I don’t know how much attention Braxton Ashcraft wants in his life, but he must be either fuming at his lack of recognition or thrilled to be left alone. As much ink has been spilled on the Pirates this year, only some of it has gone to their starting rotation, as opposed to Konnor Griffin or the team’s new cadre of veteran bats. Of that fraction, Paul Skenes dominates the headlines, followed by the talented but frustrating Bubba Chandler, the newly returned Jared Jones, and the occasionally truant Carmen Mlodzinski.

But as of this writing, Ashcraft is in the top 10 in baseball in pitcher WAR, trailing Skenes by only a tenth of a win. And this on the heels of Saturday’s loss to the Braves, in which Ashcraft surrendered nine hits and six earned runs in five innings. I wouldn’t be especially worried; it’s only Ashcraft’s second bad start out of 13, and the Braves will do worse to better pitchers before the season’s out.

Ashcraft was a pretty big prospect: A second-round pick out of a Waco, Texas-area high school in 2018, and the no. 60 overall prospect heading into last season. And he pitched quite well as a rookie in 2025, with a 2.71 ERA and 2.78 FIP in 69 2/3 innings, split more or less evenly between the rotation and the bullpen. So it’s not like he came out of nowhere, but he would’ve been third-favorite for the role of Skenes’ sidekick if you’d asked around a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The homers have yet to arrive for Andrew Benintendi.

My great, big, bold prediction for FanGraphs this year was that Benintendi would hit 30 home runs. It’s now the second week of June, and he has six. If he keeps this pace, he’ll finish with 15. Somehow, I think that means I’m off by 100%.

My reasoning at the time was flawless, of course. Benintendi the last two seasons had quietly reinvented himself. He’d always hit the ball in the air, but rarely with oomf, and almost always to left or center field. He averaged just 12 home runs per 600 plate appearances over the first eight years of his career, with sometimes good, sometimes not-so-good results.

But he clubbed exactly 20 homers in each the last two seasons. How? He simply took his existing contact-in-the-air profile and changed its direction to the pull side. He wasn’t hitting the ball farther; he was simply aiming shallower. This is the thing to do in baseball right now, unless you’re the Rays. Read the rest of this entry »

In the summer of 1872, Martin Malone pitched three complete games in three days for the Brooklyn Eckfords of the National Association. In today’s game, a pitcher who threw three complete games in three days would be hailed as something of a miracle, but Malone’s accomplishment loses a bit of its luster when you consider the context of the era. According to the numbers in our database, starters went the distance 83% of the time that season. Another piece of context scrapes the rest of the shine off with a machete: Over his three games, Malone allowed 86 runs on 96 hits. You will not be shocked to learn that he went 0-3.

Nineteenth century record-keeping being what it is, those are Malone’s only three games in our database, and for several reasons, that’s not quite fair. First, those three games don’t represent anything like a complete picture of his total performance. Malone first suited up for the Eckfords five years earlier. “It is surprising that all of Malone’s vital statistics remain undiscovered,” wrote David Nemec in Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, “for he seems to have been an integral part of the Brooklyn baseball scene for more than a decade.”

Next, Malone’s pitching may not have turned out well, but he did go 5-for-16 with a walk, for a .313 batting average and 115 wRC+ at the plate. Last and most important, it’s hard to say how much credit Malone really deserves for all the runs he gave up. He only allowed one home run. He didn’t walk anybody and he didn’t strike anybody out. He did what so many pitchers have been implored to do over the course of baseball history: He let the offense put the ball in play and trusted the defense behind him. It was a catastrophic mistake. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2026 season has not gone the way the Houston Astros envisioned. After Sunday’s loss to the Athletics, the Astros are 30-37 and in fourth place in the AL West. The only reason they’re even within shouting distance of first place is because the entire division has been mediocre so far. However, that doesn’t mean that everything’s gone wrong for them. One thing that has gone decidedly right for Houston is Yordan Alvarez’s comeback season. A fractured hand cost the three-time All-Star nearly four months of the 2025 season and, combined with a sprained ankle in September, limited him to a total of 48 games, his fewest since a torn patellar tendon wiped out all but two games of his 2020 campaign. But now he’s back with a vengeance, hitting .316/.431/.650 in 65 games for 3.3 WAR. He also leads the American League in home runs, RBI, and is second in batting average, behind only Yandy Díaz, at .325. We’re well into the third month of the season, which means the Triple Crown discussion is more than just silly speculation. Not that I’m above that, of course.

It’s true that two of the three Triple Crown stats have lost a significant amount of their analytical heft in recent decades, but it’s still a rare achievement for a player to finish the season leading his league in batting average, home runs, and RBI. More than that, though, Triple Crowns are cool. In the nearly 60 years since Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski won the AL Triple Crown in 1967, only Miguel Cabrera has managed to pull it off, in 2012 with the Tigers. No NL player has secured a Triple Crown since Joe Medwick in 1937.

For better or worse, Alvarez has tended to be overshadowed by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani when the masses talk about baseball’s most feared sluggers. It’s hard for a huge power hitter on a successful franchise to be underrated, but I’d argue that Alvarez is actually one of those few examples. His 165 wRC+ ranks 11th in baseball history and fourth in the expansion era among players with a minimum of 3,000 plate appearances, and while that is bound to come down during his eventual decline phase, he’s set himself up nicely to be one of baseball’s all-time-great sluggers. He offers little defensive value, but he’s an incredibly well-rounded offensive player; he’s not a swing-and-miss hacker like many huge power hitters, and his production doesn’t diminish against left-handed pitchers. In fact, as Matt Martell explained in a Members-only mailbag column in January, Alvarez is the best left-on-left hitter since Barry Bonds. And even when we lower the minimum to 1,000 plate appearances, Alvarez is fifth in batting average among active players. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with a table.

And what a wild table it is. Brooks Raley has secretly been way better than I’d realized. I bring this up to illustrate how dominant Jason Adam has been over the past five years: By most measures, one of the best relievers in baseball. By ERA, the best reliever who’s had a remotely normal career. Adam’s breakout season was 2022, and since then he’s posted an ERA under 2.00 four times in five years, including 2026. His one down year: 2023, when he posted a 2.93 ERA in 54 1/3 innings. Most pitchers would kill to struggle like that. Read the rest of this entry »

Jesús Luzardo has been pitching better than you might think. The 28-year-old Philadelphia Phillies left-hander is an uninspiring 4-4 with a 4.56 ERA over 13 starts covering 73 innings, but his surface stats only tell part of the story. Luzardo has a 3.40 FIP — it was a sparkling 2.77 prior to his most recent outing — while his 26.7% hard-hit percentage ranks second lowest among qualified pitchers. Moreover, he misses his fair share of bats. His 25.6% strikeout rate ranks in the 73rd percentile, while his 30.7% whiff rate is in the 86th. Good fortune simply hasn’t been on his side. At .343, Luzardo has the highest BABIP among qualified pitchers.

The lefty’s lack of luck isn’t what I wanted to talk to him about when the Phillies visited Boston in mid-May. Rather, I was interested in how he has evolved as a pitcher since we first spoke nine years ago. At the time, Luzardo was a 19-year-old Oakland Athletics prospect who was playing for the New York-Penn League’s Vermont Lake Monsters. A lot of water having gone under the bridge, change was inevitable.

———

David Laurila: We talked back in 2017 when you were getting your feet wet in short-season ball. Just how much have you changed as a pitcher since that time?

Jesús Luzardo: “I have a little bit different repertoire now. I’ve added some pitches. I’ve fine-tuned my mechanics. Along the way, I’ve just matured as a pitcher. I mean, I feel like I still have a long way to go, that I can get even better. I haven’t reached my full maturity as a pitcher. But I’m definitely a lot more polished. I know more about myself, what makes me me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Shane Baz features a five-pitch mix: a four-seam fastball and a knuckle curve being the most prominent in terms of usage. The Baltimore Orioles right-hander also throws a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. And then there is the offering that reluctantly remains in his back pocket. Baz would love to one day unleash his knuckleball on major-league hitters.

“I threw one when I was a kid, up until I was probably 13 or 14,” explained Baz, who was a big Tim Wakefield fan while growing up in Tomball, Texas. “It was my only off-speed pitch up until then — I was just fastball/knuckleball — so I’ve got a lot of experience with it. I actually try to throw it in every bullpen [session]. I’ll definitely get it into a game, eventually. I just have to convince [pitching coach Drew] French to let me throw it. Maybe next spring training I’ll be able to mix some in and show him what it looks like in a game. I mean, it’s pretty good.”

Baz went on to say that that he threw his pet pitch with a three-finger grip — “fingers on the horseshoe, right by the label” — in his younger days, but once his hands got bigger he went to “the traditional two-finger knuckleball.” And while he basically stopped throwing it in games once he matured and developed more pitches, he’s never lost his affinity for baseball’s butterfly.

At 96.1 mph, Baz’s four-seamer is above average for velocity, but while extra oomph is advantageous for heaters, that isn’t the case for low-spin floaters.

“I can get it up to about 80, but those aren’t as good,” Baz said. “I think it’s best when it’s like 70 to 75. That’s when I have the best control of it and can keep the spin really low. When I’m trying to throw it hard, it starts spinning more and not having as much knuckle effect.”

His overall understanding of the pitch is impressive, and that includes spin properties. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Judge has been in a slump lately, and what’s more, his right shoulder has been bothering him when he swings the bat. The 34-year-old slugger sat out the Yankees’ three-game series against the Guardians this week after initially being diagnosed with a bone bruise on a right upper rib. On Thursday, after consulting with multiple doctors, including a specialist in thoracic outlet syndrome, the Yankees announced that Judge has been diagnosed with a stress fracture in his right first rib, an injury that will sideline him for several weeks and leave a sizable hole in the New York offense.

According to the Yankees, Judge will require a period of rest and limited activity, and then will undergo re-imaging in four to six weeks — sometime in early-to-mid-July — after which the next steps will be determined. The team added that it does expect Judge to return this season.

Prior to Tuesday, Judge had started all 59 of the Yankees’ games, either in right field (53 times) or at designated hitter (six times). He had been experiencing pain in his right shoulder for some indeterminate amount of time, with the problem particularly affecting his swing during the team’s series in Sacramento this past weekend. He went 2-for-12 with three strikeouts against the A’s, though he did record five hard-hit balls out of the nine he put into play. Perhaps more tellingly, he had homered just twice over the past four weeks, and from May 11–22, went 11 games without a single RBI, the longest such stretch of his career; he had 10-game droughts in 2016, ’19, and ’23. To be fair, Judge’s latest drought owes something to his teammates. The Yankees hit just .214/.306/.363 during that 11-game span, giving him just six plate appearances with runners in scoring position; he went 0-for-5 with a walk. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, Gerrit Cole took his first loss since coming back from Tommy John surgery. After two starts of at least six scoreless innings, Cole got tagged for three home runs against the Guardians. Even so, it’s a promising return for the Yankees’ ace, who’s still throwing in the mid-to-upper 90s. His curveball is still curving, and while his fastball mix has evolved over his career in response to some trend or other, I’m confident he’ll find something that works. He always has.

I got to thinking about Cole in the context of a question I posed earlier this week about Adley Rutschman: Who’s the best draft prospect of the 21st century? Who presented the best combination of high floor and elite upside? The answer to that question is probably not Cole; if you were going for a workhorse college starter, you’d pick Mark Prior, Stephen Strasburg, or Paul Skenes. Or maybe even Carlos Rodón. But Cole definitely fits the bill; there’s a reason he was the top pick in the best draft class of the past 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth 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 »