If you’ve had to avert your eyes from the funeral pyre of the 2025 Baltimore Orioles, I feel ya. It has, at times, not been a pretty sight. But hope springs anew, as of Tuesday, with the return of Kyle Bradish to the Orioles’ rotation.
Bradish was a late-blooming prospect who only really put it together in his age-26 season, and was only at the top for a little over a season before he tore his UCL last June. Since Bradish went down, the Orioles’ pitching staff has weathered some even noisier crises: The departure of Corbin Burnes, a season-ending back injury to Zach Eflin, a season-ending (possibly multiple seasons-ending) shoulder injury to Félix Bautista, and ongoing elbow issues that have kept Grayson Rodriguez out of action all year. (I’m not comfortable calling Rodriguez’s injury season-ending, because the question of whether you can end something that never started is an ontological conundrum I’m not equipped to solve.) Read the rest of this entry »
Pardon me, but have you by any chance seen second base? It can usually be found over in that large patch of dirt, but I seem to have mislaid it. Second base. It’s the second of the bases. I could have sworn I left it right there. Amid the dirt. You turn your back for one second. Maybe I should retrace my steps. Here’s what happened.
It was the bottom of the ninth. One out, runners on first and second. Fernando Tatis Jr. came to the plate. That’s the white pentagon in the ground over there. When a strapping slugger comes to the plate, I have to take a walk. Out of respect for his prodigious power, I bid farewell to my traditional post alongside third base and I sojourn a half dozen steps in a northerly direction, toward the outfield. Sometimes I carry a generous scoop of trail mix in my back pocket for such journeys. Tonight I went without, and maybe that’s what did me in. Low blood sugar can wreak havoc on your sense of direction. Read the rest of this entry »
Early in the season, the American League Most Valuable Player race didn’t look like much of a race at all. Continuing a stretch of dominance dating back to the latter days of April 2024, Aaron Judge was destroying opposing pitching at a level not seen since Barry Bonds, putting himself on a pace to challenge his 2022 AL record of 62 home runs and even flirting with a .400 batting average. He couldn’t maintain that breakneck clip, however, and while he’s cooled off, Cal Raleigh has closed the gap, setting a home run record of his own while powering the Mariners’ bid for a playoff spot.
On Sunday against the Athletics at T-Mobile Park, Raleigh went 3-for-5 with a pair of two-run homers, both off lefty Jacob Lopez; the first had an estimated distance of 448 feet — his longest of the season — and the second 412 feet. On Monday against the Padres, Raleigh went deep against JP Sears, a solo homer with an estimated distance of 419 feet.
The home runs against the A’s were Raleigh’s 48th and 49th of the season; with them, he tied and then surpassed Salvador Perez’s 2021 total to claim the single season record for a player whose primary position is catcher. The shot against the Padres was his 50th, an unfathomable number for a player who spends most of his days squatting behind the plate. Read the rest of this entry »
Casey Mize had seven big league appearances under his belt when he was featured here at FanGraphs in January 2021. He also had high expectations. Drafted first overall by the Detroit Tigers out of Auburn University three years prior, the right-hander ranked 32nd when our 2021 Top 100 Prospects list was published that February. Bullish on his ability, Eric Longenhagen projected Mize as a “no. 2 starter capable of pitching at the top of a contender’s rotation.”
Our lead prospect analyst’s assessment came with an “if he stays healthy” caveat. Longenhagen wrote that he was “sufficiently scared of Mize’s injury history… to slide him behind players of a similar talent.” Those concerns have unfortunately been validated. The 28-year-old hurler required Tommy John surgery in June 2022, and he has also landed on the shelf with a handful of comparably mild maladies.
His numbers reflect the time missed, and the impact that it has had on his career. Entering the current campaign, Mize had thrown just 291 innings as a Tiger, and his ledger included a lowly 9-19 won-lost record to go with a 4.36 ERA — not exactly what was expected from a high-profile draft pick with a high-ceiling arm. Read the rest of this entry »
The Mets are the best Rorschach test in baseball right now. You can see almost anything you want to when you look at them. A band of high-paid underachievers? Sure. A great team in a rough stretch? Yup. A triumph of pitching development? Sure thing, but also a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t have enough starters to get through the season. Each of those topics – and plenty more – are worth a closer look. But in watching the Mets in recent weeks, I’ve been struck by the same observation every time I watch a game. That observation? Man, Francisco Lindor is good.
Lindor has been right at the center of the Mets’ mid-summer meltdown. After starting the season as hot as he ever has, he posted two straight abysmal months in June and July while the team swooned in sympathy. I’m not sure you understand quite how bad it was, so let’s look at the numbers. He hit a desultory .205/.258/.371 over those two months, good for a 77 wRC+. So imagine my surprise when I looked at this year’s hitting leaderboard and saw Lindor’s 4.7 WAR in 11th place.
Now, am I writing an article to tell you that Francisco Lindor is good? I mean, kind of. More than that, though, I’m thinking of this as an appreciation post. Lindor’s year-to-year consistency is otherworldly. He’s putting the finishing touches on his fourth straight five-win campaign, all with wRC+ marks between 121 and 137. He’s doing it without it ever feeling like it’s unsustainable. So let’s appreciate that greatness and take a look at what this year’s roller coaster says about Lindor’s time in Queens more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »
By all rights, this should be a lost season for Daulton Varsho. The Toronto center fielder missed the first month of 2025 while rehabbing from offseason rotator cuff surgery. He started his year with a seven-game minor league rehab stint during which he batted .129 with no walks and no extra-base hits, good for a wRC+ of -29. Varsho got one month in Toronto, and then a strained hamstring stole another two months from him. After seven more games in the minors, Varsho returned on August 1 and now has 20 more games under his belt. So just to recap, Varsho’s season has gone: rehab for a month, play for a month, injured for two months, play for another month. He’s seen a grand total of 44 games of action.
That’s not exactly enough time to get your bearings, especially after a major surgery. At least, that wouldn’t be enough time for most people. Varsho is putting up the best numbers of his career. He’d never topped a wRC+ of 106 in a single season, but he’s currently at 127. He’s already posted 1.5 WAR, and although he can only get into a maximum of 74 games, he’s almost certain to put up the third-most WAR of his career. What makes all this even wilder is that Varsho only heated up during this most recent stint. He ran a 102 wRC+ before the hamstring injury, and he’s at 161 since he returned. As the cliché goes, getting Varsho back from the IL was Toronto’s best trade deadline acquisition. In fact, on a per-PA basis, Varsho has been a top-25 position player, on pace for 4.3 WAR over a normal, 150-game season.
So what is Varsho doing differently in this weird, bifurcated season? I’ll go over a few changes later on, but honestly, not that much. He’s just being himself, but his traits have been intensified over this short timeframe. Varsho has always been an extreme lift-and-pull hitter with a very steep swing. He piles up home runs and strikeouts, and he runs low BABIPs despite his speed because of that homer-or-bust approach. This season, he’s striking out more than ever, hitting more homers than ever, and running a career-low BABIP. Varsho has always been one of the game’s true elite outfielders despite below-average arm strength. This season, he’s putting up bonkers defensive numbers even though his arm has been one of the weakest in baseball so far. It’s like we got the from-concentrate version of Daulton Varsho, but somebody forgot to add water. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not telling our readers anything they don’t already know, but defense is a very important part of baseball, especially at the up-the-middle positions. You probably watch enough baseball to list the best and worst couple of defenders at each position with a fair amount of accuracy; I bet you’d nail most of them off the top of your head (aside from Trea Turner, I think the 2025 FRV list is damn good), and that you have a proper appreciation for the importance of defense at the premium positions, even if it comes with some amount of sacrifice on offense.
In the prospect realm, though, things are trickier. Prospect hit data from TrackMan and Hawkeye has become common in public-facing analysis and discourse, but defense remains something of a black box. There aren’t many publicly available minor league defensive stats, and so much of evaluating defense is still best done visually, at least in my opinion. I wrote a version of today’s piece a few years ago, wherein I performed the same sort of video deep dive that I use to evaluate top shortstop prospects’ defense, and ripped and edited together key plays from that deep dive to share with you.
This year, I’m turning that exercise into a series. I’m going to batch together a few players at a time until I’ve gone through all of the 50 FV shortstops, as well as a few key prospects with lesser grades. That will include all of the players linked here, plus a few more. Read the rest of this entry »
The Texas Rangers placed second baseman Marcus Semien on the injured list with a broken left foot over the weekend, retroactive to Thursday’s games. The result of a foul ball hitting the top of his foot, Semien was initially diagnosed with a contusion, but after getting multiple additional opinions, that diagnosis was revised to a fracture of the third metatarsal and a Lisfranc sprain. Semien, who turns 35 next month and whose last injury that merited an IL stint was a wrist contusion back in 2017, is having one of his weaker offensive seasons, with a .230/.305/.364 triple slash line, but thanks to his still-solid glove, he’s still amassed 2.1 WAR. The injury likely ends Semien’s regular season, and given where Texas is in the standings, probably his 2025.
I can’t think of many good times to break your foot. Just speaking for myself, I might consider a broken foot preferable to, say, going to a wedding I really don’t want to attend. But Semien is a professional athlete, not an introverted middle-aged baseball analyst who writes from home surrounded by computers and cats, and his team is on the brink. Texas is coming off a sweep of the Cleveland Guardians, but those three wins only got the team back to the .500 mark, with a 9-13 record for August. Read the rest of this entry »
The Baltimore Orioles came into this year with a few goals. Foremost among them: reach the playoffs, find reliable pitching, and sign some of their young core to contract extensions. Goal one is out of the question. Goal two is up in the air. But goal three? Goal three is going strong after the Orioles and Samuel Basallo agreed to an eight-year, $67 million contract extension, with a team option and escalators that could push the total value to $88.5 million. Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner first reported the deal.
Basallo, currently the third overall prospect in baseball, debuted in the majors last week after a whirlwind tour of the minor leagues. He overpowered A-ball at 18 in 2023, mastered Double-A in 2024, and was hitting .270/.377/.589, good for a 150 wRC+, in Triple-A before the O’s called him up. He’s been far younger than his opposition at every level, and it just hasn’t mattered; his colossal raw power has papered over any weaknesses or growing pains again and again.
Throughout his ascension through the prospect ranks, the biggest question about Basallo has been whether he’ll stick behind home plate or have to move to a less demanding defensive position, likely first base. While Basallo’s offensive performance has been consistently excellent, his defense hasn’t been quite so exciting. A stress fracture in his elbow has slowed him, costing him valuable reps at catcher. He played DH about as frequently as he caught in Triple-A this year, and the same was true in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »
Most of the time, you don’t really have to squeeze your glove when you catch the ball. At least, you don’t have to think about squeezing it. It’s an instinctual thing, and while it’s different if you’re a catcher, the whole point of the glove is to corral the baseball. It was designed just for that. The ball tends to stick in there.
That’s most of the time. Sometimes you really do have to think about squeezing the ball, though. Sometimes there’s geometry involved. I love the geometry.
I love thinking about the angles. How do I position myself so I can catch this throw and apply the tag in one motion? Should I wait on this ball, or should I circle around it so I can charge it and field it on a short hop? At what point do I give up on picking this throw and step back to catch it on the long hop? Read the rest of this entry »
