The worst part of a long rebuild is about a third of the way through, when the teardown is nearly finished and the daunting enormousness of the task starts to sink in. At that point, the old guard is gone but the core of the next good team is still in the minors at best — sometimes, the next superstar is still in ninth grade.
But someone has to go out there and log some minutes for the tanking ballclub. And in every rebuild — sometimes because of keen scouting or inspired development, but often as not just through sheer volume — one or two of those random unfortunates breaks out and survives into the next competitive window.
I’ve long been fascinated by players in this situation, because they fall into one of two categories. First, there’s the Rhys Hoskins class. Hoskins was an uninspiring college first base prospect who exploded into the one bright spot on some late-2010s Phillies teams that I cannot describe accurately on a family website. Read the rest of this entry »
Perhaps it was the batting order switcheroo, or maybe it was the minor league ballpark. Bumped out of the leadoff spot for the first time since last August 11, and down to fifth in the order for the first time during Bruce Bochy’s run as manager of the Rangers, Marcus Semien recorded his first multi-hit game of the season on Tuesday night in Sacramento. The 34-year-old second baseman went 2-for-3 with a three-run homer, a walk, a sacrifice fly, and four runs batted in against the Athletics — a much-needed positive sign given his season-opening slump.
Semien’s big night took place at Sutter Health Park, where the relocated A’s and their opponents have bashed out 5.4 runs per game while batting .270/.342/.466. Whether or not the venue was a factor, Bochy’s new lineup worked like a charm, as new leadoff hitter Josh Smith, new no. 2 hitter Wyatt Langford, and the slumping Jake Burger all homered for the Rangers as well. All of the shots were served up by 29-year-old righty Osvaldo Bido; Semien, who had already plated the Rangers’ second run with a first-inning sacrifice fly, crushed a middle-middle sinker 417 feet to center field to break open a 4-2 game in the fifth inning:
The homer was just Semien’s second of the season, and just his third extra-base hit. He entered the game batting .141/.209/.192 for a 17 wRC+, with all four of those numbers ranking among the bottom four among the 170 players with enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. His new and improved slash line (.160/.231/.247, 39 wRC+) now puts him among the bottom 10 qualifiers in those categories, but he isn’t close to being the worst on the team. Joc Pederson (.052/.141/.069, -37 wRC+) is having even bigger problems, including an 0-for-3 on Tuesday, but the Rangers don’t have nearly as much invested in him as they do in Semien, whom they signed to a seven-year, $175 million deal in December 2021. Read the rest of this entry »
Over his first five starts, Aaron Nola is 0-5 with a 6.43 ERA. On Monday night against the Mets, Nola nearly put up his best performance of the season, allowing two earned runs over six innings before things went off the rails. In the seventh inning, the two runners that he bequeathed to the bullpen scored, leaving him with a final line of 6 1/3 innings and four earned runs. Still, it was an improvement.
No one has more losses or fewer wins than Nola this season. Only three qualified pitchers have a higher ERA. How much should we be panicking right now? I will tell you up front that I don’t know the answer. There’s plenty going on, and I don’t know how to make all the pieces fit neatly, so I’m just going to lay out what I’ve learned. Let’s start with a whole bunch of advanced ERA estimators. Read the rest of this entry »
The Braves entered 2024 with high hopes for the coming season, but their campaign ended in disappointing fashion. After making the playoffs by the slimmest of margins, they were unceremoniously eliminated by the Padres. It’s now been more than seven months since Atlanta’s early exit, and the calendar has flipped to a new season. The same cannot be said for the team’s fortunes.
Indeed, the Braves have started off this year in a funk, and not of the good Sly and the Family Stone variety. A season-opening series against the Padres, followed by a trip to Chavez Ravine for a matchup with the defending-champion Dodgers, left Atlanta with seven losses to start the season and Reynaldo López on the IL for most, if not all, of 2025. A sweep of the similarly underwhelming Minnesota Twins staunched the bleeding somewhat, but another wound opened up soon after, as Spencer Strider strained his hamstring playing catch on Monday and returned to the IL just one start after coming back from major elbow surgery.
A 9-14 start, even when coupled with the loss of López and Strider, doesn’t make 2025 a lost cause, but it does complicate matters considerably. Let’s first look back at the ZiPS preseason projections for the NL East standings. Read the rest of this entry »
Shelby Miller is so old… (“How old is he?”)… he got R.A. Dickey to ground out in his first major league inning. He’s so old he threw more than 200 innings for the Braves when they were bad. He’s so old he threw more than 200 innings in a single season, full stop.
I guess 34 isn’t that old, but Miller has lived and died a hundred times during his career in professional baseball, and if the first eight appearances of his second go-around with the Diamondbacks are any indication (10 innings, 10 strikeouts, only four total baserunners), he’s back to life again. Read the rest of this entry »
Ceddanne Rafaela can jump. He can bound up and over a high outfield wall to rob a home run. He can leap forward to secure a ball that otherwise would have fallen out of his reach. He can spring up like a cat to turn a double play after laying out for a catch. But none of those jumps are the kind I’m referring to. I’m talking about this:
In the GIF you just watched, Rafaela travels more than 100 feet in less than five seconds to rob Bo Bichette of extra bases. It’s a stunning catch. It would have been a tough enough play for the Gold Glove winner in right field, let alone for Rafaela coming over from center. That ball had an expected batting average of .820 off the bat, and just look how far away Wilyer Abreu is when he realizes all he can do is back off and let his teammate work his magic. You don’t need Statcast to tell you that’s a five-star catch, and it stands out even among the nine five-star catches we’ve seen this year. It was one of only three with a catch probability of 5%.
Rafaela’s slide into the outfield wall, the way he raised his glove in triumph, and the fact that this happened on the first pitch of the game make this an endlessly rewatchable highlight. Yet, what really makes this catch so spectacular is the sheer amount of ground he had to cover before he could even consider reaching out for the ball. It’s not that he crashed into the Wasabi sign in right field, but that he was anywhere close to the sign to begin with. In other words, it’s all about his jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello there, FanGraphs readers. Today I’d like to tell you about a reliever on the Los Angeles Angels. Now sure, just last week, I wrote about how much help the Angels needed on the pitching front, and in the bullpen in particular. And sure, the guy we’ll be discussing today has a 4.05 ERA and a 4.08 FIP so far this year, not exactly stud closer numbers. Was he a trade throw-in last summer, one of four lottery tickets the Angels landed in exchange for a reliever in a contract year? He sure was. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s interesting. So I’d like to introduce you to Ryan Zeferjahn, the best reliever you’ve probably never heard of.
The first thing you should know about Zeferjahn is that his primary pitch is weird. Everyone calls it a cutter, and in many ways, that makes sense. Let me show it to you in action:
Yep, that’s a cutter. It’s 90-ish mph, with less rise and arm-side fade than a four-seam fastball, and it makes batters look uncomfortable because they can’t quite classify whether it’s a fastball or a breaking ball. Miguel Vargas read that pitch as inside, and then it held the plate thanks to unexpected cut. But Zeferjahn’s cutter has, for lack of a better way of saying it, a lot of cut even for a cutter. This isn’t something you would pick up from watching a GIF or two, but that pitch has about six inches of glove-side break. Read the rest of this entry »
Albert Cesare/The Enquirer/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Over the 30-plus years that I’ve been following baseball, it seems like a collection of newfangled stats comes out every couple years. WAR, DiPS, wOBA, UZR, exit velocity, spin rate — America’s most rigorously empiricized sport has gone from scribblings in Henry Chadwick’s notebook to having more inscrutable acronyms than the Department of Defense.
My default position on new stats is one of interested skepticism. As a public-facing analyst, I don’t want to stake my reputation on a new metric that might still have serious flaws. It usually takes months or even years for people smarter than me — or at least, people who did more than barely pass their graduate statistics class — to iron out the kinks and figure out how to read and utilize the trendy new stats.
We haven’t even reached May, but on Sunday, Elly De La Cruz made what will certainly go down as one of the best defensive plays of the 2025 season. In the bottom of the second inning in Baltimore, Reds opener Brent Suter clipped the outside corner with a slider and Jackson Holliday fought it off, sending a weak line drive up the middle off the end of his bat. The ball was ticketed for center field, but nobody told De La Cruz, who ranged to his left and did his best Superman impression. He seemed to hang in the air forever as he corralled what would have been the game-tying hit.
At this point, it’s possible that Superman is going to start doing an Elly De La Cruz impression. Truly, on this Easter Sunday, Elly was risen. De La Cruz got full extension, utilizing every inch of his 6-foot-5 frame. He sacrificed his face in the process, selling out for the catch so completely that he smacked his chin and the brim of his hat into the dirt when he finally landed. When the ball found leather, the Orioles fans who had started cheering in anticipation of an RBI single instead found their voices rising in both pitch and decibel level as their disparate vocalizations merged into one united “Awww!”
I spent a significant portion of my Monday morning watching this play on repeat, then searching for as many angles of it as I could. I wanted to see the catch, but even more than that, I wanted to see the reactions. You know how when you’ve watched your favorite movie enough times, you no longer need to keep your eyes on the focus of the frame at any given moment? You start to notice all the subtle things going on in the background, the way one extra covers their face to keep from laughing, or a tiny visual joke on a blackboard. After I’d marveled at De La Cruz’s athleticism until my eyes lost the ability to focus, I started watching everyone else marvel at it. Read the rest of this entry »
Max Scherzer has had a Hall of Fame-quality career. Now with the Toronto Blue Jays, the 40-year-old right-hander has accumulated 73.0 WAR to go with 216 wins and a 133 ERA+ across his 18 big league seasons. Moreover, his 3,408 strikeouts rank 11th all time, and his résumé also includes three Cy Young Awards, eight All-Star selections, and a pair of World Series rings. Writing about his Cooperstown chances last summer, my esteemed colleague Jay Jaffe called Scherzer “a lock for election.”
Let’s turn the clock back to 2007, when Scherzer made his professional debut that summer a full year after he was drafted 11th overall by the Arizona Diamondbacks out of the University of Missouri. The following spring, Scherzer was ranked fourth in the D-backs system when Baseball America’s 2008 Prospect Handbook was published. Rankings and in-depth scouting reports weren’t yet a thing here at FanGraphs.
What did Scherzer’s 2008 Baseball America scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think of it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what BA’s Will Lingo wrote and asked Scherzer to respond to it.
———
“The 11th overall pick in 2006, Scherzer pitched for the independent Fort Worth Cats and held out before he would have reentered the draft pool.”
“That’s right,” replied Scherzer. “Now that you think about it, the rules have changed since then, but when I got drafted by the Diamondbacks… actually, let’s go back to pre-draft. That season, my junior year, I slammed a door on my finger. I tried to pitch through it and developed biceps tendonitis. That scared off a lot of teams.
“I came back at the end of the year and pitched well, so I went into the draft saying that I was still looking for a top-college-pitcher contract. That was when you could still sign major league contracts out of the draft, and it’s what I told teams I was looking for. Arizona drafted me under those pretenses, but then tried to tell me I was hurt. I was like, ‘You guys literally just saw me at the Big 12 tournament. Everything is back. I’m good.’ I let them know that I wasn’t going to take 11th-pick slot; I was looking for a major league contract, which is what the top college pitchers in the past few years had gotten. Read the rest of this entry »
