If you’re a casual follower of great relief seasons, this year has probably been all about Mason Miller for you. That’s eminently reasonable. It’s June 4, and his strikeout rate is still above 50%. If there’s a second name in the running, it’s probably Cade Smith, whose 21 saves pace the big leagues. Maybe Cleveland just has a “dominant closer” machine in the clubhouse somewhere. Who needs Emmanuel Clase? But the reliever atop our leaderboards isn’t either of those guys. (They’re second and third, mere hundredths of a win behind, but let me have my bit.) It’s rubber-armed October stalwart Louis Varland, who is most famous for being available a lot.

Varland pitched in nearly every game of the Blue Jays’ playoff run last year, which made him something of a folk hero in Canada. Those appearances weren’t notable for their outrageous quality – he had a middle-of-the-road 3.94 ERA and a 5.01 FIP in 16 innings – but for how impressive it was to take the ball day after day, no matter the situation, and give his team valuable innings. No Toronto reliever entered in more important spots, and while Varland had zero win probability added in the aggregate, that availability was just cool, and particularly noticeable in today’s splintered world of playoff pitching.

This year, Varland is still throwing a ton of innings. He’s 11th in relief innings pitched, but the guys in front of him are pretty much all long relievers. He’s also tied for 11th in relief appearances. Consider this: No reliever who has appeared as often as Varland has thrown as many innings as him, and no reliever who has thrown more innings has appeared more often. You can rack up a lot of innings pitched if you throw multiple frames per appearance. You can rack up a lot of appearances by being a short-stint guy. It’s pretty difficult to be both, but Varland accomplishes it. Read the rest of this entry »

Reid Detmers has saved his career — again.

Detmers, if you weren’t aware, is a top 10 starting pitcher to this point in 2026. He has accrued 2.0 WAR, which is slightly more than Chris Sale, Max Fried, and Jesús Luzardo. If it weren’t for Cristopher Sánchez, Detmers might have a case as the best lefty starter in baseball right now. He’s also been the Angels’ best pitcher, even a step ahead of José Soriano, who burst onto the national stage with a red-hot April before cooling in recent weeks. Detmers has kept plugging away, quietly — surprisingly — excelling in the background.

If you’d told me in 2022 that Detmers would be a top 10 starter in baseball by 2026, I would have said, “Sure, that sounds reasonable.” That was his first “full” season in the majors, and he posted a 3.79 FIP with fine peripherals. Yes, he got sent down for about a month in the summer to work on some things, but it was a solid rookie season overall. He even showcased his ceiling with a no hitter that May.

It’s what happened in the seasons that followed that makes this one of the most unexpected early performances of the year. Detmers didn’t improve in 2023. He struck out more batters, which is good, but he developed a pesky command issue that resulted in more walks and home runs. And things got worse in 2024. He again boosted his strikeout rate, and he again gave up more walks and home runs than he had the year before. By June, the Angels had seen enough and sent him down to Triple-A. They recalled him in September for five final starts, and when he returned? Even more strikeouts, even more walks, and even more homers. Read the rest of this entry »

Daulton Varsho is a tinkerer. In each of his seasons with the Blue Jays, either SportsNet’s Arden Zwelling, SportsNet’s Shi Davidi, or both have written an article detailing a swing change – except in 2024, when Zwelling noted that for once, Varsho was going to finally try (gasp!) not tinkering with his swing.

Despite all the adjustments, Varsho remained the same kind of hitter. He had a super steep swing that was seemingly tailor made for today’s lift-and-pull focused game. He whiffed a lot and didn’t hit the ball particularly hard, but when he did square it up, he ripped it into the right field bleachers. That’s a recipe for a lot of variance – the lows involve scads of strikeouts and the highs involve heaps of homers – so it wasn’t surprising that his first three seasons with the Blue Jays saw one average season at the plate, one below-average season, and one above-average season. Although injuries limited him to just 71 games in 2025, Varsho put up a career-best 123 wRC+ and slugged 20 homers. Over a full season, that’s a 46-homer pace! If ever there was a time to stand pat, this was it, right? Right!? Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Dodd throws a sinker that doesn’t sink. Nor does it have much horizontal movement. For all intents and purposes, it isn’t a sinker at all. Despite it being classified as such, the pitch is functionally a four-seamer delivered with a two-seam grip.

Labels aside, it works just fine. The 27-year-old southpaw has thrown his signature offering 87 times (59.6% usage) this season to the tune of a .158 batting average allowed and a 26.3% strikeout rate while making seven appearances out of the Atlanta Braves bullpen. Limited to 10 2/3 big league innings due to an earlier stint on the IL for thoracic spine inflammation, Dodd has fanned a dozen batters, allowed seven hits, and issued just one free pass.

I learned about his atypical “sinker” when the Braves visited Fenway Park late last month. All I knew prior to our conversation was that Dodd’s player page showed him having transitioned away from a four-seamer, and that doing so was yielding good results. Interested in the reason behind the switch — ditto the process behind it — I began by asking him if what I’d seen was accurate. Read the rest of this entry »

Reasonable people can disagree on who the best draft prospect of the 21st century is. I think there’s a pretty good case for Adley Rutschman: A switch-hitter with patience and power, a plus defender at a premium position, a College World Series champion who’d been tested repeatedly against the toughest amateur competition in the world and come out on top routinely.

I get why you’d want the tantalizing upside of Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Mark Prior, but to me no other prospect combined a big league starter-level floor with the ceiling of a superstar the way Rutschman did. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were only looking at the top-line numbers that Roki Sasaki has posted through 10 starts — a 4.59 ERA and a 5.04 FIP in 51 innings — you could be forgiven for thinking that the 24-year-old righty had made little progress since last year’s abbreviated rookie season. At times, it has seemed as though he might be better off ironing out his mechanics and approach in Triple-A or in the bullpen, where he found some success last fall after missing four and a half months with a shoulder impingement. While Sasaki’s early-season starts brought to mind last year’s struggles, a little over a month ago he made a change to his repertoire, adding a second offspeed pitch to his mix. Since then, he’s pitched more effectively thanks not only to the new offering, but also to better command and velocity.

Sasaki’s improvement has come at a particularly opportune time for the Dodgers, as they’re once again carrying on without either Tyler Glasnow or Blake Snell. Glasnow left his May 6 start after just one inning due to back spasms and still hasn’t been cleared to throw off a mound yet, while Snell didn’t make his season debut until May 9 due to shoulder soreness, then lasted just three innings before discomfort in his elbow forced him from his start. He was diagnosed with loose bodies in the elbow and underwent surgery using the same NanoNeedle Scope 2.0 procedure that Dr. Neal ElAttrache had just used on Tarik Skubal. The new version of the surgery is aimed at accelerating recovery time, but Snell has been moved to the 60-day injured list nonetheless, and can’t return until early July. Increasingly, it appears Glasnow won’t be back before July either.

Sasaki’s new pitch is a splitter, but it’s not the same splitter he threw last season, and it’s not entirely new; it bears more resemblance to the one he threw in NPB with the Chiba Lotte Marines and in the 2023 World Baseball Classic for Team Japan than it does to its immediate predecessor. Statcast has redefined the offspeed pitch he threw last year as a forkball and is tracking the two pitches separately. Sasaki throws his splitter about five miles an hour faster than his forkball, and relatively speaking, it gets a bit more rise and a lot more arm-side run. Since introducing the new pitch — which I’ll get into more below — he’s lasted at least five innings in all six of his starts, something he’d done in just four out of eight starts last year and one out of his first four this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. 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 »

Emboldened by my success in predicting breakout seasons for Liam Hicks and Xavier Edwards, I’ve decided to rebrand myself as the world’s greatest booster of short Marlins guys.

I’ve been a Max Meyer fan since long before he became a Marlin. I love undersized hard-throwing college right-handers. I love plus athletes from unfashionable Midwestern schools. I love guys with a breaking ball and an edge. Meyer was a freshman on the 2018 Minnesota team that gave the eventual national champion, a totally loaded Oregon State club, everything it could handle. (I’ve mentioned the 2018 Corvallis Super Regional previously, as the center fielder on that Minnesota team grew up to be Sketchy Ben from Love Is Blind.)

By 2020, Meyer was the no. 3 overall pick and top college pitcher in his draft class. Not that I expect any of you to remember my thoughts on draft prospects from six years ago, but here’s what I wrote on draft night: “Meyer isn’t the best player in this draft, but he’s my favorite.” Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Carroll is the best left-on-left hitter in baseball right now.

It’s been a tremendous year for Carroll, however you want to split up the data. He has a 152 wRC+. He has 2.6 WAR. It’s looking like his best-ever season — a perfect follow-up to his best-ever season last year.

That Carroll appears to be taking another step forward in 2026 isn’t quite newsworthy. But the way he’s doing it certainly is:

Carroll is all of a sudden crushing lefties. He was just average against them the first few years of his career. Last year, he was fairly good in left-on-left matchups, though that improvement seems to stem more from his overall growth at the plate rather than a specific step forward against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds went 10-17 during the month of May, dropping from first in the NL Central to last, making this a terrible time for them to lose their most important player. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened on Monday, when shortstop Elly De La Cruz landed on the injured list for the first time in his career after straining his hamstring on Sunday. Now in his fourth big league season, De La Cruz was hitting .280/.346/.509 with 12 homers and a 134 wRC+ in 58 games, and looked to be on his way to making his third consecutive All-Star team. His 2.7 WAR was enough to lead all National League shortstops and rank second in the majors at the position, behind Bobby Witt Jr.. Minor league infielder Edwin Arroyo was called up from Triple-A Louisville to take De La Cruz’s place on the roster.

While it’s never good news to see your superstar miss time, the silver lining is this is not a season-risking injury. After limping while running the bases on a fifth-inning single on Sunday against the Braves, De La Cruz immediately came out of the game and underwent an MRI the next day. Manager Terry Francona described the results as “kind of between a Grade 1 and a Grade 2” strain. For those without the weirdly specific knowledge of muscle strain terminology, Grade 1 typically refers to a mild strain and Grade 2, a partial tear. So this is more than just a “Rub some dirt on it and get back in the game” thing, but less than a “Crap, do we have to look up Jose Iglesias’ phone number?” diagnosis. The initial prognosis is that De La Cruz will be out for two-to-four weeks. Read the rest of this entry »