Archive for Teams

It’s not obvious why Landen Roupp is good, but it’s probably time to find out.

Roupp’s 2.54 xERA is seventh among qualified starting pitchers. He’s striking out batters, getting groundballs, and working deep into games. He’s tied for 15th in the majors with 0.9 WAR. That’s about 70% of what he was projected for by FanGraphs Depth Charts in the preseason. It’s one of the most surprising performances of April.

Most pitchers “get good” because they miss bats, or attack the zone, or both. That doesn’t apply to Roupp this year. His 25.1% whiff rate is about the median among qualified pitchers, and his 37.1% zone rate is bottom five. Frankly, he doesn’t throw a ton of strikes.

The underlying “stuff” metrics aren’t any more impressive.

Roupp doesn’t throw particularly hard, or display outlier movement, or place near the top of any leaderboard I know to check. And yet, he excels. Where is all that value coming from? Read the rest of this entry »

They say that no news is good news. Google tells me that saying is attributed to James Howell, a 16th-century writer and politician, but I disagree. I attribute it to Sully and Murph, the two imaginary Red Sox fans whose lens I like to interpret Boston sports news through. I mean, COME ON. Last week, Sonny Gray hit the IL with a hamstring injury. Over the weekend, the Sox fired manager Alex Cora of his duties, along with a significant portion of his coaching staff. While the echoes of that momentous decision were still reverberating through the city, there’s now this: Boston placed staff ace Garrett Crochet on the 15-day IL with shoulder inflammation. Woof. The Sox can’t catch a break.

Crochet’s IL placement follows a frustrating start to his season. Through six starts, he’s had three spectacular outings and three clunkers. His last time out, he put together one of his best starts of the year: six innings, seven strikeouts, and no earned runs against the Orioles. But toward the end of that outing, his velocity dipped sharply. Despite sitting 95-96 mph in the early innings, he was down in the 91-93 range by the end of his start.

Crochet told Christopher Smith of MassLive that he felt some fatigue in his shoulder during that start, and that he doesn’t think this is a serious injury. “Was able to grind through (the fatigue) there at the end. It just makes more sense to get ahead of it now so I’m not playing catch-up the rest of the season,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Diego Padres. 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 »

The moment may prove fleeting, but at this writing, the Braves have a claim as the best team in baseball. At the outset of this season, Atlanta looked as though it might be headed for disaster yet again due to injuries and absences, with another Jurickson Profar suspension and the loss of Spencer Strider providing a particular sense of déjà vu. Instead of stumbling out of the gate, however, and even with a far-from-complete roster, the 2026 Braves have dominated opponents on both sides of the ball. At 21-9, they own the majors’ best record — and it appears they’ll get Strider back soon, as well.

Nearly five weeks in, the Braves haven’t lost a series. They kicked things off at Truist Park by taking two out of three from both the Royals and A’s, then went on the road and split a four-game set with the Diamondbacks before taking two out of three from the Angels. Upon returning to Atlanta, they took two of three from both the Guardians and Marlins, and after that sandwiched a pair of series wins against the reeling Phillies — a three-game sweep in Philadelphia and then two out of three at home — around a three-out-of-four series win in Washington. That’s eight series wins and one tie to date; by comparison, the Dodgers and Yankees (both 20-10) have each dropped pair of three-game series and split a four-gamer.

To be fair, after last year’s 76-86 dud and the retirement of manager Brian Snitker (replaced by bench coach Walt Weiss), the Braves were still essentially projected as NL East co-favorites alongside the Mets, according to our Playoff Odds, with a forecast for 89.6 wins, a 30.6% chance of winning the division, and a 79.0% chance of making the playoffs. Still, few expected them to return to dominate in such fashion. Through 30 games, they’ve matched the second-best start in franchise history, a record shared by the division-winning 1969 and 2000 editions. The only time they’ve started better was in 1997, when they went 22-8 and finished 101-61. They’ve gone 16-6 against sub-.500 teams without even getting a shot at the struggling Mets, and 5-3 against teams .500 or better. Their current record isn’t a fluke, in that they’ve actually got slightly higher Pythagorean- and Base Runs-projected winning percentages (.722 and .695, respectively) than their actual mark; both of those rank second in the majors behind the Dodgers, while their +68 run differential is tops. The Braves have run up those numbers by scoring a major league-high 5.70 runs per game and allowing just 3.43 per game, tied with the Yankees for second in the majors and behind only the Dodgers. Read the rest of this entry »

A major league debut is always an exciting occasion; it represents hope for the team and its fans, and the culmination of a lifetime of hard work for the player. I’m a cynical old crank, but I never tire of watching proud parents gush about their beloved son in a mid-inning interview with a sideline reporter.

It’s not remarkable that, in the fourth inning of the Guardians’ 1-0 loss against the Rays, that Gary Bazzana flushed red and got choked up when telling Andre Knott about his son. What’s remarkable is that he talked about his son in an Australian accent.

See, Tuesday marked the long-awaited debut of the no. 1 pick in the 2024 draft, second baseman Travis Bazzana. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been fascinated by Caleb Kilian for quite a while. Since 2021, to be precise, when he put together a dazzling 80 innings of minor league work for the Giants and then got traded to the Cubs in a deal for Kris Bryant. At the time, Kilian was essentially a lottery ticket, an eighth-round pick in 2019 who was old for his level. But man, those 80 innings were just the kind of innings I like – great command fueling both a pristine walk rate and a ton of strikeouts. I filed a mental note to keep my eye on him: Low-stuff high-command guys sometimes pop with a change of scenery, at least in my head.

That didn’t transpire in Chicago. Kilian got a cup of coffee in 2022 and another one in 2023, but his walk rate ballooned as he reached back for more velo against tougher competition, both at Triple-A and in the majors. And then a shoulder strain cost him half of the 2024 season. He returned for 2025 and found himself in minor league limbo as he transitioned to the bullpen; the Cubs released and then re-signed him due to roster considerations, and he hit minor league free agency after the season. He signed a minor league deal with the Giants over the winter, now as a full-fledged reliever. And that’s where the meat of this article begins.

The early book on Kilian was a standard one: plus command, wide arsenal, but no true out pitch and below-average velocity. In his time with the Cubs, however, that changed. By 2024, Kilian was touching 100 at times, but we graded his command as only average. In other words, his results and scouting report matched: He was throwing harder, but it wasn’t working better.
Read the rest of this entry »

Rob Thomson, the unlikely skipper of the 2022 National League Champion Philadelphia Phillies, has fulfilled his most important function as manager. The Phillies are 9-19, tied for last place not only in the division, but also in the entire league. That’s unacceptable for a team with championship aspirations. So overboard Thomson goes. Bench coach Don Mattingly, father of Phillies GM Preston Mattingly and an experienced big league manager in his own right, will take the tiller for the foreseeable future.

This is the second managerial firing in four days, after Alex Cora’s ouster in Boston. Both cases involved a well-regarded and successful bench boss paying for the sins of a flawed roster. And just as some wondered why Cora lost his job when Craig Breslow had put a losing team together, fingers across the Delaware Valley are pointing to president of baseball ops Dave Dombrowski as much as Thomson. Read the rest of this entry »

Brant Hurter is a reliable reliever who largely flies under the radar. Since debuting with the Detroit Tigers in August 2024, the 6-foot-6, 250-pound southpaw has fashioned a 2.49 ERA and a 3.41 FIP over 64 appearances comprising 119 1/3 innings. Moreover, he has registered a pair of saves and a 13-4 won-loss record.

He is off to a solid start in the current campaign. Hurter has come out of the ‘pen 11 times and allowed just three earned runs over 11 frames. His outings have been timely. The 2021 seventh-round pick out of Georgia Tech has wins in all three of his decisions.

Befitting his low profile, Hurter wasn’t highly regarded coming out of college, nor was he viewed as a future star while down on the farm. That doesn’t mean our lead prospect analyst didn’t see a big league future. Ranked 17th with a 40 FV on our 2024 Tigers Top Prospects list, Hurter was described by Eric Longenhagen as a pitcher he could “see in an important bulk relief role.” Read the rest of this entry »

The AL West is a bit of a mess right now. For the first time in a decade, the Astros are nonfactor. The Mariners — defending champion and heavy preseason favorite — got out of the blocks slowly and are just now kicking into gear. So almost by default, Major League Baseball’s only mononymous franchise is in first place.

I don’t think anyone would accuse Carlos Cortes of driving the Athletics’ offense; his 67 plate appearances are only about half what full-time starters like Shea Langeliers, Nick Kurtz, and Tyler Soderstrom have recorded. But in that limited playing time, Cortes is hitting .377/.433/.689 with four home runs and only four strikeouts.

That’s right, Cortes is DiMiaggioing. Read the rest of this entry »

The Houston Astros have a knack for disappointing Aprils. Despite usually being projected as the favorite or second favorite in the AL West every year for the last decade, the last time the Astros didn’t have a losing record at some point in the second half of April was 2019. But year after year, they’ve tended to get a powerful second wind. Excluding 2020, for obvious reasons, they haven’t finished with fewer than 87 wins in a season since 2016; overall, Houston has the second-most wins in baseball since the start of the 2017 season. During those previous mediocre starts, the projections have stood by the Astros. This time… not so much.

To see the last time the Astros started this dreadfully, you don’t have to go back very far. In 2024, they hit their nadir after 26 games, at 7-19. I wrote then, as I do now, about the hole they were digging for themselves. Though it was still an uphill battle to come back in the AL West — they in fact did, handily — the projections never turned sour. ZiPS projected the Astros to win 88 games going into that season, and despite their 7-16 record at the time I wrote that article, the computer still thought they’d continue to win games at the previously predicted rate.

ZiPS does not have the same optimism that it had in 2024.

This time around, ZiPS doesn’t even think Houston is a .500 team the rest of the way, let alone one that’ll end up close to its projected record in the preseason. The Astros had a relatively deep rotation in 2024, especially compared to today, and at the time, basically all of their starters were injured. But ZiPS thought enough pitching would filter back in over the coming weeks to get the team back on track. However, in 2026, ZiPS only loves one Houston pitcher, Hunter Brown, and just a few days ago, general manager Dana Brown said Brown won’t be back until June, and that’s if there are no setbacks.

Projecting the Astros to have a sub-.500 record isn’t something that ZiPS does often. While I don’t have rest-of-season projections for every calendar date ever, I do have monthly updates, and the last time they were projected to finish with a losing record was the 2015 preseason, when they had a 77-85 projection for the year. Pinpointing the actual date by running a few more simulations, the last time before 2026 that Houston was projected to be a losing team over the rest of a season was almost exactly 11 years ago, on April 26, 2015, when a win over the Oakland Athletics improved the team’s record to 10-7 and its rest-of-season projected winning percentage to .49927.

The 2026 Astros have been this bad even as their offense has performed extremely well. They lead the American League with 5.21 runs per game, and their 118 wRC+ ranks fourth in baseball, to go along with 5.7 WAR from their position players, also good for fourth in the majors. Considering this, the Astros shouldn’t bank on an offensive surge to turn their season around. Instead, if Houston is going to make up ground in the standings, its pitching is going to have to improve.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to follow election night coverage, you might have seen the various news desks give benchmarks for a particular candidate to beat in counties or in states to be on target to win. I can do the same kind of thing with ZiPS, so I asked it to benchmark what ERAs Houston’s pitching staff would have to hit to give the team a 50% chance of making the playoffs.

TLDR: To be a coin flip to make the playoffs, if the offense performs as expected, the Astros need their pitching staff to collectively outperform their projected ERAs by about half a run per nine innings. This is true whether or not you use the ZiPS projections or the combined Steamer/ZiPS Depth Charts projections. Just to illustrate how hard that is for a team to do, I prorated the preseason 2025 ZiPS projected ERAs to the actual innings pitched, and compared those to the final team ERAs for that year.

Only a single team, the Texas Rangers, outperformed its ERA projections by more than half a run. The Brewers and Reds came close, but they fell a bit further back when adjusting for the fact that ZiPS thought the league-wide ERA would be 0.12 higher than it actually was.

Now, consider the very real possibility that the Houston offense doesn’t merely perform as expected, but hits its 75th-percentile projection instead. The pitching would still have to beat its projections by 0.33 runs per game, meaning that even in a rosy scenario like this for the lineup, this team would still be an underdog.

On a fundamental level, the Astros need to find better pitchers from among the guys who aren’t currently envisioned by Depth Charts as contributors, and they need to find them right now. Ethan Pecko is the most interesting of the internal options, and as a fellow Towson native, I can’t help but root for him. He’s currently working back from thoracic outlet syndrome, and though he’s been very good on his minor league rehab assignment, he’s not likely to be up until later this summer. When he does return, he wouldn’t be enough by himself to fix this pitching staff, even if he had a Chase Burns-esque debut. AJ Blubaugh and Colton Gordon don’t project as instant game-changers, either. Houston would likely need to acquire some pitching, but from where? This has been an odd season so far, in that many of the worst teams (Astros, Red Sox, Mets, Phillies, Blue Jays, Royals) were expected to be contenders. That means there aren’t a lot of teams looking to be early sellers. But even if there were, these other underperforming clubs would likely be fierce competition for those players on the block.

Time is not on Houston’s side, in the short or long term. The short-term challenge is obvious, but the long-term one is nearly as daunting. The Astros are second in baseball in wRC+ from players over 30 years old (129), with Jose Altuve and Christian Walker both at ages when imminent decline is highly likely. Their two key offensive players in their 20s, Jeremy Peña and Yordan Alvarez, are free agents after 2027 and 2028, respectively. At the end of last season, our prospect team ranked Houston’s farm system 29th out of 30 teams. The best solution might be to do a bit of retooling, perhaps by trading anyone unsigned past this year. Then, assuming there’s a pre-lockout window to make some free agent signings as there was in 2021, absolutely blitz the top guys available with extremely generous one-year offers, with the hope that many of those players will want to get a second look at free agency in a hopefully normal winter after the 2027 season. But truth be told, this doesn’t really feel like something the Astros would do.

However it shakes out, this may be the most crucial period of Brown’s stint as GM. The Houston Astros are in a precarious position, and none of the options look particularly appealing. Some problems simply don’t have good solutions, and if they can’t conjure one up, we may be looking at the end of a moderately successfully dynasty in Houston.