Archive for Teams

Javier López faced 756 different batters while pitching for five teams from 2003-2016. Frequently employed as a lefty specialist, the sidewinding native of San Juan, Puerto Rico did so to the tune of a 3.48 ERA, 14 saves, and a 30-17 won-lost record across 839 appearances. He also earned four World Series rings. López lifted a trophy with the Boston Red Sox in 2007, and with the San Francisco Giants in 2010, 2012, and 2014.

How well does the now Giants broadcast analyst remember his matchups against the hitters he faced? Interested to find out, I recently sat down him for the latest installment of our Challenging Career Quiz series.

I began by asking which player he faced the most times. His first guess, Chase Utley, was incorrect. His second was likewise wrong — although he did get the surname right. It wasn’t Adrián González, but rather Carlos González.

What are López’s recollections of the longtime Colorado Rockies outfielder?

“What I remember about facing Cargo is that he was an absolute monster,” the pitcher-turned-broadcaster said of the 2010 NL batting champion, whom he held to just four hits and one walk in 26 plate appearances. “He had such a sweet swing. I remember giving up a monster home run to him in Colorado. I hung a breaking ball and he hit it off the facing of the second deck. He was pretty impressive.”

Bobby Abreu was the batter López faced the second-most times (24), and he also has distinct memories of him. Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Pfaadt — former top prospect, 2023 postseason hero, recipient of a long-term extension after just one full season of big league work — lasted only three starts in the major league rotation at the beginning of 2026. After allowing 12 runs in 16 2/3 innings, the Diamondbacks had seen enough. Big contract or no, Pfaadt went off to middle relief.

Pfaadt had a 5.94 ERA and 5.37 FIP when he made his last start on April 11. In 10 bullpen outings that followed — including, it must be said, a couple very strong bulk relief stints — Pfaadt posted a 5.91 ERA and 5.47 FIP in 21 1/3 innings. The next demotion was to Triple-A Reno, an indignity for a pitcher who’d started 65 games across 2024 and 2025. Only Logan Webb and Jake Irvin had made more big league starts in that time.

Pfaadt spent less than four weeks in the minor leagues. When he came back, he went straight back into Arizona’s rotation, and immediately started pitching better than he ever had before. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I saw Aaron Ashby lean on his loopy curveball when he found himself in a jam:

Later that day, I was watching the Tigers when Drew Anderson used his own big hook to finish off an at-bat:

I’m a longtime admirer of the giant 12-to-6 curveball, a pitch that is on the decline across the majors. There’s a good reason for that – without delving into it too deeply, velocity is very important. The league-wide curveball rate is down by nearly a quarter over the last decade, and the curves that remain tend to be harder and sharper than the ones I grew up seeing. But no amount of cold hard data about the pitch’s effectiveness would make it less visually enjoyable for me. So in this, the age of the looping breaker’s decline, I set out to find some good examples of my favorite pitch, even as guys throw it less and less frequently.

How do you define a looping curveball? My first thought was to look for the curveball that falls the most from its initial trajectory as it heads home. There’s just one problem with that definition, and that problem’s name is Victor Robles:

Amazingly, this clip doesn’t come from either the 22-0 or 19-2 blowouts the Mariners endured last week; they’re having some kind of month on the “getting blown out” front. But that perfectly located curveball had an absurd amount of downward movement because he threw it at 46 mph. I don’t even think it’s a curveball, to be honest; Statcast says it had nearly a foot of positive vertical break from backspin. In any case, clearly this criteria isn’t sufficient for our purposes. Read the rest of this entry »

I had Tuesday’s Cubs-Diamondbacks Bridge League game circled on the calendar. Chicago’s big league squad is in town this week (for a series that has become spicy), and I thought this meant the organization’s recently drafted pitchers might throw in front of traveling Cubs brass who could see their new talent in the morning before heading to Chase Field for the second game of that series. “Bridge League,” for those unfamiliar, is a fairly informal, month-long slate of backfield games that take place at the spring training complexes between the end of the Arizona and Florida Complex League schedules and the end of the other minor seasons in September. It mostly exists to give newly drafted players a soft landing spot to start their pro careers.

But instead of a first glimpse at Cade Townsend or Carson Jasa, I ran into multiple, big-name rehabbers from both clubs: Justin Steele (who threw a live BP) and Ben Brown of the Cubs, and Corbin Burnes and Zac Gallen of the Diamondbacks. Here is a rundown of my day and how those guys looked, as the two teams eagerly await reinforcements during their respective playoff pushes. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been watching the Mariners the last couple of nights, you might feel like you’re back in the halcyon days of 2025. Seattle took the first two games of its series against one of baseball’s best teams, the Phillies, and Cal Raleigh launched four home runs over two nights, including a three-dinger outburst on Monday. Unfortunately, that feeling has been fleeting in 2026, as the Mariners are comfortably below .500 and have only remained in the divisional and Wild Card races because their competition has been exuberantly mediocre. As for Raleigh, after hitting 60 home runs and just missing out on the American League MVP award to Aaron Judge, he’s suffered through easily the worst season of his professional career. Raleigh’s collapse this year has been historic in its magnitude, yet both he and the M’s could still come out of this playing October baseball.

When you see a season like Raleigh’s 2025, it’s natural to expect some kind of regression toward the mean. Indeed, it’s so expected a phenomenon that a whole panoply of curses have been coined to explain it without having to get all mathy about it. Did you just have a horrible season after a great one? Well, you may have been cursed by the Sports Illustrated cover, the Madden NFL cover, a Wheaties box, a Heisman award, a sophomore slump, or an MLB the Show cover. Or maybe you just drank Jobu’s rum. Whatever you call it, Raleigh’s 2026 is well past regression to the mean and more like regression to the really frigging mean. I swear, that’s a technical term.

So just how bad a season has Raleigh had compared to expectations? You could probably just say “Austin Hedges has a wRC+ more than 20 points higher than Raleigh.” Or maybe graph Raleigh’s year-to-year home run totals, with the chart properly labeled so that people don’t think they’re viewing a win expectancy graph from a game where late-period Craig Kimbrel was the closer. But since we have a projection system handy, we can do better than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer is nearly over. The Premier League is back in business and the NFL is close behind. Kids are going back to school. The other day, I opened a window and it didn’t feel like sticking my face in a pizza oven.

That means it’s time for me to look at the Cleveland Guardians’ lineup and wonder what the heck they’re doing in the playoff race. But rather than do a deep dive on whoever this year’s load-bearing Tyler Naquin or Owen Miller is, I want to take a step back and look at this issue from a historical perspective.

Because this year, the Guardians aren’t the only team with playoff aspirations and a lineup full of question marks. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Balzer is arguably the most intriguing prospect in the San Diego Padres system. Currently ranked eighth with a 40 FV, the 21-year-old right-hander had virtually no pitching experience when he entered pro ball in 2023. Moreover, he blew out his elbow and had Tommy John surgery following his lone turn on the mound. That was at Joso Gakuin High School, roughly an hour northeast of Tokyo.

His current season has been somewhat of a mixed bag. Between Low-A Lake Elsinore (60 1/3 innings) and High-A Fort Wayne (32), he has a record of 6-2 to go with a 4.58 ERA, a 5.17 FIP, and a 23.4% strikeout rate. But while at times he’s been all too hittable, he has also shown flashes of high-ceiling potential. When I saw him toe the rubber for Fort Wayne in mid-July, Balzer fanned eight batters — including Tigers top prospect Bryce Rainer with two out and the bases juiced — while holding West Michigan to one run over five frames. A day prior, I asked him about his decision to sign with the Padres rather than joining another MLB organization or staying home to pitch in NPB.

“My goal was to be a professional baseball player; I didn’t care if was Japan or America,” replied the Yokosuka native. “But I grew up watching Yu Darvish and wanted to be on his team.”

Balzer, who was mostly raised in Nippon but spent a few years stateside while in grade school, went on to say that his decision was also influenced by his Tommy John surgery; the Padres expressed less concerned than other MLB teams about his having gone under the knife. As for the NPB teams he might have landed with — this via the league’s draft process — the Hanshin Tigers were the first to have a scout approach him after his lone pitching appearance. In terms of overall interest, he recalls the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants having been “the main ones.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday afternoon, the Astros gave up seven unanswered runs to lose to the A’s 7-6. That loss, against the team with the worst record in the American League, dropped Houston below .500 for the first time this month, and into a tie with the Texas Rangers for the AL West division lead. That was the last game of a 3-9 homestand. The capper to this bummer of a fortnight in Houston followed promptly; the team and GM Dana Brown mutually agreed to part ways Sunday evening, which is team-and-manager speak for firing him.

Boy, am I bummed that I’ve already made an Apollo 13 reference about the Astros this year. Two in the same season would just be too many. So allow me to use some Shakespeare instead: Something is rotten in the state of Texas. While a 12-game stretch of poor play is a strange reason to change GMs, this move wasn’t about a couple of poor weeks of play. Instead, it’s about the last couple of years of poor play; the once-dominant Astros missed the playoffs in 2025, and this year they’re on track for their worst record since 2014 (excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when they went 29-31 but still made the playoffs). The farm system is one of the worst in baseball – 29th in our farm system rankings. The big league team has been outscored by 44 runs this year, and BaseRuns suggests Houston has played even a bit worse than that. Things really have deteriorated in Space City.

What’s meaningfully less clear is how much of that blame should be apportioned to Brown. He joined the Astros immediately after their 2022 World Series victory, replacing the departing James Click. Not many incoming GMs inherit a roster that just won the whole ball of yarn, but that cuts both ways. Brown inherited a great roster as well as the kind of dysfunction that leads a team and its GM to split up while simultaneously reaching the peak of the sport. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies won their ninth straight game on Sunday. Cristopher Sánchez started and Kyle Schwarber hit a game-winning home run.

There are home runs and then there are home runs, and even by Schwarber’s standards, this one was a tank: straight out to dead center, over the batter’s eye. Read the rest of this entry »

The hottest pitching prospect in baseball joined the coldest pitching staff in baseball over the weekend.

Mariners left-hander Kade Anderson was solid in his major league debut on Saturday. The Cubs weren’t the softest landing, entering the day as the best lineup in the majors with a 111 wRC+. But the top prospect kept the Chicago batters off balance for five innings, striking out five with minimal resistance. Manager Dan Wilson left Anderson in to face the top of the order for a third time to begin the sixth — a controversial decision, but perhaps a necessary one given Seattle’s pitching implosion over the last two months — and he was quickly slugged out of the game. It was a sour note to end an otherwise strong debut, although dogpiling with his new teammates following a walk-off home run by Randy Arozarena certainly improved the mood.

The Mariners took Anderson third overall out of LSU last year. He got his first taste of pro ball this spring and blew through the competition in Double-A, posting a 1.06 ERA, a 1.78 FIP, a 40.5% strikeout rate, and a 3.9% walk rate over 93 1/3 innings. He made it as high as third overall on our Top 100 Prospects list, definitively the best pitching prospect in baseball at the time of his debut. He might have been called up sooner, but, well, I’ll get to Seattle’s pitching mess soon enough. Read the rest of this entry »