On Wednesday, the Yankees went to Daikin Park for the middle game of an important three-game set against the Astros. The Yanks were 2 1/2 games behind the Blue Jays in the AL East with the two divisional foes scheduled for three games in the Bronx this weekend, so maybe this matchup with Houston wouldn’t have a direct impact on their place in the standings, but every win helps at this point in the season.

With the game tied 4-4 in the bottom of the eighth, manager Aaron Boone called on Devin Williams to hold the line. Williams, a two-time All-Star and the 2020 NL Rookie of the Year, came to New York this past offseason after posting an ERA under 2.00 in each of his last three seasons with Milwaukee. This season, his last before he hits free agency, has been… uneven, let’s say, and I’ll get to that.

Still, through all the ups and downs, Williams has remained one of Boone’s high-leverage guys. He’s a big-time reliever, and a tie game on the road against a major postseason rival is a big-time situation. So on Williams came. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. You might think that this September is a poor one for baseball drama. The playoff spots in both leagues are fairly decided, give or take a bit of wobbliness from the perpetually star-crossed Mariners and Mets. Few division titles are in play – maybe the NL West or AL East, but neither feels all that likely to flip. But that’s okay, because even the teams that are probably out of it can be fun to watch, and even the teams that are already in it still have seeding to vie for. This week, I’ve turned my eye to a few teams with intriguing storylines in the month to come. I’m focusing my baseball viewing on playoff hopefuls, and there’s plenty to like. So with our customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, let’s talk baseball.

1. McLean (and Horton and Waldrep and…) Fever
One of my favorite baseball archetypes is the shooting star rookie ace. You know what I’m talking about if it’s happened to your team. Some rookie, often a heralded prospect, makes a mid-season debut and just has it. Their fastball? Unbeatable. Their breaking stuff? It just disappears! And that poise – it’s like they’ve been pitching in the majors for years, not weeks.

Whether you want to harken back to Fernando Valenzuela or rely on a more personally resonant example – 2013 Michael Wacha is my touchstone here – there’s just something special about these meteoric talents. At some point, they’re due for a downturn. How could they not be? It happens to everyone eventually. But until then, we might as well enjoy the ride. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, Shohei Ohtani hit the second-hardest pull-side home run by a left-handed batter at PNC Park this season. If that doesn’t sound like it could make your head explode, well, that’s the point. I picked the most boring way to tell the story.

Anyone who saw this particular home run knows that a more accurate representation of the experience would be this: On Tuesday night, Shohei Ohtani hit the hardest ball of his entire career, turning around a 99-mph Bubba Chandler fastball on the inside corner and launching a 120-mph missile that skimmed over the Pittsburgh turf and triggered a series of small explosions as it crashed into the right field bleachers. It was the third-hardest-hit ball of the entire 2025 season, and the sixth-hardest home run in the 10-year history of the Statcast era. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Bibee is having a down season. While he’s thrown a team-high 154 2/3 innings, the Cleveland Guardians right-hander has a 4.77 ERA and a 4.69 FIP, as well as a career-low 20.6% strikeout rate. Over the previous two seasons — his first two in the majors — he’d tossed 315 2/3 innings with a 3.25 ERA, a 3.54 FIP, and a 25.3% strikeout rate. Something has clearly been amiss.

Bibee believes that he knows what the issue has been; how to right himself during the season is the question at hand. With less than a month left on the schedule and the Guardians still holding out hope for October baseball — their playoff odds are a faint, but not impossible, 4.6% — Bibee can’t wait until the winter to get right. Much for that reason, he worked diligently in a bullpen session on Wednesday afternoon at Fenway Park, after which he expounded on his efforts to return to what he’s been at his best.

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David Laurila: We talked a few days after you made your big league debut (in April 2023). How do you compare to the pitcher you were then?

Tanner Bibee: “Stuff-wise?”

Laurila: Stuff. How you approach the game. You’re two years older and presumably smarter now.

Bibee: “That doesn’t always mean better. It’s been an interesting first couple of years in the big leagues. I obviously had a lot of success in 2023. I had some success last year after a rough month or two. This year has definitely been… I’ve been through different movement patterns. In ’23, I came in with a really high slot, then kind of slowly got it back down.”

Laurila: Purposefully, or did that happen organically? Read the rest of this entry »

In the eighth inning of Wednesday’s 7-5 loss to the Orioles, Padres reliever Mason Miller threw an immaculate inning — nine pitches, three strikeouts. Immaculate innings are rare, but not that rare. Since 2005, we’ve seen 63 immaculate innings in the majors, so around two or three per season. Miller’s is the fourth of 2025, after Cal Quantrill on May 18, Brandon Young on July 8, and Andrew Kittredge on August 6. Immaculate innings are a special treat we get to enjoy from time to time. They happen infrequently enough that they do genuinely feel special, but not so infrequently that every single one demands an article memorializing the event.

Another special treat that I’ve enjoyed recently is attending a concert with my best friend. We don’t live within driving distance of one another, so due to logistical barriers, we’ve only done this four times in the last 10 or so years. So like an immaculate inning, it’s a cool thing that doesn’t happen very often. What makes our concert history extra special is that twice now touring artists have scheduled shows on my birthday — Tame Impala’s Currents Tour in 2016 and Weird Al’s Bigger and Weirder Tour this year. And what makes Miller’s immaculate inning extra special is that he threw nothing but sliders. Trust me, you’ll see how these two things are connected in a minute, but first more about all those sliders.

If you know anything about Mason Miller, it’s probably that he fires fastballs past hitters at roughly 2,700 giga-miles per hour, which means you know that his primary pitch is not a slider — it’s his fire-breathing fastball. This season Miller is throwing his slider around 45% of the time and his fastball the other 55% of the time, with the very occasional changeup sprinkled in. In his major league career, Miller has appeared in 146 innings in which he has faced at least three batters. He had not gone Oops! All Sliders in any of them prior to Wednesday. And he only topped 65% sliders in four of those innings. His next-highest single-inning slider ratio is 85%, thrown in the final inning of a start against the Mariners in May of 2023. His slider-heavy final frame was the capper on a seven-inning no-hit outing. Read the rest of this entry »

I was doing some research on hitting the ball in the air the other way when I came across this striking leaderboard:

The five guys who hit the ball hardest the other way when they lift it? Four enormous sluggers and Brice Turang. I was overjoyed by this result at first. I wanted to find a hitter who gets to more power to the opposite field than to the pull side. If Turang is hitting the ball this hard to the opposite side, hard enough to number among the top sluggers in the game, surely it’s because of some particular feature of his swing that manifests only to the opposite field. Let’s just add in pull-side average exit velocity and…

Wait, what the?! Turang hits the ball as hard as Alonso? He has more pull power than Kurtz? This merits further investigation. Luckily, FanGraphs has already been all over it. Esteban Rivera wrote about Turang’s increased bat speed all the way back in May. Michael Baumann highlighted Turang as a potential elevate-and-celebrate candidate. Over at Baseball Prospectus, Timothy Jackson noted that Turang’s bat speed gains have stuck. In fact, his 4.2-mph increase in average swing speed is the largest improvement in the sport. All those gains have brought his swing speed all the way up to… the 22nd percentile. Huh? The guys on that leaderboard with him are in the 94th, 94th, 98th, and 92nd percentiles, respectively. Clearly, swinging harder can’t be the only explanation for Turang’s breakout performance. Let’s go a little deeper than “bat faster ball go far,” shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros are almost definitely going to make the playoffs again. They have a four-game lead in the AL West with 22 games to play, which puts them at roughly 2-to-1 odds in favor of winning the division and 9-to-1 odds in favor of taking part in the postseason in some fashion. That would make nine playoff appearances in a row and 10 in 11 years for the Astros, across multiple roster makeovers, three front office regimes, and three managers. Same as it ever was.

What’s a little unusual about this Astros team is that the pitching staff is a bit unsettled. Not unheard of, to be sure; I remember that 2017 team with a pitching staff that destabilized to total entropy after Justin Verlander and Dallas Keuchel. But manager Joe Espada is going to have to do a little tinkering here to make sure the pieces all fit. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the dream is dead. Throughout the season, I have been tracking Nick Allen’s chances of reopening the Homerless Qualifier Club, the exclusive fraternity of players who make enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title but fail to hit a single home run. In 2022, Myles Straw became the only entrant since 2012 and just the 19th of the century. Allen has played in 128 of Atlanta’s 139 games, but batting last and frequently giving up his spot in favor of a pinch-hitter has kept him just under the threshold of 3.1 plate appearances per game all season long. The cruel cat-and-mouse game is finally over, though, because the Braves have claimed Ha-Seong Kim from the Rays off waivers. Kim started at shortstop on Tuesday, going 2-for-4. Manager Brian Snitker made it clear that Kim will play there for the remainder of the season.

Kim tore the labrum in his right shoulder on August 18 last year, requiring surgery and putting an unceremonious end to his final season with the Padres. The Rays took a gamble on him knowing that he wouldn’t be available until May at the earliest, signing him on a two-year deal with an opt-out for $13 million this year (with $2 million more in incentives), then $16 million in 2026. If he performed well, Tampa Bay would have him for one season at a big discount, and he’d get a second shot at having a proper platform year. Instead, Kim’s return was delayed until July by hamstring and calf injuries, and lower back issues put him on the IL twice more in the past two months. In all, Kim got into just 24 games with the Rays, making 93 plate appearances and recording a wRC+ of 72, his worst offensive showing since 2021, his first year in the U.S. That made keeping Kim around for the 2026 season too big a risk for the Rays.

All of this is a shame. Kim is a great player, an excellent, versatile defender with a solid bat, and injuries have now robbed him of his second chance to sign a deal that would reflect that excellence. Even if he puts up a fantastic 2026 campaign, he’ll be re-entering free agency after his age-30 season, which isn’t easy for a player whose value is so wrapped up in his glove.

Now, the Braves are the team taking a chance on Kim. Unless he puts up the greatest September in recent memory, he will forego his opt-out and get paid $16 million to anchor the Atlanta infield in 2026. He wouldn’t have to return all the way to the form he showed from 2022 to 2024 – when he ran a 106 wRC+ with 15 DRS and 7 FRV to average 4.0 WAR per 162 games – in order to make that a bargain. Still, he represents a risk. Atlanta is tying itself to a player who has suffered several minor injuries while recovering from a major one, and who hasn’t performed in his limited time with Tampa Bay. On the other hand, that time was so limited that it’s hard to tell where the noise leaves off and the signal starts. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think you can do this job for any amount of time without getting attached to particular players. Not even in the sense of having love or affection — certain ballplayers are just interesting to certain writers. For me, that manifests in just checking in with those players once or twice a season to see how they’re doing. Which reminds me, I’m overdue for my next updates on Willy Adames and Trevor Rogers.

I sometimes preface blogs about such players with the phrase, “Longtime readers might remember…”

Well, longtime readers might remember Hurston Waldrep’s splitter. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox got to work on their 2026 bullpen over the holiday weekend, signing closer Aroldis Chapman to a contract extension that keeps him in Boston for at least one more season. Chapman’s one-year, $13.3 million deal comes in the form of a $12 million salary for next season, a $1 million signing bonus, and a $300,000 buyout if a $13 million mutual option for 2027 is not exercised. That option becomes guaranteed if he pitches 40 innings in 2026 and passes a physical exam after the season.

After appearing to be in decline for at least a few years and falling out of the conversation of baseball’s top closers — and at times losing the closer’s role altogether — Chapman is dominating in his first season with the Red Sox. Entering play Tuesday, he has a 1.00 ERA and a 1.78 FIP over 54 innings with 77 strikeouts and 14 walks. No, you didn’t misread that last part: Chapman has issued only 14 free passes this season across 54 innings, which works out to a rate of 7.1% and 2.33 BB/9 — by far the lowest marks of his career. Even at his absolute best, Chapman would walk three or four batters per nine innings, a reasonable trade-off for the rest of his skillset. However, as he aged, that control degraded, and from 2021 through 2024, he walked 15% of the batters he faced. So, for him to suddenly put up the best control season of his career, at age 37, is an impressive feat.

ESPN’s Buster Olney talked a bit about how Chapman’s approach changed in the spring, but the basic explanation for what we’re seeing is he has stopped throwing his fastball down the middle. Instead, on the advice of Boston catcher Connor Wong and with the assistance of PitchCom, Chapman is now actually trying to spot his heater. While this is the type of anecdote that sometimes sounds like folklore, the data do suggest that Chapman is suddenly locating his fastball with dramatically more competence than in the past. According to Stuff+, Chapman’s Location+ of 179 for his fastball is the fifth-best number ever tallied (min. 40 innings), compared to the 94 he ran over his past four seasons. His sinker, once a sideshow in his repertoire, has become its focal point in the way the slider once was. This isn’t a sinker thrown to induce a groundball but to be an out pitch, a 100-mph sinker high and outside against righties, high and hard on the hands of lefties. Only one player in Statcast history has ever finished with a better whiff rate on his sinker than Chapman’s 38.9% this season: Josh Hader in 2019 (40.7%) and 2021 (40.5%). Read the rest of this entry »