On Saturday in San Diego, Fernando Tatis Jr. homered against the Royals, a towering shot that gave the slugger a moment to admire his work and stylishly set down his bat before trotting around the bases. Beyond that flourish, it was a timely hit, as the three-run, seventh-inning blast expanded a 2-1 lead and helped the Padres to a much-needed victory. Of particular interest to these eyes — and no doubt to those of Padres fans — was the fact that the homer was Tatis’ first since May 27, ending the longest drought of his career.

The 26-year-old slugger connected against a 96-mph sinker from the Royals’ Taylor Clarke. It came off the bat at 107.9 mph, but its estimated distance was a modest 380 feet:

“It was heavy,” Tatis said of his 21-game homerless streak. “Everybody knew it, I knew it, how long it was. I’ve just been grinding.” Read the rest of this entry »

When Riley Greene debuted in 2022, he had a tiny bit of a strikeout problem. His overall line – .253/.321/.362 in cavernous Comerica Park – was roughly league average, but it would have been better than that if he had struck out less than 28.7% of the time. Over the subsequent two years, he reined that issue in some: 27.4% in 2023 and 26.7% in 2024. He also got better at the plate while doing so. And this year, he’s off to a scorching start, .291/.345/.530 with a career-best 145 wRC+. So he conquered the strikeout demons, right? Wrong. He’s striking out a ghastly 30.7% of the time. This requires further explanation.

One of the classic paradoxes driving the way baseball looks today is that strikeouts don’t appear to be as bad for hitters as one might think. There’s essentially no correlation between batter strikeout rate and overall batter production. You could crunch the numbers to verify that – or you could just consider Luis Arraez and Aaron Judge. But while we pretty much all know this by now – the Judges and Harpers and Ohtanis of the world crack a few eggs while they’re depositing omelets over the outfield fences – it doesn’t feel as true at the extreme high end of the spectrum. After all, Joey Gallo’s outlandish 38% strikeout rate obviously held him back. But Gallo is the easiest example, and discussing his strikeout woes doesn’t quite prove a whole lot. So let’s look at the 10 hitters striking out most this year:

Aside from Greene, that’s not an impressive group. Stowers is the best of the bunch, but even including him, the aggregate statistics are quite poor. This isn’t some list of overmatched hitters doing absolutely nothing right, ether; there’s fearsome power here pretty much across the board. They’re just striking out so much that the overall package doesn’t work. So why does Greene look so different from the rest?

It starts, as MLB.com’s Jared Greenspan pointed out, with aggression. Greene spent his first years in the majors as a patient hitter, chasing less often than average and taking a few pitches in the zone as the price of his patience. My favorite proxy for hitter aggression is how often they swing at first pitches in the strike zone. The league as a whole swings at about 45% of such pitches. Greene was right around there in his first three years in the big leagues: 42.4%, 45.2%, 46.1%, respectively. Then he decided to stop letting those cookies go by. This year, he’s swinging at 56% of first-pitch strikes.

The reason for this is simple: These are good pitches to hit. From 2022 through 2024, Greene put up great numbers when he made contact with a first-pitch strike. He batted .425 and slugged .770 on them, with underlying contact metrics to match. He’s doing even more damage this year, .448 with a .966 slug. More importantly, though, he’s damaging these pitches more frequently because he’s swinging at them more often. These tend to be the best pitches to hit all plate appearance; why not take a big hack at them?

There’s a cost to doing this. Greene is also swinging more often at bad first pitches; his 0-0 chase rate is up to 18.5% from roughly 12% in his career before the season began. That sounds bad, but consider that he’s upped his in-zone swing rate by 10 percentage points. Because of this aggression, he is no longer taking as many hittable pitches for strikes. Take a look at how often he’s gotten ahead, fallen behind, and put the ball in play over time:

As you can see, this has been a great trade-off. He’s putting the ball in play more frequently than ever and falling behind less often as a result. Aggression pays, particularly early in the count and particularly for hitters as powerful as Greene.

That smidgen of extra production against hittable pitches in early counts helps explain some of Greene’s boosted production on batted balls this year – his .525 wOBACON and .504 xwOBACON are both career highs (here’s why I like these BACON stats). Want to mash the ball? Aim at easier pitches.

That said, Greene’s aggressive approach to pitches in the zone has come with some swing-and-miss downside. Break the plate down into more than just “in or out” and you can see the trade-off more clearly:

Naturally, Greene is swinging more at everything in his attempt to drive more hittable pitches. That makes sense; he didn’t simply wave a magic wand and start swinging at the good ones more without adjusting his approach to all pitches. He’s not hacking blindly at everything off the plate, or even close to that, but it makes plenty of sense that he’s taking a few more ill-advised swings along with all the extra good ones.

Normally, you’d expect this to be a self-correcting loop. Greene gets more aggressive, so pitchers leave the strike zone more often, which tilts Greene back toward selectivity as he gets ahead in the count more often and can choose pitches to hunt. Early in the count, pitchers are treating him about the same as always – he’s powerful, and so they try to nibble around the corners of the zone, accepting extra balls in exchange for avoiding meatballs. But with two strikes, particularly if you exclude 3-2 counts, they’re not giving him so much as the time of day. He sees strikes on a mere 35.3% of 0-2, 1-2, and 2-2 counts, one of the lowest marks in baseball.

That feels like a wise adjustment by opposing pitchers. This guy is powerful and wants to swing, so why bail him out by giving him something to hit? So he faces a steady diet of breaking balls in the dirt, high fastballs, sinkers off the plate in, basically everything you can think of. There’s an adjustment to be made here, starting aggressive and dialing it back with two strikes instead of maintaining that aggression all the way through. In 2024, he chased 30.3% of the time in those counts. This year, he’s up to 39.1%. That’s from “much less than average” to “more than average” if you’re keeping score at home.

The end result of this newfound aggression and pitchers’ avoidance of the zone is that Greene is striking out on 22.8% of the two-strike pitches he sees, the highest mark of his career. He’s also getting to two-strike counts more frequently thanks to his early-count swings. He’s fouling more pitches off than ever before, as well. That comes with the swing-hard-early territory; Greene will happily take some foul balls in exchange for all the damage he’s doing when he keeps the ball fair.

As far as I can tell, Greene is like no one else in the high-strikeout cohort. He’s not up there because he’s a helpless hacker who can’t make contact. He has a good sense of the strike zone, one he’s displayed in multiple seasons. His swing is geared for power, so he’ll always swing over his fair share of balls, but plenty of hitters with power swings still have good two-strike approaches. Greene just hasn’t put together his new early-count plan – attack pitches in the zone and accept a few extra chases to do it – with a two-strike approach. He’s chasing too often, and as best as I can tell, it’s because he’s swinging more frequently than ever before early in the count. It’s tough to switch mental gears, particularly while you’re learning a new approach, and I think Greene has fallen into that trap so far.

All this is to say Greene is hardly doomed to strike out 30% of the time for the rest of the year. In fact, I think his early-count aggression will end up lowering his strikeout rate, not raising it. He’s giving pitchers fewer easy options by hunting drivable pitches early. And in previous seasons, he’s already demonstrated the ability to tighten up and manage the zone late in the count. He’s still just 24 years old and only in his sixth year of professional baseball (excluding the canceled 2020 minor league season). Unlike most of the players who strike out as often as he does, he seems to have no fatal flaw that will keep him in that group. It’s just a matter of making all the parts of his ever-improving game work together, and I definitely wouldn’t bet against him fixing it sooner or later.

It’s a credit to his incredible talent that his horrid strikeout rate hasn’t really mattered so far. I love his new approach this year overall. When you have this level of power, letting early-count strikes go by is a cardinal sin. I think he’ll figure out how to modulate that as necessary – when he gets behind and pitchers start fishing for strikeouts, basically. But if you’re looking for a testament to Greene’s talent, I can’t think of any better one than his performance this year. He’s striking out a truly unconscionable amount while he tries to change the way he works at the plate, and yet it doesn’t matter. He’s just that powerful, and even though he’s aggressive, he’s not flailing pointlessly at pitches out of the zone and blunting his results on contact. The strikeouts will almost certainly come down. The new, early-count damage? That’s here to stay.

One of my favorite college baseball players of the past 15 years is making his major league debut tonight for the Reds, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about him, because I think he could become one of your favorite professional baseball players if you give him a shot.

His name is Chase Burns. He was the no. 2 pick in last year’s draft, where he received the joint-highest bonus ($9.25 million) in his class, and the no. 28 prospect in the preseason Top 100. He throws 100 mph without breaking a sweat, with an unholy slider that twists and squirms and changes shape like Medusa’s hair, with a similar effect on hitters. In his last start, Burns punched out seven Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders in seven innings. Behold.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s looking like this isn’t the year for Francisco Alvarez after all. On Sunday, the day after they ended a seven-game losing streak, the Mets announced that they had optioned Alvarez to Triple-A Syracuse and called up Hayden Senger to take his place. The 23-year-old catcher already has a three-win season under his belt, and if not for a thumb injury that limited him to 100 games last season, he’d likely be a top-10 catcher in terms of WAR over the past two seasons. This season hasn’t gone to plan either, though, and Alvarez will now try to set things straight with a Syracuse Mets team that has dropped 12 of its last 14 games.

Alvarez fractured the hamate bone in his left hand on March 8, making this the second season in a row in which an injury to his catching hand has interfered with his chance to take the next step as an All-Star-level dual-threat backstop. Alvarez started a minor league rehab stint a very short 32 days later, batting .179 over 10 games at three levels. He returned to the Mets on April 25, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the team brought him back to soon. After missing a chunk of spring training and struggling during his rehab assignment, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that he didn’t get off to a roaring start, but now that a skid has dropped them to one game behind the Phillies for the NL East lead, the Mets are no longer content to let him figure it out in Queens.

Let’s talk about the offense first. While it hasn’t been ideal, it hasn’t been disastrous either. Alvarez has gotten 138 plate appearances over 35 games, running a 91 wRC+. He put up a 97 wRC+ in 2023 and a 102 in 2024, so while this is the lowest mark of his career and a disappointment for a player who was expected to put it all together at the plate, it is by no means unprecedented. Alvarez had significantly worse 35-game stretches in each of his last two seasons:

Alvarez has been more aggressive of late, chasing and whiffing at career-high rates, and his 73% zone contact rate is among the worst in the league. However, because he’s increased his zone swing rate way more than his chase rate, SEAGER puts him in the 98th percentile, by far the best mark of his career. And because he’s seeing fewer strikes than he did in either of the past two seasons, Alvarez is running a career-high walk rate to go with his career-high strikeout rate. You could construct a real argument that the increased walk rate is worth the extra strikeouts, but the Mets clearly don’t see it that way. Manager Carlos Mendoza specifically cited plate discipline as Alvarez’s problem, telling reporters, “There were stretches where we felt, I felt like a couple of games where, OK, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. But then he’ll go a couple of games where he’s late with the fastball and then he chases, so just looking for consistency here.”

The other part of that argument has to do with the fact that Alvarez is crushing the baseball, though you wouldn’t know it from his career-low .098 ISO. We’re talking about a small sample, but he’s running career highs in hard-hit rate, as well as average, max, and 90th-percentile exit velocity. All that contact quality hasn’t turned into power largely because Alvarez hits the ball on the ground an awful lot; just 9% of his hard-hit balls have been in the air to the pull side, down from 29% in 2023 and 19% in 2024. The batted ball metrics are also shaping up in a weird way. Alvarez is running the highest BABIP of his career, but take a look at this:

Alvarez has gone from outperforming his wOBA when he hits the ball hard to underperforming it by quite a bit. But he’s also outperforming it when he doesn’t hit the ball hard. That’s not to say that all of this is the result of luck. Alvarez is running a career-low pull rate, and that drop-off is even more dramatic on balls in the air.

It’s not necessarily that Alvarez is struggling to catch up with pitches; he also went into the offseason determined to stop pulling the ball so much. “The primary focus for me has been to hit the ball the other way or up the middle, but there are going to be days where I am going to be pulling the baseball,” he said in April. “But probably 80 percent of the time my focus is more to the middle of the field to the opposite field.” It has worked, maybe too well. According to Statcast’s bat tracking metrics, his intercept point is 1.3 inches deeper than it was last season. At the moment of intercept, his bat went from being angled three degrees to the pull side to five degrees to the opposite field. In all, expected metrics like xwOBA think that Alvarez should be pretty much as good a hitter as he was last season, with the walks making up for the extra strikeouts and the contact quality making up for the less-than-ideal launch angles. However, DRC+, which gets deeper into the process, is much more skeptical:

Alvarez is an all-or-nothing power hitter, who is also groundball prone because he possess a flat swing; over the past three seasons, his 28 degree swing path tilt put him in just the 15th percentile. We’ve seen plenty of hitters make that work to varying degrees, but it’s not always the world’s most satisfying combination. He’s going to go through periods where he doesn’t make much contact, and he’s going to go through periods when he’s hitting the ball on the ground way, way too much. He’s been doing both this season, but it’s important to keep in mind that we’re talking about a small sample, just as we’re talking about a player coming off an injury and missing spring training.

In addition to changing his approach, Alvarez has also changed his setup, going from a relatively stationary stance with his bat resting on his shoulder to a more fluid stance with his bat angled higher and his hands lower:

As Mendoza noted on Sunday, the hamate injury cost Alvarez the chance to get comfortable with these changes.

All that said, the bigger concern comes on the defensive end. “I feel like the receiving and the blocking is probably an area that we want to see some improvement,” said Mendoza. Over the past two seasons, Alvarez was one of the best framers in the game, with nine framing runs in 2023 and seven in 2024 according to Statcast. This season, he’s at -4. Baseball Savant breaks the edges of the strike zone into eight different sections. Alvarez grades out as below average in seven of them, and among the bottom 10 in the league in four of them. In previous seasons, he was excellent at the bottom of the plate, but this season, he ranks 38th out of 56 qualified catchers. That is a major issue that needs to be addressed. Even in his outstanding rookie season in 2023, Alvarez was a below-average hitter, with nearly all of his value coming from framing. Maybe he just needs more time to recover from an injury to the base of his catching hand, but that skill is what gave him his real star potential. Without it, he’s a different player.

Alvarez’s blocking has also been the subject of much criticism, as his four passed balls are tied for fifth-most in baseball. However, Baseball Prospectus sees him as an above-average blocker this season, and Statcast sees him as exactly average. The Statcast numbers show that this is likely a situation where the eye test isn’t treating him well. Alvarez has let 17 pitches get by him in 2025, but they’re not the ones you might expect:

Alvarez’s opportunities have been quite a bit tougher this season. He’s actually been better than average on pitches that Statcast grades as having medium difficulty, but he’s given those gains back on chances that grade out as easy. But moderately difficult blocks don’t stick out that much, so what we notice are all the passed balls on easy chances. Moreover, Alvarez is currently catching 41% of would-be basestealers, so he is making up some value with his arm.

Now that we know all this, what does it say about the team’s decision to option Alvarez? It depends. If his issues merely stem from the injury and the lack of preparation time – if he’s going to figure it out eventually – then sending him down right now doesn’t make a ton of sense. He has already been ceding playing time to Luis Torrens. Torrens has been excellent at framing, which has allowed him to put up 0.7 WAR to Alvarez’s 0.5, even though his bat has been worse and his blocking actually has been bad. Senger is 28 and was running just a 59 wRC+ in Syracuse. In fact, he hasn’t put up an above-average offensive line in the minors since 2021. So swapping in Senger for even this reduced version of Alvarez will likely cost the Mets significantly in the short-term, and there’s always a risk that this kind of demotion could hurt a player’s confidence.

On the other hand, if the Mets really think that Alvarez could use a reset to work on his framing and figure out his approach, then it makes all the sense in the world to send him down right now. Mendoza is eager to get Alvarez more at-bats, but the Mets don’t think they can afford to while they’re battling for the division and Torrens is (slightly) outperforming him. It’s hard to say whether Alvarez’s struggles at the plate are the result of his new approach, residue from the injury, or simply bad luck over a short sample, but the Mets are clearly worried about his plate discipline. If they’re going to tinker with his swing, it’s probably better to do that in a lower-pressure environment. If it results in Alvarez having a great second half, it would be well worth the short-term downgrade.

To be clear, if Alvarez does bounce back at some point, there will be no way to really know the reason for it. Did the Mets help him figure something out? Did he just need some time to get back to his old self? Plenty of people will have an opinion, but we won’t know what would have happened if the team had just held to their current course. It seems safe to assume that Alvarez will get back to something like his old self at some point, and if that happens soon, it will make the Mets look very smart.

Last Wednesday against the Mets, Chris Sale nearly went the distance for the first time in over six years. Now he’s been sidelined — an all-too-familiar occurrence in recent years — thanks to a freak injury, a fractured rib cage suffered while making an acrobatic defensive play. His loss interrupts a strong follow-up to his first Cy Young-winning season and a stretch in which the Braves have tried to dig themselves out of their early-season hole.

At Truist Park, Sale shut out the Mets on four hits through the first eight innings, needing just 102 pitches. With a 5-0 lead, manager Brian Snitker sent his ace back out for the ninth, giving him a shot at his first shutout since June 5, 2019, when he spun a three-hitter for the Red Sox against the Royals. Facing Juan Soto to lead off the inning, Sale ran the count full, then induced the slugger to hit a soft chopper to the right side of the infield. The 36-year-old lefty dove for the ball halfway between the mound and first base, landed on his left side while stopping it, and recovered to throw to first from his knees. It was an impressive play, if not an entirely necessary one given the score and the possibility that second baseman Ozzie Albies could have thrown out the none-too-fleet-footed Soto. “Do you think he wants this complete game?” marveled play-by-play broadcaster Brandon Gaudin.

With the adrenaline pumping, Sale didn’t show any sign of injury. He followed up his diving play by striking out Pete Alonso, blowing a 96-mph four-seamer by him for his sixth punchout of the night. He was one strike away from finishing when Brandon Nimmo blooped a single into left field on his 116th pitch of the night. Not wanting to push the matter any further — Sale hadn’t gone past 116 pitches since August 19, 2017, and no pitcher this season has gone past 117 — Snitker brought in closer Raisel Iglesias, who needed just two pitches to close out the game by retiring Luis Torrens on a grounder. Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Englert throws an array of pitches. The 25-year-old right-hander’s repertoire comprises a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a changeup, a cutter/slider, a sweeper, a “big curveball,” and a “shorter version of the curveball.” He considers his changeup — utilized at a 31.6% clip over his 13 relief appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays — to be his best pitch. More on that in a moment.

Englert, whom the Rays acquired from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for Drew Sommers back in February, will also break out the occasional… lets’s call it a baby curveball.

“I threw a few that were around 60 mph when I was in Durham,” explained Englert, whose campaign includes nine outings and a 1.84 ERA for Tampa’s Triple-A affiliate. “One of them was to the best man in my wedding. It was the first time I’d faced him in a real at-bat, and I just wanted to make him laugh.”

The prelude to Englert’s throwing a baby curveball to his close friend came a handful of weeks earlier. Back and forth between the Bulls and the bigs this season, he was at the time throwing in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium.

”I was totally messing around and wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get from Snydes (Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder),” recalled Englert, whose major-league ledger this year includes a 4.84 ERA and a much-better 2.93 FIP. “I lobbed it in there, kind of like the [Zack] Greinke-style curveball, and landed it. I thought he would laugh it off, but instead Snydes goes, ‘Huh. You could maybe use that early in counts to some lefties.’ That was him having an openness to, ‘Hey, make the ball move different ways, do different things, use them all.’” Read the rest of this entry »

By most measures, the Rafael Devers trade happened suddenly. It came without advance notice of his availability, and the Red Sox reportedly weren’t shopping him around. Immediately, it drew comparisons to the Luka Dončić-Anthony Davis trade in the NBA, because hardly ever in our scoops-driven media landscape, where even the tiniest rumor is treated as currency, does a transaction involving a superstar catch us by surprise.

And yet, now that the shock has worn off, trading Devers feels like a logical outcome to the saga that began in March, when the Red Sox signed Alex Bregman to play third base without giving the incumbent a heads up. The details of the ensuing rift have been covered at great length, at FanGraphs and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here. A lot of the reporting since the trade has described the situation in Boston as untenable, and the damage done to the relationship between Devers and the team as irreparable. But based on how badly the Red Sox botched their initial response to the conflict, and then kept bungling their subsequent attempts at reconciliation, from my perspective, it seems like they didn’t make repairing it much of a priority.

We’ll tackle your questions about the Devers trade and so much more in this week’s FanGraphs mailbag. But first, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I won’t try to slow-play it; there was nothing I didn’t like this week. Baseball is freaking great right now. There are huge blockbuster trades that ignite passionate fanbases, for better or worse. The playoff chase is starting to heat up as we approach the All Star break. Crowds are picking up now that school is out. The weather is beautiful in seemingly every stadium. We’ve entered San Francisco Summer, which means it’s a lovely 57 and foggy most days here, ideal baseball weather for me (and you, too, if you live here long enough to acclimate). So I have no bones to pick this week, nothing that irked or piqued me. It’s just pure appreciation for this beautiful game – and, as always, for Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose column idea I adapted from basketball to baseball.

1. The Streaking… Rockies?!
The hottest team in baseball right now? That’d be the Red Sox or Dodgers, probably – maybe the Rays or Astros depending on what time horizon you’re looking at. But if you adjust for difficulty level, it has to be the Rockies, who were one James Wood superhuman effort (two two-run homers in a 4-3 victory) away from a four-game sweep of the Nationals. Add that to their Sunday victory over the Braves, and they’re 4-1 in their last five. That could have been a five-game winning streak!

Sure, baseball is a game of randomness. Every team gets hot for little micro-patches of the season. But, well, this feels like the biggest test of the “anyone can do anything for 10 games” theory in quite some time. These Rockies are terrible. Their everyday lineup features six players with a combined -1.4 WAR this year. Those the starters – the bench is worse than that. Their rotation has an aggregate 6.23 ERA. They’ve been outscored by 196 runs this year; the next-closest team is the Athletics at -128. Read the rest of this entry »

I watch a lot of baseball, to the point that you might think it would all seem routine to me. After all, how many times can one person see a monster home run before the achievement loses its luster? Yet, at least for me, that could not be further from the truth. More often than not, the players on the field still find ways to captivate and surprise me. In a league with Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Paul Skenes, the unimaginable seems to happen on a regular basis. But early last week, I experienced one of the more jaw-dropping baseball moments of my life, courtesy of Athletics rookie center fielder Denzel Clarke in a game against the Angels.

I wasn’t the only one either. The whole baseball was excited about Clarke’s catch. Martín Gallegos of MLB.com talked with Clarke and his peers about it. In the Wall Street Journal, Jared Diamond used the catch as the hook to tell a more in-depth story about Clarke. Sam Miller covered Clarke’s two-and-a-half week progression of dealing with the wall over on his Substack, Pebble Hunting. And, of course, last week Ben Clemens led his Five Things column with Clarke and the catch. If you’re like me and can’t get enough of the catch, you should check out all four of these pieces.

So, about that catch… Clarke channeled his inner Spider-Man by scaling the Angel Stadium wall, catching the ball, and gracefully protecting his body on the way down, finishing with a perfectly symmetrical two-foot landing. The athletic ability is no surprise, given he was doing this last fall in Arizona. The little things, though, are great to see from an early development perspective. The entire play is a perfect demonstration of everything that Clarke excels at defensively — burst, route, deceleration, wall awareness — in addition to the acrobatics. I’m going to break it all down here today. But first, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page about how good Clarke has been on defense to start his young career. Let’s start with the outfield OAA leaders this season:

Clarke has played in 24 games and has 9 OAA, which is tied for third best among outfielders. The two players ahead of him — Pete Crow-Armstrong and Ceddanne Rafaela – have both played over 400 more defensive innings than him. Basically, almost every time Clarke has attempted a play that most other outfielders wouldn’t have made, he’s caught the ball.

Having 95th percentile speed is certainly a major part of that, but as we know, speed alone doesn’t make an elite defensive outfielder. To understand the other pieces of Clarke’s defensive game, we have to watch some video. Where better to start than with the Spider-Man catch.

With Grant Holman on the bump and Nolan Schanuel at the plate with no runners on, Clarke has a standard alignment. On a 1-0 pitch, Schanuel gets a splitter over the heart of the plate and puts as great swing on it, launching the ball 29 degrees at 102 mph to left-center field. Let’s watch it again:

Man, there are so many things to unpack with this play. Clarke is already at full speed by the time the camera cuts to him. He has the third-best burst in the majors, meaning that once he gets going in his route, he is absolutely cooking to get to the ball. Clarke’s reaction metric is actually only around average compared to other outfielders. What he does is a common strategy many fielders employ when tracking down fly balls: He waits a split second to find the ball to make sure he’ll take a more efficient route. From there, he accelerates to the spot where the ball is going.

After the jump, outfielders need to determine where they are relative to the ball and the wall, and then adjust their speed accordingly. Here, Clarke steals two quick looks after sprinting for several steps. First, he flicks his head around to look for the warning track; then, after a few more steps, he flicks his head around again, this time to find the wall. These glances force him to slow down and be more under control as he attempts to make the catch, which is especially important on this particular play, when he not only has to track the fly ball but also scale the wall.

His elite burst, efficient route, and poised deceleration give him a chance to make the play. Pure athleticism does the rest.

With a few choppy steps on the warning track, he gets in the perfect position to propel his body up and over the wall. He then grabs the top of the wall with his throwing hand to steady himself. Simultaneously, he extends his left arm, snags the ball, and rotates his upper body to protect is shoulder and halt his momentum so he and the ball don’t end up on the other side of the fence. He continues his clock-wise turn and rolls off the wall to land smoothly with two feet on the ground, then pops up to celebrate his absurd accomplishment.

Clarke dazzles on defense even when he’s not robbing home runs. I am most impressed with his proficiency on low line drives. These may seem fairly straightforward, but they are among the more difficult plays for outfielders. On an episode of his Bleacher Report podcast, On Base, from last week, Mookie Betts spoke with guest Jackson Merrill about a number of baseball topics, including Clarke’s catch. During the conversation, Merrill, a converted shortstop in his second year as a center fielder, said line drives are the most difficult batted balls for him to field. This is a common sentiment among outfielders. You have less time to read the flight of the ball and determine its trajectory; hesitation can lead to extra bases. So outfielders have to make a decision quickly and stick to it — and they need to be correct. Here are some examples of liners that Clarke has tracked down so far this season:

That first one, hit by Nick Castellanos, looks destined for the gap, but with a quick read and a straight route to the ball, Clarke catches it with ease. He recognizes the ball is looping a little, meaning he has a bit more time to cut it off in the air. If it’s hit slightly harder or with less arc, maybe he wouldn’t attempt to catch it, instead opting to head for the wall and play the carom.

Or maybe, considering how Clarke approaches the scorchers off the bats of Taylor Ward (second liner) and Bo Bichette (fourth), he’d run faster and make the play anyway. He looks just as comfortable snatching those two would-be extra-base hits, each rocketed over 105 mph.

He can afford to do this because of how quickly he can slow down. See how he overruns Ward’s line drive? That would be disastrous for most outfielders, but not for Clarke. He’s sprinting to his right, then suddenly decelerates with a slide and reaches back to his left. And he can do this in all directions.

The best outfielders are often the ones who aren’t afraid to sacrifice their bodies. Clarke is no exception, but he also isn’t reckless; he knows how to dive in a way that limits his injury risk. Watch the third play in the video above, when he dives forward as he comes in on the ball. Notice how he catches the ball in the center of his body. This allows him to make the catch with his hands facing upward so his wrists and shoulders are less exposed, thereby preventing awkward landings that could lead to jammed joints, torn ligaments, and broken bones.

Clarke’s defensive skills are so advanced that the A’s are willing to run him out there even as he struggles mightily at the plate. The good news, as Ben noted in last week’s Five Things, is Clarke was a productive hitter in the minors, and maybe he just needs time to develop at the big league level. I really hope that’s the case, because it’s such a treat to watch him play center field.

I will break all this down. You will get your thousand words. But sometimes a graph does most of the work for you, so let’s just get to it. Here’s the WAR put up by the catchers of every team so far this season:

Wait, sorry. Wrong graph. That one only has 29 teams. My mistake. Let me throw the Nationals on there real quick:

So yeah. That changes things a bit. What the hell is happening in Washington DC? I’m not sure any of the million ways you could answer that question would provide good news, but this catcher situation is its own kind of ugly.

Nationals backstops have put up -1.7 WAR this season, a full 1.5 worse than the Angels in 29th place. These are not replacement-level killers. These are killers who live far beneath the earth’s surface, digging tunnels, crushing people with rocks, blowing them up — wait, I guess I’m just describing Dig Dug, but you get the point. Washington’s catchers rank 29th in wRC+ and 30th in baserunning and overall offense. They rank 28th in catcher ERA. According to Statcast, they rank 30th in blocking, 30th in framing, and – hey, look at that! – 13th in caught stealing above average. So it’s not all bad.

We have team positional splits going back to 2002, and over that period, the 2009 Pirates and 2019 Rangers are the worst teams on record, with -3.1 WAR each. The Nationals catchers are on pace for -3.8 WAR. They’re on pace to break the record before Labor Day! Over our 24-season sample, the Nationals’ -1.7 catcher WAR has already sunk to them to the 14th-worst total ever recorded. They needed just 75 games to put up more negative value than the other 707 teams on the list. They dropped three spots just last night! This is truly execrable stuff. So let’s ask again, what the hell is happening behind the plate in DC? Here’s the bottom of the catcher leaderboard. Note that unlike the numbers you’ve seen so far, the table below shows total WAR accrued by catchers, not just WAR accrued while playing catcher:

Well, that’s one way to end up at the bottom of the list. Only two players have caught a game for the Nationals this season, and they rank second- and third-to-last in WAR. Keibert Ruiz has not been the worst offensive catcher in baseball, but because he ranks sixth in plate appearances, he has accrued the most negative offensive value. His defense grades out as the worst among all catchers according to Statcast’s fielding run value, and fourth worst according to DRS. Riley Adams is right behind him, thanks to a -19 wRC+ and his own defensive struggles. So far this season, 28 different individual catchers have hit more home runs than the Nationals have as a team at the catcher position.

As for the other players on the list, Jacob Stallings was so bad that he was released by the Rockies. Endy Rodríguez and Ben Rortvedt have also lost their respective jobs. Maverick Handley was just filling in and is back in Norfolk now that Gary Sánchez has returned from a wrist injury. You see where I’m going here. Almost everyone on this list has been bad over a tiny sample. Some of them were only pressed into service because of an injury in the first place. The only players on this list who are still receiving regular playing time are Ruiz and the WAR-defying Martín Maldonado, whom we should probably be calling The Big Intangible. Playing this badly will cost you your spot – even over a small sample, even in Colorado – but not in Washington.

The Nationals came into the season ranked 27th at catcher in our Positional Power Rankings, with a projected 1.5 WAR. They’ve already raced past that total in the opposite direction, but it’s not like this scenario was unforeseeable, or even unprecedented. Here’s what Leo Morgenstern wrote about Ruiz at the time: “Here’s the good news: Our projections think Ruiz can hit like he did in 2023 and catch like he did in 2024. It isn’t a sexy profile, but it’s enough to merit a starting job at the big league level.”

Instead, Ruiz is hitting like he did in 2024, and his defense metrics have regressed to right between the numbers he put up in 2023 and 2024. That’s a bummer, but it’s certainly not a shock. Adams is experiencing some bad batted ball luck – he’s probably not going to keep running a .103 BABIP – but he came into the season with a career 89 wRC+, and his defense has graded out roughly the same as it did in previous seasons. In other words, Ruiz and Adams are so far behind their projections because the projections assumed they’d regress to the mean, but they’ve instead gotten even worse. Ruiz is currently on pace to put up -2.0 WAR. According to our database, that would be the 13th-worst catcher season in major league history. And somehow, even though he’s only gotten into 20 games, Adams is on pace for the 28th-worst of all-time.

Unfortunately, for as far below replacement level as Washington’s catchers have been, there aren’t any obvious replacements available. When Eric Longenhagen ranked the Nationals top 32 prospects last May, Drew Millas was the only catcher who made the list. He ranked seventh with a Future Value of 45, but he’s currently running a 75 wRC+ in Triple-A Rochester. His 28.6% hard-hit rate puts him in just the eighth percentile (among Triple-A players with at least 150 PAs). As a whole, Washington’s catchers throughout the minors are running a 101 wRC+, which ranks 25th. They only have one catcher above Single-A with a wRC+ above 75. Millas will probably be up at some point. He’s had cups of coffee in each of the last two seasons, and even after his lousy start, the projection systems see him as better than both Ruiz and Adams right now.

The bigger problem is that there isn’t all that much reason for the Nationals to change course. Ruiz is in the third year of an eight-year deal (with club options for two more years beyond that). The team is tied to him, and publicly at least, still considers him part of the exciting young core that is now starting to coalesce. James Wood, MacKenzie Gore, and CJ Abrams are thriving. Luis García Jr. just put up a three-win season and is running good underlying numbers despite iffy results. Dylan Crews is still waiting for his own topline numbers to catch up to his impressive peripherals. Brady House just arrived in Washington. But the Nationals are still nowhere near being a competitive team. The supporting pieces aren’t there. The pitching staff isn’t there. Regardless of Dave Martinez’s recent comments in support of his coaching staff, the team also ranks at or near the bottom in both defense and baserunning.

The Nationals started the season with a 3% chance of making the playoffs, and they’re now down to 0.1%. They’re still acting like they don’t expect to compete, largely limiting their acquisitions to one-year deals for veterans they can flip at the deadline. Maybe general manager Mike Rizzo will decide it’s time to sign some players and make a run at it after the season ends, but this year is already lost. The best the team can hope for at the catcher position right now is snagging an underperforming veteran on the waiver wire to take Adams’ place and Millas performing solidly in a call-up. And if Ruiz’s performance doesn’t turn around, they’re almost certain to set a particularly ignominious record.