Chandler Simpson may be the fastest player in baseball. At the very least, the 24-year-old center fielder is one of the few major leaguers with 80-grade speed, befitting a player who stole 104 bases in 110 games at two minor league stops last year. A day after making his major league debut with the Rays, Simpson’s speed figured into a controversial play in Sunday’s game against the Yankees at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, as he broke up Max Fried’s no-hitter… retroactively. That might not even have been the game’s most contentious call, as Aaron Judge lost an apparent home run on a towering fly ball that was ruled foul, even after a replay review.

Fried had held the Rays hitless through 5 1/3 innings when he faced Simpson for the second time in the bottom of the sixth inning. With a 2-2 count, Simpson hit a 78.6-mph grounder between first and second base. Yankees first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, a four-time Gold Glove winner, ranged over to his right to field the ball, but as he did, it deflected off the heel of his glove and towards second base. Simpson reached safely.

The play was initially ruled an error on Goldschmidt, and Fried carried on, retiring five of the next six hitters — the exception being when he grazed Curtis Mead’s right foot with a sweeper — and keeping the no-hitter intact through seven innings while the Yankees stretched their lead to 3-0. By the time the 31-year-old lefty took the mound for the eighth, the official scorer had reversed his previous decision, wiping out Goldschmidt’s error, crediting Simpson with a hit, and ending Fried’s no-hit bid. Read the rest of this entry »

First impressions are everything, the expression goes, and a poor one could have doomed Juan Soto’s 2024 season. The Yankees dealt five quality players for one year of his services; a slow start in the Bronx would have invited the wrath of tabloids and fans alike. But Soto started with a bang, gunning down a runner at home plate to preserve a ninth-inning lead in his debut and going on to hit .325/.438/.561 in his first month as a Yankee. From day one, he was undeniable.

This time around, he hasn’t been as lucky. Soto remains in New York, albeit in a different borough, and he’s fresh off signing the largest contract in professional sports history. By those standards, his start this season is underwhelming. His batting line is 25% above league average, but the shape of his production is essentially Soto at his least productive: tons of walks, a few too many groundballs, and not much extra base damage. The quasi-slow start prompted a story written by The New York Post’s Mike Puma headlined “Juan Soto opens up to The Post about pitchers’ new approach without ‘the best hitter in baseball’ behind him.” Read the rest of this entry »

Penn Murfee was mentioned in the interview with Trent Blank that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. Discussing pitch profiles, Seattle’s director of pitching strategy recalled the erstwhile Mariners reliever being “a guy who had cut-ride” on his four-seam fastball.

Murfee is now with the White Sox, and Chicago’s South Side club is in Boston for a weekend series, so I took the opportunity to get his own perspective on the offering. What I learned talking to him at my home base of Fenway Park is that the movement he gets on his heater is circumstantial. Moreover, it’s legal.

“Back in 2021, in [Triple-A] Sacramento, my pitch profile changed from a running arm-side fastball,” explained Murfee, who was in the Seattle system from 2018-2023, the last year-plus of that span in the majors. “For whatever reason, I started choking the ball a little tight, and began throwing what was classified as a cutter. It went to zero inches of horizontal movement. My pitching coach at the time said, ‘Whatever you changed, don’t change it back.’ He said that I went from having a very average fastball to something unique.”

The reason behind the movement change? He stopped using sticky. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. There must have been something in the water across the league over the past seven days, because while this column always highlights delightful oddities that I caught, they aren’t often so delightful or so odd. This week, rarities abounded. There were runners getting hit by throws, wild acrobatics, no-look passes, and even a pitchout. Hot teams and cold teams clashed, errors got compounded, and situations that felt in hand rapidly got away. So keep an eye on the runner at first base, and let’s get started – after my customary thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, who popularized this column format for basketball.

1. Not-Quite-Free Bases
Jarren Duran is off to a slow start to the 2025 season. And while the problems have mostly come at the plate, everything seems a little off. Take this misadventure on the basepaths last Thursday. Duran led off the bottom of the 10th inning with a game-tying single. That made him the winning run, and he immediately started plotting a theft of second base to get into scoring position. Nick Sandlin checked on him:

Then he checked on him again:

That’s two disengagements; Sandlin wasn’t likely to try again. Duran stole 34 bases last year. He’s blazing fast. He was 5-for-5 on the season and had already swiped one in this game. Second base was as good as his. And so the Blue Jays took extreme measures, calling for one of the least-used plays in modern baseball, a pitchout:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets upgraded their outfield in a big way this past winter simply by signing Juan Soto, but even with the $765 Million Man hitting reasonably well — if not up to his own high standards — the unit has been one of the majors’ least productive thus far. Now an injury has shaken up the roster, as Jose Siri has been sidelined by a fractured tibia, leading the team to test Jeff McNeil in center while he’s on a rehab assignment and setting up some further experimentation.

The Mets acquired the 29-year-old Siri in a trade with the Rays last November 19. Through the first two and a half weeks of the season, he shared time in center with Tyrone Taylor; both players are righties, so the Mets didn’t have a strict platoon in place. On Saturday, Siri fouled a ball off his left shin, and while initial X-rays were negative, a follow-up MRI taken two days later revealed a fracture. The Mets finally placed Siri on the 10-day injured list prior to Thursday’s game, but they haven’t given any indication as to when he’ll return. As manager Carlos Mendoza said, “[H]e’s going to be out for a while.”

“Awhile” will be measured in months. According to the Baseball Prospectus Recovery Dashboard, the few examples of position-player absences due to tibia fractures ranged from 86 days (Tommy La Stella in 2019) to 160 days (Andre Ethier in 2016), with Nick Gordon’s 137 days in 2023 representing the midpoint; one has to discount the 60-day absence of former Met Phillip Evans because the 2018 regular season ended before he could recover. Read the rest of this entry »

Trent Blank plays an integral role in one of baseball’s top pitching organizations. Now in his sixth season on the major league coaching staff, Blank is the director of pitching strategy for the Seattle Mariners. He’s well-suited for the job. The 35-year-old former minor league hurler holds an MS in Kinesiology and Exercise from Dallas Baptist University, and he previously worked at TMI Sports Medicine as a baseball performance specialist. Along with his current position, Blank has served as Seattle’s bullpen coach.

Blank sat down to talk about the Mariners’ pitching process prior to the start of the regular season.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with a pitcher the Mariners [purchased from the Cincinnati Reds] shortly before spring training. What made Casey Legumina an attractive acquisition?

Trent Blank: “Whenever we sign anybody, we look at them through a lot of different lenses, and he popped for both our player development and analytics groups. From my perspective, we really liked some of the unique things that he does with the baseball. He has good uphill plane since he kind of changed his delivery. With his spin profile, we think we can add a couple of pitches. We’re also thinking about bringing a couple of pitches back, and repurposing them. He has a lot of raw materials we feel we can put together in a different way.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on that?

Blank: “When we add stuff, it’s generally based on a certain spin profile we see. Then, when we talk about repurposing… with Casey in particular, it’s the sweeper. He’s had different versions of it, because he’s had different slots. We like the pitch. Adding some aggression is one thing. We’re still working through it, but the main thing is getting his fastball going at the top rail a little bit more.”

Laurila: Generally speaking, how does the organization approach introducing changes to a pitcher’s arsenal? Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox, coming out of the worst season in modern major league history, started 2025 with a bang: an 8-1 win over the Angels on Opening Day. They lost the next two games, then pounded the Twins into smithereens on the last day of March. Since then, the Sox have dropped 12 games out of 14 and once again settled like silt on the bottom of the American League standings table.

It’s not going to be their year after all. But I don’t think it’s going to be as miserable as it was in 2024, and Chase Meidroth is one reason why. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres signed Nick Pivetta to a four-year, $55 million deal in mid-February, it marked an awakening from a sleepy and disappointing winter. With ownership embroiled in a battle over who would control the team in the wake of Peter Seidler’s death, San Diego had let several key free agents from last year’s 93-win Wild Card team depart, including Jurickson Profar and Ha-Seong Kim, but hadn’t spent more than $3.5 million or issued a contract longer than a year when it came to restocking. Pivetta was the exception, and while he was signed to be the fourth starter behind Dylan Cease, Michael King, and Yu Darvish, so far he’s been the stingiest rotation member on the hottest team in baseball.

On Wednesday afternoon at Petco Park, Pivetta spun six innings of one-run ball against the Cubs, allowing just four hits and striking out six, while Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. each drove in a pair of runs. Though reliever Wandy Peralta served up a solo homer to Pete Crow-Armstrong in the eighth inning — the rare lapse by a bullpen that’s been lights out so far — the Padres won 4-2. After beginning the season with seven straight wins over the Braves and Guardians, and winning their first 11 games at home before losing to the Cubs on Tuesday, they’re now a major league-best 15-4, outdistancing the world champion Dodgers, who have played just .500 ball since opening the season 8-0.

Though San Diego swept the Braves in the Wild Card Series last year and then went the distance with the Dodgers in the Division Series before getting eliminated, this season’s club wasn’t expected to be a particularly strong one in light of its offseason inactivity, which also included losing reliever Tanner Scott and catcher Kyle Higashioka to free agency. The Padres replaced Profar — who had followed up a career-worst season with a career-best one that earned him his first All-Star selection — in left field with a platoon built around 35-year-old Jason Heyward, whom they signed for one year and $1 million. They went light at catcher following Higashioka’s departure, cobbling together a tandem of Elias Díaz and Martín Maldonado, two backstops who were released by their respective teams last summer; San Diego had added Diaz after he was dropped by the Rockies in August, then retained him on a one-year, $3.5 million deal. The Padres appeared so geared toward reining in spending that the Pivetta move was initially presumed to be a precursor to trading Cease. Read the rest of this entry »

No player wants to suffer a significant, season-ending injury like Jung Hoo Lee did last May, especially in their rookie year. But when players do find themselves in that situation, they can at least use the time to reflect on their performance and make adjustments that they think will improve their game upon their return. Despite it being early in the season, it seems that is exactly what Lee has done.

The Giants center fielder’s offensive improvements warrant a look under the hood to see exactly what he has changed, because right now, he seems like a completely different player from the one we saw last year. So far this season, Lee is sporting a 192 wRC+, a .394 xwOBA (86th percentile), a 43.1% sweet-spot rate (87th percentile), and a .446 xwOBACON. Those are all big improvements compared to his limited 2024 sample. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth 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 »