Though they’ve lost two straight to trim their AL West lead to a single game, the Mariners are a first-place team thanks to a recent 16-4 stretch that has boosted their record to 20-14. As I noted last week, their success for a change hasn’t been driven by the strength of their rotation, which has been without George Kirby thus far due to shoulder inflammation and is now without Logan Gilbert, who landed on the IL in late April with a flexor strain. Rather, Seattle been carried by an exceptionally potent offense, a marked contrast from recent years, particularly 2024, when the team’s failure to score contributed to the August firings of manager Scott Servais and hitting coach Jarret DeHart. These Mariners have benefited not only from Cal Raleigh’s heavy hitting, but from the ongoing presence of Randy Arozarena, who was acquired just before last year’s trade deadline, and rebounds from players who struggled due to injuries last season, such as J.P. Crawford and Jorge Polanco. The return of Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez to their coaching staff has helped, and it does appear as though T-Mobile Park has been a bit more forgiving than usual.

Raleigh and Polanco are the hitters getting the headlines. Raleigh is currently slashing .240/.359/.574 with a major league-high 12 homers, and he ranks third in the AL in slugging percentage behind only Aaron Judge and Alex Bregman, and fourth in the league in wRC+ behind those two and Jonathan Aranda(!). While Polanco doesn’t have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title because an oblique strain has limited him to swinging left-handed and to DHing instead of playing the field, he’s hit a ridiculous .369/.407/.750 (233 wRC+) with nine homers in just 92 plate appearances (14 short of qualifying). Crawford is batting .294/.417/.404 (151 wRC+) and Arozarena .224/.366/.414 (136 wRC+). Both players are walking over 15% of the time, with Raleigh drawing a pass 14.4% of the time; the team’s 11.2% walk rate leads the majors.

All of that has helped the Mariners withstand a comparatively slow start by Julio Rodríguez (.206/.308/.375, 103 wRC+) and a wave of injuries that has forced right fielder Victor Robles, outfielder-first baseman Luke Raley, utilityman Dylan Moore, and second baseman Ryan Bliss to the injured list alongside the aforementioned rotation stalwarts [Update: Moore was activated just after this article was published]. Even so, the Mariners have gotten a 100 wRC+ or better from every position besides first base (where Rowdy Tellez, Donovan Solano, Raley and Moore have combined for a 60 wRC+) and right field (where six players, among them the injured Robles, Raley and Moore, have combined for a 90 wRC+). Read the rest of this entry »

Bailey Ober wasn’t highly regarded when our Minnesota Twins Top Prospects list was published in December 2019. The towering 6-foot-9 right-hander was ranked no. 40 with a 35+ FV. And our prospect-analyst team at the time wasn’t alone in having relatively low expectations for him. Baseball America’s 2020 Prospect Handbook didn’t include Ober in its 30-deep rankings of the Twins system, nor did MLB Pipeline find room for him in its own top 30.

Yet despite the lack of hype, Ober is now a mainstay in Minnesota’s rotation. A 12th-round pick out of the College of Charleston in 2017, he made his major league debut in May 2021, and he’s since gone on to log a 3.76 ERA and a 3.89 FIP over 95 starts comprising 510 innings. So far this season, Ober has toed the rubber seven times and has a 4-1 record to go with a 3.72 ERA and a 3.85 FIP.

What did his FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel wrote, and asked Ober to respond to it.

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“There’s very little precedent for someone with Ober’s velocity having big league success, but it’s clear why his mid-80s fastball has been dominant to this point.”

“That was the year my velo dipped way down,” Ober said. “I was 92-94 before that. My mechanics were terrible. We were trying to work on some stuff and it just went in the wrong direction. But I also had the best success I’d ever had, stats-wise. My ERA was [0.69] that season, which is why no one was in a rush to change anything. I was able to blow guys up with 88 mph.”

“His size and deceptive overhand release point create tough angle on his stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »

It isn’t supposed to be this easy. When the Phillies traded for Jesús Luzardo over the winter, they did so with the understanding that he wouldn’t be an ace right from the jump. He was coming off a rough and injured 2024, he’d only hit 20 starts in a season once in his career, and every warning light you could possibly imagine was flashing – worst stuff model grades of his career, lowest strikeout rate, lowest whiff rate, highest hard-hit rate.

Those warning signs explain why the Phillies were able to acquire Luzardo for relative peanuts. It also explains why our projection systems were unenthused by him heading into this year, projecting a 4.19 ERA, a distant fifth among Philadelphia’s starters. No one doubts Luzardo’s potential, but after six seasons and 500 innings (itself not a great sign) of roughly league-average work, well, at some point you are what you are.

Right, yeah, Luzardo’s been the best pitcher on the Phillies this year and one of the best pitchers in baseball. I’m not as surprised as I thought I’d be. But given that we’re a quarter of the way through the season and his ERA and FIP are both below 2.00, I think it’s time to take a closer look at what he’s doing differently.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox dropped to a .500 record over the weekend, but that bit of unpleasantness was overshadowed by the loss of starting first baseman Triston Casas to a serious knee injury. Running to first during the first of a three-game set against the Twins on Friday, Casas collapsed suddenly while trying to beat out a slow roller fielded by the pitcher, Joe Ryan. It was revealed on Saturday that Casas had ruptured his left patellar tendon, and on Sunday he underwent surgery. Without Casas, the second-place Sox have to reconsider their short-term options at first base, ideally before they fall too far behind in the AL East.

Boston could find no cause for optimism to put a positive spin on what happened. Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow came right out and said the team doesn’t anticipate Casas to return in 2025. So, if you were hoping the first baseman might sneak back in time for the playoffs, that appears to be highly unlikely.

So what does this mean for Casas? Well, from a baseball standpoint — rather than a rehabilitation one, as I’m even less qualified to make medical pronouncements than Dr. Nick Riviera — coming into the season, ZiPS saw Casas as a solidly average first baseman, with a projected slash line of .246/.350/.462, a 125 wRC+ and 1.6 WAR. That last number was on the low side simply because ZiPS projected him to play in only 108 games, partially due to his being platooned in the past but also owing to his history of injuries. I expressed some concern about his profile in the preseason because of his struggles with making contact.

Casas was off to a slow start this year, hitting .182/.277/.303 with a bleak 58 wRC+. That’s worrisome for any player, but even more so for a platoon first baseman without much defensive value. All 27 games he started this season came against a righty. April’s gonna April, but the bad start did put a bit of a damper on his long-term outlook. Crank out some projections, ZiPS-o-Matic!

Without factoring in his injury, Casas’ struggles to start 2025 caused a clear drop-off in his next-five-years projections, though I don’t personally think it was enough to fundamentally change our perception of him. He’s still a power-hitting first baseman you’d be happy to have in your lineup, but he’s not a major star to build around. As an aside, ZiPS is far less worried than the Red Sox are about letting Casas face left-handers; he is projected for a .226/.317/.395 line against southpaws in 2026. That’s not ideal, but it’s also not an unusually large platoon split for a left-handed slugger.

ZiPS is aware of injuries, but mainly in hindsight; it factors in the time missed after the fact because I don’t like being the position of diagnosing current injuries. But in this case, because we know that Casas’ rest-of-season projection is almost certainly going to be zero plate appearances, I don’t mind breaking the rules and telling ZiPS that 2025 is over and Casas missed more than 100 games with a knee injury.

As you can see, the season-ending injury has slightly soured his projection. But if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Casas’ game isn’t really based on speed, meaning that ZiPS expects the overall long-term impact of the knee injury to be less for him than it would be for a faster runner. By contrast, when I run the same projection for Jarren Duran after giving him a serious knee injury — Sorry, Jarren! — his projected 2026 WAR declines from 3.5 to 2.2 WAR.

Casas ought to be back in 2026, but the Red Sox have to answer the question of what to do at first base for the next five months. Romy Gonzalez has been Casas’ platoon partner this year, and at .327/.382/.449, he’s hit well in his 55 plate appearances as of Monday morning. But he’ll probably lose a hundred points or so from his current .421 BABIP, so it’s unrealistic that he’ll keep up that line. That said, he has been making hard contact this season, with a hard-hit rate approaching 60%, up from 50% last year, meaning that his production is not a stone-cold fluke, either. ZiPS projects Gonzalez to post a 107 wRC+ the rest of the season, a reasonable performance for a Plan B first baseman, but the Red Sox should be a bit more ambitious than settling for reasonable, especially when the player in question is more of a substitute utilityman than a true first baseman.

But whom should they target then? That’s the harder question. Rafael Devers would seem to be the likely internal option, and the team hasn’t explicitly ruled that out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Red Sox decided not to switch his position again considering how he responded when they moved him off third base after signing Alex Bregman. In this case, perhaps discretion is the better part of valor. Boston also does not appear to be inclined to temporarily move to prospect Roman Anthony to first base.

Outside the organization, pickings are slim at the moment, as few teams have completely given up on the season. Andrew Vaughn is probably available, and his peripherals suggest that he’s performed better than his actual numbers during his brutal start, but I’m not sure Boston really wants a reclamation project here. The recently demoted Jake Burger would result in the same objection. If the Nats are interested in trading Nathaniel Lowe, he may be the best option out there, and he’s not a free agent until after next season, though that might make them less likely to move him. And the Brewers probably aren’t yet at a point where they’d let go of Rhys Hoskins for cheap. Anthony Rizzo is still a free agent, and Jon Singleton is now in Triple-A with the Mets, but if those are the two best options out there, I think the Red Sox would be better off just rolling with Romy. (I want to see Marcelo Mayer get some time at first, but that’s mostly so I can make some kind of lame Romy and Marcelo’s High School Reunion joke.)

The injury to Casas doesn’t doom his future outlook too much, nor does it shatter Boston’s chances to contend this season, but the Red Sox need to decide what they want to do here fairly quickly. Sure, the impact of any first base move would be limited, but even a marginal upgrade could make a difference in a tight AL East race.

Random relievers can do crazy things in small samples. Who can ever forget Nationals right-hander Justin Miller striking out 57.9% of the hitters he faced across a three-week stretch of 2018? Or Kody Funderburk’s legendary whiff explosion to close out the 2023 Twins season? Guardians reliever Hunter Gaddis is on one of these incendiary strikeout runs, and it’s driving me to madness.

Gaddis might not strike you as operating at the same level of random as Miller and Funderburk. By any set of reasonable standards, Gaddis broke out last season, appearing in nearly half of his team’s games while delivering a 1.59 ERA. But — forgive me — I didn’t really buy it. His 23.7% strikeout rate matched the league average for relievers, and his arsenal didn’t exactly justify a .205 BABIP. Given his pitch shapes and peripherals, I figured Gaddis would settle in as more of a solid middle-relief type than one of the premier backend arms in the league. And then this April happened. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January, I wrote an article called “Unfuzzing the Strike Zone.” The premise was pretty simple. As umpires have grown more accurate, as the edges of the strike zone have gotten clearer and more distinct, the strike zone has effectively gotten smaller. Misses go both ways, but there’s a big difference between an incorrectly called ball and an incorrectly called strike. Calling a pitch inside the zone a ball doesn’t shrink the effective size of the zone, but calling a pitch outside the zone a strike does make it bigger. As long as a pitcher knows it’s possible to get a strike call out there, they’ll consider it part of the zone. Little did I know that as I was writing that article, Major League Baseball was preparing to test its exact premise.

The strike zone has steadily shed its fuzz over the past 23 seasons, but on Thursday, Jayson Stark and Ken Rosenthal reported in The Athletic that the league has decided to break out a sweater shaver. Over the offseason, the Major League Umpires Association came to a new agreement with MLB. Part of the agreement included tightening the standards by which ball-strike calls are graded.

Umpires used to have a two-inch buffer around the edge of the strike zone, meaning that if they’d missed a call by fewer than two inches outside the zone, the call would still go down as correct in their assessments. Having that buffer is necessary because calling balls and strikes is extraordinarily difficult. It’s extremely rare for an umpire to get every call right even in a single game. The new border is just three-quarters of an inch on either side. The league is demanding a less fuzzy strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

It is well known that analytics have changed the baseball landscape. Moreover, it is widely understood that the evolution is ongoing. Embracing innovation, especially within the technology realm, has increasingly become a must for teams looking to keep up with — and ideally get a step ahead of — the competition. For front offices across the game, it’s adapt or die.

What does that mean for the general managers and presidents of baseball operations who lead those front offices? In other words, how have the ever-continuing advancements impacted their jobs over the years? Wanting to find out, I asked four longtime executives for their perspectives.

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On how analytics have impacted the job

John Mozeliak, St. Louis Cardinals

“When I first broke in, how you made decisions was basically based on scouting reports and traditional statistics. Now it’s much more analytically driven because of the advanced metrics. If you think about it, in the old days when people would invest in stocks… it’s the same kind of thinking now. The more information you have, the better your decisions are. That’s changed quite a bit over the last 25 years.

“Two things come to mind. One is understanding the longevity of a player. In other words, how long should you be investing in a player? The other thing is prospect evaluation; how much value someone might have, even though they’re still in the minor leagues. When you think back to 20-30 years ago, a lot of times minor league players didn’t have the same type of value that you’re seeing today.

“The economics of baseball have changed drastically. There is more revenue in the game, and higher payrolls, but there is also how you think about moving talent for talent. It’s much more based on economics than just pure ‘I think he’s a good baseball player.’”

Jerry Dipoto, Seattle Mariners Read the rest of this entry »

Ty France went into last season trying to be something he’s not, and the results reflected that. Over 535 plate appearances split between the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, he slashed .234/.305/.365 with 13 home runs and a 93 wRC+. Statistically speaking, it was the worst year of his career.

Now with the Minnesota Twins after inking a modest $1M free-agent deal in mid-February, France went into yesterday with numbers more in line with what he did from 2019-2023. A month-plus into the campaign, the 30-year-old first baseman has a 118 wRC+ and a .271/.341/.407 slash line.

How has he rediscovered the better version of himself?

“My swing is simple and compact right now,” France told me prior to an 0-for-4 Friday night that included his being robbed on a diving catch and lining an at-em ball at an infielder. “Instead of trying to do too much, I’m just trying to get in my best position and take a good swing.

“Guys are getting paid for homers and doing damage, so a lot of my training last offseason was geared toward trying to hit the ball in the air and drive the ball,” France added. “I kind of lost touch with what I was best at, which is using the right side of the field just collecting hits. This past offseason was about getting back to the basics and rediscovering who I am as a hitter.” Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first five weeks of the 2025 season, the best you could say about Mike Trout was that he was at least healthy enough to play every day and was hitting a lot of home runs. However, the 33-year-old slugger departed Wednesday’s game against the Mariners with soreness in his surgically repaired left knee following a sprint to first base, and while he remained on the active roster for Thursday’s game, afterwards, the Angels placed him on the injured list with a bone bruise in the knee. That’s not a worst-case scenario, but it’s frustrating news on top of what’s already been a slow start.

Trout entered this season with more question marks hanging over his head than at any point in his 15-year career. After playing just 82 games in 2023 due to a fractured hamate bone — including just one after July 3 — he was limited to 29 games last year due to a torn meniscus in his left knee. He underwent surgery, but instead of the typical four-to-six week timetable, he needed nearly three months before beginning a rehab stint, and then played just two innings for Triple-A Salt Lake City before exiting due to discomfort in the same knee. After he flew back to Anaheim for further evaluation, he was diagnosed with another meniscus tear, requiring season-ending surgery.

Upon reporting to the Angels’ spring training facility in Tempe, Arizona in February, Trout met with general manager Perry Minasian and manager Ron Washington, and together they decided that the best course of action would be to move the 11-time All-Star center fielder to right field in order to save his body some wear and tear. Up until Wednesday, the plan seemed to be working; he’d played all 29 of the Angels’ games (matching last year’s total) with seven starts at DH interspersed with his appearances in right field. His .179/.264/.462 batting line, 96 wRC+, and 0.1 WAR aren’t anything to write home about, but he’s been hitting the ball hard on contact. His nine homers are enough to tie him for third in the American League alongside Tyler Soderstrom, Spencer Torkelson, and teammate Logan O’Hoppe, behind only Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh. Read the rest of this entry »

I never thought I’d get to use the transit method. If that phrase rings a bell but you can’t quite place it, let me remind you about NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which spent nine years pointed out into space, observing stars. By measuring tiny dips in the brightness of those stars, scientists were able to detect the existence of thousands upon thousands of planets that orbited them. Those exoplanets blocked out some of the light when their orbit brought them between their star and Earth, and Kepler was attuned to interpret the minuscule effect of those shadows. Anyway, this is as close as I’ll ever come.

It happened in Seattle on Wednesday, and it started in the bottom of the seventh inning. The score was knotted at three at the beginning of the frame, but the Mariners quickly broke things wide open. J.P. Crawford knocked in two runs with a single past the third baseman, then Julio Rodríguez knocked in Crawford with a double to the deepest part of the ballpark. That brought Cal Raleigh to the plate with Rodríguez, briefly, on second. In the dugout, tuckered out from his 270-foot journey, Crawford did exactly what a high-performance athlete is supposed to do. He focused on recovery.

Raleigh took a Reid Detmers curve for a ball, then another for a strike. Rodríguez took off as soon as Detmers raised his right foot for the 1-1 pitch. The slider hit the outside corner and Raleigh was out in front of it, chopping it down toward the third baseman. Or rather, toward where third baseman Luis Rengifo would have been standing were he not covering third base. The steal attempt forced him over to the bag and he watched helplessly as the world’s easiest chopper floated right toward the vacancy he’d created. But that vacancy was soon to be filled. Rodríguez bore down on the base, putting him on a collision course with the ball. Or not. Read the rest of this entry »