown. That’s the kind of tightrope that a player with Olson’s skill set is always walking; a slight dip in power or BABIP can be the difference between average and excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

Owning a baseball team isn’t work in any meaningful sense. If it were, John J. Fisher would be out of a job by now. Fisher’s Athletics are on pace to have the worst single-season record of any AL or NL team since 1899. It’s not even June yet and they’re 24 1/2 games out of first place and 18 games out of third. Their 4-23 record in divisional play has floated every other team in the AL West over .500. Only one qualified starter, Jordan Lyles, has an ERA worse than Oakland’s team ERA. The baseball stinks, and ironically, A’s fans are seeing more of it anyone else. There is no rest for the weary.

The story of professional baseball since the 2010s has been that of a divorce between competitive and financial incentives. Winning does not beget profit; quite the opposite in some cases. But even as a commercial enterprise, the Athletics have been an astonishing failure. Their attendance is the worst in the league by far, with some midweek games against uninspiring opponents drawing as few as 2,000 paying customers. After a blowout win in Oakland over the weekend, the Astros’ social media team tweeted “10 runs in front of tens of fans” in reference to the pitiable attendance at the Coliseum.

There’s a long tradition of fans (or operatives, in this case) of big-market teams mocking their counterparts who cheer for less successful clubs by tweeting pictures of empty seats. It predates the idiom “poverty franchise,” but carries the same sentiment. Look at this worthless team of losers and the uncommitted dilettantes who can’t be bothered to cheer them on. Surely our greater commitment will be rewarded by the baseball gods, they say.

That brand of banter is increasingly viewed as impolite, and not just because it wasn’t long ago that the Astros lost 100 games a year with no one in the stands to witness their ineptitude. It’s because more and more, owners like Fisher are making clear that unwavering allegiance is folly. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Miami Marlins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third 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 I 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 »

Everton-Bournemouth stands out among today’s Premier League matchups, as the former will secure a return to England’s elite division with a win (they could also survive with a loss or a draw, but only if both Leeds and Leicester City likewise fail to win). Everton FC, which is located in Liverpool, was last relegated below the top flight in 1951.

As most EPL fans are aware, Everton’s home grounds, Goodison Park, are located less than a mile from Anfield, the historic home of Liverpool FC. They also know that the principal owner of Everton’s longtime arch rival is John Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group purchased the more-ballyhooed of the two clubs in 2010.

According to a new book by Bruce Schoenfeld, the acquisition happened only after initial reluctance from FSG’s ultimate decision-maker. As chronicled in Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports, Henry proclaimed the following during a business meeting held to assess the possible purchase:

“But I don’t want to own a soccer team.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to say this bluntly because it’s something that most should agree with: Harrison Bader’s defense in center field is special. Unfortunately for Bader and baseball fans, he has never totaled above 430 plate appearances in a single season, so we’ve never had the privilege to see him run around the outfield for a traditional full season and rack up defensive value. But even with this limitation, he’s still at or near the top of just about every aggregated defensive metric leaderboard for the last few seasons. If you watch him roam the outfield — and I mean really watch him — you realize that this is a player who does everything correctly out there and has an unflappable baseball IQ. If you could write a script on how to be the perfect outfielder, all you would need to say is “be Bader.”

Let’s start by addressing where Bader ranks next to his peers this season in terms of defensive metrics. I’m only going to focus on Outs Above Average (OAA) for this piece. Defensive metrics are a great starting point to a conversation like this, but they are a complement to video analysis that will show us the details of a player’s fundamentals and decision making.

Here are the leading outfielders in terms of OAA this season:

One of these is not like the others! Given that OAA is a counting stat, a player with at least 16 fewer games played (usually more) should not be on this list, but Bader only trails Robert this season in OAA, and that is mainly due to his Success Rate Added. That gives some more insight into how valuable he has been in his limited sample this year. Read the rest of this entry »