Archive for Teams

Since the start of the year, I’ve been watching Jordan Walker mash the ball as I try to figure out something to say about it. As a card-carrying Walker booster – I’ve got a Top 50 Trade Value ranking to prove it – I’m very willing to believe in Walker’s promise. But as a sometime Cardinals fan – being a professional baseball writer makes fandom complicated – I’m afraid of getting burned. Walker has already gone from one of the most heralded prospects in the game to one of its worst-performing full-time players. Now he’s one of the best-performing players? Being a little skeptical is just a matter of self-preservation.

Now that we’re a month and a half into the season, though, I can’t keep myself from investigating. Walker hasn’t had stretches this productive since his rookie year. He hasn’t had stretches where he’s hit the ball on the ground this rarely as a major leaguer, period. He’s been 14.5 runs above average offensively in 2026 – after being 13 runs below average offensively for his entire career before now. If that isn’t screaming for an article, I don’t know what is.

If you know two things about Walker, they’re probably these: He swings hard, and he can’t get the ball off the ground. That makes it easy to think through how he might improve: keep swinging hard and stop hitting it on the ground. When I designed the Squared-Up Explorer for the FanGraphs Lab, Walker was actually one of my favorite examples to use. Look at where his best swings are, compared to another guy who swings very hard:

The bubble size represents frequency, and being further right means more squared-up contact. Before 2026, Walker squared up the ball most frequently on grounders, and he hit a ton of them. For his part, Judge isn’t squaring the ball up every time he hits it or anything, but he’s following a simple recipe. He swings really hard, he gets the ball in the air a lot, and then he profits. The harder you swing, the more valuable hitting the ball flush becomes; Judge doesn’t need to hit it pure every time to clobber dingers at a historic rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Arrighetti has twice been featured here at FanGraphs in standalone fashion, yours truly having interviewed the 26-year-old Houston Astros right-hander in April and August of his 2024 rookie season. On both occasions, he displayed an impressive knowledge of pitching analytics, as well as a thoughtful overall approach to his craft.

Our third conversation ended up focusing on his curveball. Arrighetti has been throwing the pitch at 31.4% clip this season, and not only has it been his most-used offering, it has been highly effective. As of this writing, it has yielded a .121 batting average and a .151 slugging percentage while eliciting a hefty 50.9% whiff rate. Arrighetti, who took the mound just seven times last season due to a fractured thumb and then right elbow inflammation, has made five starts this year to the tune of a 4-1 record and a 1.88 ERA over 28 2/3 innings. I spoke with him about his curve at Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: You’re throwing a lot more curveballs than in years past. Why is that?

Spencer Arrighetti: “Before I got hurt, it was a top-10 curveball in baseball. That makes me feel confident to throw it to whomever, and at any time in the count. Having a pitch like that goes a long way, especially as a starting pitcher. I’ve just leaned into it a little more this year. In the past, I had the thought process that to get a chase or a whiff on a curveball, you had to set it up with a fastball — something harder in the zone — in order to make a hitter be early on it, or to be off of the shape. I’ve kind of found that there are guys that I can just spam it to. I can throw it as many times as I want, in the zone, out of the zone, and get good results. Read the rest of this entry »

In a world defined and cheapened by soulless and repetitive optimization, the Cleveland Guardians are intractably themselves. Make no mistake, the Guardians’ quirks and foibles are the result of those same nihilistic capitalist forces; they’re trying to compete against teams with less-tightfisted owners in more fashionable locales. Those restrictions have shaped the Guardians into something gnarled and odd and occasionally unsightly, like a knotted tree sprouting from a rockface, or a squid that’s evolved to live in darkness 10,000 feet below the ocean surface.

It’s not always traditionally pretty, but it’s unique.

Here we are, in the middle of May, with Cleveland once again in sole possession of first place in the AL Central. (Don’t look at anyone’s record within the division, I’m making a point.) Not everything has gone smoothly for the Guardians so far this year, but they’re getting contributions where it counts. Especially from Parker Messick. Read the rest of this entry »

In his first three seasons, Patrick Bailey carved a niche as one of the game’s top defensive catchers, dominating the Statcast defensive leaderboards and winning two Gold Gloves. The development of his offense has lagged, however, and with the Giants struggling to score runs and sporting one of the majors’ worst records, they’ve decide they can live without Bailey’s glovework. On Saturday, they traded the 27-year-old backstop to the Guardians for 23-year-old lefty pitching prospect Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson and a Competitive Balance pick in the upcoming draft.

This is the second season in a row that president of baseball operations Buster Posey has shaken up San Francisco’s roster with an early-season trade; last year, it was the mid-June acquisition of slugger Rafael Devers in a blockbuster with Boston. You don’t have to squint too hard to accept that both trades were aimed at upgrading moribund offenses, but when the Giants dealt for Devers, they were 11 games above .500 (41-30), one game behind the Dodgers in the NL West. They felt they’d landed the offensive cornerstone that had eluded them after unsuccessful pursuits of Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, a player who could help them return to the postseason for the first time since 2021. This time around, they entered the day of the trade 15-23, last in the division, and the move appears far more tilted toward the future, as Wilkinson has just gotten his feet wet in Double-A and the draft pick won’t make an immediate impact.

If this trade had occurred just prior to the deadline (August 3 this year), it might have been characterized as a white flag, part of a larger selloff. To these eyes, it’s a shakeup that at worst smacks of panic and at best places a lot of faith that Posey — a likely Hall of Fame catcher who has yet to show similar prowess as an executive — has found a diamond or two in the rough with his two recent catching acquisitions: Jesus Rodriguez, who came from the Yankees in last year’s Camilo Doval trade, and Daniel Susac, who was flipped by the Twins in December after being plucked from the A’s as a Rule 5 pick. Both are 24 years old and have fewer than 10 games of major league experience, with Susac, who turns 25 on May 14, currently on a rehab assignment after being sidelined by neuritis in his right elbow. Eric Haase, a 33-year-old backstop who hit his way out of a starting job in Detroit in 2023, started in Saturday’s 13-3 drubbing by the Pirates — San Francisco’s ninth loss in 11 games — while Rodriguez started Sunday’s 7-6 win, which lifted the team’s record to 16-24, still third worst in the NL. Read the rest of this entry »

Kai-Wei Teng had a limited repertoire when he signed with the Minnesota Twins out of Taiwan in 2017. The right-hander from Taichung possessed just a fastball and a curveball. A lot has changed since that time. Now 27 years old and pitching for the Houston Astros, Teng attacks hitters with a five-pitch mix that includes a sweeper that is not only hard to hit, it is no fun to be on the receiving end of in catch-play.

“It’s insanely good,” Spencer Arrighetti told me last weekend at Fenway Park. “I throw a sweeper. Lance [McCullers] throws a sweeper. We have a couple of other guys who toy around with it. But Teng’s is incredible. Truly. I played catch with him, and it looks like a fastball for 48 feet, then takes a 90-degree left turn. Not all sweepers are created equal. Some of them are a little loopier and bigger, but his is 85 mph. I mean, it’s gross. It really is a great pitch.”

The numbers back that up. Teng has relied on his most-used offering 36.3% of the time this season to the tune of a .118 BAA, a .118 SLG, and a 27.9% whiff rate. His other numbers are impressive, as well. Over 14 appearances, Teng has a 2.35 ERA, a 3.83 FIP, and a 24.7% strikeout rate over 23 innings.

I asked Teng for the story behind his best weapon. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine a video game designed around failure. One where winning isn’t defined as completing a set of objectives, but rather as finding the most creative, painful, and improbable ways to avoid completing the task at hand. I haven’t heard of such a game, but I’m convinced that it must exist, because the Reds are speedrunning it before our very eyes.

Entering May, Cincinnati was 20-11 and in sole possession of first place in the NL Central. To that point, they hadn’t been more than a game out of the division since April 3. One week later, the Reds are now 20-18, six games back, and in sole possession of last place in the division. Now, measuring strictly on length of losing streak, Cincinnati’s skid isn’t nearly as notable as the 12-gamer put up by the Mets or the 10-gamer that contributed to the dismissal of Phillies manager Rob Thomson. But by several other measures, the last week of Reds baseball has been an even more profound and excruciating experience of failure.

The Reds’ true talent as a team is still a bit of an enigma at this point in the season. They haven’t hit well — their team wOBA sits at .311, which ranks all the way down at 23rd in the majors, but a BABIP of .262 and an xwOBA of .332 suggest some misfortune at the plate. On the other side of the ball, their 4.61 team ERA is in the bottom third of the league, their 5.16 xERA ranks last in the majors, and their 4.80 FIP doesn’t rate much better. With those numbers in mind, it should come as no surprise that Cincinnati’s win total as estimated by BaseRuns sits around 16, a full four wins fewer than their actual mark. Read the rest of this entry »

With Thursday’s 6-2 win over the Mets, the Rockies snapped a six-game losing streak and lifted their record to 15-23, momentarily escaping the distinction of owning at least a share of the National League’s worst record, which is currently shared by those Mets and the Giants (14-23). If they are again one of the majors’ worst teams, the Rox are at least not on pace to approach last year’s 119 losses, nor are they entirely devoid of bright spots, including catcher Hunter Goodman, starter Tomoyuki Sugano, and relievers Chase Dollander and Antonio Senzatela. But by far their brightest spot lately has been the play of Mickey Moniak. Now in his second season with the team, Moniak leads the league in slugging percentage (.700), ranks second in wRC+ (176), and is third in home runs (11) despite barely having enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title.

Alas, the 18-game hitting streak Moniak rode into Thursday came to an end in that victory, as he went 0-for-3 with a strikeout and a walk. He’d barely kept the streak alive on Wednesday night, going hitless in his first four plate appearances. He got under a pair of hard-hit balls against Mets starter Freddy Peralta, producing a popup to shortstop and a fly out to center field, both routine, and struck out twice, once against a high Peralta fastball and once against a low-and-away Brooks Raley sweeper. By the time he came to the plate for the fifth time, the Rockies were down 10-4 with one out in the ninth. Moniak ripped a hot smash 106.7 mph just to the left of pitcher Sean Manaea and past the outstretched glove of second baseman Marcus Semien as he dove to his right.

During Thursday’s game, Moniak’s contact wasn’t nearly as solid, though he almost kept the streak alive with a soft liner. The ball’s 64.3-mph exit velocity and 21-degree launch angle made it the kind of flare that actually lands for a hit more often than not, with just enough oomph to get over the infield dirt; the expected batting average on such balls is .550, but Semien did a fine job chasing that one down. Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins have accumulated the fifth-most WAR of any team from their catchers this year. Their backstops have a collective 133 wRC+ at the position, third highest in baseball. This has been one of the team’s biggest strengths to start this season, so it was a bit of a surprise to see Miami make a pretty significant change at the position earlier this week. On Monday, the Marlins optioned Agustín Ramírez to Triple-A, calling up top catching prospect Joe Mack to take his place on the big league roster. The reason why they felt comfortable making this swap has been the standout play of Liam Hicks, the much less-heralded catcher also in his second big league season.

As Miami’s top overall prospect a year ago, Ramírez spent nearly the entire season in the majors. He put up a .231/.287/.413 slash line (91 wRC+) in 136 games as a rookie. Despite the nearly league-average batting line, he accumulated exactly 0.0 WAR because of some pretty atrocious defensive numbers. Per Statcast, he had the second-lowest Fielding Run Value of any catcher with at least 500 innings at the position. He was actually a slightly above-average pitch framer, but his throwing and blocking grades were the worst in baseball.

Through a month of play this year, Ramírez’s bat hasn’t really taken a step forward; his 86 wRC+ is a hair below what he accomplished last season, though the shape of his production looks a little different. His walk rate is nearly four points higher than it was in 2025, but his power output has cratered thanks to a six-point drop in barrel rate. The defense hasn’t improved either, and so the Marlins sent him back to Triple-A to work on his skills behind the plate. Here’s how manager Clayton McCullough put it on Monday:

“It got to the point where it is performance and felt like, especially on the defensive side of things, that while he put in a lot of good work this offseason and had seen some glimpse of things getting better, that part of his game needs to continue to improve to be able to catch up here for us.”

Read the rest of this entry »

On April 29, 2021, Matt Olson hit himself in the face with a baseball in the batting cage at Tropicana Field. A freak bounce off the L-screen left him with the kind of shiner an athlete can usually only acquire by going 12 rounds with Marvin Hagler, but fortunately no lasting damage. By May 2, Olson was well enough to return to the lineup, and he hasn’t missed a game since.

Olson’s consecutive games streak now stands at 820; not only is this the longest active run in baseball, he recently passed Nellie Fox for the 11th-longest streak in MLB history. Assuming he avoids any further batting practice mishaps, Olson will end the season with the eighth-longest streak ever. Only seven players in MLB history — and 10 in all of North American top-level sports — have ever played in 1,000 straight games. Olson is due to become the 11th before the All-Star break next year. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. Actually, this is a slightly different column: Five Nico Hoerner Throws From Shallow Right Field I’ve Liked This Year Plus Assorted Veteran Cubs Defenders. That’s a little bit less catchy, though, and it’s at least vaguely Five Things formatted, so I’m counting it. Does “plays a single second baseman has made in one area of the field in one month of play” sound like too narrow a topic for not just one article, but five vignettes? It sure does – until you watch Hoerner play. When I voted for him in the Fielding Bible Awards last year, I wrote this: “I actually spent a while reviewing his defense on video. That wasn’t because I seriously considered anyone else for the top spot; it’s just that satisfying to watch him play.” Today, you can be a video reviewer alongside me. Try not to spit out your drink. And of course, what introduction could be complete without credit to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, the inspiration for this column?

1. Calmness Under Pressure
When you’re on the baseball diamond, things won’t always go right. At the big league level, the margins are razor thin. The other guy lives in a big house, too. Half a second late, and there’s no chance for an out. Throw to the wrong base? That’s often going to cost you. But the Chicago infield is packed to the gills with defenders who can tilt the playing field with guile, clawing that razor-thin margin back. A freakishly high chopper, off the bat of Joey Wiemer, gave baserunner Andrés Chaparro a good opportunity to take an extra base on an infield single. Hoerner probably shouldn’t have even attempted to throw him out, but he went for it:

Read the rest of this entry »